Mammoth

I urge any couple struggling to raise a family while holding down a job and trying to keep up the life style without going insane to watch Mammoth, starring Michelle Williams and Gael Garcia Bernal. It is the latest movie by Swedish director Lukas Moodyson, who hit it big time a few years ago with such diverse movies like Show Me Love (teenage love), Together (Swedish commune living in the 70's) and Lily4ever (human trafficking).

To me, Mammoth is not trying to be clever or pretend to "know the answer about everything" even though it could seem so at first, with it's constant use of obvious symbolism and stark super-realism. If anything, it is almost over-simplistic in it's way of layering corresponding stories that are both mirror reflections and consequences of each other.

The desperate inability to reach out is making the characters unable to speak their mind and or put words to their feelings and is hurting them all in different ways and it is difficult to watch them struggle with unwanted silence and the constant feelings of alienation but at the same time so familiar, so close to home: The desperate phone conversations between the young married couple at the heart of the plot, unsuccessfully trying to share moments with each other whilst not even in the same country, fighting time zones, sleep-deprivation and cultural adrenalin seems very familiar to me. And the constant feelings of guilt that is tearing them up, to work so hard but to never be enough, never having enough time, holding on to the tiny glimmer of hope that maybe, just maybe, next week it will be better, we will work less, travel less, have more time to spend with our daughter - that is the foundation of so many families in the Western world today.

It is not a happy Friday night film by any standards, but it is a film that will not leave you alone for a long while, and it is very thought provoking.