Dolan's Mommy Dearest

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Mommy's too much, Mommy's not enough, Mommy's just right - anything but square in that 1:1 frame Xavier Dolan's latest movie is bursting outta the box from its first bloodied moment, and he clearly wouldn't want it any other way. Pretty much everybody draws blood at some point, including maybe my eardrums - I was worried at the start that all the screaming was going to grow old quick. And it did, and then it didn't - the beat to the Celine Dion kicked in and we danced all night and fought all night and I felt just as battered around as I was meant to, most likely, but man can Xavier make a movie scene sing. 

A string of scenes, an avalanche of scenes, the friction between discordant mismatched fabrics and tones and nouns and verbs and movements rubbing our eyes and our thighs raw - sounds over sounds that shouldn't go together, that don't go together, suddenly do. It doesn't tread lightly, and it does leaves victims in its wake, and it did wear me down. But it's also alive like movies too often aren't - pulsing and spitting and trembling with entirely earned emotions. Everybody's a warehouse of watchability from top to bottom, aisle to aisle, stacking up all-too-human magics. It's terribly great and sometimes terribly grating too, sometimes all at one time. It is nobody but nobody's but his and bless him for it, but now maybe you can just give me a band-aid and let me lick my stinging singing wounds in peace.

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