Film review: Mommy

In the suburbs of Quebec, a fifty-something woman crashes her car, stumbles out and swears. It would be a point of high drama in most movies; in Mommy, it is one of the more banal happenings for Diane (Anne Dorval) whose life is a series of car crashes.

She is the titular Mommy to Steve (Antoine Olivier Pilon), an ADHD-suffering teen. Steve is often violent and unpredictable, loud, lewd, rude, racist and menacing. Spending two hours and twenty minutes in the company of such a character could be unbearable, but for the fact that he can also be sweet, loyal, sensitive, generous and hopeful. The then 16-year-old Pilon’s mature, complex and dynamic performance is stunning.

Similarly convincing is Dorval as a chain-smoking, brash and brassy widow whose short skirts and low-cut tops show that she hasn’t given up on life, despite the constant struggle to keep her son out of trouble. Not an easy task.

After Steve starts a fire in a café, injuring a fellow inmate of the mental health institution that houses him, he is kicked out of the juvenile unit and moves back in with Diane. The pair befriend new neighbor Kyla (Suzanne Clement), a young mother on leave from her teaching position after a nervous breakdown left her with a speech impediment.

We’re not sure quite why, but all is not well between Kyla and her husband, and while most people run a mile from Steve’s volatile behavior, the troubled housewife is drawn to and finds solace with Diane and her unruly son, whom she starts to tutor so he can apply for college. As the trio bond and help each other – Steve focusing on his studies, Diane enjoying friendship and fun and Kyla’s stammer receding during her time in their company – dare we hope that things might turn out okay?

Hmm. A title card at the beginning notes that in this imagined Canada of the near future a new law allows parents to institutionalize disturbed kids with no legal process, which hangs ominously over the ensuing events. The happiness and progress that the dysfunctional trio makes is fragile, and there is always something – an overly friendly male neighbor, spiteful neighborhood kids, the law – threatening to bring it crashing down. But then isn’t that the human condition?

Astonishingly, director Xavier Dolan is only 25. Despite his youth, he has crafted a powerfully unsettling yet moving film that touches on family ties, love, hope, acceptance and vulnerability as well as the foremost theme of mental distress and its impact on those around. It’s shot in a 1:1 aspect ratio, meaning we see events in a square, a format that is played with to memorable effect in the middle of the film.

But Mommy is primarily a very human story, painfully raw, sometimes undisciplined and certainly too long, but a searing depiction of the parent-child bond, with its pleasures and pressures blown up.

Debbie Stowe