In Tree of Life, Jessica Chastain played a mother who could float. In Mama, she's attacked by one. Chastain shot this dignified little thriller in fall 2011 during the stretch when literally every arthouse theater played at least two of her pictures?between Tree, Coriolanus, The Help, Take Shelter, Texas Killing Fields and The Debt, she was indie cinema's inescapable new queen. Universal intended to release the Guillermo del Toro-produced Mama last October, but shelved it until the week after Chastain was nominated for an Oscar for Zero Dark Thirty. Is this her reputation-besmirching Norbit? Pshaw ? for my money, it's her best performance yet.
Mama starts with a child's hand scrawling ?Once upon a time,? words that send us all the way back to, uh, the financial collapse of 2008. A Wall Street bigshot (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) has a nervous breakdown: He shoots his co-workers, shoots his wife, and kidnaps his two girls, ages 3 and 1, with the intent of hiding out and shooting them, too. (Alas, murder-suicide is today's version of parents in the Brothers Grimm casting out their children to survive in the forest.) The place he chooses to pull the trigger is a cabin in the woods that belongs to "Mama," a ghost who doesn't take kindly to deadly dads. Side note: Why is Hollywood newly obsessed with monsters who are painfully thin and flexible? It's as if our entire generation grew up having nightmares about a double-jointed Karen Carpenter.
As the opening credits roll, kiddie crayon sketches show us what happened next: The scared blonde tykes cling to their new ghost mommy and revert to crawling on all fours and eating rats. It's a feral child fairy tale! Cut to the present where we…
Brooke Burns Busy Philipps Cameron Diaz Cameron Richardson Camilla Belle Carla Campbell Carla Gugino Carmen Electra
No comments:
Post a Comment