Mothers and Daughters

Elizabeth (Naomi Watts) has focused her life entirely on professional success and personal independence. A committed relationship or even a child are out of the question for her. Moments of self-doubt or bad memories of her childhood are smothered in hard work or meaningless sex. But an affair with her new boss Paul (Samuel L. Jackson) forces Elizabeth to rethink her life. For Lucy (Kerry Washington), on the other hand, there is only one goal in life: she desperately wants to become a mother. But unfortunately, she and her husband are unable to have children, which is why the couple has decided to adopt. Physiotherapist Karen (Annette Bening), on the other hand, could have been a happy mother, but she had to give away her teenage daughter. The resolute woman still suffers from this loss today. Even though Elizabeth, Lucy and Karen don't know each other, their fates are very much intertwined...

Mothers and Daughters, the new drama from Rodrigo Garcia (Passengers, Feelings You Can See...), son of Nobel Literature Prize winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez, is a fine film in its own right. The actors deliver decent to very good performances, and the individual storylines are also engaging and moving in principle. Still, the overall picture doesn't really leave a convincing impression. Not only that the many different plot elements, even if they might have a certain meaning for the outcome of the movie, are just too much of a good thing. Also the fact that the whole production comes across as arguably ponderous, only to culminate in an overly thick resolution at the end, doesn't really sit well with the drama.

The way Garcia introduces the characters in the script he wrote is quite successful. Especially Elizabeth, who doesn't seem to think much of harmony in a partnership and doesn't really like other people to think so either, is a very interesting character, to which Naomi Watts gives the necessary facets with her convincing play, which make sure that the young woman doesn't seem completely unsympathetic to the viewer. Annette Bening also plays very well, but she follows a too fixed pattern that roles she impersonates always follow. While this doesn't make her performance bad or weak, it simply makes her unsurprising. Kerry Washington (The Last King of Scotland) is completely overshadowed by these two very strong actresses and hardly gets a chance to step out of it. Thus, her storyline remains the weakest and least interesting.

Mothers and Daughters is an all-female film, but unlike many a work aimed at this target audience, it does not reduce its protagonists, and thus its intended audience, to prosecco-drinking fashionista's, but shows them as much more multifaceted women with many strengths, but also many all-too-human weaknesses. Garcia can be given credit for that, too. Perhaps this may also lead to some viewers being able to see past the many lengths and enjoy the film as a strong ensemble drama and great emotional cinema. But the bottom line is that the whole thing would have benefited from a little more lightness and a not quite so contrived ending. Therefore: actually only for mothers and daughters with a lot of patience and lovers of worn US dramas quite recommendable!

An article by Frankfurt-Tipp