Annie Graham Is A Good Mother In Ari Aster’s HEREDITARY
For Mothers Day, Chad Collins looks at Toni Collette s portrayal of Annie Graham in HEREDITARY!
Annie Graham (Toni Collette) is a good mother. In Ari Aster’s sensational, spellbinding, almost criminally scary debut
Hereditary, matriarch Annie Graham is ostensibly anything but. A living, breathing testament to the generational linkage of trauma and illness, the Graham family haunting is best exemplified by her slow unraveling.
She screams in Oscar-caliber fashion, berates her living son Peter (Alex Wolff) as though it’s congenital to her being, and is no less a terrifying specter in that house than the ghost of deceased daughter, Charlie (Milly Shapiro). Annie Graham, at first glance, is not a good mother, but a bad one.
Isle Of Dogs, Sunday, Channel 4, 6.05pm Wes Anderson is one of the quirkiest and most consistently inventive directors working today. Films such as The Royal Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou are cult items, while his 2014 crowd-pleaser The Grand Budapest Hotel brought deserved wins at the Oscars and the Golden Globes and his 2009 stop-motion animation Fantastic Mr Fox is nothing short of a modern masterpiece. Anderson blends the whimsy of directors such as Whit Stillman and Hal Ashby (both big influences) with the oddball world-building of Jean-Pierre Jeunet, director of arthouse hits Amelie and (with Marc Caro) Delicatessen. But on top of all that he adds something uniquely his own – a very particular world-view – and an ability to draw to his work a roster of regular collaborators which reads like a Who’s Who of everyone’s favourite actors. Bill Murray, Jeff Goldblum and Tilda Swinton lead the list.
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Figure 6: Holly Andres, 2016
Aster’s narrative begins with the death of Ellen Taper Leigh, matriarch of the Graham family, whose funerary service is led by a seemingly ambivalent eulogy presented by her daughter, Annie (Toni Collette). Annie confesses her confusing and often times tumultuous relationship with her dementia-ridden mother, claiming that she was a private individual who held many secrets and never shared anything about her interpersonal relationships. A mother to thirteen-year-old daughter Charlie (Milly Shapiro) and sixteen-year-old son Peter (Alex Wolff), Annie spends the course of the film inadvertently exposing the dark secrets of her mother’s life while simultaneously navigating the process of mourning with and without her family.