Mammoth (2009) or, Modern Life Misery

♥♥

Intimacy and depressive shell-shock appearance clash on this dropped-in-space poster for Lukas Moodysson's Mammoth

 

A nurse in New York has her hands in life and death situations at work, while her daughter is taught words by a Filipino nanny/maid who has two sons of her own, who miss her. The father in the New York family is off on a contract-signing job in Thailand.

Mammoth is written and directed by great Swedish filmmaker Lukas Moodysson (Show Me Love/Fucking Åmål (1998)). The title refers to a mammoth ivory pen that the man receives in the film as well as a line from one of Moodysson's poetry collections: "Our Savior buried like a Mammoth."

The film starts alright, and one senses quickly that here is an emotional drama with high stakes involved. But the very Swedish family drama, relocated to New York, or so it feels, gets too labored and sharpened in that every story in Mammoth seemingly must move towards misery. At the same time Michelle Williams (Wendy and Lucy (2008)) and Gael García Bernal's (The King (2005)) lead couple, - who seem like the filmmaker's exponents for the competent modern day parents, who still feel lost in the world, (because they lack a resting-place in faith/religion), - are wearying. - Especially Bernal, whose character is thoroughly insufferable in Thailand, where he by turns lectures on (Swedish) equality philosophy, makes promises voraciously as some 16 year-old, gets what he wants and then takes off.

SPOILER The impact of a couple of the tragedies in Mammoth (a boy passes away in the hospital; the nanny/maid's son is raped in the Philippines) is also lessened, because we see them arriving in advance. Moodysson's well-meaning and often well-acted fate-crossing drama can with a bit of harshness be described as misery porn, and it also seems very inspired by Alejandro Gonzáles Iñárritu's masterpiece Babel (2006), though it (also) lacks that film's striking visuals. Mammoth is overrated.

Moodyson presents the film here in a 2-minute clip

Cost: 10 mil. $

Box office: 2 mil. $

= Box office disaster (returned 0.2 times its cost)

[Mammoth premiered 19 January (Stockholm, Sweden) and runs 125 minutes. Shooting took place in Thailand, the Philippines, New York and Sweden from November 2007 - ?. Williams learned that her fiancee, star actor Heath Ledger had passed away in his sleep while filming Mammoth. The film opened #83 to a 4k $ first weekend in 1 theater in North America, its only release in the country, where it grossed just 9k $ (0.5 % of the total gross). The 3 biggest markets were Sweden with 1.5 mil. $ (75 %), Spain with 182k $ (9.1 %) and Finland with 113k $ (5.7 %). The film won a Guldbagge (Sweden's Oscar). Roger Ebert gave it a 3/4 star review, translating to 2 notches higher than this one. Moodysson returned with We Are the Best!/Vi Är Bäst! (2013). Bernal returned in The Limits of Control (2009); Williams in Blue Valentine (2010). Mammoth is rotten at 45 % with a 5.18/10 critical average at Rotten Tomatoes.]

What do you think of Mammoth?

A Hole in My Heart/Ett Hål i Mitt Hjärta (2004) or, A Hole in My Brain

[ZERO]

 

+ 3rd Worst Movie of the Decade

+ Worst Movie of the Year

A young woman seems to have passed out in some cereal or her own vomit on this poster for Lukas Moodysson's A Hole in My Heart

4 people are in a small, ugly apartment; 3 of them are making a porno flick. The fourth is an insufferably depressed emo-son of one of the pornographers.

A Hole in My Heart is a complete botch by Swedish master writer-director Lukas Moodysson (Lilya 4-Ever (2002)). It is a bit as if a white racist had made a film about blacks, this simply being the deeply prejudiced, one-sided and unwatchable pornography narrative conjured up by a pornography-hater. Few if any good films have ever sprung from hate, and A Hole in My Heart sure isn't one to change that.
The mix of nonsense is dreadfully related to us in off-putting digital photography. The least unsympathetic of the four is the exceedingly drab son, (played by Björn Almroth, who hasn't appeared in anything before or since), and this may constitute the movie's primary sin: It is unbearably dull throughout, as well as pretentious in the extreme.
I value some of Moodysson's other films tremendously, but I don't hesitate in calling A Hole in My Heart a mountain of plot-deprived bull. Trash.

 

Related post:

 

2004 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess [UPDATED I]

The 2000s in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess

An interview with Moodysson in connection with his most recent film, We Are the Best!/Vi Är Bäst! (2013)

Cost: Unknown
Box office: Unknown
= Unknown (but likely a mega-flop)
[A Hole in My Heart premiered 10 September (Toronto International Film Festival) and runs 98 minutes. Moodysson initially intended to shoot the film in the US and ask Christina Aguilera and Sylvester Stallone to star in it, but realized he couldn't do it. It was shot in 4 weeks in Trollhättan, Sweden in August 2003. At least one of the cast members, Thorsten Flinck, reportedly took morphine during shooting to cope with the troubling work.The film was released with a 'disturbing images'-warning on its posters in Sweden, which the censors there hadn't done since Pier Paolo Pasolini's Salò (1976). It was shown in a few theaters, and 16,425 paid admission there in its first two weeks. In Denmark, who acted as co-producing country behind the film, just 1,402 paid admission to see it. The film was released in 1 theater in North America, where it played for two weeks at #112 and #131 and grossed 3,784 $. If the budget was a modest 5 mil. SEK (approximately 0.56 mil. $), the film looks like a mega-flop theatrically. It was, incredibly, nominated for the European Film Award and the Nordic Council Film Prize. A Hole in My Heart is rotten at 41 % with a 4 critical average at Rotten Tomatoes.]

What do you think of A Hole in My Heart?