Mother’s Days
Another month, another unhappy, solitary mother dealing with feelings of rage and resentment.
Die My Love
Director: Lynne Ramsay • Writers: Edna Walsh, Lynne Ramsay, Alice Birch, based on the book by Ariana Harwicz
Starring: Jennifer Lawrence, Robert Pattinson, Sissy Spacek, LaKeith Stanfield
USA • 1hr 59mins
Opens Hong Kong December 4 • III
Grade: C
Jason Reitman’s Tully from 2018. Nightbitch by Marielle Heller and Oliver Chan’s Montages of a Modern Motherhood from last year. Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, which won Rose Byrne a Silver Bear at Berlin just this past February. And now, Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love. Mothers have been the subject of art for ages, but it appears that exhausted, overworked, under-appreciated mothers who don’t really enjoy the whole motherhood thing and for whom it’s not all rainbows and happy memories and bundles of joy are having a moment – and with the exception of Tully women are saying this themselves. Though, it should be noted Tully was written by a woman (Diablo Cody), so.
Motherhood is a tough gig. If a kid turns into a psychopath it’s mom’s fault. Are they disruptive little shits with no manners? Mom’s fault. Lonely and neglected from time to time? All mom. Are they ambitious and accomplished? Then they’re probably like dad. GTFOH with that. The joke about Freud starting his sessions with, “Tell me about your mother,” is indicative of how much weight we put on mothers, in both praise and condemnation. How many movies or books or TV series have we consumed about a woman’s despair over not being able to have a baby? Just once I’d like to see one of those home pregnancy ads or a scene in which the woman (or the couple) breathe a heavy, heavy sigh of relief at a negative test.
Livin’ the dream
Director Lynne Ramsay is treading familiar Lynne Ramsay territory in Die My Love, essentially a film about fucked up family dynamics – and a healthy dose of postpartum depression. Ramsay broke out with We Need to Talk About Kevin back in 2011, about a woman trying to connect with her son who (wait for it) turns into a shcool shooter (kind of), and then made waves most recently with You Were Never Really Here, about a guy abused as a child and in the military who makes a violent living rescuing trafficked children. Die My Love is every bit as grim and punishing as those two films, but with way less narrative momentum and way more opaque fussiness. In fairness, Ramsay isn’t really trying to say anything, and similar to Bronstein’s If I Had Legs is just trying to put us in headspace of a woman who’s overwhelmed by her maternal circumstances, and who despite social messaging about motherhood being a gift and how it “takes a village” finds she’s utterly alone.
Grace and Jackson (Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson) are a couple of young hotties that are totally horned up for each other all the time – jokes aside, that’s actually important – who relocate to a small town in Montana after his uncle dies and leaves Jackson his ramshackle fixer-upper of a house. Naturally she’s the one who gave up New York for this, not the other way around, and before you know it they’re parents to a newborn. Jackson is off working and finding side pieces all the time; evidently no matter how hard she tries, Grace’s post-baby body no longer horns him up. Frustrated on every level and with zero human contact with the exception of Jackson’s mom Pam (Sissy Spacek) and an enigmatic motorcylist that passes the house, Karl (LaKeith Stanfield), Grace starts to spiral, trapping herself in a cycle of erratic violence, alienating people, isolation then violence again. It doesn’t end well.
Die My Love is a relentless 120 minutes inside a shattering and despondent mind, made even more intimate and immediate by Seamus McGarvey’s (Bad Times at the El Royale, The Accountant 2) claustrophobic Academy ratio photography. Good choice too, because not much actually “happens” here; it’s simply a portrait of feral, female rage. Unfortunately it comes off as somehow holllow. No, not every movie needs a conventional plot or likeable characters, and many have had neither to glorious effect – Bad Santa is a story about an utter asshole and it’s tremendous (happy holidays). But it took three writers to adapt Argentinian writer Ariana Harwicz’s book into a series of strong sequences (Grace and Pam’s chats over tea are especially strong) rather than a whole story. Admittedly Ramsay has done a terrific job of making us feel as frayed and at our wits end as Grace does, but Die My Love also flirts with just being misery porn. It doesn’t help that Jackson is a baffled and ineffectual non-entity unless he’s brushing off his wife’s obvious cries for help or committing her to the psych ward. Pattinson has been nearly perfect since he left Twilight behind (Good Time, The Lighthouse The Batman), but here he’s oddly detatched, as shadowy as he’s frequently shot. Lawrence is back in Serious Acting mode, spending a great deal of time crawling on all fours like a predatory animal for… reasons, and literally throwing herself into Grace’s specific madness. Kudos to her for going for it, but it doesn’t make us clockwatch any less. Die My Love is not a movie you watch. It’s a movie you experience. And once again I’m experiencing vindication for my child-free life choices.