Mother and Child

Mother and Child is a lot like the 2004 film Crash, which followed about a half-dozen urban characters whose lives intersected in unexpected ways. Annette Bening stars as Karen, a touchy, sour, and judgmental single woman caring for her elderly mother and lamenting the child she gave up for adoption nearly 40 years earlier. A young Black couple wants a child but can’t have one; luckily they know a pregnant teen who offers them hers. Naomi Watts plays Elizabeth, a top-notch lawyer and driven seductress who is apparently mourning the parents she never knew.

These characters (and others), so disparate at first, eventually link together in ways that make the plot work but are not entirely convincing. The film is a little too plodding and precious for its own good; Elizabeth heads to her apartment rooftop and meets a blind teen girl who muses about adoption within the first few minutes of meeting her; Jimmy Smits’s character unaccountably pursues and falls for Karen, when any sensible man would have refused to put up with her abusive attitude and left her to her own bitterness.

The film has some good performances, including by Annette Bening and Samuel L. Jackson (as Elizabeth’s boss with whom he strikes up a relationship). Mother and Child wants to be about a lot of things, including loss, redemption, identity, adoption, and more. There are plenty of “message” moments, like when an overwhelmed new mother complains about the responsibilities of caring for a baby and is set straight by her own no-nonsense mother who asks her if she thinks she’s the first woman to have a child.

The film’s heart is in the right place, but at over two hours it seems overdrawn and bloated. It needed fewer characters and a stronger narrative to keep it on track, and the script is so busy juggling characters that it neglects to really flesh them out.