Love away

I notice that many of the positive reviews for this film are from Scandinavia. I'm not, and I ran into some real holes in the story. The subject of the film is parents and children, and what happens when the two are separated by necessity. The film opens in New York, where Leo, the main character, has become fabulously wealthy, and loves his kid, but must fly off to Bangkok to seal a deal that will make him even wealthier. His story is the skeleton of the movie,but it's also the weakest and least convincing. Two other stories (or four) complete the film, showing us family separations-by-necessity that are more convincing. I for one found the story of the Filipino nanny much more watchable and believable. The Philippines produces too many intelligent, well-educated people for its economy to support, so roughly 15% of the adult workforce are forced to leave the country to work overseas; Gloria, the nanny, is one of them, and she has to leave her children in Olangapo while she sends money back from New York. I knew about that situation going in, but the film does a nice job of dramatizing it. meanwhile, the main story, starring Gael Bernal as the wealthy-but-tortured New Yorker, just doesn't work, partly because it's either poorly-written or not written at all. Bernal is a good actor, but here he sounds as if he's been asked to improvise his own dialogue, and it sounds just like improvised movie dialogue from other badly-improvised movies: boring, flat, and very, very, very repetitious. Improvisation can be done right, and when it is, it works beautifully, as in Happy-Go-Lucky and The Class, but not here. Whether it's improvised or not, Leo's part of the film is one long boring cliché. There are some other little glitches in the film that strain credulity, but overall I'll ignore the Leo section and give it a 6 out of 10.

In New York, the immature family man Leo Vidales (Gael García Bernal) is a successful businessman, owner of the Underlandish, a successful website of digital games and married with Dr. Ellen Vidales (Michelle Williams), a dedicated surgeon of the emergency room of a hospital. They have a daughter, Jackie (Sophie Nyweide), who is an intelligent girl that is raised by her nanny, the Filipino Gloria (Marife Necesito) that spends more time with her than Ellen. Gloria has two sons in Philippine that miss her.

When Leo need to travel to Singapore with his partner Bob (Tom McCarthy) to sign a millionaire contract with investors, Ellen operates a boy stabbed in the stomach by his own mother and she feels connected to the boy and rethinks her relationship with Jackie. Meanwhile Leo is bored waiting for the negotiation of Bob with the investors and he decides to travel to Bangkok and lodges in a rustic cottage on the seashore.

Leo meets the young prostitute and mother Cookie (Run Srinikornchot) and he has one night stand with her. Meanwhile, Gloria's ten year-old boy Salvador (Jan David G. Nicdao) misses her mother and decides to find a job. His innocence leads him to a tragedy.

"Mammoth" is a melodramatic film about motherhood – there are four parallel situations of mother and children – Ellen and Jackie; Gloria and her sons; the boy Anthony and his mother that has stabbed him; and Cookie and her baby.

I had a great expectation with this film, but unfortunately the plot does not work well and is pointless, going to nowhere. There is the contrast between people and specially children from the First and Third Worlds, but nothing new. The narrative is cold and not engaging.

Gael Garcia Bernal is miscast and his immature character has nothing to do with his mature wife. Sophie Nyweide steals the film with her top- notch performance. There are so many tragedies along the story that in the end I was expecting that Leo had contracted AIDS with Cookie and would transmit the disease to his wife Ellen. The title "Mammoth" refers to the expensive pen that Bob gave to Leo, but I did not understand the intention of the author with this title. My vote is six.

Title (Brazil): "Corações em Conflito" ("Hearts in Conflict")

Mammoth is an ambitious, highly contemplative take on the implications of global capitalism for individuals, families and communities. Moodysson illustrates a world in which market economy as the Western way of life both encourages and obliges human action that, irrespective of one's intentions, reproduces unequal social relations and reinforces existing power structures.

One could criticize Moodysson of presenting only conservative, private solutions for the social problems caused by globalization. The protagonists do not try to face their social circumstance head on or to find political ways for addressing their situation. In stead of seeking social change through collective action, family becomes of central importance. Only some vague escapist dreams are left for the disillusioned workers at both ends of the global working class.

Despite the film's fatalism, Moodysson succeeds beautifully in constructing a convincing and authentic interpretation of the 21st century social reality of global interconnectedness. The tragedy of highly educated Western professionals that Mammoth portrays lies in the fact that they are conscious of the disastrous social and ecological consequences of their actions, yet find themselves completely unable to transform the social condition.

After reading the reviews here I wanted to put in my own 2 cents. This movie is basically about being a parent in a modern age. There are three story lines, one about a nurse in NYC, one about her husband, a computer geek with lots of money, and one about about their nanny.

The one thing the woman, the man, and the nanny all have in common are the sacrifices they make for their kids. The man and woman both have very successful jobs, and the nanny from the Philippines works in the US to earn money for her kids back home. However, the sacrifices they make are so extreme that each person becomes detached from the very reason why they made these sacrifices in the first place: Their children.

The film presents us with a critical portrayal of this lifestyle, and as such in the end this is a tragedy.

This is an excellent film, highly recommended, especially for those of us who must balance work and family life on a daily basis.

Mammoth (2009)

The symbolism of the title will escape most people (it did me), but it literally shows up in an expensive pen with mammoth tusk inlays. This pen crosses a border of wealth and culture that the characters of the movie can't ever cross. And yet the lives of all the many different narratives interwoven here are perfectly parallel.

But we know that parallel lines by definition never meet, even if they seem to in the distance down the tracks.

The three or four narrative threads are relatively independent even if they relate completely in theme (and in some small direct connecting way) to each other. It's a little like "Babel" in that the stories are literally worlds apart. Central is the New York City couple with the two main stars, computer games analyst (Gael Garcia Bernal) and his emergency room surgeon wife (Michelle Williams). They have a child who is mostly taken care of by a live-in nanny, a Filipino woman with children of her own left behind in her home country.

The third locale is Thailand because Bernal goes there on a business trip, and while he's there he has a kind of epiphany about the meaning of life. That's where the pen takes on a brief life of its own. The epiphany, like many revelations for all of us, is short-lived, too, and I think that's part of the idea. We all strive, we all have good intentions, but really nothing quite adds up.

What figures most in all of the stories are the children--not least the cute and precocious New York City girl. The children of the nanny and the child of a Thai prostitute who has a slightly caricatured but important role also figure in. If the parents are doing what they can for their children, they are also even more doing what they can for themselves. And sometimes it seems like survival, but of course, survival how, at what economic level? Would it be better in fact to not prostitute yourself (as a nanny, for example) simply to get ahead? Or is this the only way to give your children something you don't get for yourselves.

All of this is in the movie. It's intense, it wants to say a lot. And in some way it does. There is some sense that it doesn't always quite click, as if there are things the director could have pushed--or pulled--for greater effect. This isn't something to really judge from the outside, but it's not a masterpiece, which requires some other kind of aesthetic elevation. But it's really good, very good, a movie to see. See it.