Definitely a mixed bag. While, for once, we are given a Pasolini character with some charisma and emotions we can identify with, it is also true Magnani's "grande dame" performance seriously unbalances the picture. Her regularly timed eruptions of gasping,clutching-her-sides belly laughter (no doubt signifiers of her "earthiness") often seem as disconcerting and mystifying to her co-stars as they do to the viewer. On the other hand, her quieter scenes expressing her alternate anxiety and grasping love for her son are quite convincing. Most impressive of all are the two nightime set-pieces where Magnani walks, in extended takes, down seemingly desolate Roman streets (almost nothing aside from street lamps is visible) and is in turn joined and then abandoned by various other creatures of the night. All these people - mainly prostitutes and their clients and various other partiers - are plainly familiar with "Mamma Ro" and it is here that Magnani's operatic performance style actually fits the situation; showing her behavior as a defense against personal entanglements and the impingeing emptiness of the night. Pasolini is able to comunicate not only her ease and familiarity with this world and her alternate sense of cosmic "aloneness" in it, but a resonate sense of the moral disruption and decay he saw as prominent in that society. Pasolini makes powerful use of his settings throughout the movie. The ancient (and fragile) ruins giving a sense both of our increasingly tenuous connection with the past and the impermanence of the current structure of things. The use of wide, often abandoned, streets with the camera tracking backward - in front of - or forward - also in front of - the characters. We thus get the feeling of a force pulling the characters from one place and/or pushing them to another. A sense of the operation of fate perhaps? The cluster of apartment buildings also effectively communicates a sense of Rome (or the modern city) as a prison - especially in the final shot.
A couple of other notes: Ettore Garofalo is entirely believable as the sullen, swaggering, sometimes awkward son. As for Pasolini's intrusive and heavy-handed religious symbolism: it doesn't overwhelm the inherent drama of the story, or our involvement, until the final 10-15 minutes. This in stark contrast to all of his films after THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. MATTHEW. In short this most dated of 60's experimentalists seems pretty fresh here. 7/10.
A couple of other notes: Ettore Garofalo is entirely believable as the sullen, swaggering, sometimes awkward son. As for Pasolini's intrusive and heavy-handed religious symbolism: it doesn't overwhelm the inherent drama of the story, or our involvement, until the final 10-15 minutes. This in stark contrast to all of his films after THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. MATTHEW. In short this most dated of 60's experimentalists seems pretty fresh here. 7/10.