Moviegoer Diary: Mother of Tears, Hancock

MOTHER OF TEARS

Plot in a Nutshell
The final part of Dario Argento’s “Three Mothers” trilogy, in which Asia Argento plays an employee at a Rome museum who learns she alone may possess the power necessary to defeat a cruel but beautiful witch whose sisters were killed in Suspiria and Inferno.

Thoughts
Having seen only four Dario Argento movies before this one—Suspiria, Inferno, Deep Red, and The Stendhal Syndrome—my knowledge of his work doesn’t go much deeper than the conventional wisdom: a visual virtuoso, plot ain’t exactly his strong suit, hasn’t made a really good movie in a couple of decades.

But the jury appears to be out on Mother of Tears; as far as I can tell, the really avid horror fans consider it a small step up from Argento’s fairly dismal late-career output but still a huge disappointment compared to Suspiria and Inferno; meanwhile, a few of the more open-minded horror-dabbling mainstream critics were willing to cut it some slack out of a general fondness for Argento and respect for his status as one of the old masters of Italian horror. Mr. Peel, from the excellent blog Mr. Peel’s Sardine Liqueur, gave it a mild recommendation, saying he had a smile on his face pretty much the whole way through, and as someone who loved Suspiria and Inferno, that was enough to inspire me to find out how Argento brought the trilogy to a close.

Fairly artlessly, I’m afraid. I was hoping at least to have fun with this picture, but there’s a gratuitous brutality to the violence in Mother of Tears that made it a hard film to enjoy—gone was the visual stylishness I associate with Argento’s best films, the impeccably edited, operatic setpieces, replaced by flat, ugly scenes of skulls getting crushed in doorways and cleavers smashing into old men’s faces. At about the hour mark, a woman is killed in such an appalling, gratuitous, sadistic way that there was just no way for me to forgive it anymore, no way to enjoy the silly, campy ending, in which [SPOILER ALERT] Asia Argento defeats the beautiful, big-breasted evil witch by ripping her clothes off and throwing them into the fire. (By the way: I don’t know if it’s the language barrier or what, but Moran Atias, who plays the witch, manages to get through the entire film without delivering a single capable line reading. It’s really endearing.)

Unlike the first two films in the trilogy, which were structured around long suspense sequences set in specific buildings, Mother of Tears is more sprawling, with violence and chaos spreading through Rome (although Argento only had the budget to give us a tiny taste of it). And with one of Argento’s typically rambling plots, the film suffers as a result, lacking even the focus of a single physical setting. Argento’s only attempt at a visual coup is a long, elaborate Steadicam shot near the end, but while it covers an impressive amount of ground, it doesn’t amount to much in terms of suspense or storytelling.

There are a few loopy Argento conceits to liven things up: a homicidal monkey with a vendetta against Asia Argento; a professor of the occult who examines Asia Argento’s eye under a giant green magnifying glass in order to see if she’s actually who she says she is; a cameo by Udo Kier. It’s not enough to make a satisfying movie, but I didn’t have much emotion invested in Mother of Tears being good or not. I ain’t crying over it.

RATING: 2/5


HANCOCK

Plot in a Nutshell
Director Peter Berg’s underperforming summer blockbuster about a PR expert (Jason Bateman) who attempts to rehabilitate the public image of an alcoholic, antisocial, wildly unpopular superhero (Will Smith).

Thoughts
I read and listened to a lot of reviews of Hancock, all of which took pains not to reveal the “giant plot twist” that occurs halfway through—and, in many critics’ opinions—ruined the film completely. Taken alone, none of them spoiled the surprise, but taken in aggregate, they still contained enough information, however pussyfooted-around, for me to figure out what the twist was anyway. (I wonder if game theorists have a word for that phenomenon... where a piece of information can be revealed by people's very attempts to conceal it.)

And the critics were right: the twist does kind of ruin the movie. What a weird experience watching this movie was: I wasn’t really responding to the film so much as I was having a predigested opinion completely confirmed. And now that everyone has moved onto talking about The Dark Knight, it seems a little pointless to be offering my observations on Hancock, which the world seems to have already forgotten a mere three weeks into its run. But let’s see if I can add anything fresh to the debate.

The problem with Hancock’s big twist isn’t that it changes the film’s tone—up until that point (apart from the bizarre scene where Hancock literally shoves a man’s head up another man’s ass), it does a fairly decent job of blending superhero satire with some more dramatic elements.

No, the real problem is that the twist changes the film’s genre—I don’t want to get into specifics here, but it turns out [SPOILER ALERT #2] that Hancock isn’t exactly a superhero, but some kind of vaguely defined supernatural creature whose powers are affected by all sorts of laws that the script doesn’t do a very good job of explaining. And so what begins as an amusing spoof of superhero conventions (Who pays for all that damage to the roads and buildings that superheroes leave in their wake? Wouldn’t it be funny to see a superhero who isn’t in full command of his powers? What if having a superhero in your city turned out to be more trouble than it was worth?) suddenly tries to take on mythic dimensions. People close to Hancock are threatened with death, but the people trying to kill them are the victims of Hancock head-up-the-ass prank, now out for revenge.

It doesn’t work, and I’m not sure why the filmmakers thought the comic superhero/PR campaign plotline, with Hancock finding redemption while serving a jail sentence and attending anger management classes, wasn’t enough to fill an entire movie. Especially when one of the convicts in Hancock’s therapy group is played by Ralph Richeson, who was so fantastic as the ancient, antler-worshiping lackey at the Grand Central Hotel on TV’s Deadwood. The man looks ready to keel over any moment: let’s give him all the screen time we can while we’ve still got a chance!

RATING: 3/5