Reviews

This movie is reminiscent of an early Chinese movie genre of separated family members searching for each other, the difference is that the background is contemporary and the separation is not due to war and calamity, but youthful indiscretion and adolescent irresponsibility. In its contemporary north American context, the movie appears to be a direct rebuttal of "Juno" (2007), the latter unabashed in its intent to normalize birth out of wedlock and the facility of giving up one's child for adoption. This controversy is symptomatic of an issue in our time, which has superseded that between abortion and pro-life. We find its echo in the TV series "Lost", in which the character Claire at the beginning plans to give up her child Aaron for adoption would later kill to retrieve him.

"Mother and Child" also has a Latin Catholic ring to it, in its preaching of the "natural" bond between mother and child. The movie conveys the message that giving one's child up for adoption is "unnatural" and generates bad karma. It corrupts the character of all parties involved. Karen (Annette Bening), pregnant at 14, gave up her daughter for adoption, is subsequently being eaten away by it for her whole life, to the effect that she never falls in love or has any human connections except with her ailing mother, and develops a very harsh attitude toward those who try to befriend her, including a suitor as well as her housekeeper with daughter. The abandoned baby, Elizabeth (Naomi Watts), now 37, develops a misanthropic pseudo-independent character, capable of only casual affairs and delighted in home-wrecking out of malice. When she goes for gynecological exams, she is mean to the female doctor, a former schoolmate who attempts to fraternize, and turns spiteful when informed of her pregnancy notwithstanding her previous sterilization.

Yet, once Elizabeth is pregnant, it changes her character: She attempts to re-connect with her lost mother and wants to experience delivering the child in spite of doctor's warning to have a Caesarian. She dies a mother and a transformed woman. The story is tear-jerking at times, yet it ignores the fact that some birth parents are unfit for parenthood, tending to create more social problems, and most foster parents who crave children are kind and loving, and in the poverty-stricken America ghettos single mothers get pregnant to cashier the welfare check from the state. "Mother and Child", like its antipode "Juno", is ideological in its intent.

The movie title smacks of Woody Allen's earlier works, but conveying a different message for a changed time: With the waning of the Freudian parlance, the story is not about the dialectical interplay between Eros and Thanatos, but a comment on philandering and maturing. When a marrying man Roderick Blank (Simon Baker) learns from a list of destiny that he will have sex with 101 women in his lifetime, and his fiancée is only the 29th, he cancels the wedding and looks for the women on the list. The 101st turns out to be a serial killer, Death Nell (Wynona Ryder), but it takes little guess to tell that the last one on the list is the one he will marry. In a twisted way, it is a "family values" sermon, as the number 101 has a sophomoric ring to it, reminiscent of a serial number of a college-level introductory course. Matching the men's philandering is the women's turning into man-killing by the liberated sex—in spite of all the Sex and the City bravado, women do feel being molested big time, a sentiment that maketh the heroine a serial man-killer. Only when the scoring man (he is also lost) settles down with the enraged woman are both parties placated. The solution is so simple: old-fashioned, pre-sexual liberation marriage—and with kid.

The sea change that American popular culture has undergone since the beginning of the George W. Bush era is the transmutation from the cynicism of the 1990s to the promotion of heart-warming family values. The former decade was characterized by the "Sleeping With the Enemy" genre, and the featuring of the father as the incestuous rapist. At that time, Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger represented the dissenting minority voice. Now, it looks like the latter has become the main current. Almost every movie plot has to add some flavor of family values and devote some footage to father-daughter or father-son affection, from the anti-terrorist yarn "24" to Indiana Jones and The Mummy sequels, or even "Kung Fu Panda," not to mention "John Q," "Pursuit of Happiness" and "Night at the Museum." The movie "Mr. Brooks" is no exception, nonetheless it introduces a cognitive dissonance into the encomium of family values. Brooks, a murder-addict, realizes that his pregnant daughter Jane has also committed murder on her college campus and considers letting her go to jail to nip the "bad seed" in the bud. Yet, for once not urging on by his evil doppelgänger Marshall, Brooks uses a fake identity, flies to her daughter's campus, and commits a similar murder to make it look like a serial killer is still at large, thereby getting Jane off the hook. For Brooks, killing has become an addiction, but he does not wants to get caught and brings shame to his family, so he concocts a plan to disappear, and it is then that his perverse fan "Mr. Smith" is factored in. Brooks explains his plan to Smith, who agrees to kill and bury Brooks to make him disappear. Brooks, however, has a Plan B up his sleeve: At the point of facing death, he realizes that he wants to see his unborn grandchild, and thus turns on his would-be murderer. It is hard to tell whether family values have become so pervasive as to infiltrate the serial killer genre as well or "Mr. Brooks" is simply turning family values into black humor.

This is a story about a family hostage situation. As the plot unfolds, the audience should have become aware that all the family's effort at fighting back is futile at the moment when the wife catches the 2 villains off guard by picking up the hunting rifle to kill one bad guy, Peter, the other one, the mastermind Paul, finds the TV remote to rewind it to the moment before the shooting to forestall her move. This bad guy, Paul, in fact, is godlike. The audience at this point would be totally bewildered as to what to expect. Are "Peter and Paul" symbolism of authority judging whom they would let into heaven and whom they would leave for damnation? Is this magical realism? A bad dream on the part of the wife? Or a novel the husband is developing if he is a writer? (A viewer with the 2000-movie "With a Friend Like Harry" in mind is likely to think along that line — especially with the inter-textual egg motif.) The horror is built up bit by bit, from the episode of the twice-smashed eggs, which is an annoyance, to a menace through physical harm, which still seems to be a retaliation for the slap on the face, to the killing of the family dog, to the extermination of the whole family. When Paul explains Peter's pathogenesis as a psychopath to their captive audience, he mocks the American psycho-killer genre: His mother divorces her husband to be in sole possession of her son, and he cannot take it, etc. The evil motif is unexplained, as in another European movie, "The Vanishing" (1988), which, incidentally, is based on a 1984-dutch novel, "The Golden Egg" (Het Gouden Ei).

The movie has a multi-layered plot rich with symbolism. The elfin from the sea, who refuses to take off her float ring, is a jellyfish, which somehow symbolizes unfulfilled childhood wishes. The corporate strong woman, or politician, whose appearances on TV and posters punctuate the movie, laments nowadays parents fail to give their children anything. The main character Batya, while she was a child, had a deep craving for ice-cream while on the beach but the ice-cream man was turned away by her mother. The jellyfish elfin shows Batya a photo album with only one picture in it, and it is the ice-cream man on the beach, with a breeze blowing his shirt (as it moves on the photo). When the mysterious poetess, who has given up her suite to the honeymooners, commits suicide, the groom Michael finds a dead jellyfish under his feet on the beach. The jellyfish imagery is aquatic, as the poetess refers to a ship in the bottle, sealed up and not feeling any wind and thus stagnant. The Filipino domestic helper, Joy, wants to buy a large ship model for her son back home. When for the second time she gazes at the toy boat in the shop's display window, a magical effect appears: the little sails are fed by the wind, as if a real-life ship is on high sea—a little stirring of real life, like the ice-cream man's shirt catching a breeze in the photo? A third time in front of the shop, she finds it sold and becomes very much dejected, only to find it in her employer Malka's living room, meant as a gift to her. So, Joy is the only one that succeeds in giving her child something. The parent-child disappointment is not a one-way traffic, as Malka's daughter who hires the Filipino helper Joy to take care of her aging mother tries to win some acclaim to her performance in Hamlet, and all she gets from her mother is: "You lied on the floor half of the time, and uttering words that are not understandable even to people on stage!" At the end of the movie, the actress lady stares from the street resentfully through the window as her mother Malka embraces Joy inside the house.