There are moments when "Mother and Child" has the aroma of soap, but most of the time, Rodrigo Garcia's movie is a gripping tale that views how habits–for good or ill–move from one generation to the next.
A talented cast gives the film more strength, with excellent work from a witchy Naomi Watts as an attorney who happily inserts her sexuality into relationships for fun and/or profit; a struggling Annette Bening who has yet to recover from an illegitimate child of her adolescence and a feisty Sareeka Epps also carrying a child whose future she wants to guarantee. And there are fine performances from Jimmy Smits, S. Epatha Merkeson and Samuel L. Jackson. The wonderful Cherry Jones is on hand, too, a link among the various mothers and children, but I wish directors would hire her to portray a character who is not a nun.
Karen (Bening), a physical therapist, lives with her mother (Eileen Ryan) and resents her close relationship with her Latino housekeeper and her child. She also wonders about the child she gave up for adoption. Elizabeth (Watts), herself an adoptee and also a beautiful, brilliant attorney, seduces her boss (Jackson) as a long stride on her way to becoming a partner. And then, out of sheer meanness or as an act of sub-conscious revenge merely to impede someone else's good relationship, coldly does the same thing to a next-door neighbor whose wife is pregnant. Sexual tension is an important part of this film, and Watts creates it brilliantly.
A parallel plot involves Kerry Washington, as Lucy, who is trying to adopt a child after failing to become pregnant by her husband. Epps, a pregnant teenager (as Bening once was), knows what she wants for her baby, and her interrogation of Washington comes awfully close to being an inquisition at times. Merkerson, warm and far from the detective of "Law & Order," is Washington's mother, calm and helpful.
There's a great deal going on in Garcia's plot, including some wonderful acting by Jimmy Smits as a co-worker of Bening's, trying diligently to break through the solid bubble she has constructed to keep the world away. Despite the occasional drifting into soap opera, "Mother and Child" is a fine movie, showing a great deal of warmth and love as the various characters, like ourselves in many ways, continue to construct obstacles for ourselves.
"Mother and Child" opens today at the Plaza Frontenac
–Joe