Mother and Child

This is another comparable film that I preferred to widely-acclaimed The Kids Are All Right.  The main point of comparison is in superlative performances by Annette Bening, but while in the other she retains her glamour in a lifestyle magazine setting, here in Rodrigo Garcia’s film, she strips away vanity in a truly lived-in LA environment.  As with Nine Lives, the son of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and buddy of the three amigos (Cuarón, Del Toro, Inárritu) recruits exceptional actresses and actors to live out his interlocked stories of something like real life.  (Garcia is also responsible for the HBO series In Treatment, which I will have to find my way into at some point.) There is an element of contrivance in the way different story lines finally connect, but the coincidences are more grounded than in Babel and its many modish epigones.  The narrative leaps over major developments to focus on crucial moments of truth and feeling.  Bening plays a difficult, disappointed woman, a physical therapist who yearns for the child she gave up when she got pregnant as a 14-year-old, while she cares for the aging mother who has instructed her in the disenchantments of life.  In parallel, Naomi Watts (in a highly plausible pairing) plays her unknown daughter, who has sealed off the anger of her abandonment in determined independence and devotion to getting ahead as a high-powered lawyer.  They pair off with Jimmy Smits and Samuel L. Jackson respectively, as a kindly fellow therapist and the head of a fancy legal firm.  A third strand of the film is anchored by Kerry Washington, as an infertile bakery shop proprietor who is trying to adopt a child while ignoring the ambivalence of her husband.  There are several other representations of the relationship highlighted in the title, which add up to a convincing group portrait, despite some gaps in plausibility.  If you are a mother or were formerly a child, this adoption drama is worth seeing. (2010, MC-64)