I loved Mother Mary.

Having now seen it twice inside of a week (and listened to the accompanying EP many times), I think there's a very good chance that it ends up being my favorite film of the year.

So obviously I think you should see it. I want you to see it, even if you don't love it as much as I do (or even at all).

But I've found myself at a bit of a loss as I try to explain why I love it so much. As a critic, I feel inadequate… and while Mother Mary deals with a whole lot of creative complexities and creatives’ complexes… unfortunately that isn't one of them.

I was surprised by my reaction, tbh. While my friend Garth told me “it fucking rules,” it's a type of movie that I can often like but rarely love: slow and steeped in metaphor. Two women – a Gaga-esque pop star (Anne Hathaway) and the costume designer she’s come crawling back to (Michaela Coel) – talk a lot for a long time about a lot of things, sometimes even saying what they mean. We are periodically thrust into what seem like flashbacks, but you can never forget that these are stories being told because the present versions of the characters are there off to the side, observing the action. And golly does the conversation and the images it describes/depicts become stranger and more abstract the longer it goes. 

Complimentary? 

I mean, the words that writer/director David Lowery wrote that mostly Hathaway and Coel speak are good! Very good, even. There are a lot of lines in here that hit even absent context. Like “People say quitting is cowardly. I think it’s the bravest thing in the world”? Fuck dude. I could do an exhaustingly(-by-my-standards) introspective essay about that idea and how it relates to The Week I Review, a project that I was brave enough to quit but not quite brave enough to leave dead. 

(Given the relative lack of success of this iteration, I wonder if I may as well have just left the whole thing dead and actually started fresh. Though then I'd be wondering what a difference it might have made if I'd kept it. Can never win against a hypothetical, can you.)

But the more I like a thing, the more I owe to it. To review Assassination Nation, I had to watch not just Sam Levinson’s other movies but also a variety of the Japanese Pink Films that inspired its aesthetic. That 40-minute runtime was unlike anything I'd given to a single subject at that point, but how else could I explain My Favorite Movie? How else could I talk about The Best Movie than a feature-length take on alternate realities? How could I explain the identity crisis The Anthropocene, Reviewed gave me any way other than saying it to people's actual faces? (It being in London wasn't strictly necessary, but it wasn't unnecessary)?

I can't give Mother Mary what I owe it. I'm stuck thinking about the unattributed adage “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” But I don't want to write about it or even film about it. I want to design about it but I have no relevant skills.

Has anyone vibe coded an app as a form of film criticism? Probably not! And I'm not gonna be the one to change that… (Not today at least.)

My inadequacy is actually pretty easy to explain. I believe that the value a critic brings to a work is context, and I just feel like I don't have enough of it here. You could probably draw a direct line between Mary’s struggles and whatever specific insecurities drove Anne Hathaway to get a (very good) facelift. I heard phenomenal things about Michaela Coel’s series I May Destroy You, but I never saw it! So whatever links there could be to find between her depiction of trauma in that series and something adjacent to it here went way over my head. Charli XCX and Jack Antanoff wrote the mostly-bangers that I’ve been looping (minus “My Mouth is Lonely for You” which I find a little grating), and man I can imagine there’s a goldmine there, but I’m not the person to excavate it.

And then we’ve got the man who gets all the credit. It is obviously true that the conflict at the heart of Mother Mary – Mary feeling that the way she is being dressed no longer reflects her and so she runs to someone who knew her first (and best) in order to find herself again – is deeply tied to David Lowery’s career, where he has cycled between making this sort of small scale person production and live-action Disney remakes… But I don't have any deeper insight because I haven't seen most of the former or any of the latter The only other Lowery film I've seen is The Green Knight, another slow/metaphorical film that I liked a lot but didn't love. I don't care about Disney remakes, and I dunno apparently A Ghost Story has a lengthy sequence where someone just eats a pie while a dude in a white sheet watches and it's hard to imagine I'd even like that! 

But Mother Mary made me want to actually give it a shot. I think by the time I could put together a full year-end list, I will have the context I'm missing now and be able to speak on it in a critically valuable way. What a beautiful imagined future, right?

But we’re not there yet. So you’ve just gotta go see it and figure it out yourself. Which you should! It’s super hecking good! ★★★★★ on Letterboxd and all that!