MA – Review

A Cult Classic is born! And I don’t use that term loosely. I’ve been emceeing the midnight shows here in St. Louis at Landmark’s The Tivoli Theater for a decade now and if MA finds the audience it deserves, I can totally see it playing there in a year or two with an inebriated audience screaming its many memorable lines back at the screen. “Don’t make me drink alone!” could become the new “No more wire hangers!”

Octavia Spencer stars in MA as Sue Ann (aka Ma), a 50-ish veterinary assistant who keeps to herself in a peaceful rural Ohio town. One afternoon, Ma is confronted in a liquor store parking lot by Maggie (Diana Silvers), a teen who’s just moved to town with her mother (Juliette Lewis) who asks her to buy alcohol for her and her new pals.  Ma sees this as the chance to make some younger, if gullible, friends and opens up her basement as a safe place for the kids to drink and party, out of the eyes of their parents and local cops. But Ma has four strict house rules: One kid has to remain sober to drive, they can’t take the lord’s name in vain, they can’t go upstairs, and they can’t get Ma wet (ok, I made that last one up). ‘Ma’s Place’ is soon the party hangout for the whole school, but the older woman’s hospitality turns to obsession when the teens begin to realize how unstable she may be (my first hint would have been when she orders one boy to strip naked at gunpoint the first time they meet her) and look for other locales to get wasted. Old wounds involving some of these kid’s parents are opened and Ma’s place eventually goes from the best party pad in town to a nightmarish hell of torture, revenge, madness, and murder!

The brilliance in casting Octavia Spencer as the dotty Ma (the role was obviously written for her) pays considerable, glorious dividends. In everything from her Oscar-winning breakout role in THE HELP to the strong work she’s done on films like HIDDEN FIGURES and THE SHAPE OF WATER, Spencer is a chameleon of an actress. She can be the sweetest sort of woman in one performance, then turn around here and wow as a ruthless psychotic. Spencer has a field day with Ma, creating a quirky object of hate, fear, sympathy, and childishness. Spencer pushes her character this way and that, dispensing kindness and threat in equal proportions. Even after we know she’s crazy (which is early on) there is often something compassionate about her. Spencer feels like the ultimate lonely person bringing out Ma’s mentally ill side, though not in a melodramatic way. Nor is her psychosis laughable. Even when she gets foolish and says “You are guilty of being so cute! “, which is worthy of a chuckle, the scary side of her is always present. In flashbacks to her own high school years, we see the genesis of her psychosis where she was the victim of a horrible sexual prank in the “janitor’s closet” (Kyanna Simone Simpson as the young Ma is heartbreaking in these scenes), carried out by the parents of some of the young teens she’s now hosting. This backstory adds depth to Ma, a unique creation and I can’t quite think of any performance to compare Spencer’s to. There’s a bit of Kathy Bates in MISERY, some Glenn Close in FATAL  ATTRACTION, even a pinch of the ‘Horror Hags’ played by the likes of Joan Crawford and Tallulah Bankhead in the ‘60s (Ms Spencer is just 47 but coded  matronly). It’s unlikely, but in a perfect world, Ms Spencer would receive awards attention for her work in MA.

The screenplay for MA by Scotty Landes is somewhat predictable but shrewd enough not to go in totally obvious directions. Teenage behavior is exhibited that’s dangerous enough even without psycho Ma in the mix, but MA is not the teen body count parade you may expect. The script sets up a number of more pitiless adult characters to bear the (often bloody) brunt of Ma’s homicidal tendencies. This works well because good actors have been cast in these roles including Luke Evans as a cad who’d caused Ma such pain in the past, Tate Taylor (the film’s director) as a clueless cop, Allison Janney (who looks like she was on set for one day) as Ma’s impatient boss, and Missi Pyle (a mean girl staple in the ‘90s) as a drunken harpy named Mercedes (“I’m more a Porsche man”).

MA is one of the most fun ‘audience’ movies I’ve seen in some time. It’s scary, but not under-the-skin terrifying and it’s darkly funny, generating nervous laughter as well as a few big gut-busters. I hope MA finds the cult status it deserves. Even if it’s stomped on by Godzilla and Elton John at the box-office this weekend, I suspect it’s a movie that will live on.

5 of 5 Stars