{"id":603733,"date":"2026-04-14T16:22:07","date_gmt":"2026-04-14T16:22:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/603733\/"},"modified":"2026-04-14T16:22:07","modified_gmt":"2026-04-14T16:22:07","slug":"anne-hathaway-plays-a-gaga-pop-star","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/603733\/","title":{"rendered":"Anne Hathaway Plays a Gaga Pop Star"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tIn \u201cMother Mary<\/a>,\u201d the title character (Anne Hathaway<\/a>), a global pop superstar who you could say is based on a lot of people but is most directly and obviously a riff on Lady Gaga (maximalist dance pop; extravagant postmodern wardrobe; air of transgressive Catholic rapture), has a close encounter with Sam Anselm (Michaela Coel<\/a>), the British fashion designer who created Mary\u2019s visionary costumes. She was her hand-in-distressed-glove collaborator \u2014 and the two were closer than that. But they\u2019re estranged now, and haven\u2019t seen each other for 10 years. So cataclysmic was their breakup that in all that time, Sam has never once listened to Mother Mary\u2019s music.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut now, out of the blue, Mary shows up at the English country manor that\u2019s the headquarters of Sam\u2019s fashion empire. She\u2019s there because, in her words, \u201cI need a dress.\u201d A visionary dress. A dress for the big summing-up-of-her-career concert that she\u2019s about to give. The two go into the large stone barn out back where Sam does her designing, and there, by themselves, they talk: about their partnership and their past, about their wounding breakup, about the complicated brew of love and bitterness that still holds their dual spirits together.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe talk stretches on for a while, and since the two actors are vivid and on point, we\u2019re fine with settling into one of those movies that\u2019s essentially a two-hander \u2014\u00a0in this case, broken up by flashbacks to Mother Mary onstage, where she performs before her adoring throng. I\u2019ve always been partial to movies about conversation, because I think it\u2019s one of the most pleasurable activities there is, and the fact that \u201cMother Mary\u201d strikes such a familiar chord \u2014 Mary and Sam unpeeling their history like an onion, circling around it until they reach its inner core \u2014 is not, in my book, a strike against the movie.<\/p>\n

\n\tThat will come later.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tAt no point do Mary and Sam say they were lovers. The film\u2019s press material coyly describes them as \u201cfriends.\u201d And maybe they were just friends \u2014 friends intimate enough to be spiritual lovers. In a sense, it doesn\u2019t really matter. \u201cMother Mary\u201d is not a roman \u00e0 clef. The character of Mother Mary may be a fictional gloss on Lady Gaga, but it\u2019s not as if she\u2019s supposed to be Gaga. And at this point, there wouldn\u2019t be anything revolutionary in portraying a famous pop star with a private life that\u2019s bisexual. That\u2019s not the point of the movie.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhat is the point? For a while, we think \u201cMother Mary\u201d is going to be a talky, angsty, back-and-forth relationship drama, mixed in with heady footnotes on fame and creativity. Mary, named for a Beatles lyric, has composed a new song, which she says \u201cmight be the best song ever written in the history of songs.\u201d It\u2019s called \u201cSpooky Action,\u201d which is a reference to Einstein\u2019s principle of \u201cspooky action at a distance\u201d \u2014 the idea that separated particles, even when they\u2019re light-years apart, can have an effect upon each other. That\u2019s a rather ponderous metaphor for what in another movie might come down to, \u201cI still think about you.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tBut never mind. Hathaway, in disheveled straight blonde hair parted down the middle to its thick dark roots, does a convincing job of showing us that Mary, while devoted to her art (and her fame \u2014 the two can\u2019t be separated), is a mere mortal who wears her onstage persona like a cosmic costume. Her trademark is to sport some version of her signature halo, a circular head piece attached to the neck, and this connects to the religious nature of her stardom \u2014 that she\u2019s no mere celebrity, and not just an artist either, but a kind of pop demigod channeling our collective fantasies of saintliness and sin.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe film shows us that Sam, the offstage muse, is an awesome creator as well. Her visionary designs forged Mother Mary as an image (Mary once paraded down a red carpet wearing honey), so she shares in her identity. Coel, as she proves in the marvelous new Steven Soderbergh movie \u201cThe Christophers,\u201d is a great debater \u2014 she knows how to use those penetrating large eyes, and her profile that\u2019s like a Picasso come to life, to project an insinuating perception, the sense that she\u2019s reading her antagonist like a psychic. In this case, Sam views Mary with ultimate wariness and knowledge, still smarting from the scars of abandonment and what they revealed.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut all of that \u2014\u00a0spoiler alert! \u2014 winds up being\u00a0very much beside the point. David Lowery<\/a>, the writer-director of \u201cMother Mary,\u201d is a hard filmmaker to pin down, but he is, among other things, a reliably highfalutin trickster-showman who likes to tease the audience with a nearly avant-garde sense of play. I\u2019ve liked some of his films, like \u201cThe Old Man & the Gun\u201d and \u201cThe Green Knight,\u201d even if the latter fused its intoxicating roots-of-King-Arthur mythology with too much head-scratching magical realism for my taste. In \u201cMother Mary,\u201d the director gives in to that side of himself completely. This is the David Lowery-est David Lowery movie ever made. Which is to say that by the end of it, you may be scratching your head to the point of wanting your money back.<\/p>\n

\n\tMother Mary dances on the barn floorboards, and Sam says things like \u201cYou give people the gift of giving a shit about you.\u201d But what the movie really comes down to is a s\u00e9ance. And the stabbing of flesh. And a ghost. Yes, a ghost. In the form of a floating piece of red material that looks like a blanket made of organza. Is this the ghost of their relationship? Or a real ghost? That\u2019s a question that will be debated by moviegoers for maybe four seconds. Because \u201cMother Mary,\u201d as it takes the leap into Gothic metaphysical fantasy, becomes almost completely incoherent, and stays that way. It\u2019s like an exorcist movie where the devil is a piece of bolt fabric.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThe movie does have a few additional in-concert scenes, but the songs, written and produced by Jack Antonoff and Charli xcx, just sound like a bland version of what they\u2019re supposed to be. To my ears, the music conjured Taylor Swift trying to be Enya. If this were a sustained two-hander, it might have been the story of a beloved pop superstar and her genius designer, and how they forged a connection that was creative and spiritual and romantic. It might have been about how they broke up (because the pop star became too big and thought she could do it on her own), and about how that breakup was a betrayal (because it was based on the pop star\u2019s narcissism). Instead, \u201cMother Mary\u201d turns into the most befuddlingly pretentious movie about a pop star since Brady Corbet\u2019s \u201cVox Lux.\u201d It heads down a blind alley of cosmic meaning that, in the end, means nothing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In \u201cMother Mary,\u201d the title character (Anne Hathaway), a global pop superstar who you could say is based…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":603734,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[12944,49,48,221030,75,142480,142481],"class_list":{"0":"post-603733","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-anne-hathaway","9":"tag-ca","10":"tag-canada","11":"tag-david-lowery","12":"tag-entertainment","13":"tag-michaela-coel","14":"tag-mother-mary"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/603733","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=603733"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/603733\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/603734"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=603733"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=603733"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=603733"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}