Mother Mary

Well, isn't it nice that Anne Hathaway has plenty of other major movies this year? The Devil Wears Prada 2, The Odyssey, Verity, The End of Oak Street. Michaela Coel has The Christophers, too. By the time the year is up, hopefully we can all forget about the flashy drivel that was Mother Mary.

Alright, it's not that bad. No, not really. There are some elements of the movie you thought you might see when you bought the ticket. The costuming is great, although we'll get to how it's wasted. The musical numbers are good, but don't feel like they serve another purpose besides existing. The acting does its job, but it's so hampered by an overly written script that it feels as though there's nothing human in the characters. Concepts come and go, ideas are wasted like excess fabric, and the whole of Mother Mary leaves you feeling like you've just watched the adaptation of a fanfic about a pop star and her former stylist. Interesting that Anne Hathaway has actually starred in a fanfiction adaptation before.

Mother Mary depicts Anne Hathaway as the titular character, a pop star reaching the point in her career where she is more worried about the mark she's left behind than making a fresh one. Michaela Coel is Sam, her former stylist and fashion genius, who Mary approaches on one rainy day asking her to make a dress. The tension is palpable from the moment Sam's assistant (played by Hunter Schafer) tries desperately to keep Mary away. What drama could these two have? What's keeping them playing games with each other, conversing in circles instead of addressing the issues that have haunted them from young adulthood to now? The script, apparently.

Mother Mary is a psychological thriller, in its description, but the only torture of the mind I felt was in having to listen to the dialogue and watch our characters go round and round and round in an endless conversational cycle. I don't need their drama explained to me; it's quite clear the damage that's been done to their relationship, but Mother Mary decides that it needs you to sit, stew, and wallow in the ineptitude of its script to the point that you regret not bringing your watch, so you could tell how much of the 1 hour and 50 minutes runtime you've got through. The vast majority of the film takes place in a large barn, which Sam has transformed into her studio. This is fine, even if it makes the pop performance-filled trailers feel a bit like false marketing, because sometimes the setting is used rather interestingly. It's almost like the set of a play at times, and yet at others it feels like a great yawning hole where an interesting background should be.

The idea of such a closed setting could have worked, if the characters were so compelling you would watch them speak to each other in a cramped apartment or at a McDonald's drive-thru. Instead, they fall way below the ambitions director and writer David Lowery has for them. Sam speaks like she is looking at a thesaurus just out of shot, which could have been an interesting character choice. You know, we could say she speaks like that to prove her mental superiority, establish and keep her position as an eccentric genius. Yet, we never really delve deep enough into her character for that choice to become apparent, and I'm not going to give Lowery the benefit of the doubt here. Especially not when he has Hathaway making the same faces every minute, mumbling to herself about the regrets of her career, her relationship with Sam, and her new song which is inexplicably called "Spooky Action" despite it having plot relevance that you'd think would mean it needed somewhat of a weightier name.

The characters are more ideas than they are people. Mary especially feels like a shot in the dark that shows why you don't take shots in the dark. In such an interesting era of celebrity, Mother Mary's criticisms of fame never goes beyond it being physically and emotionally exhausting, because she has to do her job. There's also next to no exploration of the theming and meaning behind her name. Her songs are sad, with most of them having religious references, and the character herself is called Mother Mary. Again, we're just given ideas. It's why the songs are just songs, and we only see the outfits Sam created for Mary in a brief segment at the end. There are lots of dots, just no real thread connecting them all.

I don't find Mother Mary to be particularly ambitious. If it is, we can call me ambitious every time I get out of bed. I don't think it falls short of doing something great. I think it tried to achieve something very achievable, and still fell flat. The music works, the actors are doing their best, and the outfits you see at the end are brilliantly stylish, but the core of what should have made this film work is as sturdy as a worm-eaten apple. Sorry Anne Hathaway, but I guess they can't all be hits.