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Mother and Child
The title Mother and Child suggests a lofty exercise in religious iconography, but the template for the movie is less the Bible than Babel. In what’s now a familiar gimmick, the film slowly reveals the hidden connections among three characters—in this case, women on various ends of the adoption process. There’s the mother (Bening) who gave up her daughter as a teenager and has come to regret it; the daughter (Watts), now grown up and apparently afraid of forming attachments because her own upbringing has scarred her; and a third woman (Washington) who’s looking to adopt a child and whose relationship to the material will, it’s obvious, eventually come to the fore.
If the structure traffics in a tired concept—and the reactions of the characters seem driven less by genuine motivation than by writer-director García’s need to have all the pieces fall into place—Mother and Child is at least partly redeemed by its stars, who are tasked with interpreting roles that are variously underwritten, thankless and incoherent. Watts in particular, handed a role that makes no emotional sense (she plays a high-powered attorney who throws herself at any man in her vicinity), proves again that few actresses mix strength and vulnerability so well. The movie’s pretensions may tend toward the cosmic, but there’s at least one person onscreen intent on keeping the project on earth.
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