Mother and Child
How do you feel after a movie when you realize your emotions have been manipulated for the last 2 hours and 10 minutes? This is a tough question; it’s a movie after all! The intent is to draw you into the story, for you to relate to the characters. BUT, sometimes I get the feeling that the director has inserted so many ploys to tug at your heartstrings, to evoke an emotional knee jerk reaction that even though you know you’re being manipulated it’s just too much!
Movie example – many people I know will NEVER watch Sophie’s Choice again because it so rigorously and consistently plied you with the emotional equivalent of alcohol that when you leave the theater you are either high on heart-wrenching emotion or are ready to pass out from just tone too many gut-wrenching scene!
So Tuesday night we went to see Mother and Child and…… here’s my take on it. First of all I think you always have to be somewhat suspicious of a star-studded cast because some of these stars have agreed to play minor roles – it’s as if the Director called in all his markers. This movie features Naomi Watts, Jimmy Smitts, Annette Benning, Samuel L. Jackson, David Morse and Cherry Jones.
I’m going to come right out and be up front with the fact that from the onset, I think I may be not quite the right person to critique the movie based on the fact that I personally have Mother and abandonment issues. Having said that, my problem with the movie was that I was upset during most of it and distracted by my feelings and often found myself trying to figure out why I kept coming back to myself when clearly my life in no way paralleled the main characters of the movie.
This is a story told a few times over with slightly different twists to each incarnation of the same plot; girl gets pregnant, decides to give child up for adoption (or not) and with that decision comes lifelong fall out. How each character handles the decision (or not) and how the people around them are affected by the decision is certainly not a new or fresh concept. In fact I know I have reminded my children at different times that some of their decisions are like a stone thrown in a pond – watch the ripples and see how far they reach and how long it takes for them to dissipate. Just a fact of life, and unfortunately one that is not learned early enough in life by most of us. Ah but you might consider this a digression…. So what was my problem? Did I identify with the Naomi Watts character? God, I hope not, she was such a man-hater! No! There are universal emotions which affect all of us; abandonment, loss, death, guilt, despair – love seemingly was NOT one of the movie’s intentional ploys. Perhaps that not entirely fair since over the course of the movie, Annette Benning has a couple of epiphanies and learns to love a man, a child (although not her own) and even Naomi has an epiphany of sorts ( I missed it obviously since I went to the Ladie’s Room) and truly evolved into a persona not even remotely recognizable as the former man-hating promiscuous, aggressive bitch that she was. And really I was hardly gone 4 minutes, oh well that’s the m0vies for you.
There was hardly a dry eye in the theater – I could hear people all around me sniffling and snuffling. My eyes filled up, my throat tightened, I kept wiping the corners of my eyes. It was a teary Tuesday evening.
On the way home the four of us reviewed the movie and the performances as we are wont to do -out of the four, I am the only non-SAG member but still feel qualified to comment – after all I have seen A LOT of movies. The consensus went like this; Naomi is always good, Annette Benning looked old and then better, it was a good role for Samuel L. Jackson, there were a few directorial decisions that were too manipulative, parts of the movie were soooo predictable. You know a SAG audience is a tough room.
Anyway, I have tried very carefully not to reveal too much about the movie and it is 2 hours plus – do I think you should go see it? If you need a good cry and most of us do benefit from a cathartic cry, you should go see it!
Bill Ding and his band of clowns are the security patrol for this blog site. He is a favorite toy from the 50*s. By the way sometimes a blog is just an ego-maniacal stream of conscience.
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