No actor defined the 2010s more than Jennifer Lawrence. Less than halfway into the decade, at the age of 22, Lawrence had won the hearts of audiences as the hero Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games, and a best actress Oscar for her performance in Silver Linings Playbook (famously tripping en route to accept it). She was bold, beautiful, brash and inescapable; her self-deprecating humour paired with megawatt talent made her a Messiah for millennials – until she wasn’t.
By the decade’s midpoint, the internet seemed to sour on Lawrence as quickly as they’d fallen in love with her. Her foot-in-mouth disease began to offend instead of charm, and her dominance in the media teetered into overexposure. “I just think everybody had gotten sick of me,” she later reflected in 2021. “I’d gotten sick of me.”
This period saw the release of Lawrence’s most provocative project to date. Part home invasion thriller, part religious parable – Mother! follows Lawrence’s unnamed protagonist as she tends to the home shared with her aloof husband, a poet played by Javier Bardem (credited as Him).
As she supports her husband through writer’s block, a series of guests unexpectedly arrive at their remote house. First, a wounded man seeking refuge (Ed Harris), then his serpentine wife (played by a deliciously villainous Michelle Pfeiffer). Before long, the couple’s sons burst into the home, followed by a funeral party. By the film’s climax, thousands of people have entered the home against mother’s wishes, each claiming to be a devotee of her husband’s work. As the guests become zealot-like in their fervour for the poet, Lawrence’s character is driven to madness.
What begins as a surrealist take on Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? devolves into a full-blown Boschian nightmare – and through it all, we are with Lawrence. She barely ever exits the frame, and Mother! hinges on her complete command of the screen. Lawrence moves from wallflower to pariah throughout the film’s torturous passage; it’s a high-wire act that, in the hands of Lawrence, turns a character who risks passivity into a deeply emotional, almost primal being who guides us through the delirium. It’s a movie star turn of the highest calibre.
Mother! broke Lawrence’s streak of box office success, landing with a thud. Receiving a rare F cinema score from audiences and struggling commercially, the frosty reception to Mother! played nicely into the predictably misogynistic narrative around Lawrence’s waning star power. Despite the backlash and her first Razzie nomination, Lawrence’s fearless performance landed her some of the best critical notices of her career.
Director Darren Aronofsky has said that Mother! is a metaphor for the destruction of the environment, with Lawrence playing Mother(!) Nature. During filming, the pair began a highly publicised relationship, which ended shortly after Mother!’s release went up in flames. Lawrence later cited the tension of wanting to be a supportive partner while also being a creative muse as playing a role in their break up; the irony that this dynamic had already played out on-screen in Mother! was undoubtedly not lost on either of them, Arguably, their willingness to mine the deeply personal is part of what makes Mother! an astonishing and brutal achievement.
While audiences largely rejected Mother! in 2017, time has only revealed it to be a searing takedown of the era of stardom in which Lawrence made her name, as well as predicting the hostile social environment of the Covid era. In a viral clip, Lawrence recounted the double standards she experienced as a woman in Hollywood, having now moved into producing her own starring vehicles. She has also been a vocal advocate against sexual violence after her nude photographs were leaked in a highly publicised phone hacking scandal. In an interview discussing the crime, Lawrence remarked: “I would much prefer my whole house to have been invaded.”
The full-throttle nature of Mother! is riveting in its sheer audacity. The film’s overwhelming nature and shock value elicit equal laughter and shock. We witness Lawrence endure humiliation after humiliation and, intentionally or not, the film invites us to consider our own complicity in the spectacle of celebrity and what Lawrence has endured as a result of her stardom. “I have nothing left to give,” mother cries at the film’s apex. Lawrence’s fearless performance in Mother! is the work of an actor with nothing left to prove.
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Mother! is available to stream on Stan and Paramount+ in Australia and to rent in the US and UK. For more recommendations of what to stream in Australia, click here
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