Mother knows best in Bong Joon-ho’s sinuous, first-rate whodunit, the South Korean director’s first feature since The Host in 2006.
Exquisitely played by Kim Hye-ja (an actress who spent decades in Korean minds as a TV mother), the title character coddles her unpredictable idiot of a son as if the 27-year-old were 7. They eat and even sleep beside each other until, one hazy night, he’s charged with the brutal murder of a poor high-school floozy. With her maternal instinct in overdrive, Mother conducts a town-wide probe to exonerate her child, leading to Hitchcockian suspense and a Pandora’s Box of repressed secrets.
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Let this correspondent temper the choral praise for Lee Daniels’ — ahem, Tyler Perry and Oprah’s — Precious. It’s certainly not a total letdown (not with lead performances as immediate and crackerjack as that), but it’s also not the Great Urban Hope that so many have purported it to be. Indeed, the subject matter pulverizes the proverbial envelope — with incest, rape, poverty, illiteracy, teen pregnancy, and child abuse all saddled on the obese, African-American heroine Precious — but each misery is strung up to be drip-dried until the melodrama’s last turn of screw. The best parts, alas, are probably in the trailer. Read More »
