“Mother Mary” is a strange, sensual pop-star fever dream powered by exquisite performances and the ache of artistic obsession.
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MORBID MINI: Mother Mary is a hypnotic, divisive, deeply romantic fever dream about fame, femininity, art, and the people we consume in the name of becoming great. It will irritate some viewers beyond belief. For others, it will slip beneath the skin like red silk and refuse to leave.
Mother Mary, like many of the pop stars who inspired it, is unlikely to have casual fans. It is destined to inspire the wrath and contempt of those who find it overly talky, somewhat pretentious, and more than a bit self-indulgent while simultaneously causing breathless adoration in others, for exactly the same reason.
I am of the second camp.
Mother Mary seems aggressively simple on the tin. There are some remarkable concert set-pieces and one truly breathtaking seance.
For the most part, however, it’s a 2-hander, led by a pair of women who are absolutely at the top of their games.
The titular Mother Mary, played with remarkable dexterity and duplicitousness by Anne Hathaway, wants one last special dress. It’s for her comeback show and also, perhaps, her farewell performance.
The only person she trusts to dress her is Sam, her estranged collaborator and most likely soulmate (more on that later), played by the immaculate Michaela Cole.
Now, to address something immediately and directly: I tend to be a little defensive when men spearhead stories driven by women. That’s not because I don’t appreciate the representation on the screen. It’s because I feel like women are seldom given as many opportunities to tell their own stories as dudes are permitted to speak for us.
Additionally, well-intentioned men often miss the mark in very specific ways.
We all have lived experiences, and however well we hope to empathize, telling the stories of lives we have not lived is… challenging. That’s particularly true for straight-presenting white men, the most privileged class in the world.
So I admit, I went into Mother Mary as both a David Lowery fan and a skeptic.
There are no male speaking roles in the movie, and yay! Truth be told, there are hardly any non-Hathaway/Cole speaking roles. But Hunter Schafer and FKA Twigs both deliver powerful monologues.
The thing about Mother Mary is that in many ways, it’s powerfully feminist because it transcends gender.
I will admit it sounds like absolute nonsense, but much of the movie feels like a powerful testimony to the power of femininity, focusing on art and the bonds it creates.
We, as viewers, do not know the full extent of the relationship between Mother Mary and Sam. I have seen reviewers refer to it as “the power of female friendship,” and nothing has more strongly evoked the meme of the old lady peering at gay porn and saying, “They seem like really good friends.”
Their bond is deep, profound, and undeniably romantic.
I could write an entire essay about how that is proven by the lyrics of the music included in the movie, but I still have so much ground to cover. So stay with me, ok? Like a reviewer and a reader bound by a piece of red silk…
Mother Mary is undeniably riddled with metaphor and allegory.
Lowery gets ahead of that. Speaking through Cole, he directly addresses the audience who, speaking through Mother Mary, asks, “How much of this is literal, and how much is metaphor?” That’s effectively answered by a shrug and a, “You decide.”
In a time when media literacy is at an all-time low, how refreshing, how delicious, for a movie to refuse to hold our hand and guide us through one specific, literal meaning.
Because here’s the thing. The filmwill hit different people on different levels.
As a woman and a writer, I was drawn to the intimacy of collaboration. As a fan, I was moved by the representation of the symbiotic relationship between an artist and her audience.
Yet I can also see how relevant the casting is.
Yes, Michaela Cole is a gorgeous goddess with an unbelievably expressive face; she’s also a Black woman.
As much as we may like Annie Haths, Mother Mary DOES tell the story of a White woman who makes her success off the labor of a Black woman, claims her ideas as her own, abandons her once she is successful, and then tears her way back into the life of the betrayed Black woman.
That said, the moviealso shows an unexpected sensitivity to the punishing life of a female pop star.
Men are often slightly dismissive of women in this genre. Yet let us credit Lowery for a powerful sequence in which Mother Mary (not just a female pop star but a slightly older one) goes proudly and strongly up a flight of stairs to start a show and descends, exhausted and injured, at the end, over and over.
To every middle-aged dude-bro who scoffs at these women who put on their heels, do their choreography, and sing their asses off night after night after night, there’s a message here.
Lowery seems to say, “Let’s see you do it. There’s a physical price to pay.”
The film also explores how art is both a gift and a curse. Sam sees it as something to be freed. Once she gives it a way out, she feels lighter, better. Mother Mary feels she has to keep it contained, and it nearly kills her.
I adore this soundtrack, but it’s worth noting how absolutely essential it is to the movie.
Is Mother Mary a musical? Not in the sense that the content of the songs is essential to the plot. But the music does clearly reflect what is happening.In that way, it feels very akin to the film O Brother Where Art Thou?
The lyrics for most songs are credited to a slew of writers, including Lowery and Hathaway, underscoring the movie’s focus on the power of collaboration.
At one point, Sam says she thought hearing “Holy Spirit” would heal her. And if you read the lyrics or listen to that song, it is very clearly an ardent love song.
(Because they’re in love. Please miss me with “female friendships.” I respect female friendships. Sam and Mary are not friends.)
To be fair, the music won’t work for everyone. I have already seen some people making sarcastic quips online, along the lines of, “Oh, sure, music produced by Jack Antonoff is REALLY witchy.”
But guys, if I were a supernatural being, I actually WOULD choose well-produced catchy music. And oh lord, is it catchy.
Finally, we need to talk about Michaela Cole, whose cheekbones could cut glass.
She is an audience surrogate, which makes it easy to invest in her. But she’s also an absolute powerhouse. Honestly, if the world is not her whole damn oyster after this, it’s because people aren’t paying enough attention.
I have seen a lot of praise heaped on Anne Hathaway, and rightly so. She is wonderful. But Cole is doing something incredibly special in this movie.
Comparisons are bound to be made to works like In Fabric, which I thought of frequently, Lowery’s other films, or even movies like Smile 2 or Trap—holy SHIT, Lowery knows how to shoot concert footage.
But Mother Mary is born to be the widow of love, and she is truly unlike anything else. There is no comparison.
For some, it will fall flat, and I don’t know if I would even try to change their minds; it’s a fair read.
But for some of us, it will burrow under the skin like a pair of shears, and it will burrow into the muscles, the red silk of our broken hearts.
I can’t wait to watch it again. It’s inside of me now.
Overall Rating (Out of 5 Butterflies): 5
