Mother and Child (MA). Writer-director: Rodrigo García. Starring: Annette Benning, Jimmy Smits, Namoi Watts, Samuel L. Jackson, Kerry Washington, David Ramsey, Eileen Ryan, Shareeka Epps, Elpidia Carrillo
'First a mother bathes her child/Then the other way around.' American indie folk rock poet Conor Oberst's line, from his band Bright Eyes' 2007 song 'If the Brakeman Turns My Way', notes a simple truth about motherhood. The relationship is not static, but evolves with time and circumstances. The image of an adult bathing his elderly mother is a romantic ideal of how age can invert the practical aspects while the central bond remains unchanged.
Mother and Child recognises this adaptability, while interrogating the nature of the bond itself. It scrutinises various permutations of motherhood — few of them traditional and not all of them biological — within a highly individualised suburban American society. Like Oberst, its vision of motherhood is romantic. But it is not uncomplicated.
There's 50-year-old Karen (Benning), who, as a teenager, gave her infant daughter up for adoption. Karen is a nurse, and is carer to her infirm mother (Ryan). Here we see the inversion Oberst alludes to, though there's a glum dutifulness in Karen's approach to both professional and personal carer roles. Her outlook is bitter and brittle.
Karen is courted and eventually won over by a friendly orderly, Paco (Smits), to whom she reveals that for her whole life she has defined herself as a mother, despite her daughter's estrangement. For Karen, the parental bond abides, and is strained miserably by physical absence. She eventually finds in the young daughter of her housekeeper (Carrillo) an object for her motherly instincts, but that is no permanent cure for her grief.
Elsewhere, 30-something Elizabeth (Watts) is forging a successful career as a lawyer. Her attitudes to family and career have been shaped by the fact that she was adopted out as a baby, and that her biological mother has never attempted to contact her. She disdains the very concept of family as an impediment to success. She treats sex and intimacy as playthings, even having had her tubes tied when she was 17.
Upon winning a job with a major law firm, Elizabeth commences an affair with her employer, Paul (Jackson). Paul himself is a widower, and has therefore taken on the role of mother-nurturer to his own adult children. When, against the odds and despite her extreme preventative efforts, Elizabeth falls pregnant, it challenges