MAMMOTH (Lukas Moodysson, 2009)

I have seen only one other film by Swedish writer-director Lukas Moodysson, Lilja 4-Ever (2002), whose 16-year-old Estonian protagonist is brutalized by him, including in a montage of rapes she endures when, abandoned by her mother, she is forced into prostitution in order to survive. The mother has taken off with her American boyfriend for the States: a sign that Moodysson doesn’t harbor warm feelings for the U.S. Mammoth, which, Babel-like, is structured as three concentric circles of plot, confirms this.
     Leo and Ellen Vidales are a stinking-rich Manhattan couple; he has created video games and his own website, which is hugely successful, and she is an emergency room surgeon. The whiteness of both hospital and apartment suggests that each is the other’s extension. Their 8-year-old child, Jackie, is entrusted to the care of a live-in nanny, Gloria, whose own children back home in the Philippines, from whom she has separated herself to earn money for a new house, suffer her absence. While Ellen attends to child patients at work, Jackie and Gloria have grown extremely close, each to assuage loneliness from what she is missing. Meanwhile, Leo has left for Thailand, to complete an agreement that will make him and Ellen even richer, to sign which his business associate has gifted him with a $3,000 pen in which specks of ivory mammoth tusks are transparently encased. Leo, however, is off with Cookie, a prostitute (to earn money for her child), for a guilt-inducing one-night stand; so it is the associate who does the signing, upon Leo’s instruction, so they can get the hell out and go back home.
     With considerable contrivance, Moodysson succeeds in conveying how interconnected we all are. But his film is dispiriting, depressing; these interconnections in the globalized world are forged in misery and greed, perhaps mirroring somehow the corporate fascism that directs globalization. Gloria’s home may be perfectly adequate when we consider a (graphically shown) Filipino slum; but Gloria is depriving her children of her necessary presence in order to pursue (for them, she insists) a materialistic dream. She, like Leo and Ellen, is ambivalent, however; when one of her children is injured attempting to work so that Mom doesn’t have to do so abroad, Gloria wants to get the hell out and go home. Home is not, after all, the “global village” we are all presumably sharing, is it? Meanwhile, the metaphor has taken on a monstrous life of its own.
     Exploitation on both the giving and receiving ends; for each concentric circle of plot, another set of overlapping circles divided between family and surrogate family: Moodysson’s film is schematic and complicated. It comes from Sweden, Denmark and Germany. It is (mostly) in English, but also in Tagalog and Thai.
     Neither Gael García Bernal nor Michelle Williams is at his or her best as Leo and Ellen Vidales.