Dir. Rodrigo Garcia,, US/Spain, 2009, 126 mins
Cast: Naomi Watts, Annette Bening, Kerry Washington,
Review by Carol Allen
The story of the film is concerned with adoption and its emotional repercussions – a subject on which there are surprisingly few serious, high profile movies. It’s not really the most important aspect of Star Wars, Superman and Batman Returns, while Mommy Dearest and The Bad Seed give the concept a really bad press. The only film which springs to mind as dealing with the subject seriously and sympathetically is Mike Leigh’s Secrets and Lies.
So Mother and Child almost has the field to itself, plus the benefit of an A-list cast, a good script and engaging story from its director Rodrigo Garcia.
It’s the story of three women, whose lives are connected. Karen (Bening) is a middle aged spinster, who has never got over the trauma of giving up for adoption the baby girl she gave birth to when she was only 14. That baby is now successful 37 year old lawyerElizabeth(Watts). Though they are both living inLos Angeles, they are unaware of each other’s lives. The third strand concerns Lucy (Washington), a childless wife, who is desperately trying to adopt a baby and whose story acts as a sort of counterpoint to the other two.
The characters are complex and emotionally engaging.Wattsis particularly good as a woman, who is obsessively in control of her life including her uncommitted affair with her boss, played by the always charismatic Samuel L. Jackson. She is elegant, icy cool, self confident and controlling; at pains to avoid any emotional involvement. Things change for her when she finds herself unexpectedly pregnant, which leads her to attempt to find out more about her birth mother. LikeWatts, Bening too shows us the many layers of her character. Karen lives alone with her mother, whose death she has to deal with early in the film. She too avoids involvement with others. She is uncomfortable and sharp with her cleaner’s little girl and spikily resists the advances of her work colleague Paco (a very likeable performance from Jimmy Smits). But when Paco eventually breaks through her barriers, he persuades her to face up to the grief she still feels over her lost daughter and to look for her. Simpler and more directly moving is the Lucy’s hunger for a child of her own. All three of the actresses bring a convincing ring of truth to their performances and they are well supported by the men.
Garcia handles his story with skill and delicacy. The characters touch the heart without the film getting bogged down in sentimentality, while the final outcome is both unexpected and moving. The viewpoint it implicitly puts forward about adoption however, which is that you cannot be a whole person if you don’t know whose blood runs in your veins, may well be questionable to those, who have had a different experience of that situation. It is though true for the characters in Garcia’s film – and that’s what really matters in a movie.
xx - posted on 23/05/2012 13:13:28
