Roger Ebert used to write about the "idiot plot." Leave it to the Swedes to perfect it to the point of having every scene be an idiot scene. Movies don't come more frustrating than "Mother, Couch," which we really tried to hang in there with, but just could not make it to the end. (And probably a good thing, too. This review -- in an idiot move -- essentially gives away the ending. I would not have liked it.)
"Mother, Couch" clangs at the wrong tone from the start, as David (Ewan McGregor) is stress-walking across the parking lot of a furniture emporium, in which his mother (Ellen Burstyn) has parked herself on a couch, determined not to budge, for some unknown reason. The rest of the film involves the ridiculous idea that it's impossible to get David's mother to end her encampment. The viewer is also hard-pressed to care about why she's there and why David is beside himself over this development.
Also on hand are Rhys Ifans as David's blase brother Gruffud and their chain-smoking sister Linda (Lara Flynn Boyle, looking mummified), who is never told to stop lighting up in the store by the owner's daughter, Bella (Taylor Russell) or the eccentric owner and his twin (both played by F. Murray Abraham, in an embarrassing performance). Bella, young and cute, exists solely to flirt with middle-aged David, who is also harried because of the strains of his crumbling marriage to Anne (Lake Bell), who, in several idiot scenes, calls David on the store's landline instead of his cell, just so Russell has something to do besides stand their and look pretty.
The absurdism is tuned to 11, but the plot development never makes it out of the low single digits. This is the type of infuriating movie in which characters cannot give simple, straightforward answers to questions like normal people would, else the obvious would burst this artificial bubble. I walked out when David calls 911, and when asked to state his emergency, he keeps stammering. Try just saying, "I dropped my mom; here's the address; please come tend to her."
This is supposed to be a thinker about how our parents create obstacles and hold us down, even as we stumble into middle age. Instead, it's about annoying jerks -- Burstyn's pissy mother especially -- who don't have the sense to either let the old lady rot on the couch or simply each take an arm and a leg and not drop the old crank. I really wanted something interesting to happen and was kind of curious how it would turn out. Good thing I didn't stick around for the magical realism.
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