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REVIEW: CASA DE LOS BABYS
(John Sayles)
Reviewed by MICHAEL ROWIN
a Film Comment online exclusive
John Sayles's films are delicate in the same way that so many relevant and intricate artworks are delicate: in a career spanning 25 years, he has created complex and subtle portraits of cultural experience on the social periphery. Consistently and without showiness, Sayles captures both the nuances of the quotidian and the usually neglected macrocosmic forces that affect his characters' lives. Such delicacy is increasingly rare in current American cinema, whether mainstream or independent.
The sensitive and understated tone of Sayles's work makes it that much more difficult to understand how his latest, Casa de los Babys, fails on so many accounts. No single element stands out as glaringly false or miscalculated; the film's mood, pace, and look are perfectly adequate; each scene holds the attention. And yet, there's something undeniably off in Casa de los Babys, making it Sayles's weakest film in recent memory.
The subject matter of Casa would seem a terrific match for Sayles's cinema of social realism-child adoption. The story concerns six American women (played by Lili Taylor, Mary Steenburgen, Susan Lynch, Daryl Hannah, Marcia Gay Harden, and Maggie Gyllenhaal) who bond, to varying degrees, while adopting children in an unnamed Latin American country. Subplots give a voice to other viewpoints: the nurses of the soon-to-be adopted infants, pregnant and maternal teenagers, street kids, and leftist malcontents who see adoption as a form of imperialism.
While Sayles has successfully tried his hand at styles as diverse as magical realism (The Secret of Roan Inish) and the survival thriller (Limbo), he has excelled most with the multiple narrative structure, which proved particularly rewarding in Lone Star and Sunshine State. But the time may have come for him to push his creativity further. Whereas previous pictures achieved a balance, albeit fragile, between a central storyline and its satellites, here the premise and the film's disparate viewpoints on adoption are stretched so thin that the ideas barely connect on either an intellectual or emotional level.
Casa's heart, in fact, has been torn into six pieces. While two or three female leads might have proved interesting to follow, six turns out to be three too many - Gyllenhaal, Steenburgen, and Taylor remain superfluous or underdeveloped. The chemistry between the actresses just isn't there, which is compounded by the fact that their characters serve as types to foreground the different paths to adoption - single parenthood, miscarriage, infant death. Granted, Sayles's creations are often types, representative of some facet of cultural or social circumstance. But the characters in Lone Star and Sunshine State became compelling via traits and unique temperaments which, within the showcase of Sayles's patient storytelling, gave them an individuality. In Casa, this approach is abandoned in favor of a more two-dimensional mode. The historical and the personal don't merge in the characters' journeys as they do in Sayles's best films; instead, the film articulates different perspectives on the concept and institution of adoption through unconvincingly delivered dialogue. It would be a stretch to call this approach Brechtian - rather, it's a diluted rendering of Sayles's signature style.
Because the center of Casa doesn't hold, the entire the picture suffers. Not enough time is spent on subplots that might have been illuminating (Rita Moreno is wasted in her role as the hotel's proprietress) and, ultimately, the disparate strands never cohere.
Only two elements of Casa rise above mediocrity. The film is haunted by apparitions of street children who cast a shadow over the emotional neediness and near-selfishness of the Americans. Washing car windshields at stoplights and stealing to survive, they provide a stark and tragic counterpoint to the innocuous cute-baby montages. In one brilliant sequence, the children sniff spray-paint fumes while watching the night sky: for a moment, the chaos of the universe - busy determining the fate of the Americans, the babies, and the mothers who must entrust their offspring to the care of others - is suspended as we understand that there is almost no way out for these children.
Then there's the heartbreaking exchange between Eileen (Lynch) and her hotel maid, Asunción (Vanessa Martinez). The former envisages a fantasy day-in-the-life with her adopted daughter, while the latter imagines the life of her own child who, due to economic circumstances, was put up for adoption. Because of the language barrier, neither woman understands what the other is saying, and yet there is a tacit connection between the two, bridging differences of class, custom, and circumstances. It is a moment that reminds one of Sayles at his best, discovering common experiences amidst the isolation of modern life and capturing the daunting challenge of maintaining a sense of personal identity within an increasingly homogenized world culture.
- MICHAEL ROWIN
© 2003 by The Film Society of Lincoln Center
