Despite a frankly incredible cast of talent, Mother, Couch is bland, uninspiring rubbish for 99 percent of its thankfully brief running time. Based upon the Swedish novel Mamma i soffaby Jerker Virdborg, it is the directorial debut of Niclas Larsson, with the screenplay relocating the action from Sweden to the United States. Ewan McGregor does his best with a dross character, Rhys Ifans initially seems interesting but sort of wanders off into the background never to return and the indisputably brilliant Lara Flynn Boyle appears to have just been given an endless supply of cigarettes to smoke and nothing else to do, something even she cannot make fresh and exciting. The usually excellent Ellen Burstyn struggles with poor writing and abysmal pacing. F Murray Abraham is forgivably forgettable in a thinly-developed double turn. Lake Bell and Taylor Russell do their best with whiny, underwritten plot-points-disguised-as-characters.
The story is briefly as follows: Burstyn plays the unnamed Mother of three children, David, Gruffudd and Linda (McGregor, Ifans and Boyle, respectively) who all have different dads and all have emotional baggage as a result. David is in a potentially unhappy marriage with Anne (Bell), and we are treated to several phone calls between the two spelling that out. Burstyn’s Mother sits on a couch in a surreal furniture store run by Bella (Russell), her father Marcus and her uncle Marco (both played by Abraham). She then refuses to leave. Repeated attempts to remove Burstyn from the couch, initially to get to David’s daughter’s birthday party, are fruitless and the film becomes more ‘surreal’ (by no means a value term in this context) as it progresses, eventually culminating with a few ‘mysterious’ speeches and an incredibly heavy-handed metaphor about grief and loss.
Visually and tonally, despite initial conceptual similarities to Ari Aster’s creative but overwrought mother-anxiety behemoth Beau Is Afraid, the most obvious influence here is Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love. The themes are similar (dysfunctional family relationships, tentative romantic attraction, the violent threat hidden beneath whimsy) and the protagonist follows a similar trajectory from meekness to excessive emotional outbursts. Whereas Anderson’s film used the setting of a mattress store to great comic effect, Larsson inexplicably does nothing with the furniture store in Mother, Couch. We get no sense of the vastness of the space, most of the film is shot in an artlessly ‘arthouse’ style reminiscent of an advertisement. A couple of pleasant driving shots aside, there is nothing to see here. Two scenes shine momentarily (McGregor and Russell share a vaguely amusing candlelit dinner and the terrible anxiety of your child wandering out of sight at the beach is effectively conveyed) but are soon extinguished by the film’s joyless march to its soppy conclusion.
This lack of visual flair and waste of an interesting space could be forgiven if the central event of the film (Burstyn’s refusal to leave the couch she has sat on, which the proprietors of the store eventually demand $2,000 for) was injected with even the slightest hint of dramatic tension. A couple of derivative fast-cuts involving a loud scream and somebody driving away from the store do not do enough. Burstyn plods through heavy-handed, mean-spirited diatribes involving wishing she had never had children while McGregor sometimes winces, sometimes confronts her. These moments are repetitive and build clumsily to an astonishingly ineffective climax involving Letting Go Of The Past. Despite the fact that Charlie Kaufman’s noble failure I’m Thinking of Ending Things did a much better job of balancing a somewhat cliché story resolution with outright surrealism, the dinner/flood scene at the end of Mother Couch recalls the former film’s most self-indulgent contrivances.
Quite simply, Mother, Couch does nothing to make you care about the fate of any of its characters. If this were a purposeful, deconstructionist approach, it would still be a bad movie, but it is clear from the gratingly sentimental ending that it is not. A real dud. Do not bother unless you have to for some strange reason.
Photo courtesy of Film Movement / Memory
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