Movie Review - 'Mother and Child'

Mother and Child Starring Annette Bening, Naomi Watts, and Kerry Washington Directed by Rodrigo Garcia Rated R

There's no requirement that says you have to have likable main characters in a film. It is often suggested, however, and there's a good reason for that: If you want audiences to watch the characters you've created for the next couple hours of their otherwise occupied lives, you might want to give them compelling reasons to do it. There's a difference between villains being awful people and presenting characters you wouldn't associate with in real life when the film has no actual bad guy. Who do you pull for? It's a problem that plagues Mother and Child, which is one of those films with multiple storylines woven together until you find out they're actually the same story all along. That alone isn't enough to discount a movie, but when there is one arc that stands on its own - and is the only developing plot with a truly likable, human character at its center - then it's worth wondering why the rest of the ensemble needs to be here. Well, maybe it's because the rest of the ensemble includes Annette Bening, Naomi Watts, and Samuel L. Jackson. More on them later. The motor in Mother and Child is Kerry Washington, who offers a fierce but fragile portrayal of a woman who wants nothing more than to have a child but is unable to conceive. Lucy and her husband Joseph (David Ramsey) have tried and tried on their own, and eventually visits an adoption agency, hoping that process will answer their prayers. As it becomes evident that this may be the shot that works, Lucy begins to lose grip on other parts of her life. It's a bumpy road, but there is always a belief that the experience will strengthen her and make her a better mother when the day finally comes. On the other side of Los Angeles (or maybe not that far away, after all), walled off Karen (Bening) is dealing with the loss of her mother. It constantly reminds her that she has no one to care for her at the end of her life, having not so ironically given up her own daughter after a teenage pregnancy. We don't know for sure that Karen's chilly bedside manner - and yes, she is a nurse - began when she decided at 14 that she wasn't ready to be a mother. And on a third side of Los Angeles, there's the even more isolated Elizabeth (Naomi Watts). In a job interview, she tells her prospective employer (Samuel L. Jackson) that she's serious about winning, and she won't ever have a family or deep personal connections to drag her down. Fun girl. She has taken steps to ensure that never happens, by the way -- a little south of the border surgery when she was 18. Most girls just get tattoos when they go to Mexico. Elizabeth and Karen take pretty desperate steps to keep themselves from feeling anything, because if they felt anything then they might feel everything. And even though writer-director Rodrigo Garcia is able to give each actress enough to work with to build to some explosive moments, they're so disproportionately undeserving as they're presented here in relationship to Lucy that their pain and emotional emptiness is manifested more as comeuppance than conflict. There is resolution, of course, although Garcia exercises an annoying an increasingly common practice of introducing new supporting characters way too far into the story. As if it weren't a big enough missed opportunity to not just hand the film over to the wholly invested Kerry Washington, there are suddenly characters in the other storylines that detract attention from the other two leads. Mother and Child could be an interesting study of the vulnerability of adoptive parents. That's not an angle we see much of, and it's an important subject matter all the way around. Instead, Washington is in a rotation with two actresses who can completely impose their wills on a film. It doesn't quite happen here, in part because their characters don't demand much of us and in part because Washington is just that good, and that's troubling. Now it's just added to the list of films that try to tackle a socially relevant topic but are too afraid to meet it head-on.

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