YOUR DAILY FIX OF OSCAR: Naomi Watts in “Mother and Child”

Nov 15, 2010
- by Scott Feinberg
@http://scottfeinberg.com/deepvote3

“Mother and Child” does not hang together well enough to be a successful film, but, to be honest, I can’t entirely dismiss it. My thoughts the day after I see a movie are important to me, and on the night I saw “Mother and Child” I had a disturbing and erotic dream about Naomi Watts, so I must say the movie got to me.

The character Ms. Watts plays is a 37-year-old lawyer who has never been married and lives alone in Los Angeles. We assume she is a prig when we see her with hair drawn back and wearing conservative clothes during her job interview with Samuel L. Jackson, the improbable nice-guy-married-man-with-grown-children-head-of-a-law-firm. She says she likes to work alone and to prepare her cases carefully to avoid spontaneity. Not until later do we realize she is trying desperately to keep control — though this is hinted at when she says she wants to be a judge, and Jackson remarks that she has gone from one job to another, not the usual path.

He takes her out to dinner, and when she asks if he is trying to seduce her, he says he is not, whereupon she seduces him, and does so with a supremely confident turning of the tables, just short enough of unbelievable to be unique and thrilling. In the morning, she tells him this is not true love, but rather just the start of a quick affair — and then steps out on her balcony in her robe and gives a luscious glimpse to the young married guy next-door, whom she has previously seen with his wife and shown indifference to, but with whom she quickly becomes involved.

She is a control-freak and an adventurer, and, though she thinks her tubes are tied, she soon discovers she is pregnant. She might involve Jackson — but no, she is way too proud to break up his family. She might have an abortion — but no, it turns out she is herself an adopted child. (In fact, the whole movie could be said to be about the ironies of adoption, and therein lies its disappointment.)

The central character of the movie is not Ms. Watts but Annette Bening, who plays the woman who at 14-years-old gave birth to her — and gave her away, and who, though she’s never met her daughter, has sacrificed her whole life to her. Though Ms. Bening does a superb acting job, nothing really comes of it because the arc of her character hinges on her search, which is futile — except for a kindly piece of irony, which ends the movie in a golden haze which is neither here nor there. I’d call this the drama of the misplaced heroine: you design a movie for one actress to play the star, and another to play the supporting actress — and, what’s more, the story line calls for them never to meet.

So you end up with Ms. Bening doing a fine job playing a woman who is essentially an old maid (though Jimmy Smits comes along and marries her, in her 50s, amusingly and almost believeably), with her sacrifice and her quest taking up most of her camera time, while, about two-thirds of the way through, Ms. Watts is simply eliminated. The loss of Watts was for me like the loss of Jack Nicholson in “Easy Rider” — no more picture after that. At least, the picture that was left offered a softer and easier ending that did not resolve the problems of the most compelling character I had seen, the one who, it turned out, ought to have been the heroine.

Theoretically, if we could start the screenplay all over again, the audience would eschew the rare experience of seeing Jackson as a benevolent father tempted once and then left in peace, and instead see him dragged into the affairs of a woman who is dangerous and unpredictable because, for all her outward certainty, she is at bottom uncertain of what drives her or what it would take to satisfy her, and destructive to herself and definitely destructive to Jackson as she is driven on her path. Watts would light up the screen as that heroine. I could imagine voting for her for best actress in that imaginary movie. But can I imagine voting for her as best supporting actress in a movie that doesn’t come together to test her character or that of any other actor? Probably not.