Fridae

I have never been a fan of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s writing. This acclaimed writer has an inimitable style – which just means that all his stories are formula-driven, typically opening with a flash forward of a violent death that the entire story will work inevitably towards. And don’t get me started with the tag team of Alejandro Inarritu and Guillermo Arriaga (Babel, Amores Perros), who specialise in well-structured non-linear films that invoke white liberal guilt with tales of multiracial but stereotypical, even cardboard protagonists (played by Hollywood’s best actors) who of course must all be interconnected by a single, violent death in the end (or the beginning).

I would not look forward to the day when Garcia teams up with the Colombian filmmakers to produce a smug, inevitable tale that would end up as Oscar bait. Or maybe I would, just for the chance of heckling at it.

Well, in Mother and Child, I got what I was looking for, with Rodrigo (the son of Garcia Marquez) teaming up with Inarritu. And as much as I detest the smug, liberal-baiting, lazy storytelling that this potentially entails, Mother and Child was surprisingly well thought through and brilliantly written, with characters that are sensitively written and empathetic.

In this film, the name of the game here is motherhood and adoption. The three intertwining stories deal with variations of the same theme: Annette Benning is a woman who, as a young teen, was forced to give up her daughter for adoption; Naomi Watts is the daughter who, as a professional career woman, is still working through the trauma of being given up for adoption; and Kerry Washington is a woman eager to start her own family, even if it means adopting someone else’s newborn child. It is, despite the references to single motherhood, a tribute to motherly love.

There are so many things that can go seriously wrong here – overacting, a lazy script that relies on reactions to barely sketched characters, that reduces everything to a simplistic liberal message. It’s surprising that the team of Garcia and Inarritu – and their talented ensemble cast – manage to escape all these pitfalls, and end up creating a sensitive and ultimately optimistic movie. I’ll be keeping an eye on this for the Oscars list next year.