“Mother Mary,” Starring Anne Hathaway and Michaela Coel, Reviewed

Another set of flashbacks, showing Mother Mary performing onstage, doesn’t help from a dramatic perspective, and it does the character no favors. Hathaway is among the more rational and self-aware of current actors, with a manner that suggests both the ability to see a step ahead and the prudence not to flaunt it. (She reminds me, in this regard, of the classic-Hollywood actress Myrna Loy.) Thoughtful discipline may avert reckless performances, but it can also make the portrayal of heedless characters seem effortful. What takes place onstage in “Mother Mary” often comes across as mechanical, methodical, learned rather than lived-in, not solely because of the character’s stage manner or the actor’s temperament but because of the gaps in Lowery’s script. The actual work, the passion and the tension, of being a pop star—the writing of songs, the rehearsals, the fittings, the stagings, the workouts, the tie-ins, the choreography, the contracts, the lawyers, the money—are nowhere to be found. The behind-the-scenes passion is missing, too. The scenes of live performance show that Mother Mary is a star but don’t show why she’s a star, because Lowery, who is often among the most expressively compositional of filmmakers, films them generically, as if averaging visual tropes from concert films. Even the most active scene at the studio—of Mary dancing for Sam as she’ll do in concert—is oddly chopped up. Unlike the graceful ghost and the haunted humans in “A Ghost Story,” Hathaway is given little time or space to move.

“Mother Mary” is exemplary of troubling trends in the current cinema. As a so-called two-hander that’s also mainly a one-setter, it’s essentially a filmed play—and not one teeming with a well-meshed ensemble but a sharply delimited one, akin to such other recent small-scale films as “Peter Hujar’s Day,” “Send Help,” “Daddio,” “His Three Daughters,” “Malcolm & Marie,” and even Steven Soderbergh’s “The Christophers,” among his many films of the past decade to take a localized approach. The prevalence of this format reflects a fundamental crisis in realistic, character-driven cinema, as filmmakers try to navigate two conflicting commercial demands: to cast celebrities and to keep budgets low. A big chunk of the production money in such movies may go to paying the stars and providing their customary working conditions, leaving much less for the filmmaking itself; this forces directors to rely on a narrow scope of sets and locations, few (if any) supporting actors, and relatively spare action. The challenge then becomes how to evoke a wide world on a small scale.

It can be done. Ira Sachs’s “Peter Hujar’s Day,” starring Ben Whishaw and Rebecca Hall, is based on a real-life document—a recorded discussion, from 1974, between the acclaimed photographer Hujar and the writer Linda Rosenkrantz, that was later published as a book. Sachs stages the characters’ dialogue mainly inside an apartment, but the subjects they broach and the stories that emerge conjure the characters’ experiences in the outside world with a visually evocative force more powerful than actual flashbacks. By contrast, most other recent two-hand-one-setters suggest a resigned effort to make whatever film is possible in a commercially narrowed environment.

This sense of constraint reverberates through “Mother Mary,” and “A Ghost Story” again provides a revealing point of comparison. The 2017 film also had a starry cast (Rooney Mara and Casey Affleck, who were also friends of Lowery’s). It was made for a little more than a hundred thousand dollars, put up by Lowery himself and three friends. As Lowery put it, “No one got paid.” However unsustainable as a business model, those conditions gave rise to passionate work, and the collective fervor of cast and crew is reflected in the film’s thrillingly intense images. “Mother Mary,” by contrast, seems to want it both ways: it’s a small-scale movie of a manufactured sumptuousness, flaunting Hollywood-standard production values on its few sets. The film was shot in Germany, with a big crew, and even just the cost of transportation and lodging for the team must have been more than the whole budget of “A Ghost Story.” But the result feels like a Hollywood production done on the cheap, with strenuous efforts to mask its small scale. The handful of concert scenes are more a matter of showy display than dramatic import, and the many images of the two protagonists talking appear to strive not even for expression but for mere visual variety. That sense of strain makes the movie come off as a cry for help on behalf of the entire independent filmmaking community as it faces contradictory commercial demands.