Movie Review: Mother and Child

LITTLE ROCK — Finely acted and measured in its subtly faith-based approach, Rodrigo Garcia’s Mother and Child does not quite escape the limitations of its soapy genre but it struggles mightily and honorably before finally collapsing into third-act melodrama.

Son of the masterful Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez, writer-director Garcia has a (sometimes annoying) knack for homing in on the heart-rending quandary, and some are likely to find his movies emotionally manipulative. He’s a serviceable director, with what some might term a weakness for weepy convolution. While he has written and directed several features, most notably 1999’s Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her and 2005’s Nine Lives, perhaps his signature work is the 44 episodes of the HBO psychotherapy series In Treatment.

Garcia believes that healing can only begin when wounds are examined, and this faith in the talking cure is coupled with an apparently very Catholic view of motherhood as a woman’s essential duty - however fraught with psychic peril the acts of having and rearing children are. He’s very lucky to have corralled some exceptional talent to play his female characters, who otherwise might have come off as shrill stereotypes.

First there’s Karen (Annette Bening), a lonely 51-year-old physical therapist, still haunted by the daughter she gave up for adoption at 14. She is bitter with her aged and failing mother (Eileen Ryan), who engineered the adoption.

Meanwhile (math wizards get your pencils out), 37-year old lawyer Elizabeth (Naomi Watts) is dealing with her abandonment issues by vanquishing her opponents and predatorily bedding her boss (Samuel L. Jackson, for once not mugging and strutting).

And then there’s sweet Lucy (Kerry Washington), a happily married bakery owner, who’s having trouble conceiving and is ready to go the adoption route. The problem is her nice-guy husband (David Ramsey), for all his compassion, isn’t quite ready to give up on having his DNA replicated.

While Garcia’s take on motherhood is somewhat simplistic, he’s either very alert to nuance or extremely empathetic to his female leads, each of whom makes us believe in characters who don’t add up on the page. While Elizabeth and Karen end up doing things that seem alien to the characters they establish early on, Bening and Watts are so good that it’s not until after the movie’s over that we begin to question their arcs.