Las Vegas Sun

March 29, 2024

Film:

Mother and Child

Mother and Child

The Details

Mother and Child
One stars
Naomi Watts, Annette Bening, Kerry Washington
Directed by Rodrigo Garcia
Rated R
Beyond the Weekly
IMDb: Mother and Child
Rotten Tomatoes: Mother and Child

Early in Rodrigo Garcia’s insufferable drama Mother and Child, lawyer Paul (Samuel L. Jackson) asks his potential new associate Elizabeth (Naomi Watts) to tell him a little about herself. She responds with a mannered, carefully constructed speech that neatly lays out all the issues and insecurities that define her character and will dictate how she behaves through the rest of the airless, condescending film. That speech sets the tone for the entire movie, the kind in which every character speaks in hushed tones, using only words so heavy with meaning that they practically tumble to the floor as soon as they come out of the actors’ mouths.

Elizabeth is one of three women connected by maternity whose lives Garcia chronicles with painful sincerity. She’s an adoptee who’s learned to shut herself off from the world; her biological mother Karen (Annette Bening) lives with constant regret over the daughter she gave up but is too afraid to contact. And Lucy (Kerry Washington) is a young professional looking to adopt a child because she and her husband can’t have children of their own. All three undergo severe emotional trials throughout the film that leave them having learned convenient, obvious lessons that never feel real or earned.

Garcia never hangs back and lets his characters be people; even the supporting parts are full of overly serious dispensers of wisdom, including a mother-to-be who grills Lucy on her views on religion and a blind teenager who shows up late in the film to give Elizabeth some much-needed, painfully heavy-handed perspective.

Garcia has made several films now that focus on the inner lives of women, and he seems to place great value on actresses. But he overcompensates by making his male characters into ineffectual ciphers, and directing his actresses to go for broke in every moment of every scene. This kind of misguided affirmative action does nothing to improve the status of women in film; if anything, it enforces an image of them as unstable emotional time bombs. Mother and Child does as much disservice to its stars as it does to the art of graceful cinematic storytelling.

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