By Ali Moosavi.
[Hilary Swank’s character] is not a person who’s grieving the way that we think she should when we meet her…. It’s very easy for us to think that’s not how she should be feeling and grieving. I think in a movie about grief that was a compelling place to start from and a compelling journey. One never gets over something like this.”
In The Good Mother Hilary Swank plays Marissa, a mother grieving her son who has been murdered. She is trying to find the answers to the many questions buzzing in her head: why was he killed? who killed him? what was he up to? All she knows is that he was involved with drugs. She finds an ally in Paige (Olivia Cooke), her murdered son’s girlfriend, to help her solve the mystery. Themystery is not hard to solve and has been pushed to background by its young director Miles Joris-Peyrafitte and his co-script writer Madison Harrison, who have mainly focused on building the characters and the atmosphere in Albany, NY, where the story takes place.
Marissa has not exactly been a good mother. She had been estranged from her son because of his drug habits and there’s not exactly a strong bond between her and her other son who is a police officer. She has been a star writer in the local newspaper but is finding it hard to do any writing now. Hilary Swank’s Marissa does not conform to any of the standard protagonists of crime thrillers. The Good Mother also does not follow the established rules of this genre.
Joris-Peyrafitte’s first movie as a director was As You Are (2016), a very credible portrayal of trials and tribulations of being a teenager in the States in the nineties. Both As You Are and The Good Mother put a strong focus on the mother-son relationship. The mother in that film was played by Mary Stuart Masterson, who I had last seen in my favourite John Hughes movie, Some Kind of Wonderful (1987), where she played a teenager!
I talked to Miles Joris-Peyrafitte about the above movies.
You’ve said that, following As You Are (2016), The Good Mother is the second in a trilogy about your hometown Albany, NY. How does Albany influence this story?
There are a few things. First, it’s shot in all the locations that we grew up filming movies in when we were little kids. As kids we would see movies and project those movies onto these kinds of locations. I think Albany can be looked at like a prism for a lot of the country. It’s sort of a capital city that also has an incredible divide between the rich and poor. In that area where we shot, you have the Empire State Plaza which is this incredible brutalist structure and the Governor’s Mansion on one side of the state capital. On another side you have one of the poorest neighborhoods in the city. So there is a collision that feels very present in Albany. The opioid epidemic and Fentanyl addiction were going on when we wrote this movie seven years ago and it really felt like we were in this kind of invisible war. A lot of our favorite movies were noir films coming out of post war era. Film makers from post war Europe were making these movies about characters who are living in a time that doesn’t really have a grounded sense of truth or morality. These characters are spinning around trying to find something that has a meaning in this madness. There was something that felt similar to what the country was going through in 2015 in the sense of feeling of paranoia. A lot of young people were starting to die. I specifically didn’t know when Fentanyl addiction was starting but before that there was the opioid epidemic that was brought on by institutions abusing communities. Our film though isn’t about Pfizer or the big companies. It is about people going through grief and immeasurable loss within a context where they feel they are the smallest part of it. Where there are these massive institutions and industries crushing these people and the film is inherently a story about a mother breaking out of paralysis. Marissa (Hilary Swank) is somebody who was grieving the death of her son before he was gone, which I think applies to a lot of parents who have had kids who are drug addicts and, in a way, have given up on. Grief is a very messy and complicated thing, especially when there’s no clear blame to put anywhere. We wanted to tell that kind of story.
Marissa (Hilary Swank) is not your typical noir protagonist, the private eye or innocent bystander who gets drawn into a mystery. She is a grieving mother searching for truth about her son’s death.
Yes, we thought what the modern version of that character, the ace reporter or the private eye would be, who is very much a vestige of its time. Here we have a local newspaper that’s not doing great. She’s the arts and culture editor and hasn’t been able to write since her son’s death. So, it’s meeting an archetype at a crossroads and those differences between her and Humphrey Bogart or whoever, were the things that we felt were needed now and we never really saw women playing those types of characters. What we thought was interesting but also challenging about the film and what Hillary really leads into in a way and was incredibly brave and makes her performance all the better for it, was that she’s not a person who’s grieving the way that we think she should when we meet her. We all think about how our mothers would grieve us. It’s very easy for us to think that’s not how she should be feeling and grieving. I think in a movie about grief that was a compelling place to start from and a compelling journey. One never gets over something like this.
We shot the movie in 24 days on a very small budget. So these limitations become part of the aesthetic and you’re making those decisions based on what tells the story in the best way.”
The mother has to make a tough choice between her natural motherly love for her existing son and what is the right thing to do with regards to her murdered son.
Yes, totally and which motherly love are you going to value over the other one. We didn’t want to present a situation that had a clear moral decision because these things don’t have solutions or need wrap up. This is a situation you’re confronted with and with what you know, what is your next step?
The mystery part of the story seems to be relatively unimportant, and your emphasis is on creating the atmosphere and characterization, especially the characters of the mother and Paige (Olivia Cooke).
Yes definitely. I think all the mystery and genre stuff is to support the characters and to support what they’re going through. But it was really important to me that It’s not solving the mystery or figuring it out that is ultimately going to make Marissa change. It’s her relationship with Paige and in a way it’s her stepping back into the community and it’s giving her grief context and understanding and shining light on it. We wanted to make sure all that mystery stuff was rooted in taking somebody from paralysis into movement, even if it’s a difficult movement.
It seems every shot in the film has been framed it in a way to make it more interesting, whether we see two people talking through a glass door or shooting from a high angle or a very low angle. Are these framings written in the script or you make the selection when you go to the location?
It’s always a mix. I always want to put the camera somewhere that the image is going to communicate the feeling to the audience as much as the performances. I think that way you can sometimes take the burden off the actor needing to play the exact beat and instead let them be inside the context and let that make the emotion. We want to be on the outside pushing in. We want to be in real time, and we don’t want to know exactly what’s going on. We want to be just watching and seeing the fact that something horrible is happening but she’s also not reacting to it in the way that you would expect. So then the mystery becomes these smaller things about her personality and her character. We shot the movie in 24 days on a very small budget. So these limitations become part of the aesthetic and you’re making those decisions based on what tells the story in the best way. To me it’s about being able to mirror what the what the character is going through.
In many scenes it looks as though you’ve used natural lighting. There is scene where Marissa is moving between two trains and which makes a very interesting use of light.
Well, me and Charlotte Hornsby (the cinematographer) talked about it all the time and a big identity of the film was going to be the light; the mix of natural light and industrial light coming in from places. In that train scene we didn’t have any lights at all and part of that was because we had two hours to shoot everything on the train and the train was moving and it was just chaos. But you also lean into it because then you realize, oh this actually feels more real. Once you go into that gangway, the windows are dark and you are in this womb like metallic thing, so then you realize that’s a really interesting place for her to be and start playing with the sound. That’s another example of the limitations that you are presented with and need to figure out what’s going to be our way through these that takes all those limitations and points them towards the direction of our story.
They were churning out this type of movie in the 70s, but you don’t get many of them these days. Were you influenced by the movies of that era?
Oh yes, big time! For me the biggest influence outside the noir stuff was probably Pakula’s paranoia trilogy: Klute, Parallax View and All the President’s Men. Those were definitely big influences especially on an aesthetic viewpoint of how you put your character at the heart of a conspiracy.
What did Hillary Swank bring into the movie?
Besides just absurd talent, Hillary brought patience, she brought craft, she brought excitement and passion and for a movie that’s this small, a least in the scope of some of the movies that she’s making and has made, when she’s coming from a huge set to be in our tiny movie in Albany, that passion and professionalism and love for what she’s doing is a gift to everybody because it elevates everyone.
In your first movie, As You Are you dealt with teenagers and influence of events, like Kurt Cobain’s suicide, which was before your time. How did you create the feeling of being a teenager in that era?
I was so close to still being a teenager when I made that movie, I was 21 and I felt very much like I was making a movie about kids my age. I also think that the basic truths that you’re talking about don’t change depending on period. What changes is what the references are and for us with As You Are setting it in the 90s, besides giving us an economic background that the country was going through and a sort of social one with Kurt Cobain, was that it took cell phones out of the equation and that was really why we did it because friendships are completely different now. In The Good Mother it was the opposite as I wanted as much anxiety to be coming from phones as possible. But that’s our modern world; you are always a phone call away from a text message conveying something horrible or something great.
Have you started writing the third part of this trilogy?
We haven’t figured out what that what the next Albany movie will be but there are so many interesting stories and I want to make sure we pick the right story. We’d like to imagine that it will happen in the same world that Mary Stewart Masterson’s character (from As You Are) could have been in.
Ali Moosavi has worked in documentary television and has written for Film Magazine (Iran), Cine-Eye (London), and Film International (Sweden). He contributed to the second volume of The Directory of World Cinema: Iran (Intellect, 2015).