Reviews

An Algerian man leaves his Algerian wife and young children and goes to work in France. He sends her money every month but does not return for 48 years. 48 years! After 48 years she finally decides to search for him. Why it takes her 48 years to make up her mind to look for him the movie does not even try to explain! Receiving help from kind strangers, she manages to find her husband. The wife pleads with him to return to Algeria and rejoin his family. The husband offers feeble explanations for his 48 year absence and for his manifest reluctance to heed her pleas: his children will not recognize him, etc. She refutes his vacuous explanations, but to no avail: he decides not to rejoin her and their family in Algeria and even asks her never to visit him again because it hurts him too much! Perhaps he requires another 48 years of separation before he can arrive at a different decision. If this is a love story, then I invented the wheel.

This movie has its charms, but the actor playing Lars is not one of them. Ryan Gosling will make you want to reach through the TV screen in order to choke him strenuously -- not necessarily with a view to killing him, but just to put him in a coma long enough for the movie to proceed without him. As portrayed by Mr. Gosling, Lars is a poster boy for the rapid administration of a prefrontal lobotomy by the closest village resident with access to a jigsaw or a knitting needle. The idea that an entire town would aid and abet such a nincompoop would be heartwarming, were it not for the fact that it is so unrealistic: there is bound to be at least one rational person in any town who realizes that the best way to deal with such an obnoxious person as Lars is to feed him huge quantities of phenothiazines while administering a succession of earthquake-inducing electroshocks to his troubled temples. I'm a big fan of psychotherapy, and ordinarily opposed to such violent measures, but for Lars, at least as portrayed by Ryan Gosling, I would make a special exception!

In order to enjoy Mother Night, I recommend that you have a lobotomy first. This has to be one of the most unpleasant and unbelievable movies ever concocted. More is required of the viewer than the usual suspension of disbelief: hence my recommendation of a lobotomy. But don't do it; you probably would not understand the movie afterwards, only now the reason would be having too low an IQ, whereas the previous reason was having one that was too high.

To focus on just one of the many implausible, indeed absurd, features of the movie, the chief character, played by Nick Nolte, is a German-speaking American asked by the American government to pose as a Nazi in Nazi Germany; via his hate-filled radio speeches, he transmits surreptitious messages to the Allies that help us win the war. He is married to the daughter of a vicious Nazi policeman, who really believes in Der Fuehrer and Nazi ideology. We are given no reason to doubt that the daughter was successfully indoctrinated in the Nazi hatred of non-Aryans. So we have to wonder about this couple presented as being very much in love: what do they talk about? How does Nolte manage to love his Nazi wife?

To focus on just one of the many unpleasant features of the movie, at the end Nolte is given the opportunity to prove to the world that he was indeed a double-agent. To say the least, he squanders this opportunity. I guess we are supposed to believe that he does so for a noble reason - to keep his spy activity a secret, so that prospective future American spies can engage in the same work - but to me this rationale doesn't make much sense and it is painful to watch the Nolte character accept it, if that indeed is what he does. You would think, after all he has been through, that he would want to educate the world as to just how painful the life of a spy is, so that prospective future spies would appreciate in advance what they were signing up for. Before signing up, these potential spies could apply moral pressure to the governments of the world that seek to recruit them: they could demand that these governments support them when the mission is complete, instead of abandoning and renouncing them.

The acting is good, the women are beautiful, and the men are handsome, so if you're looking for well-acted soft porn, this movie is for you. Otherwise, you are wasting your time. The motivation of the main characters, in particular the eponymous lead, is often a mystery. She could have just told the truth - the truth as presented in the film, not necessarily the historical truth - and her lover would have been spared time in jail for a rape he did not commit. Was she protecting her father, who went off half-cocked, as it were, when he impetuously instigated a malicious lawsuit? Was she protecting herself, with her reputation suddenly of concern when heretofore only her art seemed to matter? During the trial, this strong-willed woman turns to mush before our eyes. Conversely, her lover, who starts off as a narcissistic jerk, becomes a selfless hero during the trial. At least his motivation is clearer: he sacrifices himself for love. Naturally, since no good deed must go unpunished, we are told that she never sees him again.