Mother and Child **

Director: Rodrigo García
Cast: Annette Bening, Naomi Watts, Kerry Washington
Samuel L. Jackson, David Morse, Shareeka Epps, Amy Brenneman
Marc Blucas, Jimmy Smits, Cherry Jones, Elpidia Carrillo
S. Epatha Merkerson, David Ramsey

There is something about Rodrigo García's vision of women that feels both spot-on and terribly, terribly cliché.
At times his characters achieve an intense melancholy and feel so lived-in that it's completely annoying how seconds later he forces them to deliver elaborate dialogues that make them sound like they've just arrived from Peyton Place.
In this case his screenplay centers on the relationships between mothers and children. We have Karen (Bening) a middle aged woman whose life was marked by the fact she gave up her daughter for adoption almost forty years before. This has made her cold and so afraid of people that she doesn't know how to respond to the attentions she receives from a new coworker (Smits).
Elizabeth (Watts), the daughter, is a successful attorney who uses sex as an asset and the fact that she was abandoned as an excuse to have no attachments. "I don't have expectations to fulfill" she tells her new boss (Jackson) before she begins an affair with him.
Then there's Lucy (Washington) a woman contemplating adoption given she can't have children of her own. This complicates her marriage since her husband (Ramsey) is reluctant to raising a stranger.
The film unfolds like something González Iñárritu would've made as we see how the three parallel stories eventually converge into one massive, tear-your-heart-out conclusion.
What fails in Mother and Child is that because of García's need to be poetic (usually highlighted by his elaborate camera moves and unrealistic dialogues) we never really think there's an emotional peak coming our way.
We are usually left wondering what will be the climax and this doesn't mean there's some sort of mystery going on, it's just that the director sometimes even forgets some of the stories he's telling.
There's a massive disconnect in Lucy's story especially as we see the other two women move forward in time and she's stuck in the same episode (that or either a freakishly long pregnancy from a mother to be played with charming confidence by Epps).
The movie is saved because of the performers. Bening provides beautifully nuanced work and it's a wonder to see her because the plot first tries to turn her into Charlotte Vale from Now, Voyager yet the actress finds a way to move past this extremely melodramatic mood and by the movie's end she has bloomed into a full blown human being.
Bening is stuck with some preposterous scenes where she writes letters to the daughter she has never met, any other actress would've turned these moments into exaggerated postcard moments, Bening though seems to know there's an awful amount of silliness to them and performs them like a duty, which gives her character a natural quality impossible to judge.
Watts is good but the film under uses her and turns her too much into a femme fatale (Elizabeth would've been played by Glenn Close in the 80's).
The film's revelation is actually Washington who is able to do so much with so little. Her character disappears for rather long amounts of time and we find ourselves wondering what is happening to her, more than anyone else in the film.
The manner in which she completely gives into Lucy is remarkable. She is able to embody sexuality, despair and intense warmth without recurring to cheap dramatic tricks. In a particular scene as she wonders how to deal with a baby's needs she screams "who the fuck does she think she is?" and this is perhaps the only moment in the entire film where we fully grasp what it's like to be a mother.
The pain, confusion and relentless patience that comes with motherhood isn't really easy to convey or to understand and Washington does this with effortless grace.
Mother and Child often feels rushed, despite García's languorous directing and it's fair to think that it might've worked better in serial form where we could've gotten to know these women more and understand some of their rash decisions.
Cinematic form turns it into an obnoxious condensed soap opera that never does justice to the larger themes it wants to study.

Backyard *1/2

Director: Carlos Carrera
Cast: Ana de la Reguera, Joaquín Cosío, Alejandro Calva
Jimmy Smits, Ázur Zagada, Iván Cortés, Enoc Leaño
Amorita Rasgado, Marco Pérez, Fabián Peña, Carolina Politi

The word "subtlety" doesn't seem to exist in director Carlos Carrera's lexicon. In his newest film he tackles on the gynocide that's been taking place for more than a decade in Ciudad Juárez, México, where countless women are murdered in sexual related cases with little or no results from the police authorities.
"Backyard" (which takes its name from the direct indication that the city is used as that by the United States) takes place in 1996, year when the murders began achieving notoriety.
Idealistic police office Blanca Bravo (de la Reguera-whose performance is obviously inspired by Charlize Theron) arrives in Ciudad Juárez to command an investigation dedicated to the "femicides" (as they begin being called to the disdain of government officials).
Not only will she encounter obstacles that come with the entanglements of the investigation, but she also has to face discrimination within the police force.
The governor (Leaño) resents her interest, while her colleague Fierro (Pérez) only cares about getting to the top in his career.
But not all is lost for Blanca as she finds key collaborators in a local radio host (Cosío) and a woman (Politi) who has an institution that protects abused women.
If you think you've heard this story before, there is still more to come as Carrera introduces a parallel main story; Juanita (Zagada) is a seventeen year old woman who arrives in Juárez to work in a local maquiladora (transnational manufacturer).
In the space of three months she turns from a noble, naive woman into a heartbreaker who leaves her boyfriend (Cortés) because she still has more people she wants to meet.
Juanita and Blanca's stories will obviously intersect at some point; one being a police officer and the other target for the city killers, it's only too clear where the movie will lead.
But Carrera thinks that by including subplots with drug dealers, corrupt Americans (Smits who plays the exact opposite of wholehearted, tough, goodness we're used to seeing from him) and press manipulation he will achieve depth.
What the movie accomplishes instead is to become a didactic discourse where the good are utterly pure and the bad deserve instant punishment (even if the good have to suffer endlessly to get to this).
Carrera tries to give the whole thing a flavor of Hollywood thriller by adding suspense and hinting at a possible serial killer.
The thing is that he treats each subject as something external that must be dealt with but never analyzed. All of his characters are archetypes (better than saying clichés) that come by default in genre movies.
He doesn't even bother to hide the obviousness of the character's names and what they come to represent, Blanca Bravo (could be translated as brave white-purity, peace etc.) is the ultimate heroine who suffer but never gives up.
The rest of the characters talk about the murders as if they're reading straight out of a teleprompter, they inform, but never feel.
And things get our of control in the movie with the fate of Juanita, who Carrera has built as a Lolita worthy of the punishment she gets. Some audience members might even find reasonable motivations for the ordeal she goes through (think "Othello" meets "Babel").
With pompous characters that utter things like "cheap proletariat", it's obvious that Carrera wasn't interested in the Juárez situation, other than for the pats in the back he would get for treating such a delicate subject.