Mother and Child (2009)

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.

It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.

The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

This was so painful and hard, how a mother can easily give up on her child. It's a piece of her, person another person else! that's really so deep, that Allah gives one a child and another not. it makes me think carefully before getting a baby out to this cruel world.I've really enjoyed this upset movie.

Written and directed by Rodrigo Garcia, "Mother and Child" chronicles three separate stories all centered on a powerful emotional core: motherhood. Served by three powerful performances, the actions of the three protagonists: Karen (Annette Bening), Lucy (Kerry Washington) or Elizabeth (Naomi Watts) are all driven by maternal love, mostly through the effects of its painful absence.But never too judgmental or melodramatic, Rodrigo Garcia finds the perfect tone to let these women's voices express, inviting us to understand what cements a sacred love that borrows from both nature and nurture. That's crucial because the three stories, through a clever narrative device, reassemble at the end and illustrate that if giving birth is one of the most defining aspect of motherhood, it's not the most indispensable.MOTHERHOOD IS LOVEKaren, a fifty something caregiver, gave up her girl for adoption after a precocious pregnancy at the age of 14.Trying to find her track with the help of a nun working in the Adoption's Agency, the emptiness gets more intolerable when her mother dies, leaving her painfully alone. Karen embodies the natural aspect of motherhood, which logically hates emptiness. There is one scene where she's quietly watching the daughter of her Mexican maid sleeping on the sofa, it's a silent moment but the eyes of Annette Bening wonderfully express what it is to be a mother, a strong need not only for love, but for giving love. While men desire to conquer, to accomplish, women can not live without feeding their hearts with love. Ultimately, both men and women wants to be loved, but motherhood is the purest incarnation of what love is, something irrational, generous, deprived from any interest, if only the desire to give and to forgive.It's interesting to note how the nun, who's the least likely character to be or to have been a mother illustrates how some life choices can sublimate the role of a mother, as if every woman had a natural tendency to be a mother, even indirectly.MOTHERHOOD IS TRANSMISSIONElizabeth is an ambitious lawyer who was left by her mother for adoption, an absence that clearly toughened her heart to a masculine extent. Elizabeth adopts a domineering attitude as a man's trap, using body and self-confidence to accomplish her goals: even her towering boss, Samuel L. Jackson in one of his best performances, can't resist. The film almost overplays her bitchy personality until it becomes evident that this is only the facade of a broken heart that had no other choice than being its own referential. Elizabeth highlights the tragic effect of a mother's absence, lacking precisely the inner touch that makes women so appealing to men, apart from voluptuous curves. The film kind of supports the idea that motherhood is an inner feeling, from the little girl playing with her doll to the monthly cycles that remind them of their natural status as the "origin of our humanity" (echoing a famous French painting), the transmitter of our human heritage. And Elizabeth compensates by being pregnant and becoming herself someone who transmits a part of her to the world.Again, the nun plays the same role by helping Elizabeth and Karen to find the missing part of themselves, conveying the idea that motherhood, beyond love, resonates like an existential impulse helping us to understand where we come from, to better appreciate where we go.MOTHERHOOD IS LIFENaturally, as a film that tackles the crucial subject of motherhood, pregnancy plays a vital part, and the power of Garcia's script is that it deals with archetypes only as ways to express much larger statement about the origin of maternal love. Elizabeth insists that despite the medical risk, she needs to feel the baby coming from her womb, a masochistic decision that says a lot about her desire to compensate the lack of a mother, by translating its role in the most painful way. Interestingly, the film doesn't feature delivery in a graphic way, but the one of a young 20-year old girl whose baby is supposed to be adopted by Lucy. Garcia cleverly uses this scene as a proof that giving birth IS still an important part of motherhood, and this leaves to an unforgettable moment, when, expectedly the girl decides to keep the baby, leaving Lucy in a devastating position. The heart-breaking moment where she cries and shouts that it's her baby, is followed by a moment of resignation where she believes that adoption is not natural and that you can't be a mother without giving life. She almost succumbs to the opinion of her husband who left her after realizing that he wanted a child of his own and when, in the most controversial scene of the film, she can't stand the screaming of the baby she finally adopted. I say 'controversial' because it's as if Garcia wanted to express that it's only by giving life, that a mother receive the predisposition for an undivided and disinterested love. Lucy is rightfully and immediately corrected by her caring mother.The three stories reassemble when Elizabeth dies after giving birth to Jackson's daughter, Ella, involuntarily leaving a baby to adopt for Lucy, and thanks to her crucial decision to make contact with her mother, Karen finds out from the nun that she lost a daughter but won a grand-daughter named Ella.MOTHERHOODThe three protagonists of the stories all define together what motherhood is. Elizabeth continued the cycle of life by giving a little girl to this world who'd know where she comes from, because she'll have the privilege to know Karen, her grandmother. Lucy didn't give birth but she'll provide all the love needed by Ella, as for Karen, if she doesn't live with the idea that her daughter is alive, she knows that through Ella, the spark of life is still present and ready to be loved and to be transmitted

I have no particular criticism about the technical or artistic qualities of this movie or seeing it as an entertainment light enough to pass away a couple of hours just watching all these problems with having babies, adopting babies, caring for babies, bathing babies, dying to have babies... I just wonder... are women lives SO limited that the only way to fulfill their humdrum little lives is ONLY by having babies??? I'm sorry folks, I find that aim in life so limiting that I cannot believe an intelligent woman cannot find any other way to happiness and fulfillment in her life. I just can't. I refuse to believe it. For men is so easy, man takes pleasure and disappears if he so decides, but women..., women are stuck for ever with the consequences! What about ART, what about a fulfilling career, what about LIVING??? A woman that has a child is burdened with "it" for life! As the character in the movie that got the adopted baby girl (finally, because one more minute of her struggles and I would have stopped the projection!!!) realizes, when the child howls away for HOURS, that this is no rosy picture and heavenly perfumes... (she would gladly return the baby to whomever gave it to her in the first place). Well, all that said, I swear never again to watch movies with howling babies in it.

There's nothing cheap or easy in this film. We become intimately involved with the characters to the point that, at least for me, every scene evokes heart-felt emotion and yes, tears. Everything works here, the script, direction, production, and of course the performances. Seldom have a seen such a gifted ensemble bring to life such an outstanding story. It shows real life, messy, imprecise, unpredictable, lived by real people, people I could identify with, searching for meaning, truth, trying to hold on to fleeting moments of happiness and finding it in unexpected places. There are no heroes or villains, just real people, trying to make the best of the cards they were dealt. A true gem.