mother and child written and directed by rodrigo garcia
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This notion of the writer as director, and the screenplay as a contract, is fairly unusual in the movie business—especially on big studio films, where writers revise scripts on the set to please anyone from the director to the producer to the stars. But Garcia’s attitude makes particular sense when you consider his background: his father is Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the Nobel Prize-winning author of Love in the Time of Cholera and One Hundred Years of Solitude. It also may explain a great deal about his three feature films, Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her (2000), Nine Lives (2005) and now Mother and Child. They’re writerly in the best sense of the word: they focus on characters, and the story springs from who these people are rather than putting them through their paces. When Garcia’s films succeed they do so on the strength of his writing, and when they fail their shortcomings can usually be traced back to the writing as well.
Unfortunately, Garcia’s movies can also be writerly in the worst sense of the word, exposing not the characters but the writer. Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her suffers most from this sort of clumsiness; it too weaves together stories of several women but without the later film’s narrative rigor. Sometimes when Garcia needs to fill in a character he’ll channel pages of omniscient narration through some faux-mystical figure: an unhappy doctor (Glenn Close) gets a tarot reading so emotionally precise it might have been dictated by her psychotherapist, and a no-nonsense bank officer (Holly Hunter) strikes up a glancing acquaintance with a hoary old bag lady who subjects her to a series of preternaturally exact character analyses. Garcia also has a penchant for disabled characters (in Nine Lives, a deaf-mute man; in Things You Can Tell, a dwarf and a blind woman), and more often than not their disability is tossed lazily into the mix as a bit of exotica.
