High praise for the movie “Mother and Child”: It’s as good as a TV show.
Although it’s not as fine as HBO’s “In Treatment,” a show run by this movie’s writer-director, Rodrigo Garcia, “Mother and Child” reclaims some cinematic space for the low-key character study that has largely been ceded to the small screen. It treats its characters with a graceful sorrow. Revelations don’t burst forth; they unfurl . . . Slowly. Perhaps too slowly for some, but I appreciated the way the camera is parked and attentive, intimate as a diary. Into it, three women pour their agonies about adoption.
Karen (Annette Bening), an LA physical therapist, was 14 when she gave up her newborn daughter. She has never forgiven herself.
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She writes unsent letters to her unknown child — now a frosty 37-year-old lawyer named Elizabeth (Naomi Watts), who has sharpened her aloneness into a blade.
The third woman, Lucy (Kerry Washington), a chef who can’t conceive a baby with her husband (David Ramsey), is using the same Catholic adoption agency that links the other two leads. But when she meets the pregnant 20-year-old (Shareeka Epps) who might be willing to give away her baby, she comes to feel as helpless as an applicant for a job everyone wants.
The film is an actors’ showcase that Bening makes the most of. She chooses coarse unglamour — all lines and flintiness — rather than the preening anti-glamour that can be a kind of vanity. (You know the roles, the ones that carry the subtext, “Can you believe how much work it takes for someone like me to pretend to be ugly?”) She’s also an unmother, forever scanning crowds and wondering whether her daughter might be in them.
A friendly co-worker (Jimmy Smits) offers her smiles and homegrown tomatoes, but Karen’s inner unease keeps lurching between them, disguised as rudeness or indignation. She huffs that it’s an invasion of her privacy to give others the impression that they’re dating — by dropping off that sack of vegetables. “The word is ‘Thank you,’ you weirdo!” he huffs.
Watts, an actress whose willingness to be charmless is charming, puts her freon-charged character across immediately in a job interview with a senior lawyer (Samuel L. Jackson, bow-tied and avuncular) in which she announces that she is a stern solo act proudly free of any family ties, thanks to early death in her adoptive family. Yet she prefers, kittenishly, to report to men: “Women find me threatening.” Maybe that’s because she doesn’t bother to retract her claws around them.
As if to prove that her lifelong lack of attachment was a choice and not her sad fate, she churns through jobs and men. Yet she hovers around LA, where her mother gave her up for adoption, as if to prove that the old lady hasn’t made the slightest effort to find her.
Washington’s Lucy, with clothing and demeanor seemingly borrowed from Donna Reed, is relatively underwritten. When she tells the pregnant girl she doesn’t believe in God, the episode is meant to tell us something about her but doesn’t. Her role in the plot will be essential but prosaic. (I warn you that the film’s executive producer is Alejandro González Iñárritu — the name is Spanish for “contrived ending.” See “Babel,” “21 Grams,” etc.)
The film is heavy going in some ways, but it’s refreshingly blasé about race (although almost half of the major players are black, the only reference to this is a wry one, when Elizabeth says of the Samuel L. Jackson character, “This is Paul . . . my father”), and there is a direction to these women’s struggles. Catharsis? Maybe. At the very least it’s a reminder to be grateful if you have someone to call on Mother’s Day — and if you know who that someone is.