Mother and Child (2009)

Purely Joyful Movie!

How sad is this?

Great Film overall

I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

This movie deals with adoption and a mother's love through three intertwined stories.Annette Benning plays a woman who as a young girl gives her child up for adoption. Throughout her adult life, she is bitter, and unable to love and be loved. She meets Jimmy Smits and she slowly starts to melt and tries to find the daughter she has given up.Naomi Watts is a bitter, driven, self absorbed woman who is unable to form relationships too. She knows she was adopted and it is not until she is ready to have her own baby does she want to find the woman who gave her up. Samuel L. Jackson plays her boss and lover, and he gives a subtle, but strong performance. The last story deals with Kerry Washington who is unable to conceive with her husband and are in the midst of an adoption with a young girl. In the middle of all this, her husband decides he can't go through with it and basically she becomes a single mother.I thought the acting was excellent and you really felt the emotions of each character. I have seen the movie twice and cried twice. I can't recommend this movie enough especially if you are a mother. There is sadness, but the movie ends on a somewhat happy note as each woman accepts her past.

Mother and Child is a Crash type movie where unrelated characters of different races come together or become related by the end. The Watts character is the daughter given up years ago by the Benning character and they are seriously troubled because of it. Annette is a spinster who distrusts men and Watts is a psychopath who manipulates them. What develops is both meet kindly coworkers or neighbors that eventually melt their hearts and all ends happily. It is a well made film with great direction and acting if you are a true believer in humanism. The left sees people as troubled but good deep inside except for conservatives who are evil through and through. The right see people as troubled who act good (to maintain social order), may become better through suffering, but basically are fallen. My view is closer to the second.That distinction explains why this move is unrealistic. With so much unhappiness they wouldn't have waited 37 years. Second you can't melt the heats of troubled people. If you spend time around them you'll become troubled also.. The message I received was that promiscuity is dangerous and if you want to be a mother you wait until you are mature, find the right partner, then have children if it is affordable and wanted. Otherwise revert to adoption. Finally, everyone in this movie would have lawyered up which makes me ask why basically good people are so litigious all the time? Why don't they just sit around all day affecting others lovingly and forget about working in law, social services, or whatever? Too many contradictions in that belief and feelings seldom make sense. Suffering follows close behind.

In Los Angeles, the therapist Karen (Annette Bening) is a bitter woman that nurses her terminal mother Nora with the support of her maid Tracy (Carla Gallo) that has a little daughter. Karen misses her unknown daughter that she gave for adoption thirty-seven years ago when she was fourteen years old. Her new colleague Paco (Jimmy Smits), who is a widower, is a gentle man and courts the unpleasant Karen.The bakery owner Lucy (Kerry Washington) wishes desperately to adopt a child since she can not have a baby but her husband Joseph (David Ramsey) is not supportive to the idea.The efficient lawyer Elizabeth (Naomi Watts), who is Karen's daughter, is an independent and promiscuous woman that does not want to have a baby and has tubal ligation. When she joins the law firm of Paul (Samuel Jackson), she has a love affair with him and becomes his mistress.When Nora passes away, she feels a great need to know Elizabeth. She marries Paco and his daughter Maria, who is a religious woman, convinces her to seek out Elizabeth. When Lucy meets the single mother Ray (Shareeka Epps), who is a demanding woman, Joseph leaves her since he does not want to raise a foster child. When Elizabeth finds that she is pregnant, she quits her job in Paul's firm and works as secretary in a small company. Their lives will be entwined in very dramatic situations."Mother and Child" is a powerful drama about different views and feelings about motherhood. The therapist Karen has never overcome the loss of her daughter for adoption. The infertile baker Lucy wants to be a mother and her desire costs her marriage. The lawyer Elizabeth is traumatized by her childhood and is an independent woman that does not want to have a baby and ironically gets pregnant. In the end, there is redemption with the second chance for Karen. My vote is seven.Title (Brazil): "Destinos Ligados" ("Connected Destinies")

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