Mammoth

You expected him to compromise. You demanded of him not to. This goes in between.

Mammoth tells the story of the wealthy New York couple who keeps a nanny from the Phillipines for their daughter. The nanny's sons are on the other side of the world. There are certainly no equal living conditions here and the film attacks globalization.

But it does so in a rather quiet way. Moodysson has said that he's too old to judge people anymore. And that's a pity, because it makes this film rather toothless. You can't have your criticism taken seriously if everybody more or less are victims.

The acting is all right here, but still this is a very Americanized movie. Moodysson has had resources, OK, but he has lacked the artistic possibilities, working within this system.

Like Innaritu's "Babel", Lukas Moodysson's "Mammoth" focuses on groups of people who share connections with each other, as well as the dilemma of family members parted from their loved ones by the need to earn a living in the global economy. At the film's opening Leo is a computer game whiz, living the American dream with his wife Ellen and a delightful 7 Y-O daughter in a vast apartment high above the streets of Manhattan. Their child's nanny Gloria resides with them, but this immigrant worker's calm exterior conceals growing agitation at being separated from two young sons, who live with their grandmother back in the Philippines.

The idealistic, unworldly Leo must travel to Thailand for the signing of a business deal. As he sets off on his trip Ellen works a punishing schedule as an E. R. surgeon, fretting that she's losing her daughter's affection to Gloria, and compensating for this anxiety by getting emotionally entangled in the case of a child who has been brutally stabbed by his mother. After arriving at his Bangkok luxury hotel, Leo pines for his family, exchanging disjointed voice-mails with Ellen while he waits for the lawyers to conclude their negotiations. Eventually he escapes the city for a remote beach resort, where he befriends a young prostitute after rejecting her professional advances.

The film takes its time building up the pressure, but it's no great hardship watching such a talented cast heating up the stew until the pot boils over. When it does, the story avoids sentimentality, and Moodyson tosses his characters into an emotional whirlpool. The story makes it clear the struggles of the poor will always be remorseless - but also suggests future upheavals might await Leo and Ellen.

After reading the reviews here I wanted to put in my own 2 cents. This movie is basically about being a parent in a modern age. There are three story lines, one about a nurse in NYC, one about her husband, a computer geek with lots of money, and one about about their nanny.

The one thing the woman, the man, and the nanny all have in common are the sacrifices they make for their kids. The man and woman both have very successful jobs, and the nanny from the Philippines works in the US to earn money for her kids back home. However, the sacrifices they make are so extreme that each person becomes detached from the very reason why they made these sacrifices in the first place: Their children.

The film presents us with a critical portrayal of this lifestyle, and as such in the end this is a tragedy.

This is an excellent film, highly recommended, especially for those of us who must balance work and family life on a daily basis.

Mammoth (2009)

The symbolism of the title will escape most people (it did me), but it literally shows up in an expensive pen with mammoth tusk inlays. This pen crosses a border of wealth and culture that the characters of the movie can't ever cross. And yet the lives of all the many different narratives interwoven here are perfectly parallel.

But we know that parallel lines by definition never meet, even if they seem to in the distance down the tracks.

The three or four narrative threads are relatively independent even if they relate completely in theme (and in some small direct connecting way) to each other. It's a little like "Babel" in that the stories are literally worlds apart. Central is the New York City couple with the two main stars, computer games analyst (Gael Garcia Bernal) and his emergency room surgeon wife (Michelle Williams). They have a child who is mostly taken care of by a live-in nanny, a Filipino woman with children of her own left behind in her home country.

The third locale is Thailand because Bernal goes there on a business trip, and while he's there he has a kind of epiphany about the meaning of life. That's where the pen takes on a brief life of its own. The epiphany, like many revelations for all of us, is short-lived, too, and I think that's part of the idea. We all strive, we all have good intentions, but really nothing quite adds up.

What figures most in all of the stories are the children--not least the cute and precocious New York City girl. The children of the nanny and the child of a Thai prostitute who has a slightly caricatured but important role also figure in. If the parents are doing what they can for their children, they are also even more doing what they can for themselves. And sometimes it seems like survival, but of course, survival how, at what economic level? Would it be better in fact to not prostitute yourself (as a nanny, for example) simply to get ahead? Or is this the only way to give your children something you don't get for yourselves.

All of this is in the movie. It's intense, it wants to say a lot. And in some way it does. There is some sense that it doesn't always quite click, as if there are things the director could have pushed--or pulled--for greater effect. This isn't something to really judge from the outside, but it's not a masterpiece, which requires some other kind of aesthetic elevation. But it's really good, very good, a movie to see. See it.

There was a big speculation of Moodysson being a total sell-out, doing a major picture in America, but that obviously wasn't the case. It isn't Moodysson quite like you've seen before, but definitely not in a bad way. He innovated his style into new directions, without compromising his vision.

Gael García Bernal has proved himself to be one of the greatest actors of this generation in Iñárritu's pictures, and Mammoth comes as no exception. In fact I feel a little Iñárrituish vibe in the movie; the whole theme is pretty similar with Babel.

Somebody commented earlier here, that Moodysson was just "teethless" with his society critic in Mammoth, but I really have to disagree. I wouldn't even use the word "critic" in Mammoth's case - I don't see Moodysson as a preacher, but as an objective lens, which allows us to see the world differently. It's art people, not politics; pointing fingers isn't the point.