Forget that the studio-produced drama seems a thing of the past.
Forget, too, that the female audience remains an afterthought to green-lighting honchos (a few of whom are women).
Rodrigo Garcia, maker of “Mother and Child,” has forged a kinship with Golden Age great George Cukor, director of “A Star Is Born” and “The Women.”
The 50-year-old son of novelist Gabriel García Márquez is establishing himself as a maker of what was once called “the women’s picture.”
But the man behind three, women-centered ensemble films doesn’t quite see it that way. A deeper humanism drives him.
“I don’t have an instinct when I write my own scripts to set them in other lands or another period,” said Garcia over breakfast at a Denver hotel.
“The quest is never invading Poland or killing lions. I like the setting to be domestic, to be very private, to be middle class or lower-middle class. To be about the relationship between people who are joined at the hip, who can’t live with someone, can’t live without someone. All these qualities make it easier, more interesting to use women characters.”
A quietly consuming work, “Mother and Child” opened Friday at the Chez Artiste. Annette Bening, Naomi Watts and Kerry Washington play Angelinos linked, unbeknownst to them, by adoption. Their stories unfold as sagas of longing, fury and — maybe, just maybe — acceptance of those things that cannot be changed.
Bening plays Karen, a prickly physical therapist, who at 14 gave up her infant. Elizabeth (Watts) is that child grown up and grown hard. A whip- smart attorney, she’s hostile to attachments. Bakery owner Lucy (Washington) can’t conceive; she and her husband begin the adoption process.
“All three are insane control freaks,” Garcia said. “Elizabeth and Karen understand that a decision was made for them. And they won’t allow that to happen again. Elizabeth handles it aggressively. Karen does it passive aggressively.”
Even Lucy isn’t immune to, as Garcia said, making the imperfect perfect. “She saw her inability to have a baby as a failure,” he said, adding, “which is insane.”
An alternative title might have been “Adoption, a Love Story.” But again, that would miss the movie’s universal anguish and tenderness.
When he first began working on the idea, the movie didn’t concern adoption.
“I was intrigued by the notion of people who might live their life obsessed by an absent person, Garcia said. “I thought I’d love to explore the idea of two woman who lived sort of obsessed with each other who’d never met. The idea of adoption was secondary.”
He brought in Lucy when he found the back and forth between Karen and Elizabeth “monotonous.”
“I thought I needed a third person to balance it out. I wanted to keep it in the same mode of that desire for an unknown person. I thought a person who adopts a baby is also pining for a person they’ve never met. It’s that desire to connect with a stranger and make that stranger part of your life and your love.”
Garcia is himself surrounded by women. He is the father of two daughters, 14 and 11. His wife of 16 years teaches elementary school in Los Angeles, where he has lived for nearly 20 years. He was born in Colombia and reared in Mexico City.
“When I was growing up, I always had a hunch that I would have daughters, only,” he said. “I don’t know if it was a hunch or a wish, but I wasn’t surprised at all. I live very much in that planet right now.”
One of the many fine things about “Mother and Child” is that Garcia never treats that orb like Venus. Instead it’s just a place called Earth.
Film critic Lisa Kennedy: 303-954-1567 or lkennedy@denverpost.com; also on blogs.denverpostcom/madmoviegoer
