I'm one of those saying Ouch, stop poking me. That's not to say that Annette Bening, Naomi Watts, and Kerry Washington aren't lovely playing women who must deal with the life-altering consequences of adoption. Just that the characters in Rodrigo García's movie never rise above being sample clientele. Bening, in a forceful, barefaced performance, is fiftysomething Karen, who, as a teenager, gave an infant daughter up for adoption and has wept ever since, masking her sadness with a sour, spinster veneer. Watts is Elizabeth, an adoptee in her 30s who has turned the loneliness of having never known her own mother into a sexualized hardness she likes to think of as independence. Young, married, and infertile Lucy, played by Washington, longs for a child of her own. Woe, by the way, unto the good, decent men — played by Jimmy Smits, Samuel L. Jackson, and David Ramsey — who cross these women's paths. In the ovarian jungle of Mother and Child, each gent is undervalued in his own way.
