Almost nothing of what annoyed me about this movie actually makes it a bad movie; indeed, it may even be that the things I find irksome about the film are things that others will find endearing about it, just as someone else might well find admirable the stylistic…uh, quirks, I guess…that I thought were, I don’t know, distracting at best and downright annoying at worst. And in a way it’s sort of a shame, because the story begins rather well. The script is dry and somewhat leaden, and yet the characters begin to bloom almost at once, which says more about the acting talents of Naomi Watts and Annette Bening than it does about the abilities of Rodrigo García as screenwriter and director.
Karen (Bening) is a middle-aged woman who got pregnant when she was fourteen and gave the baby up for adoption. Elizabeth (Watts) is the daughter. The two have never met and have not the slightest inkling of the other, apart from knowing that there is, in fact, an other. Karen is so unwilling to let other people get close to her that she almost comes across as comical. Elizabeth is a lawyer with her eyes on the prize and the ruthless nature of someone who is willing to say or do anything to get what she wants.
Paul (Samuel L. Jackson) is Elizabeth’s boss, the owner of what is, to all appearances, a rather tony law firm in Los Angeles. He should probably know better than to sleep with one of his attorneys, but to say that he goes to bed with her almost effortlessly less than a week after hiring her isn’t even saying it the right way. It would be more accurate to say that once she decides she wants to fuck him, he gives in without a fight.
Paco (Jimmy Smits) is a co-worker of Karen’s who is obviously - though quite inexplicably - smitten with Karen from the moment they are first shown together onscreen. Their interactions are uncomfortable at first, but eventually she allows herself to hold his hand, and then tell him about the daughter she gave up and how her entire identity now is wrapped up in regretting her decision to give her daughter up for adoption; and then in the next scene Karen and Paco are getting married.
Seriously.
The young black couple going through the process to adopt a baby because they can’t have kids of their own seems like a gratuitous subplot at first - and yet oddly provides one of the few attempts for the film to wrestle with the meaty philosophical issues that should (but don’t) provide the backbone of the story. During their interview with the woman who will give up her baby, the prospective adopting mother admits, under direct examination, that she does not believe in God. The same topic is later raised (and allowed, as here, to just sort of fade away) during a picnic with Paco, Karen, and Paco’s daughter from a previous marriage. I guess we could assume that García meant to do more in these scenes than identify a few token non-believers, but I can’t really imagine that anyone would buy that argument.
Both Bening and Watts play their characters cold and detached, in age-appropriate ways. Karen’s harsh manner toward the daughter of the woman who is both her housekeeper and her ailing mother’s caregiver demonstrates both the awkwardness of someone who has never raised children and a latent resentment of the fact that this woman has a child in the first place. There is little subtlety in this misplaced expression of the guilt Karen still feels at having abandoned her daugher thirty-seven years ago; and if it’s not obvious enough for you, the connective tissue of the scenes when Karen, in voice-over, writes letters to a daughter she has never known should help to wiggle any misaligned blocks into a Tetris.
There are Catholic overtones to the film, though they mostly serve to focus your attention on García’s rather heavy-handed point about God’s plan. I imagine there is more than one Catholic adoption agency in Los Angeles, but for the sake of convenience - a crutch of religion, but whatever - all of the characters whose lives are wrapped up in adoption go to the same one. That makes it easier for all of the pieces to fall together at the end. The film ends happily, of course, though there is a token tragic moment. After all, there would not be Christianity without a carpenter nailed to a wooden cross (ain’t that ironic?) - also without Roman emperor Constantine but again, whatever.
I don’t really want to give away the tragic part, but I can’t say much more about the story without doing so. The story is constructed as a fable, along the lines of the theme that everything fits into God’s plan. Everything works out in the end, except for the parts that don’t work out because they would put an extra wrinkle into the resolution - and might have forced García to come up with a plot point that could not be easily glossed over and swept away by saying it’s all in God’s plan.
The inherent danger in using the God’s plan theme to tell a story is that you can wind up using it as a get out of jail free card in order not to have to deal with issues that would come up in the non-fanciful world. The biggest instance of that problem in this film comes early, when Elizabeth beds Paul. I suppose it’s possible that no one else in the firm ever notices anything even slightly inappropriate going on between them; but I can’t say that for sure, because we never see any of their life at work apart from brief conversations in her office. Most of the action in the film takes place in houses or apartments, closed spaces where García can exert tremendous control over what takes place. Outside influence, of course, would damage the very thin veneer of authenticity that encloses his utopian City of Angels.
Indeed, one of the annoying things about the film overall is how brief most of the scenes are - you get the part you’re supposed to see, and then we go on to the next scene. It’s almost as though the characters exist in just enough of a vacuum for García to convince himself that his story is plausible. Suspension of disbelief, however, is for things like ten-foot-tall blue people, cars that transform into robots, and Jim Carrey characters who don’t hurt themselves; for a human drama to work, the characters and situations must be authentic. That is not the case here - at least, not after the first act. In order for this story to work, you have to believe that God works in mysterious ways. Otherwise, it’s just an implausible mess.
It’s also insulting for García to “out” two of his characters as non-believers and then not give their belief any kind of attention or relevance in the story - as though he mentioned them just as tokens. Then again, he’s peppered the film with an almost equal mix of whites, blacks, and Latinos, so it’s entirely possible that he’s playing the quota game with faith, too. It would fit in with the overall theme of this Hallmark Hall of Fame hunk of drivel.
Having said all that, however, I should also say that the film is not without its nice moments. Much of the characterization in the first act works very well, particularly in Elizabeth. Watts is so good in this first third that I found myself thinking Oscar nomination, at least for a bit. Once the film goes off the rails, though, it’s hard to believe that the Academy would sully its good name by considering this film for anything. Even the friggin’ score is derivative. If composer Ed Shearmur wasn’t listening to the score from Revolutionary Road over and over again while coming up with this, then I’m a monkey’s uncle.
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