Mother and Child - Movie Reviews
Elizabeth (Naomi Watts) is a city-hopping attorney with plenty of career drive and no attachments — she treats her lovers with black-widow disdain. In another part of Los Angeles, Karen (Annette Bening) cares for the elderly and looks down her nose at everyone she encounters.
Then there’s Lucy (Kerry Washington), who wants to give her husband a child but can’t. The three lives become intertwined, of course.
And though Watts’s Elizabeth brings a sense of darkness and unpredictability to the film, the hyperbolic flourishes (Karen keeps telling people she’s “difficult” on the heels of an ample demonstration) and the melodramatic climax offset the actresses’ best efforts. Director Rodrigo Garcia, who navigated similar terrain with Nine Lives, seems to have cinematic mother issues that require the audience to sign on as therapist.
Elizabeth (Naomi Watts) is an over-ambitious, thirtysomething lawyer, new to a firm and eager to make her mark, sans friends or the support of workplace colleagues. Like a heat-seeking missile she targets the firm's owner, Paul (Samuel L. Jackson), an older widower with a weak libido. Karen (Annette Bening), a physical therapist, takes care of her elderly mother. She too is unable to form bonds with just about anyone. Untrusting, terse, emotionally crippled she doesn't know how to handle the advances of a Paco (Jimmy Smits), a well-meaning suitor. Lucy (Kerry Washington) is determined to have a baby, but she cannot give birth herself. She is hell-bent on adopting, even if her husband Joseph (David Ramsey) and her mother (S. Epatha Merkerson) may be ambivalent.Complications are poured on to the characters like a torrent of rain, adding levels of pain that can only be seen by looking deep in their eyes. Elizabeth never knew her real mother or father. Karen was forced by her mother to give up a child for adoption 37 years ago. Lucy's insecurities are boundless. The three ladies live within minutes of each other but are oblivious to each other's presence. Credit writer/director Rodrigo Garcia for creating the characters, writing their lines, weaving them together and painting a picture that caresses forlorn mothers and children. His script, themed around adoption, has a lyrical feel. His direction of a multi-cultural, multi-generational, ensemble cast that revels in subtle performances that resonate long after the final credits, is thoughtful and sensitive.
Watt's cold persona has such complexity and masks deep hurt. Bening's love-deprived Karen has a shield around her heart. Washington's need to be a mother rings true. And for once a story clearly designed around women's needs does not scapegoat men. Jackson's austere turn as the father figure Elizabeth never had is his most supple performance to date. Smits, as the angel of mercy assigned to pierce the armor of a crippled woman who is old beyond her age, is saintly.
The original music by Ed Shearmur, and classy cinematography by Xavier P'rez Grobet give the film the feel of an exquisite string quartet with pleading music that peaks at all the right times.
A plot synopsis of this film would resemble a flow chart. Bottom line: It’s about, you guessed it, mothers and their children. The overlapping narratives all drive home the same point – mothers need children, and (sort of) vice versa. Karen (Annette Bening), when she was 14, placed her baby up for adoption at the insistence of her now invalid mother (Eileen Ryan), with whom she lives unhappily. Karen writes unmailed letters to the daughter she never knew, but we in the audience have the privilege of observing that daughter all grown-up. Naomi Watts’s Elizabeth, who shucked off her adoptive parents years ago, is now a bitter, take-no-prisoners lawyer who also doubles as a man trap. To say she seduces her new boss Paul (Samuel L. Jackson) would be a gross understatement. She commandeers him.“Mother and Child” is clearly intended to be about the unbreakable bond, against all odds, between mothers and their children. It much more closely resembles a handbook for sensitive guys looking to win over tantrummy women desperate for love. Grade: C (Rated R for sexuality, brief nudity, and language.)
Writer-director Rodrigo Garcia's "Mother and Child" interlaces three stories set in contemporary Los Angeles and, as with many other elaborate spoke-and-wheel screenplays ("Crash," "Amores Perros," "Babel," etc.), the characters are ruled by a series of encounters and decisions leading to the moment when the audience says: Aha! So that's how those stories crisscross!The men in Garcia's world tend to be decent, rather passive characters; it's the women who run the show (for once). Garcia, whose earlier works include "Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her" and "Nine Lives," is a dramatist of considerable taste and spare elegance. Some of his emotional switchbacks feel forced (Bening's role, in particular, seems to be missing a transitional scene or two). But Garcia doesn't try to compete with the unruly emotions visually; he and cinematographer Xavier Pérez Grobet control the palette tightly until the feelings warm up later, and the movie exists in a suspended state of tense expectation.
You may buy the increasingly intertwining pattern of Garcia's script; you may resist it. Or more likely both, depending on the scene. But the characters and their dilemmas hold your interest, which is, after all, job one in this business we call classy, well-acted soap opera.
The movie unfolds with novelistic pacing for a leisurely but engaging two hours, with Elizabeth and Karen living in the same city but tantalizingly apart. They both embark on love affairs, although with little apparent expectation or desire to make a real connection ("you should watch your weight," Karen tells potential love interest Paco, played by Jimmy Smits, when he orders pie on their first date). The bitter-cynicism gene runs deep in this family. "Life is just one disappointment after another," Karen's mother sighs. These are not nice women, but we are so aware of their psychic bruising that we cut them the necessary slack. It also helps that they are wickedly entertaining; Elizabeth deliberately takes her panties off and deposits them in the dresser drawer of the pregnant wife of a man she's about to sleep with.
It's also a little too neat. All entertainments are to some extent manipulative of their audiences' emotions, but when movies get that label, it usually means we feel cheated or pushed into a reaction that the filmmaker didn't work all that hard to earn. (Given the difference between canine and human lifespans, it is inevitable that the dog in Marley & Me will die at the end. If you knowingly went to see a dog movie not based on a Stephen King novel, you shouldn't whine about being manipulated into crying.)
I don't resent Garcia because I was still sniveling under my sunglasses 15 minutes after Mother and Child was over. I'm grateful to him for the cinematic reminder of how lucky we are to have mothers or children (this movie isn't as easy a Mother's Day date as Babies, but it's more worthwhile). However, at a crucial moment near the end, Garcia has to manipulate one of his characters dreadfully in order to get all of us —actors, characters, viewers — where he wants us. He has to push someone into an illogical decision that a person would be highly unlikely to make — or even be allowed to make, medically speaking. It's a credit to Garcia and his actors' impeccable performances that you go along with it even for a minute. Afterward, though, it eats away just a little at your faith in the movie — and at that good cry.
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