Film Review No. 2

     French-Canadian director, Xavier Dolan, redeemed himself with Mommy, after directing 2010's unremarkable Heartbeats, which was crippled by the young director's overzealous aesthetic choices and a weak script. Mommy still bears its flaws, but manages to tell a powerful story with considerable attention to cinematic beauty. The story of a teenage boy filled with anger and his mother burdened by her son's erratic, aggressive behavior is carried by soaring performances from Antoine-Oliver Pilon, Anne Dorval, and Suzanne Clement.

Antoine-Oliver Pilon in Mommy

     The performances were so good that they seemed like real life. Dorval mastered moments of intense emotion, ranging from sadness to happiness to fear. Pilon is a budding talent, commanding the screen with gripping displays of rage and angst, while maintaining a boyish innocence. And Clement showed much restraint as a character with repressed anger, waiting to be unleashed. The narrative consisted of a lot of emotional ups and downs and therefore jutted out in all sorts of directions. Despite the intensity of the story told, Dolan, who also wrote and edited the film, failed to leave me with a sense of catharsis, something I typically yearn to be left with at a story's conclusion. I actually teared up at one of the final few scenes that took a turn I didn't expect, but the scenes that came after seemed to cheapen that feeling and left me with anger towards Dorval's character, rather than a contemplative state of mind. I was, however, able to subjectively sympathize with her decisions.

Xavier Dolan in 2014

     I found the filmmaker's decision to expose only half of the screen for the majority of the film to be its most crucial downfall. He used it as a gimmick, and though I understood the symbolic meaning and admire his gumption, I generally don't find much appeal in cinematic gimmicks. During my time in film school, I saw a lot of my classmates get hung up on one visual concept, or some other sort of concept, and focus on it through the very end, even though they were the only ones who thought it was the coolest thing ever. "This will make my film," they think, and it just ends up crippling it. The select few parts of Mommy in which Dolan actually utilized the entire screen were so beautiful that it hurt to see him purposefully choose to stunt his artwork for most of the movie just to convey something so trifle compared to the greater meaning of the story.

     In conclusion, I am interested to see how Xavier Dolan continues to mature as a visual storyteller and plan to follow his work in the future, as I do see quite a bit of potential in his abilities.