The Good Mother is one of the most callous films I’ve seen in a long time. It not only wastes the considerable talents of Hilary Swank and Olivia Cooke (although I can’t fully absolve Swank — she’s one of the film’s executive producers), but it also uses the alarming and tragic numbers of recent drug abuse and overdose deaths as nothing more than a coatrack for an unbelievably silly mystery. The film shows some slight sensitivity early on, and so it expects us to forgive its artless, heartless wallowing.
Swank plays Marissa Bennings, an Albany journalist and mother grieving the loss of her estranged addict son, Michael. We never see him alive. Michael’s grieving girlfriend Paige (Cooke) strikes up an unlikely friendship with Marissa after the funeral, and the two slowly piece together the questionable circumstances surrounding Michael’s death. Marissa’s other son, Toby (Jack Reynor) is a police officer, and so he helps as much as he’s able, but our two female protagonists largely stay out of his way at first, so that their sidecar investigation can go on uninterrupted.
It is difficult to fully express the irritation I felt when the film’s biggest secret was revealed. The resolution to what in real life would be unimaginable hardship is so beyond cheap here. It is perfunctory at best. The struggle of drug addiction deserves, and of course has received, far more thoughtful artistic treatment many times over. Why, then, make a film with so little insight now, when we have such high levels of drug-related death in this country?
I would say that it feels like something must have been lost from script to screen, but I couldn’t begin know what that might have been. This is because another of the film’s many problems is that it’s one of those movies where the same four people just happen to keep bumping into each other in a fairly large city. The Good Mother is so small in scope that I just can’t see where another plot thread could even hope to stitch in. Thematically, that scope should widen in order for the film’s meager compassion to register. Sadly, it just keeps on narrowing.
I understand that there’s often a fine line between sensitive and exploitative, and of course that line is always purely in the eye of the beholder. However, it’s astounding how little real humanity is on display here. Cooke, for her part, is the film’s shining light, at times nearly saving it from its wanton misery-porn aesthetics. But director Miles Joris-Peyrafitte and his crew almost seem to take pride in how loudly they can drown out even the best performances with obnoxious music cues, unnecessary visual grunge, and awful editing decisions. Those decisions leave us no time for genuine character development. We only get to know these people as pawns in a haphazard game. The “twist,” such as it is, seems positioned as an excuse for the film’s lack of wit or grace, and it’s a lame excuse at that.
The situations The Good Mother presents us with, along with how it concludes them, give us a very grim picture with nothing in the way of hope or redemption. I have no doubt that there are real stories as tragic as this fictional one, and I certainly don’t need every story I’m told to have a moral or a happy ending. I am, however, almost always looking for a director’s empathy; their interest in human dignity. Through well-written characters, we can empathize with anything or anyone. I would be very surprised if anyone told me this film helped them empathize with individuals struggling with addiction or those with addicted family members. That slight sensitivity I mentioned earlier is the film’s needle in the haystack once its mystery gets rolling. The Good Mother wants to be a slick mystery with a heart. At my most forgiving, I’d say it forgot to be slick and forgot to have a heart. | George Napper
