Mammoth Movie Review

Swedish director Lukas Moodysson makes films about the ways people need each other. His newest film, Mammoth, is more specifically about the ways children and parents need each other. Here is a director who is comfortable with vastly different tones while maintaining a similar approach and style. This isn’t as joyous and celebratory as Together and certainly not the depressing nihilism of Lilya 4-Ever, but it falls somewhere in between.

There is something of an Alejandro González Iñárritu influence here, with interconnected action that takes place in three places around the world (New York, Thailand, The Philippines). The casting of Gael García Bernal (star of Iñárritu’s Amores Perros) is perhaps an homage to that influence. Mammoth doesn’t have the heavy-handed serendipity found in the films of Iñárritu, but deals with the interconnectedness of the characters in a more restrained and natural way.


This is a rare movie that doesn’t have much of a plot to speak of, but holds your interest by allowing events to simply unfold. It is an intimate portrait with a close family at the center. Ellen Vidales (Michelle Williams) and her husband Leo (Bernal) are happily married with a lovely 7 year old daughter, Jackie (Sophie Nyweide). They have a live-in nanny named Gloria, who regularly speaks by cell phone to one of her two sons she’s left back in the Philippines. Ellen is an ER surgeon and Leo has a successful Internet gaming company that sends him to Thailand to put his name on the dotted line of a contract negotiated by his agent (Tom McCarthy).

Ellen works the grave shift at the hospital and sees her daughter in passing as she arrives home. Gloria essentially raises the little girl, even teaching her Tagalog, her native language. We catch up often with Leo on the other side of the world. He makes frequent phone calls home, mostly from boredom, and exchanges loving words with Ellen. Gloria’s sons, Salvador and Manuel, miss their mom and Salvador begs for her to return. Then the grandmother takes him on a tour of the city that includes the poorest citizens to illustrate what’s in store for his future if mom no longer has American dollars to send home – picking through garbage in a landfill is the best thing on offer.

As the characters have more physical distance between each other, they find themselves more emotionally disconnected despite ease of access with cell phones and computers. Ellen and Leo are in touch daily, but of course he misses his family and the day-to-day events of life. Leo is in constant contact with the business dealings, yet he’s kept distant because he’s not a negotiator so he takes a side trip to the coast where he fabricates an identity as a backpacker and keeps less frequent contact with his family. Gloria keeps photos of her boys on the wall and often speaks with Salvador, but she’s completely absent from their lives.

Interconnectedness applies to the past in the way Leo contemplates the extinction of mammoths and in Jackie’s contemplation of dinosaurs (“Maybe God didn’t like them so he made them extinct and created humans,” she says). It applies to the cosmos as Jackie takes a trip to the planetarium and learns that the earth is a tiny speck in the vast universe. It applies to past lives and after lives as Leo learns from a local Thai woman about reincarnation and how animals can return as people. It applies to the animal kingdom as another surgeon tells Ellen about the whale songs that can reach each other across 60 miles of ocean. All of these examples feed into the greater picture Moodysson is trying to paint with this film, which is one of connections being a necessity of life. Even after we’re gone, what remains may one day be recycled as decoration just as the mammoth’s tusk provides the ivory inlay of a pen Leo is given.


The film is really well crafted with a wholly natural pace and tone. The dialogue has the feel of being entirely improvised with characters speaking naturally to one another. It hardly ever feels scripted or polished. They seem to be saying what they’re feeling in the moment. Moodysson keeps the camera tight in most shots, rarely retreating to long shots. He’s shooting for intimacy.

My biggest criticism would be that he draws a clumsy parallel between the fates of two boys on different sides of the world – one a patient in Ellen’s hospital and the other Gloria’s older son. Without giving away too much, I’m also not sure how I feel about the nature what befalls one of the boys. Surely the same desired effect could have been achieved by having it be less grotesque and depraved. It feels a bit forced, although the naturalistic tone never attempts to extract artificial emotions.

This is Moodysson’s first widely released feature in English. He established himself as an important European film maker some years ago. With Mammoth, in some ways a nearly perfect film, he’s broadening his appeal and getting set to become an important world film maker.