Mother Mary: Anne Hathaway – Photo: Frederic Batier/A24
By the grace of good timing, both Anne Hathaway and Michaela Coel have better movies out this season than David Lowery’s tiresome drama Mother Mary.
Those talented actresses, their fans, and certainly their agents, should be glad if audiences catch their work in The Christophers or The Devil Wears Prada 2, and not just this pretentious, if lushly designed, go-nowhere glimpse behind the curtain of pop superstardom.
Hathaway and Coel aren’t the problem. They are fully committed to whatever it is that The Green Knight writer-director Lowery intends in depicting the emotionally fraught reunion between Mother Mary (Hathaway), a Lady Gaga-Dua Lipa-coded pop diva, and Sam Anselm (Coel), the fashion and costume designer whose eye-popping looks helped define Mary’s image earlier in her career.
Once intensely close collaborators and friends, the two have been estranged, we learn, via Sam’s overwrought opening voiceover describing her premonition that Mary would return, like a cancer. “You are a carcinogen. You are a tumor,” she intones.
Clearly, these two did more than collaborate on Mary’s tour garments, but the film remains purposely vague about just how close they were before “whatever happened, happened,” as Sam puts it. Girl, what happened?
Were they lovers? It seems so, from the moment Mary, in the midst of an artistic meltdown, bursts into Sam’s busy atelier to declare, “I need a dress.” Despite her tough talk at the beginning, Sam can’t say no.
Taking Mary into her countryside barn studio, she is wary yet eager, calculating but still somewhat caught in the spell of her fragile ex-soulmate.
Sam gets to work designing a dress, a process that apparently entails she and Mary first reckon with their bitter past and exorcise their painful demons. So, in the vaguest terms possible, they sit in that barn and go back and forth picking apart “whatever happened” between them.
Then, in the most literal terms possible, they summon the ghost of their past relationship — or the pain they caused each other, or the sum of all the love and hate they felt — and, in an extravagant fantasy sequence, work together to exorcise this phantom, presented as a billowing ribbon of diaphanous blood red fabric. This sounds far more interesting than it plays out onscreen.
A psychic medium, Imogen, portrayed as a ditz savant by alt-pop singer FKA Twigs, is summoned to join them in the barn. A scene of Mary stunned into immobile silence watching the ghost fabric, airborne, undulate towards her, is an excellent example of the film’s eye-popping costumes, production design, and visual effects being used in the service of total nonsense.
Sam and Mary talk in circles around the subject of their nebulous relationship, with Lowery offering hints only through gruesome body horror that the pair probably explored each other’s bodies. Rivers of tears flow, along with long-winded speeches — including, inexplicably, a plaintive analysis from Sam’s assistant Hilda (Hunter Schafer).
Yet, all that’s definitively communicated is Sam’s worship of pop idol Mary. Lowery (who claims the character was largely inspired by Taylor Swift) often frames Mary as a goddess, lit from within, as drab Sam stares up at her transfixed.
Is Sam in love with Mary the person, or the celebrity, or neither, who knows? Mother Mary definitely is more captivating as a pop star onstage than as a weepy narcissist bickering with her ex in that barn.
The film’s scenes of Mary in concert performing her songs (actually written by Jack Antonoff and Charli XCX) ably capture the atmosphere and aesthetics of a pop diva arena show. Hathaway looks stiff hitting the choreography, but she sounds great. Mother Mary: The Concert Movie would undoubtedly be a better time than this.
Mother Mary (★★☆☆☆) is rated R and playing in theaters nationwide. Visit fandango.com.
The luminous black-and-white cinematography is a leading attraction of François Ozon's seductive drama The Stranger. A faithful adaptation of Albert Camus' 1942 novella L'Étranger, the film presents its grim, suspenseful tale in gorgeously crisp contrast, shot by Ozon's frequent cinematographer Manu Dacosse.
Set in French Algeria, circa 1930s (though filmed in Morocco), the film's arid landscapes appear even harsher in this light, while the seasides shimmer invitingly.
The ancient city of Algiers bustles with its cosmopolitan mashup of colonial French folk and the local Arab population, two streams of activity that rarely intersect in the world of enigmatic Meursault (Benjamin Voisin), a French settler in Algeria.
Lesson number-one for prospective brides and grooms: if you feel tempted to play a game of Truth-or-Dare right before your wedding day, just don't. Emma and Charlie learn that lesson the hard way in The Drama, a wickedly funny comedy from Norwegian writer-director Kristoffer Borgli (Sick of Myself).
The engaged couple, truth be told, play a slightly different game of true confessions. It goes horribly awry after one of them spills a revelation too shocking and disturbing to ignore.
The confession lights a fast-burning fuse on a stick of dynamite that might blow up the happy couple's special day, and their whole relationship. Will they or won't they stay together to make it down the aisle?
If ’80s teen movie master John Hughes had been brave enough or interested enough to explore the obvious queer subtext in any of his classic coming-of-age comedies (we’re looking at you, Duckie), he might have come up with something like Screams from the Tower -- though probably funnier and with a better soundtrack.
Cory Wexler Grant wrote and directed this sweet, engaging, and still chuckle-worthy trip back to 1995, set at a suburban Illinois high school.
Clearly inspired by Hughes films and the TV series Glee, Grant’s film deals in obvious gay subtext, as well as loud-and-proud coming-out drama, in its touching story of best friends Julien (Richie Fusco) and Cary (David Bloom) co-hosting a wild and crazy morning show on their school’s public radio station.
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