Review: 'Mother and Child'

A moviegoer fortunate (or discerning) enough to catch "Mother and Child" might briefly forget that perennial (and legitimate) complaint of actresses, that Hollywood doesn't give them any roles worth playing.

"Mother and Child" makes a worthy showcase for the talents of three leading actresses and a handful of supporting ones. It also ensures that the characters they play more than deserve our attention - characters so strange yet true that viewers might find themselves in the too-rare position of having no idea what they will do, or even if they're the kind of people we want to root for. In the end, they are.

And in this season that gives us a movie built solely upon the gee-ain't-they-adorable magical power of "Babies," here is one that really explores both the gravitational pull of motherhood and some of the ways procreation can throw lives out of orbit. Its two main characters, played by Annette Bening and Naomi Watts, are deeply, hauntingly affected by the fact that the former, who became accidentally pregnant at 14, gave the latter up for adoption.

Bening plays a brittle woman who is almost comically incapable of getting along with others. When a kind-natured new co-worker (Jimmy Smits, allowing himself to look just dumpy enough to be vulnerable) tries to befriend her, she treats him like a stalker.

The daughter she never knew is a more powerful echo of the original: a high-achieving lawyer who avoids emotional attachments by choice, except when they fit the path she has laid out for herself. Though Watts doesn't need to bed her new boss (Samuel Jackson, who like Smits makes himself much less sexually confident than usual), she does it anyway, sternly establishing a power dynamic in her favor.

While we're learning how this decades-old adoption is anything but a finished transaction, we meet a third woman (Kerry Washington) who is desperate to make her marriage complete by adopting a child. The needs and choices of all three women will eventually intersect in a melodramatic way that might have been a little hard to take, had writer/director Rodrigo García (son of author Gabriel García Márquez) not supplied so much nuance along the way, both in these characters and in the many other maternal relationships that color the film.

García is able to take his time with this complicated emotional landscape, and the movie's patience with its characters' shifts - along with the tight knit of its thematic concerns - keeps "Mother and Child" from suffering the ills that plague some films that set out to connect strangers' lives in presumably unexpected ways. Maybe it's a good thing the film didn't open on Mother's Day. But though it's not always a rosy picture, "Mother and Child" certainly takes the creation of life, and the responsibilities inherent in that act, more seriously than many of its peers.