At the Maryland Film Festival last month, writer-director Rodrigo Garcia said that his electric drama about primal bonds, "Mother and Child," the festival's closing-night attraction, would have been a top property for Bette Davis and would have received the full red-carpet treatment during Hollywood's Golden Age.
As he spelled out in an interview at the Hotel Monaco the next morning, a director who wants to make an emotion-based movie in 2010 about families coming together or flying apart has to make it for a modest price and fill it with marquee names such as Annette Bening and Naomi Watts.
Judging from the ovation Garcia received for "Mother and Child" and the applause that broke out when he mentioned his two earlier films, "Things You Can Tell Just By Looking At Her" (1999) and "Nine Lives" (2005), Garcia has been winning fervid fans. That base of support is part of what he needs to keep making his kind of movies. Garcia's dramas unite his robust appetite for strong personalities with insight and sensitivity about the ties that bind and sometimes mend us.
It helps that his reputation has grown with cable TV work such as "In Treatment," which he developed (from a hit Israeli series) and wrote and directed for HBO. It helps even more that his original scripts draw the attention of Hollywood headliners — and that Garcia often summons the best acting to date out of stars like Bening and Watts.
"No reducing!" says Garcia at one point in the interview — and that could be his motto when it comes to the issues and conflicts in his screenplays. "Mother and Child" pivots on a 14-year-old girl forced to give up her daughter at birth in a "closed adoption" (where the identity of the birth parents is unknown to the child).
This separation cripples the lives of these complex female characters. The mother remains paralyzed with remorse and bitterness and afraid of intimacy well into middle age; she's played to prickly-tender perfection by Bening. The daughter, who never bonded with her adoptive parents and never tried to find her real ones, becomes a seductive sort of control freak; she's played with sublime command and an energizing unpredictability by Watts.
Garcia says he didn't set out to make a message movie about the potential cruelty of adoption. "Women make their own informed decisions about what is best for them and for their baby. But Bening's character, at 14, didn't make it — it was made for her. And once that is done she can't un-ring that bell. What interests me is the problem that has no solution."
Bening won over Garcia when she read the script and told him, "I know this woman" — a woman whose life turns upside-down when she turns her regret inside-out. As she gets to the root of her unhappiness, Bening manages to soften unsentimentally. Watts does something equally difficult. "Naomi can be very steelly and look like a considerable person, but she's also very vulnerable and emotional; she can project toughness but also a girliness," he says.
Together, says Garcia, they convey that "even though these women do not have each other, do not know each other, in a sense they have never lived without each other." The "presence of an absence" also haunts the third major character in "Mother and Child," a married woman with fertility problems who is eager to adopt a child. Garcia says Kerry Washington doesn't just hold her own with these two heavyweights: She helped her director broaden and universalize the action. She enlarged Garcia's view of women who see "their inability to get pregnant as a personal failure, which, of course, it's not." She turned her role into the embodiment of a certain kind "of bourgeous nuttiness — it's a very recognizable middle-class desperation. We want our lives to be just so; we want to do well in all fields. If we choose parenthood, we want to excel at it."
When Garcia started writing the script 11 years ago, he wanted to portray "something I hadn't seen on film before: a black yuppie couple struggling for perfection." Washington's striving, self-lacerating character is no longer unusual on the big or small screen. But Garcia's unself-conscious embrace of all his characters is still unusual and heartening. It reflects his core vitality. "I like the idea that life cuts through time, generation, race. Life imposes itself everywhere. If you discover you have a grandson who is Chinese and lives in Shanghai, you will jump on a plane to see him. That's what life does."