Friday, May 7, 2010
Film Your Weekend at the Movies with Men, Babies, Mothers and Children
Posted by Mark Asch on Fri, May 7, 2010 at 8:58 AM
Babies: I suppose it might be misleading to call this "baby porn," huh? Maybe that means we should use it, just to kill the "[blank] porn" construction for good. I haven't seen the full movie yet, but I have seen the trailer a few dozen times, and heard the oohs and sighs it elicits from audiences of all ages as footage of an international team of lethally cute babies unspools with merciless adorability. Basically, as a Mother's Day present, you should go see this movie, swoon, go home and conceive those grandchildren your mom has been quietly wishing for. Sure, they're expensive and unruly and potentially life-ruining, but... babies! So cute! Seriously, this movie is going to make bank. Can it outgross Iron Man 2? No... not at first. Can it make $40 million a weekend for the next thirty weekends? MAYBES!
Mother and Child: Writer-director Rodrigo Garcia has been blessed with sensitivity to how women live their everyday lives. In ensemble pieces like Things You Can Tell Just By Looking at Her and Nine Lives, he wrote almost exclusively for women, interconnecting moments of low-key anguish, disappointment, and revelation. His new film, Mother and Child, zooms in on three women: a middle-aged nurse (Annette Bening), a frosty lawyer (Naomi Watts), and a young professional (Kerry Washington) looking to adopt a child with her husband. All three stories are about motherhood, though only the Washington thread is clear about it from the top. Narrowing his focus to Bening, Watts, and Washington (with strong support from Samuel L. Jackson as Watts's boss and Jimmy Smits as Bening's warm coworker) seems like an ideal moment for Garcia's breakthrough, but it turns out that spending more time with his characters means he can't cut away before the stories drift into melodrama. He's so sensitive, in fact, so attuned to his prickly creations, that the mood becomes almost oppressive: hushed, morose, and oddly formal. Garcia is at his best when quietly observing, but when his characters address conflicts directly, the dialogue turns weird and stagy. Washington brings a bit of natural rhythm to her character's desperation, and Watts has the advantage of remoteness (her coldest scenes are her most fascinating), but the more stilted and contrived moments do no favors to Bening. Her slightly cartoonish demeanor—downturned mouth, coiled body language—was put to far better use in American Beauty, large-scale critical re-evaluation be damned. Mother and Child is obviously intended as a complex, nuanced alternative on a weekend that usually brings us the likes of Monster-in-Law, but in its weakest moments, it's more like Arthouse Lifetime.
Top Commenters
