Directed by
Rodrigo Garcia
126 minutes
Rated MA
Reviewed by
Emma Flanagan
Mother And Child
Synopsis: Karen (Annette Bening) is a woman haunted by the ghost of the child she gave up for adoption 37 years ago. That daughter is determinedly-single Elizabeth (Naomi Watts). Karen is too scared to seek out her daughter for fear of rejection, while Elizabeth is so consumed by anger at her adoption and then loss of adoptive parents at a young age that she leads a life best-described as misanthropic. When Elizabeth discovers she is pregnant, it starts a chain of events with unforeseeable results.In Australia 2010 there is relatively easy access to information about birth parents for adoptees, once adopted children reach 18 years of age. This makes the story told here seem strangely old-fashioned. If this film had been made in Australia, the story would need to be set some time like the 1950s when teenage girls “in the family way” made for social disgrace.
There’s no such scandal here in contemporary Los Angeles, where children of single women are just a fact of life. For Mother And Child is not about the social disgrace of single parenthood, but rather about the lifelong personal dislocation of both mother and child when the two are separated at birth.
Just how far the dislocation goes is exemplified by Elizabeth. Early in the film she states that she chooses to be single and gives a well-rehearsed speech about why this is so. Yet despite being successful in her corporate lawyer career and lusted after by married men, it becomes clear that there is much more to her being single than meets the eye.
In a congruent way, her mother, Karen is unable to cope with life, choosing to live at home looking after her ageing mother, unable to either get over her first love, the teenage father of her child, or the giving up of her baby.
This film would more accurately have been entitled “Mother and Daughter,” for although there is one male baby in this tale, the key relationships here are all about those between mother and daughter. What does it mean to be a mother, what is the tie between mother and daughter, how does becoming a mother change your perception of your own mother, yourself and what is important in life? These are the questions which Garcia is asking in interesting ways.
The males in the film are largely peripheral, decent for the most part, but not essential to the fundamental process of childbearing and rearing. One could see this as a reworking of the feminist anti-male dictum that “a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle”, but Rodrigo’s treatment is too subtle for that. Thankfully, there are no simplistic answers in a film which is well-acted, with great production values.
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