Mother and Child (Rodrigo Garcia, 2010) - God has a plan.
Innocent people will die and lives will be tragically twisted, but if you manage to survive long enough He will make His plan known to you, and it will be good.
That is the pious, quaint tone of this sentimental lecture in "what's most important in life" that is too naive and well-intended to rise to the level of actually being offensive.
The film interweaves three storylines.
Annette Bening is a hardworking nurse, a single older woman taking care of her dying mother.
She is prickly and proud, emotionally unavailable to others because she didn't get enough love from her mother growing up.
We find this out in a very matter-of-fact manner, as everything negative in this film is simplistically explained as the result of some failure to live a righteous life.
A classic sense of Catholic guilt weighs heavily on this film.
Garcia's world is filtered through the lens of religious wish-fulfillment.
People are genuine and well-meaning.
The worst quality these characters demonstrate is that they sometimes change their minds about things.
Garcia proceeds to lecture us on morality, so his naivete makes this a tenuous proposition to say the least.
Naomi Watts plays a successful and driven lawyer, the only evidence of which appears in expository dialogue, as Garcia is too lazy to write any scenes of her actually working.
She soon seduces her older, African-American boss (Samuel L.
Jackson) as well as the male half of the couple next door.
She is portrayed as constantly running from commitment and, God forbid, actually seems to enjoy casual sex on her own terms, so of course Garcia punishes her for these grave misdeeds.
Careerism and sex out of wedlock are portrayed as psychological hangups, the effect of not having enough down-home family values.
In this respect, Mother and Child is a big step backward when seen from a feminist standpoint.
Rounding out the leads is Kerry Washington, overacting in her portrayal of a young woman attempting to adopt a child, because she can't get pregnant by her husband.
We follow the complicated relationship she develops with the birth mother, from whom she must win approval.
Based on the evidence in this film, adoption appears to be an inhumane and cruel institution bent on separating children from their mothers.
If this is the outlook on adoption, you can imagine how the film deals with even the suggestion of abortion.
The script is full of unnatural, didactic lines that all seem to blend together.
The acting performances are all distinct, but the words themselves all read like they are being spoken by the same person, which is a classic screenwriting misstep.
Mr.
Garcia is a better director than he is a writer.
Side characters are introduced merely so the leads can learn a lesson about their own lives.
There is a plentitude of weepy, joyous moments, and they are saccharine enough to make you sick, or at least to lodge your eyeballs permanently to the upper lids.
Now, Garcia is no woman-hater.
His films usually put the weight of their stories on the shoulders of women.
In Nine Lives, he interwove nine stories but kept them separate.
Here, the stories seem separate at first, and then come together like pieces of a puzzle, different strands of the same story.
The feeling we come away with is that everything has a purpose and we are God's perfect creations, despite all our suffering.
I fear this all-encompassing point-of-view, because it encourages one to accept a particular set of ancient teachings as the Word, and discourages thinking that is independent of this religious doctrine.
It offends me as a thinker.
Anything so doctrinaire is oversimplified.
That the film comes across as reactionary in regards to how it views the sex lives of single women is more of an indictment of the simplistic worldview the film has overall as opposed to any anti-feminine impulse.
Nevertheless, the world of Mother and Child is fantasyland.
Innocent people will die and lives will be tragically twisted, but if you manage to survive long enough He will make His plan known to you, and it will be good.
That is the pious, quaint tone of this sentimental lecture in "what's most important in life" that is too naive and well-intended to rise to the level of actually being offensive.
The film interweaves three storylines.
Annette Bening is a hardworking nurse, a single older woman taking care of her dying mother.
She is prickly and proud, emotionally unavailable to others because she didn't get enough love from her mother growing up.
We find this out in a very matter-of-fact manner, as everything negative in this film is simplistically explained as the result of some failure to live a righteous life.
A classic sense of Catholic guilt weighs heavily on this film.
Garcia's world is filtered through the lens of religious wish-fulfillment.
People are genuine and well-meaning.
The worst quality these characters demonstrate is that they sometimes change their minds about things.
Garcia proceeds to lecture us on morality, so his naivete makes this a tenuous proposition to say the least.
Naomi Watts plays a successful and driven lawyer, the only evidence of which appears in expository dialogue, as Garcia is too lazy to write any scenes of her actually working.
She soon seduces her older, African-American boss (Samuel L.
Jackson) as well as the male half of the couple next door.
She is portrayed as constantly running from commitment and, God forbid, actually seems to enjoy casual sex on her own terms, so of course Garcia punishes her for these grave misdeeds.
Careerism and sex out of wedlock are portrayed as psychological hangups, the effect of not having enough down-home family values.
In this respect, Mother and Child is a big step backward when seen from a feminist standpoint.
Rounding out the leads is Kerry Washington, overacting in her portrayal of a young woman attempting to adopt a child, because she can't get pregnant by her husband.
We follow the complicated relationship she develops with the birth mother, from whom she must win approval.
Based on the evidence in this film, adoption appears to be an inhumane and cruel institution bent on separating children from their mothers.
If this is the outlook on adoption, you can imagine how the film deals with even the suggestion of abortion.
The script is full of unnatural, didactic lines that all seem to blend together.
The acting performances are all distinct, but the words themselves all read like they are being spoken by the same person, which is a classic screenwriting misstep.
Mr.
Garcia is a better director than he is a writer.
Side characters are introduced merely so the leads can learn a lesson about their own lives.
There is a plentitude of weepy, joyous moments, and they are saccharine enough to make you sick, or at least to lodge your eyeballs permanently to the upper lids.
Now, Garcia is no woman-hater.
His films usually put the weight of their stories on the shoulders of women.
In Nine Lives, he interwove nine stories but kept them separate.
Here, the stories seem separate at first, and then come together like pieces of a puzzle, different strands of the same story.
The feeling we come away with is that everything has a purpose and we are God's perfect creations, despite all our suffering.
I fear this all-encompassing point-of-view, because it encourages one to accept a particular set of ancient teachings as the Word, and discourages thinking that is independent of this religious doctrine.
It offends me as a thinker.
Anything so doctrinaire is oversimplified.
That the film comes across as reactionary in regards to how it views the sex lives of single women is more of an indictment of the simplistic worldview the film has overall as opposed to any anti-feminine impulse.
Nevertheless, the world of Mother and Child is fantasyland.
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