Family above all else: a review of the movie "The Good Mother"
An emotionless thriller about blind parental love.
The product of resourceful Russian localization "The Good Mother" (The Good Mother or Mother's Milk - as it is written in the opening credits) hardly has anything in common with Guy Ritchie's action film. The film's protagonist is alcoholic journalist Marissa (two-time Oscar winner Hilary Swank), who suffers the death of her youngest son Mike, who is rumored to be involved in the drug business. At the funeral, Marissa confronts Paige (Olivia Cooke), Mike's pregnant girlfriend who once linked him to illegal substances. Amidst the shared tragedy, the two women forget old grudges, find common ground and even become friends. Paige decides to conduct her own investigation into Mike's death, in which she is assisted not only by Marissa, but also by her eldest son Toby (Jack Raynor), who works in the police force.
Contrary to the efforts of Russian localizers, the film with the title "Mother's Wrath" seems to have everything but that very anger. The plot, based on the current topical theme of the opioid crisis in the U.S. (just last month Netflix released the series "Side Effect: Death", dedicated to the activities of the pharmaceutical company Purdue Pharma), focuses on the story of one family, which could well happen in real life. Swank, Cook and Raynor, the latter once again playing a double-bottom character, play the bingo of classic psychodrama with all the ingredients: moneylessness, depression, professional burnout, addictions and domestic violence. Swank, who most often gets phenomenally strong and unbreakable heroines, suddenly changes herself, reincarnating into a woman literally crushed by irreconcilable circumstances: a mother who has lost her child. There is no anger as such, but there is a faint bitterness enveloping the gut, and it is this bitterness that prevents one from moving on and adequately perceiving reality. This is the main conflict of the movie.
While Marissa lives out her grief over a bottle, Paige, hoping to find therapeutic relief from her pain, begins to unravel the criminal tangle in which her once-living boyfriend has become entangled. The family drama lazily alternates between a crime thriller and a pre-flaw slo-mo, unreliable zooms and a tense string soundtrack, probably borrowed from some Tye Sheridan movie. Yet into something more than a story about living through grief "Mother's Wrath," alas, it never turns. Even when new victims are glimpsed in the frame, the degree of intrigue risks going to zero - all the script twists move along the usual curve, not daring to go beyond the traditional canon. From this, watching the narrative at some point becomes elementary boring. Emphasized dry television camera Charlotte Hornsby ("Mistress") indifferently documents all the events, without much expenditure on sentiment and any artistic solutions.
In this seemingly completely featureless narrative, Wrath of the Mother director Miles Joris-Peyrafit, the author of the controversial western Dreamland with Margot Robbie and Finn Cole, attempts to construct a so-called docudrama, his own incorruptible look at the opioid crisis, which, as is often the case, hits ordinary people who are far removed from medicine the hardest. Nevertheless, the realism of "Mother's Wrath" is soporific rather than inspiring, and important issues hang in the air as half-hints, remaining behind the scenes for most of the movie. The most frustrating thing is that even the chosen docudrama Joris-Peyrafit now and then cheats, trading on bright, almost theatrical mise-en-scene in flashbacks and climaxes. Against this background, powerful, truly lived acting performances are simply lost, leaving only a devastated bewilderment at what we have seen.
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