Isn't that poster a
thing of true hideousness? Anyway, there are certainly spoilers in
what follow... To begin with I enjoyed this very much.
Claustrophobically close-up camera work on Jennifer Lawrence (who I
thought did creditably throughout, particularly early on when a
certain stiffness or blankness in her performance very effectively
amplifies the sensation of always being the last to know) is combined
with the usual horror clichés (curious little sounds, sudden jump
scares), all adding up to a very funny rendition of that feeling of
having people descend on your house for reasons that escape you and
then refuse to bloody well leave.
The mechanisms may be transparent but the tension was deliciously
maintained. (Michelle Pfeiffer is also deliciously waspish.) After
which, unfortunately, things begin to escalate in a kind of
sub-Kaufmann fashion (think Synechdoche, New York
all happening much faster with a great deal more – entirely
predictable – violence) and the sheer muddled banality of the
allegory makes itself more and more apparent. I've got sympathy with
A.O. Scott's recommendation: "don't listen to anyone who natters
on about how intense or disturbing it is; it's a hoot!", but I
couldn't spot the "churning intellectual energy" he sees at
work. Aronovsky seems to think that allegory is a matter of making
parallels which then justify themselves, simply by being parallels.
Oh, Ed Harris has a wound in his side because he's Adam,
so Eve is surely about to turn up. But why is Adam on the verge of
death? Oh, who cares, it lets us bring in Cain and Abel so that
things can start to get violent... We need a flood! Get some people
to sit on a sink, then... The most coherent thing I could extract is
that Bardem (as God) represents male creative energies while Lawrence
(the Earth Mother) represents the feminine. The film thinks it's
critiquing the patriarchal, male-centred traditions of religion, art
and capitalist extraction (no theme too big or obvious for
Aronovsky), but it appears to be entirely unaware that its
representation of Woman (non-intellectual, hard working and
uncomplaining – well she has a moment of complaint when things get
really bad, but
acquiesces happily enough at the very end – whose real function is
to bring life into the world) operates entirely
according to the same misogynist logic as the representation of "God
as Man" it wants to attack. (I also imagine that Aronovsky
intended to attack Christianity in general with the baby-eating
scene, but he ends up rehashing age-old anti-Catholic propaganda.
Perhaps that was the point but such subtle niceties seem quite beyond
this film...) For some reviewers, inexplicably, this kind of thing
passes for profundity; I think it's the kind of thing that gives
allegory a bad name. I would watch the first half again, though.
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