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Serious 'Mother Of George' Suffers From Too Much Beautiful Filming

By Rob Christopher in Arts & Entertainment on Sep 26, 2013 4:30PM

2013_9_26motherofgeorge.jpg Mother of George opens with an elaborate wedding taking place in a hotel. It's an African wedding and everyone is dressed to the nines in richly patterned textiles. There is a lot of dancing and ceremony; on the dance floor, the wedding guests hover around the bride and literally shower her with money for good luck.

We are in Brooklyn.

Adenike, the bride, is beautiful, and deeply in love with Ayodele, the groom, a handsome chef at an upscale restaurant. She's journeyed to America to be his wife. But their love is put to the test when they're unable to conceive a child. As the newlyweds, Danai Gurira and Isaach De Bankolé are extraordinary. They communicate both the passion of young love and the confusion of two people just getting to know one another, and their vivid performances propel the story forward.

But the most important thing to know about Andrew Dosunmu's new movie is that it won the Best Cinematography award at Sundance. That honor is richly deserved. It's undeniably one of the most gorgeous movies I've ever seen in a theater. The interplay of light and shade, of the textures of skin and clothes and surfaces, and most of all the astonishing range of color—kudos to Bradford Young for his masterful artistry.

However, beautiful images aren't enough to carry an entire movie. In fact, Mother of George is too beautiful. Halfway through the movie I found myself wishing that Dosunmu would toss in an ugly shot here and there just for variety's sake. It is, after all, partially an examination of married life's untidiness. But he never does. In the end, the striking visual splendor of each and every moment overwhelms the rather simple story at the heart of the movie. Overwhelms it and becomes distracting, for Dosunmu and Young usually frame their shots for maximum aesthetic impact rather than to prioritize the human beings on screen. And when performers like Gurira and Bankolé are doing such stellar work, breathing life into characters that could easily feel like stereotypes, it's a real shame.

The movie gets points for convincingly immersing us in a tight-knit community of Yoruba culture. But don't be fooled: the central plotline in Darci Picoult's screenplay is classic Maternal Melodrama 101 (see: The Great Lie, That Certain Woman, To Each His Own), complete with a meddling mother-in-law who can't leave the young couple well enough alone. Its contrivances don't stand up to scrutiny. Now as past stylists such as Douglas Sirk demonstrated, the artificiality of melodramatic plot devices, with their attendant high-pitched emotions, can make for emotionally wrenching drama of the first order. But it requires a delicate balance of stylization and honesty. Dosunmu has yielded his movie to the tyranny of beauty, unfurling a feature's worth of striking images that have the effect of keeping the viewer at arm's length from the characters' predicaments. Mother of George is indeed breathtakingly beautiful. If only it was a little more human.

Mother of George screens Sept. 27 through Oct. 3 at the Gene Siskel Film Center