Mother of George (2013)

During the first few scenes "Mother of George" is an exciting, visually arresting piece of international drama. It seems to be an infrequent and rather mesmerizing look at the life of one Nigerian immigrant trying to lead a proper marriage in a Manhattan jungle. As it continues, however, director Andrew Dosunmu's tricks wear out their welcome and finally become nagging relatives making life a chore.

This is a small story about a woman named Adenike (Danai Gurira) who is caught between the world's of tradition and her homeland, and the life she now leads in New York. Under the pressure of her family and the small but vibrant community of Nigerian-Americans who surround and fill her life, she becomes desperate to have a child. Maintaining the bloodline is more than the sheer egotism of modern America, it is essential to the family's happiness. The options presented to her--from Western medicine to...less acceptable methods--are played out as we watch a battle of wills from a supremely unusual subculture within our nation.

When I began watching this film I found myself very excited. It opened on what I can only assume to be a traditional Nigerian-style wedding, in which Adenike is finally going to bring respect to her generation of her family. The costumes and music are bright and exotic; it seemed a piece of filmmaking in which I could leave feeling a bit more cultured and a bit smug with myself. The film seemed reptilian, as though it had scales and expanded with a fleshy aliveness.

Towards the end of the film I found myself fighting desperately not to fall asleep, and I would have done so were it not the world premiere of the film and had I not been seated two rows in front of the director and cast. I discovered that after one became acquainted with Dosunmu's visual style it became a tedious task repeat himself over and over, sacrificing substance for style. His script was thin and poorly written, though somehow dialogue always seems better when in a different language (he should have kept it all in a local dialect). Once the drama of the film is learned, and it certainly takes its time in revealing the conflict, there is little left but to watch Adenike sluggishly try and resolve the issues.

I dismissed some of the mediocre acting at first, attributing some of the clumsiness to the actors' discomfort with performing in english. It was at the end of the film when several of the actors spoke to the audience that I realized that all of the main characters but one were American, or had lived in the United States for most of their lives; english was their primary language. It was not necessarily the actors' fault that they delivered poor performances, it was the director's fault for keeping them second.

Dosunmu undoubtedly has a keen eye for creating breathtaking mixtures of sight and sound. He knows color, shape, texture, and how to play with an audience's emotions via music. There were a great many scenes which held self-contained moments of unabashed beauty, stylized to perfection. He has a great eye for both symmetry and asymmetry and his knack for changing the focus of the film from the main character or object to something unrelated in the foreground was interesting, but ultimately pointless. I spent so much time wondering the significance of every altered shot and came up with nothing. I attribute that, once again, to the lack of substance in his story. Just because someone wants to make a movie does not mean that someone should be able to pick up a camera, point and shoot arbitrarily. That's the role of the photographer, an artist I don't much appreciate.

When every single scene seemed to be manipulated in some way, when Dosunmu stuck his fingers very noticeably in every shot, it began to be rather exhausting. Art for the sake of art is masturbatory, and nobody wants to see an artist jack off in front of them. A film is not simply about one person, whether it be writer, director, actor, whatever. It is a collaborative experience, and when one key figure of the movie making process decides to step up and make the project all about himself the entire film fails, simply because it should rely so heavily on the collective. Dosunmu ought to take some notes before his next Sundance experience.

1.5/4