The poetry of pain

Swedish writer/director Lukas Moodysson's uneven and ill-conceived drama Mammoth has moments of quiet poetry, but they aren't enough to balance out the play of conflicting ideas, banal dialogue and overly simplistic moralizing on display throughout the film's 125-minute running time.

Mammoth follows the fates of Leo and Ellen Vidales (Gael García Bernal and Michelle Williams) and their 8-year-old daughter, Jackie (Sophie Nyweide). The Vidales are wealthy, depressed and overworked. They employ a Filipino nanny, Gloria (Marife Necesito), to care for Jackie during their incessant absences.

Leo makes his way to Thailand on business and takes to romancing a prostitute named Cookie (Run Srinikornchot) in the countryside while his wife battles insomnia and constant trauma (she's a surgeon with unusually thin skin) back home.

Meanwhile, Gloria's two young sons plead with her to come home, and the older boy (Jan Nicdao as Salvador) resorts to progressively more dangerous activities in a hopeless quest to finance his mother's return. Needless to say, it all ends rather badly for Salvador and Cookie and, basically, for everyone else, as well.

Bernal and Williams are exceptional as the ennui-beset central couple. It's difficult to imagine the charming Bernal as a vapid and unctuous moral imbecile, but the actor makes it happen. Nicdao and Martin Delos Santos are heartbreaking as Gloria's sons, and Nyweide sells her attachment to her nanny with utter conviction.

Marcel Zyskind's inspired cinematography is a high point. The visual portrayals of Third World desolation and natural beauty are equally mesmerizing. Whatever communicative power the film possesses is due in no small part to Zyskind's efforts and the sincerity of the cast. It's disturbing to realize that images of children picking through trash for food and generally suffering the plight of the powerless can be aesthetically captivating, but Zyskind obviously knows what he's about.

Art-house cinematography aside, Mammoth is clearly agitprop. What isn't as clear is exactly what point of view Moodysson is espousing. His treatment of religion is confusing, to take just one example. He is, among other things, an outspoken Christian. But it's difficult to tell if he is attempting to highlight the transcendent nature of church-going with a scene where young Jackie accompanies Gloria to Mass, or instead underscore the intimacy of young Jackie's relationship to her nanny. It's possible that he intended to do both, but he achieves neither.

Moodysson has been accused of misogyny in the Swedish press for presenting a plot that in some ways seems to equate women working outside the home with child abuse. But an alternate (and perhaps more plausible) interpretation of the subtext in the director's contrived storyline is that he is attempting, however poorly, to comment on the unfortunate clash of cultures that results when impoverished peoples sacrifice their happiness and the well-being of their own children to care for the children of wealthy Westerners. The film is obsessed with exploitation and inequality, and, however condescending Moodysson's portrayal of his impossibly angelic maids and prostitutes may be toward women in general, he nonetheless demonstrates a great deal of sympathy for them as characters.

In the end, most of the blame for the confusion that has arisen in response to Mammoth rests solely with Moodysson. At the very least, the writer/director is responsible for creating an intermittently lovely but generally muddle-headed film.  

James Walling can be reached at
jwalling@praguepost.com