Don’t judge this ‘Mommy’ too harshly

Starring Anne Dorval, Antoine-Olivier Pilon and Suzanne Clement. Directed by Xavier Dolan. In French with English subtitles.

Rated R for language throughout, sexual references and some violence. Check listings for theaters. 2 hours, 19 minutes.

Bottom line: A melodrama that makes us think

By Roger Moore

Tribune News Service

It’s easy to judge her.

Diane Despres is 40-something, wears her skirts too short, her jeans too tight (and too bedazzled) and her blouses open a little too low.

She’s a brassy gum-snapper, cheap and so self-absorbed it’s no surprise that her teenage son is a hyper-active, mercurial train wreck. When a Quebec boarding school says “We’ve done what we can” for Steve, that is “your turn,” “Di” is belligerent and defiant. She doesn’t take their final warning about her sometimes-violent son seriously.

But this “Mommy” is made of stern stuff. Maybe she underestimates Steve’s tirades, laughing them off. Diane, limited as her options and intellectual resources seem to be, is a fighter.

Xavier Dolan’s “Mommy,” in French with English subtitles, is a showcase for Anne Dorval in the title role. Over the course of this overlong melodrama she wins our understanding and occasionally our sympathy as she struggles to get and keep a job, find a man and keep her maddening, monster of a son (Antoine-Olivier Pilon) under control. A tantrum-tossing kid in a man’s body, Steve is a punk who needs medication that he refuses to take, needs attention that no single parent (Di is widowed) can provide.

He has a volcanic temper, and Diane’s efforts to cope with or at least withstand his wild-eyed tirades make us fear for her and for him. She has a temper, too.

Then, there’s hope, the possibility of a rescue or at least a respite from the tension. Diane befriends their quiet, school teacher neighbor Kyla. She can stay with the kid, help with the home schooling, maybe give him a chance to have a normal life, which Diane allows herself to fantasize about. Maybe he has musical gifts, maybe those will take him into the mainstream.

But writer-director Dolan will not let us off that easy. Kyla, played with a guarded jumpiness by Suzanne Clement, has her own issues. Something bad happened in her life, something that makes her needy enough to suffer the company of this dumpster fire of a family next door. She endures Steve’s crude and inappropriate sexual come-ons and his mood swings, but for how long?

Dolan’s film tests our patience as we and the two women deal with Steve’s eruptions. He wears on us as he wears on them. We suspect that lack of medication isn’t his only problem. He has mastered the behavior of a jerk, an obnoxious, self-absorbed creep. Whatever these women get out of each other as friends, a two-person support group, he tests with his constant ugliness.

But it we’re lucky, even as the film reaches its much-delayed climax, we remember how we first judge this “Mommy,” her life and her world. And maybe we leave the theater a little embarrassed by that.