“It’s hard being a parent. You know that you’re doing harm all the time.”
It’s hard not to wonder if there isn’t some unwritten prerequisite within the film world that says a certain number of indie films must contain some level of quirkiness. A character can’t make any decisions for themselves without seeking guidance from the tree they hid under as a child, or a couple can only communicate with each other while under water. The quirky and the quietly fantastic will never cease to draw in audiences looking for depictions of life that are slightly left of center, but it’s actually somewhat rare that a film is able to pull such an experience off successfully. Fortunately, one such recent example, Mother Couch, does. The film offers up an intriguing premise (that of a woman who plants herself on a sofa and refuses to leave it) and ends up being not just a winning quirky indie, but one of the most healing tales of dysfunctional families to come around in quite some time.
When the matriarch (Ellen Burstyn) of a dysfunctional family sits down on a couch for sale in a unique furniture store, her three grown children, David (Ewan McGregor), Gruffd (Rhys Ifans), and Linda (Lara Flynn Boyle) try everything to get her to leave. As the brunt of the task ultimately ends up falling to David, he turns to the store’s sympathetic employee Bella (Taylor Russell) for advice.
If Mother Couch didn’t already earn its quirkiness stripes from its plot, it surely would have from the somewhat otherworldly aspects that flow throughout the entire film. Adapted from a Swedish novel by Jerker Virdborg, Mother Couch‘s European nature is felt everywhere, and while some of the international sensibilities don’t translate too easily to the American landscape of the film, the cultural blend does help in giving off a warm surreal quality. It’s a surrealness that’s aided by its main setting. A somewhat unusual furniture store where everything looks period and there aren’t any customers around save for Mother, David, and their family, makes for a wonderfully odd backdrop with unorthodox staging and a sense that everyone is in a whole other reality altogether. Director Niclas Larsson does a superb job in juxtaposing the somewhat gothic atmosphere within the store with the sunshine of the outside world. The store itself functions like the past, capturing the eternally distant family there and forcing them each to face themselves in one way or another. By the time Mother Couch ventures into the uber-surreal in the final act, which borders on Charlie Kaufman territory, we realize it’s a place we’ve been waiting to go to.
Mother and her offspring are easy to dislike. As a young woman, she developed a habit of marrying a man, having his child, and then taking off to another country to do it again with someone else. In the present day, Mother is seen as a woman who has had more than enough of giving everything she never wanted to give. In many respects, she was never capable of being the kind of women that was expected of her. While it’s difficult to blame someone for their nature, in this instance, it has resulted in a family that is hostile, callous, and altogether seemingly hopeless as far as human beings go. But there’s something so refreshingly honest about how unforgiving these characters are and the gentleness that the film shows them carries with it an affection that perhaps none of them ever received before. I’m sure Mother Couch could be deeply troubling depending a person’s family experience and how their upbringing influenced them as an adult. But while both author and director are uncompromising in their illustration of this decidedly broken family, they’re also quick to show us enough glimpses of their humanity to show that hope can still exist for them.
McGregor has never let his characters or audiences down. The actor has cultivated a body of work in which he has shown total commitment to every role he’s taken on. Mother Couch shows the actor giving another heartbreaking turn full of anguish and vulnerability with a great many emotional strokes that end up resulting in what might be the actor’s best turn. Ifans and Flynn Boyle likewise do some of the best work of their respective, varied careers. Each one surprises by giving the kind of subtle depth that one might not expect to find in people like Gruffd and Linda. Elsewhere, Russell is ethereal and poetic as Bella, giving off the right amount of empathy to make her seem like an actual person rather than a creation and F. Murray Abraham enjoys something of a small tour-de-force as the twin bothers who own the furniture store.
No one eclipses Burstyn, however. As the titular Mother, the 91-year-old conjures up yet another stunning characterization to add to her already-impressive repertoire. The character of Mother could so easily have been seen as arch and monstrous, but Burstyn knows how to avoid such a cliched approach. Instead, the actress digs deep into her character’s humanity and ends up painting a portrait of a woman who has reconciled herself with the choices she’s made and the lives she’s affected along the way. Rather than make her apologetic, the actress instead chooses to embrace her character’s flaws, letting them explain Mother as the woman she always was for one of the best latter-day performances of the Oscar-winner’s career.
Even though Mother Couch is based on a novel, audiences would be forgiven for thinking its origins began on the stage. Maybe it’s because of its European feel that the film feels almost too much like a play, despite plenty of moments throughout that prove to be genuinely cinematic. There’s a fragmented nature to the whole experience which almost hurts the film more than it moves it along. Still, the involving character moments that this allows for are priceless and the overall compelling nature that exists from the beginning is never lost. Films about dysfunctional families aren’t hard to find, but Mother Couch goes further than most by not having their characters excuse their own flaws or ask for anyone (including the audience) for forgiveness. Instead the film gives them the tools they need to let go of the bitterness towards what they never had and fully embrace not only what they could have, but what they do have.
