'Mother's Instinct' review: The plot drifts off and pushes the action into absurdity
OK, maybe "Mother's Instinct," now in theaters, is less a movie than an excuse for Oscar-winning co-stars Anne Hathaway ("Les Misérables") and Jessica Chastain ("The Eyes of Tammy Faye") to dress up in 1960s suburban housewife fashions and try to kill each other. Though critics may throw darts, it's a delicious premise.
On a hot summer movie night, wouldn't you prefer a yummy campfest -- think Faye Dunaway in "Mommie Dearest" -- to a shallow psychological thriller trying to pass itself off as prime-era Hitchcock? The choice is yours. One is frisky fun, the other is flat as roadkill.
In his directing debut, the acclaimed French cinematographer Benoît Delhomme, ("The Scent of Green Papaya," "The Theory of Everything"), who also creates pretty pictures in this film, can't instill suspense into a scene to save his life or his career as a director.
It's Delhomme's divas who do the heavy lifting, using their star power to fuel a thin script that Sarah Conradt adapted from 2018's much better "Duelles," from Belgian filmmaker Olivier Masset-Depasse.
It always helps to have pros like Hathaway and Chastain in your corner. Still, even with such compelling starshine, "Mother's Instinct" never achieves the kind of liftoff that the right director, say Todd Haynes in "Far from Heaven" mode, could achieve with effortless style and subversive substance.
Here's the plot: Besties Alice (Chastain) and Céline (Hathaway) are caught up in the girly-swirly job of maintaining the illusion of domestic bliss. Their husbands, played by Josh Charles and Anders Danielsen Lie, are barely worth a glance. Sweet revenge for those macho flicks that treat women like decoration.
Both ladies have children: Alice's son Theo (Eamon Patrick O'Connell) and Céline's boy Max (Baylen D. Bielitz). It's Max who takes a fatal fall off a balcony in an accident that Alice arrives a minute too late to avert. The mom tension quickly escalates into hostility, especially when we learn the Céline, dressed in widow's black, is physically unable to bear another child.
Alice deeply resents Céline's sudden attention to Theo, a child who craves the attention his careerist mom can't or won't provide. Alice longs to be -- yikes! -- a journalist.
The tension leads to a climax that Hathaway and Chastain play to the hilt and beyond. And cheers to costume designer Mitchell Travers (no relation), not just for creating wardrobes that wow but also help define character. And that earring Céline wears near the end speaks volumes that the script barely investigates.
That's the frustration inherent in "Mother's Instinct." You keep thinking how much better it should be as the plot drifts off into a tricked-up ending that pushes the action into absurdity. Still, the gorgeous spectacle of Hathaway and Chastain trying to shoot each other down with withering looks -- and looking fab while doing it -- is not to be missed.
