Hilary Swank in the film “A Mother’s Wrath” by Miles Joris-Peyrafitte. Review

The dramatic thriller “The Good Mother” by Miles Joris-Peyrafitte was released, in which Hilary Swank played the main role of a mother who is not so much angry as grieving and torn between this grief and attempts to save what remains of her long-collapsed life. families. The film itself, as I discovered Julia Shagelmanby the end it also falls apart, with no chance of recovery.

A Mother’s Wrath is the third feature film by young director Joris-Peyrafitte, his second collaboration with screenwriter Madison Harrison, and the second part of a trilogy they planned about their hometown of Albany, New York. The first was Joris-Peyrafitte’s debut, As It Is (2016), a crime story about teenagers in the 1990s whose friendship is destroyed by a joint crime. Between these two films, he stepped far into the territory of American myth: the plot of Dreamland (2019), which was also released in Russia, unfolded in the 1930s against the backdrop of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, and a couple of its young heroes resembled Bonnie and Clyde.

There is nothing mythological in “Mother’s Wrath”: Albany is filmed here in a purely realistic manner, although the camera’s flights over it give the city additional scale and even some urban monumentality. And the background to the events of the film are problems that are more than relevant for the United States: the opioid crisis and police corruption. At the same time, the action was moved to 2016, which, it seems, was necessary for the authors only to casually mention the election campaign that ended with the victory of Donald Trump. However, all these attempts to emphasize topicality are rather detrimental to the film – none of the significant hints carry enough weight for the film to become an acute social drama, and at the same time they dilute the emotional impact of the family and personal drama.

Its main character is Marissa (Hilary Swank), once a star reporter for a local newspaper, now mechanically doing editorial work there. The reason for her reluctance to fit into the new, digital and network reality is not even that she is an old-school journalist, for whom an interesting story is more important than clicks and views, but that, having become a widower and having lost all ties with her beloved son Michael (played in flashbacks by Screenwriter Harrison) Due to his drug addiction, Marissa has become a shadow of herself, spending her days in an alcoholic haze. At the beginning of the film, this fog is pierced by the news brought by the eldest, exemplary son Toby (Jack Reynor), a police officer: Michael is dead. Moreover, it was not heroin that killed him, but a bullet – Toby suspects Michael’s best friend Ducky (Hopper Penn), with whom he dealt drugs.

This news, on the one hand, devastates Marissa, and on the other, it is accepted as something inevitable: it is clear that in her soul she buried her youngest long ago. An unexpected glimmer of hope appears when Michael’s girlfriend Paige (Olivia Cooke), whom Marissa initially greets with hostility, reveals that she is pregnant. Without much enthusiasm, rather obeying a difficult to articulate mixture of guilt and duty, Marissa lets her into her home, but gradually comes to life, perhaps seeing in the future child a new chance for herself and her family. Also not immediately, but effectively, Paige infects her with her quest for justice for Michael: she does not believe in Ducky’s guilt and wants to find the real killer behind the distribution of “dirty” heroin mixed with fentanyl throughout the city, which is called “mother’s milk” with morbid irony “

The two women embark on a dangerous quest, although most of it falls on Paige’s shoulders, while Marissa continues to slip into the glass, then into the same intoxicating memories of a happy past, when Michael was a child, and it seemed that there was only light and light ahead for them all. joy. Toby assures his mother that Paige cannot be trusted; she herself is probably somehow involved in both drug trafficking and the death of his brother.

However, as a result of her investigation, Marissa suddenly discovers secrets that threaten to destroy her family completely and add new losses to her list of sorrows. She finds herself faced with a terrible choice, from which she finds salvation in something that she seemingly gave up on long ago – journalistic work: putting her experience into an article should help her make a decision. And she really accepts him, but in the end, the authors’ efforts to show how complex and ambiguous life is and how rarely the only correct answers are found in it drive them, the heroine, and the audience into a corner.