Love away

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.

In New York, the immature family man Leo Vidales (Gael García Bernal) is a successful businessman, owner of the Underlandish, a successful website of digital games and married with Dr. Ellen Vidales (Michelle Williams), a dedicated surgeon of the emergency room of a hospital. They have a daughter, Jackie (Sophie Nyweide), who is an intelligent girl that is raised by her nanny, the Filipino Gloria (Marife Necesito) that spends more time with her than Ellen. Gloria has two sons in Philippine that miss her.

When Leo need to travel to Singapore with his partner Bob (Tom McCarthy) to sign a millionaire contract with investors, Ellen operates a boy stabbed in the stomach by his own mother and she feels connected to the boy and rethinks her relationship with Jackie. Meanwhile Leo is bored waiting for the negotiation of Bob with the investors and he decides to travel to Bangkok and lodges in a rustic cottage on the seashore.

Leo meets the young prostitute and mother Cookie (Run Srinikornchot) and he has one night stand with her. Meanwhile, Gloria's ten year-old boy Salvador (Jan David G. Nicdao) misses her mother and decides to find a job. His innocence leads him to a tragedy.

"Mammoth" is a melodramatic film about motherhood – there are four parallel situations of mother and children – Ellen and Jackie; Gloria and her sons; the boy Anthony and his mother that has stabbed him; and Cookie and her baby.

I had a great expectation with this film, but unfortunately the plot does not work well and is pointless, going to nowhere. There is the contrast between people and specially children from the First and Third Worlds, but nothing new. The narrative is cold and not engaging.

Gael Garcia Bernal is miscast and his immature character has nothing to do with his mature wife. Sophie Nyweide steals the film with her top- notch performance. There are so many tragedies along the story that in the end I was expecting that Leo had contracted AIDS with Cookie and would transmit the disease to his wife Ellen. The title "Mammoth" refers to the expensive pen that Bob gave to Leo, but I did not understand the intention of the author with this title. My vote is six.

Title (Brazil): "Corações em Conflito" ("Hearts in Conflict")

Written and directed by Lukas Moodysson, "Mammoth" is a melancholic indie feature showing how both those who have money and those who don't can be equally unhappy. On a deeper level, it's also about how parents – mainly out of necessity but sometimes out of cruelty - often fail to provide their children with the care and nurturing they need to feel protected and loved.

Leo (Gael Garcia Bernal) and Ellen (Michelle Williams) are a young married couple with a seven-year-old daughter (Sophie Nyweide) who live in a fancy loft in Soho. Though a self-described "hippie" in his younger days, Leo has recently made it to the "big time" by turning his nerdish obsession with internet video games into a multimillion dollar enterprise. But Leo can't quite adjust to being a part of the privileged classes, and he yearns for a simpler life focused on his family, something that seems to be becoming ever more difficult to achieve with his busy schedule. Ellen works nights as an emergency room surgeon, which prevents her from spending the kind of quality time she would like with her daughter, Jackie, who, in turn, is becoming ever more attached to Gloria (Marife Necesito), her Filipina nanny. Gloria, meanwhile, is heartbroken at the fact that she's had to leave her two little boys back in the Philippines to basically fend for themselves, while she earns enough money to build the house they will all one day live in.

Leo and Ellen are united in their desire to do good in the world – Ellen, by patching up broken bodies and shattered lives, and Leo, by spreading his new-found wealth around to those in need. In a way, they're finding their own means of helping to bridge the gap between the haves and the have-nots in this world. But at what cost to their family unit? The movie draws a distinct contrast between life in Manhattan and life in the Philippines, where Gloria's children live with the everlasting threat of poverty hanging over their heads, and Thailand, where Leo goes on a business trip and where his attraction to a beautiful native girl may ultimately prove too powerful to resist.

Though at times it may seem meandering and insufficiently developed in terms of its storytelling, "Mammoth" finds its own strength in concentrating on those little moments of truth that form the essence of real life. And even though there is a surfeit of musical-montage sequences running throughout the film, it is partly counteracted by a subtle, spare and haunting musical score that nicely accentuates the lyrical nature of the piece. The last half hour, in particular, becomes a poetic and powerful account of people learning to prioritize their own lives in such a way as to be of the greatest value to both themselves and those around them.

Now that Moodysson is back from the grave (oh, but what a fine grave it was) there is ridiciously high hopes for this first international production. It usually takes about five to fifteen minutes before I get tangled up in his movies, this time though it toke almost half an hour. Mammoth is of course more complex, with much more going on at the same time in different parts of the world, than his other works. Or not more complex, maybe just wider. Nevermind; it's a fine piece of cinema, great storytelling and speaks grimly to us about the world we're raping, the time we're wasting and the people suffering becaurse of our western lifestyles. Mostly it's about the children who are crushed in the middle of our lost struggle to make a life, buy more stuff or just to survive. Does that make sense? The movie does, in a sad way.

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.