Just in case you still needed another movie to make you feel guilty about things you didn’t do, here’s Mammoth, a film whose redeeming qualities are all but completely negated by the fact that it’s several years late to the hyperlink game (which people were already starting to turn on by the time that Babel came out). The premise is solid enough, the actors are trying their best, and writer-director Lukas Moodyson (this is his first English language film) clearly tried very hard to not make a bad film, but to a degree, that’s the problem. It’s hard to take on a narrative that spreads across two continents and several time zones, and then not take any further risks with the subject matter. As a result, you have a film that presumes to show everything, but instead says nothing, or at least doesn’t say what it seems to want to.
Leo and Ellen Vidales (Gael Garcia Bernal and Michelle Williams) are a young, successful couple living in a loft apartment in downtown Soho, with a gorgeous view of downtown New York seen from the rooftop where Ellen runs on her treadmill. But naturally, like all young professionals in independent films, they are tremendously angsty most of the time, and seemingly unable to appreciate the blessings that life has bestowed on them. Since they are so busy with their professional lives, their daughter Jackie (Sophie Nyweide) is largely raised by their maid Gloria (Marife Necesito), a Filipino immigrant who is working in the United States to try to provide a better life for her two children back in the Phillippines. Since she misses her children so, she is more than happy to take on the added responsibility, and even goes so far as to begin teaching Jackie Tagalog. When Leo goes on a business trip to Thailand, circumstances conspire that force them all to confront their obligations to their children, and come to terms with the cultural inheritance that they are giving to them.
Once the film got the long, dreamy wide shots of the Vidales looking out their loft windows onto the cities outside (naturally wondering what it all means) out of the way, I thought that the film was going to go somewhere interesting, because for all of the movies this century about cultural clashing, there have been disappointingly few about cultural adoption (Malibu’s Most Wanted doesn’t really count). The relationship between Jackie and Gloria presents an interesting contradiction in terms, in that Jackie is an American girl, raised in an American city, who finds Filipino culture far more interesting than her own. It’s certainly not unheard of for American children to find other cultures more interesting than their own (for an extreme example, there’s almost certainly a great movie hidden in the life story of John Walker Lindh), and for a while, the film respects that intricacy. It also breaks some new ground in the character of Leo, who takes a detour from his trip in Thailand to try and discover something different (this is best expressed in a scene where he stops by the side of the road to see an elephant; he reaches out to touch it, and, for an instant, it feels like it’s reaching back). The sincerity with which he goes through Thailand believing that everything within the country is simply more honest than anything he could ever experience as a capitalist American (while still enjoying all of the privileges that his wealth affords him) is nicely counteracted with scenes of Gloria’s children longing for her, in much the same way that one can imagine Jackie longing for his attention before totally giving up and moving on.
As you might have guessed, all of this nicely textured ambiguity is all but completely obliterated in a third act that cleanly divides its characters into righteous and otherwise, but more disappointing yet is who the film decides to punish and who it decides to reward. In particular, the film’s treatment of Gloria is distressing, strongly implying that she was a bad parent for wanting to give her children a better life, and that she should never have left the Philippines in the first place. Who’s the real enemy here that created all of these problems? The capitalistic system that created the disparity between these two countries? The blending of cultures in general? Moodyson never says for sure, but there is still the sense that whatever it is, you’re supposed to feel bad about it (could the constant juxtaposition of American wealth and third world poverty mean anything else?), but you’re also not expected to do anything except feel bad (as Leo comes home and is reunited with his family, comfortably placing all of them outside the realm of any consequences for their actions), and accept that the gulf between these two worlds is simply too large to bridge. For a two hour investment of time, that feels like kind of a meager payoff.
DVD Bonus Features
Just a trailer.
"Mammoth" is on sale April 20, 2010 and is not rated. Drama. Written and directed by Lukas Moodyson. Starring Marife Necesito, Sophie Nyweide.
