Mixing in a soporific way three stories where the adoption plays a paramount role between the mothers and their daughters, Mother and Child seems to last four hours in its way of doing meet superficially and in a pretentious way a multitude of characters.
Three women will see their way crossing in the joy and the pain. Karen (played by Annette Bening) gave her child in adoption and she has more and more difficulty in tie bonds with her entourage. Her daughter that she forever considering, Elizabeth (played by Naomi Watts), resembles to her, changing city not to think about her past. For her part, Lucy (played by Kerry Washington) would like to adopt, and an occasion is offered finally to her…
Son of the popular Gabriel Garcia Marquez writer, Rodrigo Garcia has touched the realization for several years. His best films (Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her and Nine Lives) have all joint to present several stories which put in scene a multitude of women. After a forgettable turning towards suspense with “Passengers”, here he is back to his topics of predilection, Mother and Child, of which he also ensures the scenario, while asking his good friend Alejandro González Iñárritu to act as an executive producer, which can be always useful to open closed doors and inaccessible.
Her new feature film is strewn with the most beautiful possible intentions. Which are the bonds between a woman and her child? How to fill this vacuum which is drawn up? What is really a mother? How to make to catch up with wasted time? A horde of universal and timeless questions which seem without end. With the image of the story line, moreover. Even if it lasts only 126 minutes, the production spreads out during at least forty five minutes, recalling and underlining what was already known as previously, ardently seeking to tap the least emotion.
Profiting from a setting in studied scene but ultimately empty and too invaluable, which puts on the account of the chance of the life several annoying improbabilities, this heavy object handicapped by a sound screen a little too invading does not have the happier hand in its way to concocter its characters. The feminine roles multiply as rabbits (all these mothers which seem almost magic, the teenager blind woman, etc), with beings which do not have sometimes any other function but to bring a message moralizer. All hardly goes better within the three principal destinies. Kerry Washington in vain multiplies the smiles and lets sail her natural charisma, her Lucy misses the consistent one, developing that too tardily. It is still worse on the side of the antipathetic Karen that defends Annette Bening mechanically. Only Naomi Watts makes accept the distress of her being, and the scenes which she defends with Samuel L. Jackson are among most interesting and touching batch. Still there, the vision of Garcia lacks nuance, reducing the man to a simple spectator who is more often than differently far away from balance family.
Prefabricated work on creditable sets of themes, Mother and Child is in fact heavy and repetitive mix which wants to make well but which does much too much of it. All the opposite of the significant and minor Casa de los babys of John Sayles which tackled with much more know-how a similar subject.
