‘Mommy’ challenges, rewards

Fri., March 6, 2015

Roger Moore Tribune News Service

It’s easy to judge her. Diane Despris is 40-something, wears her skirts too short, her jeans too tight (and too bedazzled) and her blouses open a bit too low.

She’s a brassy gum-snapper, cheap and so self-absorbed it’s no surprise that her teenage son is a hyperactive, mercurial train wreck. When a Quebec boarding school says “We’ve done what we can” for Steve, that it’s “your turn,” Di is belligerent and defiant. She doesn’t take their final warning about her sometimes-violent son seriously.

“Loving people does not save them.”

But this “Mommy” is made of stern stuff. She may underestimate Steve’s tirades, but Diane, limited as her options and intellectual resources seem to be, is a fighter.

Xavier Dolan’s “Mommy,” in French with English subtitles, is a showcase for Anne Dorval in the title role. Over the course of this overlong melodrama she wins our understanding and occasionally our sympathy as she struggles to get and keep a job, find a man and keep her maddening monster of a son (Antoine-Olivier Pilon) under control. A tantrum-tossing kid in a man’s body, Steve has a volcanic temper, and Diane’s efforts to cope with or at least withstand his wild-eyed tirades make us fear for her and for him. She has a temper, too.

Then, there’s hope. Diane befriends their quiet schoolteacher neighbor Kyla. She can stay with the kid, help with the home schooling, maybe give him a chance to have a normal life, which Diane allows herself to fantasize about. Maybe he has musical gifts; maybe those will take him into the mainstream.

But writer-director Dolan will not let us off that easy. Kyla, played with a guarded jumpiness by Suzanne Clement, has her own issues. Something bad happened in her life, something that makes her needy enough to suffer the company of this dumpster fire of a family next door. She endures Steve’s crude and inappropriate sexual come-ons and his mood swings, but for how long?

Dolan’s film tests our patience as we and the two women deal with Steve’s eruptions. He wears on us as he wears on them. Whatever these women get out of each other as friends he tests with his constant ugliness.

But if we’re lucky, we remember how we first judge this “Mommy,” her life and her world. And maybe we leave the theater a little embarrassed by that.

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