Mammoth
Dir: Lukas Moodysson
Rating: 2.0/5.0
IFC Films
125 Minutes
The scale of 2000s white guilt parallel narrative art-films, from worst to best, goes like this: Crash, Mammoth, Babel. Lukas Moodyssons’ film, however, has more in common with Alejandro González Iñárritu’s pretty-looking film than it does with Paul Haggis’ banal “everybody’s a racist” drama. For one thing, it stars Gael García Bernal and doesn’t take place in Los Angeles. So we’re off to a good start.
Mammoth seems to be about people’s places in the world. Leo (Bernal) is in Thailand for business and having a terrible time until he decides to make it a vacation and have some fun. His wife, Ellen (Michelle Williams), is a surgeon who’s tending to a kid whose mother stabbed him in the stomach while struggling for the attention of her daughter Jackie. Jackie spends all her time with her nanny, Gloria, who’s a Filipino immigrant working for her children back home.
Director Moodysson lives up to his surname, as nobody in this movie is very happy (except Bernal when he finally cuts loose). More interestingly, Moodysson has some weird oedipal issues he’s obviously working through in this film as each woman (save for Jackie) has some fatal flaw that prevents her from being a perfect parent. Williams, as a successful surgeon, has no time for her daughter, and when she does have time, Jackie only wants to hang out with Gloria. Gloria is a bit busy making money for her family in America to protect her kids. And, in a shocking twist, the Thai prostitute that Bernal falls in love with also has a kid. Either Moodysson has mother issues or he thinks kids are a burden. Either way.
The story’s a whole big parallel narrative thing, but at least it’s firmly established that all these people know one another. There are no cute connections to make. There are no clever coincidences that are supposed to be meaningful. So the film has that going for it.
What it doesn’t have going for it is an ability to keep interest. Just because you have several narratives working at once doesn’t mean that each one is interesting or worth spending very much time on. It also doesn’t help that sometimes the film spends so much time in one place that it’s easy to forget that there were other ones going on. This especially happens with Leo’s narrative because it features a character with something to do (even if it’s travel around Thailand) and something resembling a character arc. Because he’s not a mother, I suppose Moodysson likes him a bit better.
So, is Mammoth about how globalization chews up and spits out tourist and migrant worker alike? Is it about how every mother is shitty? Conversely, is it about how every mother sacrifices her children for that same children’s well-being while attending to a different child? Do we all just need a vacation? Ultimately, I don’t know what Mammoth is going for besides being depressing.
