What’s typical of great actors: they create characters, not performances. You betcha. And that’s what makes the movie, MOMMY, so damned good, a motherlode of mature, pure, crystalline characterisation from everyone, but especially the three central characters of this compulsively watchable film.
Two and a half hours spent with a 15 year old brat with extreme ADHD is not my idea, nor probably yours, of entertainment, but such is the mastery of his material and the acumen of the actors he has cast, writer/director Xavier Dolan has dealt a trump card in making a sow’s ear story into a silk purse cinematic experience.
Terrifying temper tantrums, candid, raw, visceral, relationships- this is CGI – candid, genuine, intelligent- movie making par excellence.
Dolan, in an audacious and exquisite move, has shot the picture in reduced ratio. The perfect square in which it consists framed faces with such simplicity, makes it the ideal structure for “portrait” shots. No distraction, no affectations are possible in such constricted space. The character is our main subject, inescapably at the centre of our attention. Our eyes lock. The focus is intense.
The titular MOMMY is Die, a widow for three years, and with her son, Steve, placed in a correctional facility. Although she sees herself as a rock n roll princess, she’s deeply mature when it comes to her son’s education and future. A lioness, her problem child is her pride.
Die’s raging temper, her sexualized gait and manners, her coarse language – which she tries to soften up in order to impress her son – make her a comical, sharp-witted, loudmouthed yet laudable and lovable being.
Anne Dorval is superlative in the title role, sublime, earthy and ethereal, magnificent and mercurial. Adorable in her mix of fragility and ferociousness.
Left virtually mute by a vague trauma, Kyla is high school teacher on sabbatical who has just moved into town for an undetermined amount of time. Any remote sense of dialogue with her husband and her daughter seems impossible, and the days are silent and long. But when Steve and Die makes their entrance in her life – or is it the other way around? – She finds hope again. Her cold, timorous temper warms up, her tics grow dim, and her elocution improves.
Suzanne Clement ignites Kyla with the honest dignity of virtue and genius, her unspeakable trauma palpable, as is her deliverance through mutual salvation.
Steve is played by Antoine Olivier Pilon who brings a charm that is subversively unique. Since his father’s death, Steve has made a circuit of specialized centres for kids with behaviour problems and has scored a home run; he’s handed back to his mother for being too much to handle. But his – excessive – love for her, his resolution to be the man around the house and the way he candidly and irresponsibly wears his heart on his sleeve make him a truly troubling antihero.
Missing his past life with his father, Steve holds onto the project of peacefully living with Die. But his condition, for which he often ends up resenting himself, keeps alienating her and dispels the faintest notion of peaceful coexistence.
There is nothing Steve wouldn’t do to make his mother happy. Unfortunately nothing. For something has to give – and how!
Haunting, harrowing, hilarious, human, MOMMY is cinematic dynamite. Boom!