Mother and Child

How three women are affected by adoption. 51 year old Karen (Benning) has never stopped thinking about the child she gave up for adoption, 37 years earlier, when she was 14 years old. That child (Watts), now a successful attorney, lives an empty life, centered around achievement in law, careless sex based on conquest, extreme cynicism about life and people. A black woman (Washington), unable to conceive her own child, desperately hopes that adopting will fill the void in her soul.

Benning allows herself to be seen by the camera as she is, a 53 year old woman who is not trying to hide her age. She need not hide anything; no one should. She is stellar as a woman haunted by her past, caring for her aging mother, unable to connect with people. Into her life enters a fellow physical therapist (Smits), whom she pushes away, afraid of connecting, of feeling emotion. He persists, and they become friends, and, eventually, marry. That marriage is a little forced, and a weak spot of the film. One of few.

Watts is an unsympathetic character, despite what might be a most sympathetic circumstance: she misses not having a mother, not knowing whom her birth mother was, and that haunts her. Yet she turns that hurt and anger into a manipulative cynicism of undue proportions. During a sexual encounter with her new boss (Jackson), she not only controls the entire act, but calls him old man, deliberately wanting to put him in his place (she is already on top, literally).

You may not quite trust “Mother and Child”— its soft spots and fuzzy edges give it away — but you can believe just about everyone in it. A.O. Scott's NYT review.

Washington's character, Lucy, is a layered woman who desperately wants to be a mother. When she and her husband interview with a nun who will arrange the adoption, and then with the mother who is going to give up her baby, Lucy talks incessantly, then upbraids her husband for not stopping her. When the birth mother decides not to give up her baby, Washington launches into a tour de force, an amazingly emotional and hysterical outburst of anger and pain. It is acting at its best.

In the end, all three stories meld into one. Elizabeth, pregnant, abandons her law firm, goes to work with a public interest firm, and insists on giving birth naturally despite a dangerous condition. She sees her brown baby (her boss was indeed the father; she got pregnant despite having tied her tubes at 17 {this scene is weak, and a missed opportunity, though perhaps Elizabeth would not have reflected on it} and decided to have the child), but dies. That baby is given to Lucy, and Lucy agrees to let Karen visit.