Jennifer Lopez stars in Netflix’s latest action thriller titled The Mother under the direction of Niki Caro, director of the live action of Mulan), and he does it together with an interesting cast made up of Joseph Fiennes, Omari Hardwick and Gael García Bernal.
The Mother
The Mother follow the story of an ex-marine who decides to join a criminal group of arms trafficking. This decision is made based on a future economic need considering the treatment that veterans receive when they return home.
However, when he discovers that they not only traffic in arms, but also in people, he decides to leave. And that’s when the problems start. especially since she is pregnant by one of the criminal leaders. This time, making the right decision leads her to make the biggest sacrifice of her life: abandon her daughter to keep her safe.
Years later, the threat against his safety and that of his daughter returnsso he must return to the weapons and violent mechanisms that he learned in the past in order to save her.
About the premiere of The Mother in the catalog of Netflix originals, We spoke with Niki Caro, the film’s director, and two of the leads played by Hardwick and Fiennes. We talk about motherhood, the moral codes that the characters face, and the separation between a villain and a new heroine.
The complex idea of motherhood in The Mother
The Mother breaks with the idea that being a mother exempts women from being anything else. It doesn’t matter if it’s good or if it’s bad. Here, the main character played by Jennifer Lopez is a murderer, but also a mother, and she makes us understand that being a mother is not a simple thing, but rather a part of something bigger and more complex like his humanity.
Niki Caro: Yes, it is. We are so used to movies that women are not the most interesting character, And certainly in movies of this size, if there’s a mother, she’s usually in the kitchen, or she’s driving, or she’s in the store.
Having such a complex woman at the center of The Mother, a mother with very interesting abilities and certain complexities, it felt like a bold and interesting decision. And it’s important to put a character at the center that’s not just a superficial version, It’s not a character written by a man or written as a man that we turned into a woman.
This is actually a woman with all her complexity, with all the decisions she has made that have not been good, and how she needs to reconcile all of that with the thing she loves most in the world: her daughter.
Niki Caro on motherhood
The director’s response is interesting, because while we were watching the film, with the scenes between the main character and her daughter, the first reaction is to say that she doesn’t act like a mother. But how should a mother really act? Movies and series, books and history have told us that a mom should act in certain ways, but this is a lie.
Niki Caro: That’s right, that’s true. She “doesn’t act like a mother” because she doesn’t know how to be a mother. He never had one and never was one. She had to give her daughter to protect her, and that is her greatest sacrifice. The most pressing of The Mother es when the girl comes into her life and she has to learn to be a mother.
That is what is truly moving about this story. So along with all the excitement of the action, you also have all the emotion, which is quite unusual in this genre.
Niki Caro on the mother-daughter relationship in ‘The Mother’
Moral compass: one of the dilemmas of ‘The Mother’
There are two relevant characters after the one played by Jennifer Lopez. The first is that of William Cruise carried by Omari Hardwick, an FBI agent who gets personally involved in the protagonist’s case, and who seems to become her love interest.
Cruise, said by himself during our interview, serves as a “beacon” to illuminate the dark path of Lopez’s characterwho remains in the extremes that come from living in a context of violence such as war or criminal groups.
In The MotherIn relation to Cruise’s character, there is a very revealing scene. Cruise and the protagonist are in Cuba, and he asks her about a past event in which she saved him. Your answer is, “He felt like a man worth saving.”
In contexts of violence and survival such as those mentioned above, the characters often decide, for better or worse, who lives and who dies. In a strange twist, they get to choose who deserves to be saved.. What are the qualities or situations that give someone a decision of that size?
Omari Hardwick: Yeah, that’s a great question, absolutely amazing question. Let’s start by getting to the rough and raw of it all first, if that makes sense to you. The lurid and stark reality of it all is that she’s military and her whole life, before, if we did a backstory on her, you could tell that she doesn’t trust people easily.
You are in the military where you are forced to trust people, at least the commanding officers. What we know about a person in his position is that sometimes they are next to a person who lost their leg in an explosion, or who injured half of their face. She was a woman who looked around her with all these army men, and she thought, “Who am I going to take in the security van? Who do I take to the infirmary first so they can start medical care on this person?”.
So when you get to Cruise, we can see his humanity, because she has this antenna to decide who is worth saving or not… you! And with Cruise, he doesn’t have that tick tock, but he absolutely goes, “You, you are worth it, I have to be on my guard, I’m not a sniper just for being one, I also have to know when I walk into a room I have to find out who seems to be untrustworthy and who doesn’t”.
Omari Harwick on her character in ‘The Mother’
Is the protagonist of ‘The Mother’ a heroine? No she is not
Nature can be harsh and you can’t change it, and in The Motherbetween cold and exposed scenarios, that reveals to us that some people are just mean. This is where Adrian Lovell comes in, played by the great Joseph Fiennes.
He is the villain. No doubt. He has no limits. But it is interesting how although he is the bad guy, the protagonist is far from being a heroine. There are huge differences, but they are not completely separate. It’s just that the understanding of their actions draws a complex line between the two.
Joseph Fiennes: That’s a great question. There is this fallibility in his character and in all of us. We’re all saddled with flaws and inconsistencies, but she clearly made a connection with these bad guys, and she has to pay to unwrap that relationship and distance herself.
So we don’t get all the details of that, but there’s a kind of fallibility and what it means to hang out with the wrong people, and that’s what happens. In The Mothershe spends the rest of the film trying to extract herself from that relationship.
Joseph Fiennes on character extremes
