In contemporary cinema, Alejandro González Iñárritu (Babel) has created a whole cottage industry around melodramas starring ensemble casts in which seemingly disconnected plotlines ultimately converge to impart some moral lesson. So it is no surprise to see his name attached (as executive producer) to Mother and Child, a drama about motherhood, child abandonment, and adoption written and directed by Rodrigo García. While I'm no fan of Iñárritu's heavyhanded approach to what is already supposed to be a rather high-strung genre, what attracted me to see this film is director García, who I discovered for his sensitive attention to actors when he was writing, directing, and showrunning HBO's wonderful psychodrama In Treatment, a show so unlike any other, I once listed its serialized first season as one of the best films of 2008. Just as in that series, Mother and Child's strongest component is the acting by its uniformly spectacular cast.
