Xavier Dolan’s fifth film, Mommy, tells a tale of tough love with some fresh ideas – like shifting aspect ratios to underscore mood, tone and point-of-view. It’s an ambitious, intense film that won this year’s Cannes Jury Prize, but may have been blessed with an underwhelming selection in competition.
When her son, Steve (Antoine Olivier Piton), sets fire to the institution where he is being treated for ADHD and a number of other mental health issues, they refuse to keep him any longer – forcing his mother, Diane ‘Die’ Després (Anne Dorval) to take him home.
Steve runs hot and cold by turns, suggesting one of his many disorders is being bipolar. When he’s got it together, he’s charming, and fun, if a bit profane; when he loses it, it’s like he’s a spoiled, out of control five-year old. His mother really tries to be supportive and protective, but she, too, has a temper and at times it’s easy to wonder if she suffers from the same problems he does – but was never diagnosed.
She matches him emotion for emotion, but he’s the one who has been labeled mentally ill. If not for Kyla (Suzanne Clément), a former teacher who lives across the street, their situation could be even worse.
In order to get Steve up to speed, education-wise, Diane tries to home school him, but really has no idea – which is where Kyla, who lives across the street from the pair, comes in.
Kyla has a speech problem – she stutters and stammers. At first, Steve makes fun of her speech, but as the three have dinner and a few drinks (Steve is underage, but they’re celebrating his being home…), her problem diminishes and it comes out that she was a teacher (grades 7-9) and, when Diane loses her job, she asks Kyla to help school Steve while she is out job hunting.
Despite liking Kyla, Steve rebels during their first lesson – to discover that shy, stuttering Kyla is not someone to be messed with. When he grabs her necklace, she promptly lays him on his ass. His response is appropriate – he wets himself. By standing up for herself, she earns his respect and they carry on.
Die really wants to protect her son and keep him safe, but events transpire over the course of the film to make it plain that she just isn’t capable of doing so. When they’re getting along it seems possible, but when he goes off on her with language that would make a longshoreman blush, or steals groceries or any of a number of other things, it’s plain he needs more than she give him.
He needs more than either Die or Kyla can give him.
Much of the film is shot in a narrow aspect ratio that calls to mind a cell phone, which serves to emphasize the intimacy of the characters’ struggles, widening to varying degrees as moments of hope come and go for Die.
Even though Die is willing to sacrifice everything to keep Steve home – she even loses her job to do so – the physical and mental anguish that result from efforts just wear her down. If not for her growing friendship with Kyla, she’d probably have reached the point of no return much sooner. Dorval is magnificent as Die, every emotion writ large behind her tired eyes.
Clément is also superb, as Kyla goes through a metamorphosis from shy/scared, stuttering rabbit to regaining her confidence through her work with Steve. As much as she comes to love Die and Steve, she has a family that she cares for even more – we don’t seem much of them because they are not germane to the story, but their impact on her is always there.
Piton does stellar work as Steve. He goes from perfectly – emotionally and physically – to full on crazy in a flash and makes every step of his straining to maintain control palpable. He is called upon to show the most range of the three leads and pulls of the complex role without a single false note.
Mommy’s major problem, though, is that at 134-minutes, there are stretches that just seem repetitive and dull in comparison to the film’s many amazing moments. There was a lot of squirming in seats at the screening I attended – and the applause the film got at the end was kind of muted (Project M and Whiplash, to name two, got a much more enthusiastic response).
A bit of pruning and Mommy could be the brilliant film that Cannes said it was.
Final Grade: B