Mother

Bong Joon-Ho's "Mother" is stunningly made in terms of shots, devices, and effects. The director is obviously a talented orchestrator of such things. One thing he has to work on, however, is constructing a better plot. If everything is going to circle around one murder, think that out a little more. Well, that's what the film does circulate around, and on paper, it sounds very good. The thing is, Bong tries to slap his trademark tragicomic tone to the film. Why this doesn't work is that the film essentially doesn't evolve while it is in these first scenes. In his much more famous and better movie "The Host," the film was rotating its cylinders while it was being darkly silly, so it (for me) ended up working out. Also, with this on-the-pointness, he was able to conjure up humor, worries, and thoughts in the same scene, and it worked well.

In this film, Hae-ja Kim plays a mother, who tries to make life nice for her son, Yoon Do-Joon (Bin Won). Problem is, he's suspected of murder. He's put into jail (after one of the most bizarre interrogations in a while, involving apples), and his mother cannot quite believe it. So she goes beyond sanity to get him out, since he "couldn't hurt a water bug" (a passing reference to Hitchcock's famous mother film "Psycho," one of a few to that work; the Playlist pointed out that it was Hitchcockian in their review). It just feels that there's too little to run on here. Sure, there are nice moments and nice shots, but the plot is not so well-planned, so things at times take a back seat to the slipshod story.

As my friends said, the film is exceedingly long at 129 minutes, and it could be probably a half hour shorter, if you cut some of the useless rogue interrogations that are performed and perhaps the lurching scene that has two of the leads taking revenge on some rich old men guilty of hit-and-run. I might have even started with the murder itself. Another problem is that I feel the characters at times are very one-dimensional (save the mother). I can't understand why such is a problem. I mean, Joon-Ho did make "Shaking Tokyo" of the three-timer "Tokyo," and that was filled with rich, deep characters. Was it because he shared screenwriting credit with Eun-kyo Park? Hey, I don't know what went on in the process, but all I can say is that there's a lack of spreaded roundedness here. (Well, actually, "Shaking Tokyo" was pretty much about one character, so you might give Joon-Ho a break and say he tries to round someone out.)

What can I say about Hae-Ja's performance? All-in-all, it's (I guess) okay, if a little strange and over-the-top. It's hard to endure at times. But it must be said that she really creates a disturbing character. It's very similar to Tilda Swinton's work in "Julia," except there Swinton was given a good film to wreak havoc throughout. In "Mother," Hae-Ja has to stumble through the below-average plot and has to make good of it. There's some merit in that. "Mother" as a whole, however, is uneven (even Nick's Flick Picks, a glowing endorser "changed his mind a few times), sticking out with good technique but, as a whole, not as good as I expected. C+