The Year of Anne Hathaway has begun. Mother Mary is the first of five films that star Hathaway this year – others include The Devil Wears Prada 2, The Odyssey, The End of Oak Street, and the latest Colleen Hoover adaptation Verity. Most of those are big box office plays, but Mother Mary is a true “one for me” indie, distributed by A24 and directed by David Lowery, best known for A Ghost Story. And while it’s premature to speak for any of these other films, I can’t imagine that any of them will make as good use of Anne Hathaway’s unique talents as this Mother Mary does. You could count on one hand the number of other actors who could credibly pull this role off, and Anne Hathaway isn’t just convincing – she is genuinely great.
Hathaway stars as the titular Mother Mary, a pop superstar decades into her career. After an onstage accident, Hathaway shows up at the home of Sam Anselm (Michaela Coel), her estranged close friend and fashion designer, requesting a costume for her comeback show. Sam has not listened to Mother Mary’s music in a decade and still has not forgiven her for cutting her out of her circle without even a property goodbye. Nevertheless she agrees to design the costume – perhaps partly because she can finally release all of her pent-up rage towards Mother Mary now that she has a shred of leverage.
Coel is really the perfect foil to Hathaway, and the relationship dynamics between their two characters are explored richly. Sam’s hurt is very evident but she has a wryness that never lets the hurt become exhausting – enough time has passed that she has moved on in a lot of ways. It also frames the film as a real critique of Mother Mary, or perhaps even moreso, of attaining the level of fame that allows you to act in harmful ways towards others with no real repercussions. The film pulls off the tough balance of keeping us mostly on Mother Mary’s side while picking apart the idea of a representational figure for large groups of people to idolize.
Other than some expansive musical performance sequences, there is a chamber piece focus to the first half of the movie – it is mostly Sam and Mother Mary trading barbs, ideas, and recollections while Sam designs Mother Mary’s costume in her workshop. The movie is at its best when it is in this mode, with the two leads riffing off each other’s energy. The dialogue is strong enough and the production design is striking enough that the film feels very focused and grounded.
Mother Mary isn’t content to stay as a chamber piece, though, and as it expands it gets less interesting – particularly once the pentagrams, seances, and ouija boards show up. The film enters into a thematic and visual territory that is straight out of the A24 playbook but has very little life or identity of its own, and in doing so it loses its focus on the core energy coming from the performances. It becomes less rooted in the characters and their very real emotions of hurt and longing, and attempts to externalize some of its ideas – but it isn’t successful in making that switch.
Still, there is something about the Coel and Hathaway energy that really works here, even through the messy end of the film. A dance sequence that Mother Mary performs (sans music, at Sam’s request) in the workshop is the most striking display of Hathaway’s talent – with pristine modern dance gradually giving way to a near-possessed writhing on the ground. But that sequence isn’t the only display of Hathaway’s ability to do it all, as she performs vocals with a pop sheen, and is seen many times performing on stage. A lot of effort has been expended to make these performances credible, with high production quality and seven strong original songs. These aspects make this uneven film worth engaging with, even if it doesn’t all come together in the end.
