Mommy

Directed by Xavier Dolan.

2014. Rated R, 138 minutes.

Cast:

Anne Dorval

Antoine-Olivier Pilon

Suzanne Clement

Patrick Huard

Alexandre Goyett

Michele Lituac

Our story begins as Diane (Dorval) is picking up her teenage son Steve (Pilon) from an institution after another violent outburst. He appears to suffer from some form of autism, and has been labeled as a child with behavior issues. She is going to take him home and try to raise him herself. At times, he's just too much for her. A major dilemma is that Steve needs to be home-schooled, but Diane needs to work in order to support them. To help with this, neighbor Kyla (Clement) agrees to help with the schooling. Before you know it, she's like a third member of their family. All the while, the relationship between Diane and Steve ebbs and flows. As things move along, we're drawn deeper into a world where there are no easy solutions to the problems that arise. Whatever answers we may come up with only lead to more questions. We recognize that these people are in a difficult situation and grasping at straws to see what works.

The role of Steve is a tricky one to get right. When portraying a person with a mental disability, it's easy to go way over the top and come off as cartoonish, or to play it too flat and never rise above being a caricature. Antoine-Olivier Pilon manages to find a solid balance. Even during his most outrageous moments, we know that this is not some raving lunatic, but a boy struggling to grow up. These are followed by a period of expressive remorse and feels true to life in my limited, but up close experience with such youngsters (can't really say anymore on that). The writing must also be credited for this as it handles this character with much care.

As good as Pilon is, it's the performance of Anne Dorval as Diane that drives the movie. She is phenomenal in one of my favorite turns of 2014. She gives us both raw emotion and guarded action. She plays Diane as a woman who puts up a tough front with everyone, including her troubled son, but walks on eggshells around him due to her underlying fear of what his reactions might be. It's clear that she is ill-prepared to deal with this situation, but is learning as she goes along. Diane struggles to express even the simplest niceties because she abhors the thought of her own vulnerability. There are times when she knows she must. It's terribly difficult for her to swallow that pill, but she does. Because she will do anything for her son, she isn't necessarily shy about asking for help, but showing gratitude when that help is granted is a problem. Dorval conveys all of this, effortlessly. We never feel that she is acting. Instead, she feels like a woman, a mother, in over her head, fighting tooth and nail to make this life of hers work.

Director Xavier Dolan does a wonderful job giving these characters, plus Kyla, plenty of room to breathe and grow together. He makes it clear that the three of them are constantly learning, not only one another, but themselves. To accomplish this, he never rushes his story. He lets it develop organically. At the same time, it's paced extremely well and never drags. He does what Richard Linklater tries and fails to do with Boyhood. Dolan puts us inside the everyday lives of characters who feel like real human beings without an actual plot and makes it a compelling experience. We watch intently and rack our brains trying to figure out what shape these people will be in when we leave them, not lamenting how much longer it will be before we do. Dolan maintains the focus on the relationship between the mother and son by ensuring every second of the film affects it, even if one of them are not present. This includes Steve's interactions with Kyla. The two develop a relationship of their own, but everything that happens between them ultimately informs what happens between him and Diane. It's an intently focused film that never waivers, nor lets us waiver.

In many cases, our greatest strengths are also our biggest weaknesses. Such is the case with Mommy. The focus that lets us dive in and swim around the lives of Steve and Diane also excludes a huge chunk of Kyla's life to the film's detriment. We know that she is a wife and a mother, yet that's all we ever know of who she is. This isn't satisfactory due to the sheer amount of time she spends with our main characters. She's with them seemingly all day, every day. Occasionally, she doesn't make it home for dinner. We get very brief glimpses that this doesn't necessarily sit well with her husband, but it's not explored. In a film about relationships, it feels like a missed opportunity to not examine how much (or how little) damage she is doing to the ones she had before we met her. Near the end of the movie, she goes back to the way things were before Diane came calling for help as if nothing ever happened. During the entirety of the movie I wondered what her husband and child think about this? It felt like an empty space that, if filled, would really make Kyla a great third character, a fully fleshed out being. As it stands, she's a glorified nanny who only exists to serve the needs of our heroes. Her flatness robs the film of the emotional heft it was going for with a moment between Kyla and Diane. More importantly, it robs us of knowing what makes Kyla tick.

Another issue with this film's ultra-focus is that Dolan extends it to the technical side of things. He plays a game with the movie's aspect ratio meant to be deeply symbolic, but is actually annoying. Much of Mommy is shown to us through a sliver of the screen. Through this, we're supposed to feel claustrophobic and suffer from the same boxed-in feeling the people on the screen presumably have. At points where the world seems to be a particularly happy places, the shots widen out to a more conventional ratio only to shrink back down when things return to their version of normal. It's so blatantly done that it's distracting and ineffective. I'm no director and have no expertise in film-making, but it seems there are more subtle ways to achieve the effect Dolan wants. The example that comes to mind is Sidney Lumet's 12 Angry Men. Throughout that movie, subjects were shown using increasingly closer shots. The increase was gradual. By the end, we felt like we were really locked in the juror's room with twelve angry men. Similar tactics could have been used here. Instead, Dolan opts to have things such as Steve literally opening up the frame. It feels gimmicky and, therefore, unnecessary.

As strengths tend to do, they manage to make up for their shortcomings. In this case, it's a double-barreled climax that lifts us to unimaginable heights and abruptly drops up from them. I won't spoil what happens. I will say it's set up by a montage that rivals the opening of Disney's Up for emotional power, and concludes with a bold ending critiquing mental healthcare in Canada. The movie ends, not where we want it to, but where it must. The question we have to ask ourselves is whether or not this is good for the people involved? When asking this, we must be prepared that we may come up with different answers and/or reasons why for each of our three main characters. We must also be prepared to change what those answers might be, a number of times. Nothing is black-and-white. Right and wrong are fluid concepts that change based on the situation. Mommy shows us this and dares us to figure it out. We give it our best shot, or we're just saddened by a simple, but literal interpretation of what happens. This helps us ignore the film's imperfections and dig into its meat. Thankfully, there's plenty to chew on.