DVD REVIEW: Mother And Child (2010)

 FRACTURED LIVES

Melodrama, by its very nature, stretches the boundaries of narrative expression to achieve emotional peaks. The idea is to tug at your heartstrings and if that means putting the characters through improbable situations, or sketching them in broad, even strokes, so be it. Subtlety then, isn't a quality usually associated with the genre. Unless you count a rare film like Rodrigo Garcia's (he's Gabriel Garcia Marquez's son, and an accomplished filmmaker in his own right) Mother And Child, with a subject that automatically lends to excess, yet tackles it with uncanny sensitivity. Garcia earlier directed the superb compilation of loosely connected vignettes, Nine Lives (2005), exploring various facets of relationships, each story complete in itself and shot in a single take for maximum impact. 

With Mother And Child he explores motherhood and adoption through the lives of three women, again inter-connected in a fundamental way, without actually knowing it themselves. Each is complexed, sensitive and highly charged. Circumstances force them to re-examine their lives and bring down the walls they've built around themselves. With a masterly, suspenseful structure, Garcia keeps us and his characters guessing as they spiral towards their destinies. 

Annette Bening, as Rachel, has the ability to look vulnerable even when she's cruel and defiantly hostile, either towards Paco (Jimmy Smits) her co-worker at a therapy clinic or the Mexican maid and her little daughter who takes care of her ailing mother. It's heartbreaking to watch Rachel look at the little girl with contempt born entirely of self-loathing.

Every act of kindness or even normalcy is viewed with suspicion or naked resentment, fuelled by a 37-year-old wound when, as a 14-year-old girl, she was forced to abandon her newborn baby. Her entire life has been shaped by this one episode and while she makes no overt attempts to find her lost child, she writes her elaborate letters in a diary sharing her lonely life with her offspring, ironically, her only meaningful relationship.  

In another part of L.A. is Elizabeth (Naomi Watts), a manifestation of the same wound that wracks Rachel's life. She's an accomplished lawyer, who likes to stay on top of things at all times in a disturbing, cold-blooded sort of way -- whether it's her career or her fleeting relationships with men, almost always on terms dictated by her. She seduces her widowed boss (Samuel L Jackson) and sleeps with her pregnant neighbour's husband before stuffing her soiled panty in the wife's dresser! Underneath such casual viciousness is a little girl with no home or family to go back to and scars of the past haunting her life every waking moment. Yet Elizabeth believes she has her life under control. But does she? 

The third story involves the passionate Lucy (Kerry Washington) an intelligent entrepreneur who's traumatised by her inability to conceive. She and her husband are in the process of trying to adopt a baby through the good offices of a kindly nun. A pregnant teenager agrees to offer them her baby, but has to put them through a detailed interrogation first. Lucy's desperation gradually transforms into strength and determination to have that adopted child and live on her own terms.

In Garcia's worldview, men are benign, but almost passive bystanders, and yet both Smits and Jackson's characters play a role in cracking shells and healing wounds in gentle, surprising ways. It's remarkable how Bening and Watts work as perfect foils as the narrative moves smoothly from one woman's story to the other, we get sucked deeper into their emotional morass and despair.

Mother And Child is a deeply satisfying film, although the question Garcia's treatment raises and leaves unanswered, is, why is motherhood such a primal element in a woman's life? And is it really the only way a woman can feel complete and fulfilled? 

Comments

[Deepa Deosthalee]

Thanks Neeraj. I enjoyed the film even though it's sentimental, or perhaps because it is so. :)

[Nrjgupta]

Deepa, this sounds like a very interesting film. I am definitely going to see. Thanks for reviewing it .... otherwise would have missed it !