One aspect of girlhood not often explored are friendship breakups. The feeling of bile that eats up your heart as you desperately fight with someone who was once dear to you is a feeling hard to find elsewhere.
The new movie “Mother Mary” highlights more of a post-friendship breakup in its plot. Pop singer Mother Mary, played by Anne Hathaway, and designer Sam Anslem, played by Michaela Coel, were once bestfriends for 15 long years. But after a misspoken anecdote during an interview turns into a fight, they distance themselves from each other. After 10 years, Mary shows up at Sam’s door demanding a new dress for a show to represent who she truly is. But what she’s really after is closure once and for all.
While the movie has such a refreshing execution on confronting this friendship breakup, I do have my problems with it.
Mainly, I feel the movie tries to be two different things at once: a stageplay and an arthouse film. And these two forms of storytelling fight to be the center of the movie.
The stageplay form plays out during the first half of the movie after an introduction of who Mary and Sam are. This, I believe, is the weakest aspect of the movie.
Mary is consistently disheveled. From her damp hair to her closed-off demeanor, as the first half goes on with barely any movement or escalation, she teeters toward unpleasant rather than sympathetic.
The same goes for Sam. She goes from evolved and articulate to selfish and pretentious in a way, in her overuse of words to get under Mary’s skin. Again, these are real flaws within Sam. But with how drawn out hers and Mary’s tension had become, I itched for them to call each other out, so the audience could learn a bit more about what their friendship used to be like.
Through the tension and scorned feelings, Sam constantly repeats the meaning of metaphors, especially in both her and Mary’s artistic work.
The movie, of course, has its own metaphors directed at the audience, which is something I actually enjoyed. Besides the obvious metaphor explored throughout the movie, the supporting characters become symbols to Mary and Sam.
There are only a handful of speaking characters in the film, and even fewer are named. The limitations this choice brings about actually speak to the significance the named characters have. Other than the two main characters, the remaining characters whose names are shared on the screen were Imogen, played by FKA twigs, Miel Contrera, played by Alba Baptista, and Hilda, played by Hunter Schafer.
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There are other named characters listed on the “Mother Mary” IMDb page. But if memory serves correctly, they are not named in the movie.
These three characters, being the only ones besides the main characters to be named, hold a heavy weight on the movie. Each is a symbol of who Mary and Sam are.
Hilda, Sam’s assistant, shows just how successful she has become in her time without Mary. But their relationship also represents the loss Sam has seen in her character; she can no longer work with someone, only have someone work under her. Sam fills her life with work and uses this as a means of false growth.
Meanwhile, Imogen, one of Mary’s new friends, represents how haunted Mary is by how her friendship with Sam ended. Miel Contrera represents the next best thing in pop music. And to Mary, despite how proud she is of Miel’s new success in music, she ignores her fears of being replaced until she can no longer take it; Mary pushes herself until what she has ignored can no longer be sidelined and consumes her.
Outside the symbolism of these characters, I quite appreciated the choice not to have a male character. Even in movies that are more common and relatable to women, male characters will still, at times, be a core part of the story. This is usually not an issue, though I have noticed that these characters occasionally serve as a window for the male audience to engage with a topic they cannot relate to.
The choice to simply focus on the two women in this broken friendship is actually putting emphasis on friendship breakups versus making the movie about a post-friendship breakup and a couple of other major moments.
I personally do not rate movies. I find it difficult to place an actual number from an arbitrary scale onto the art of storytelling. I do, however, occasionally have a very strong feeling of a rating a piece of media places in me.
For “Mother Mary,” that’s a solid 6, maybe 6.5. It has the potential to be a very artistic experience of what it means to confront your ex-best friend, and also has the potential to be a very somber stage play about the complexities of ending a relationship. But where the movie falls flat is its indecision about which direction to take.