CASA DE LOS BABYS -----------------
In an unnamed South American country undergoing economic woes, six North American women of vastly different backgrounds band together as they wait out adoption red tape in a posada that has become known locally as "Casa de los Babys."
Writer/director John Sayles once again employs his formula of showcasing a regional area through its societal strata to lessening results. "Casa de los Babys" is a simpler disappointment than "Sunshine State," with its obvious political statements and shallowly drawn characters.
Sayles's North American six-pack is composed of a variety of types. Daryl Hannah ("Northfork") is Skipper, a new age Coloradan obsessed with fitness. Marcia Gay Harden ("Pollock") is Nan, a Midwestern shrew. Gayle (Mary Steenburgen, "Sunshine State") is a recovering alcoholic. Leslie (Lili Taylor, "High Fidelity") is a single New York publisher the rest of the group whispers is a lesbian. Jennifer (Maggie Gyllenhaal, "Secretary") is a well to do New Englander trying to save a floundering marriage with a child. Susan Lynch ("From Hell") is Eileen, an Irish native living in Boston who is scraping pennies to adopt her child.
Leslie and Gayle bond and interact with the rest of the group less. They also have little to do with the local culture, with Gayle revealed as an alcoholic at a local AA meeting in a brief sequence and Leslie brushing off the advances of young stud Reynaldo (Guillermo Iván Dueñas) on the beach. (Reynaldo is reworked into the plot as the unknowing father of the baby of fifteen year old Celia (Martha Higareda) who is being pressured to give up her child for adoption.) Leslie acts as the group's educator and translator, but Taylor has little opportunity to give her character any background. Steenburgen may as well have been cut as Gayle exists simply to exclaim how worldly Leslie is in comparison.
Skipper and Jennifer pair up and have an encounter with a local unemployed architect who asks for four dollars to act as a tour guide (the most touching subplot). Gyllenhaal's Jennifer is a naif who has tearful conversations with her husband on her cell phone. Hannah has one of the film's two best scenes when she recounts the loss of three babies while massaging Jennifer. The actress tugs some of the only true emotion from Sayles's curiously uninvolving film. Equally good is the underrated Lynch who conjures up a magical moment of motherhood describing her future daughter to hotel maid Asunción (Vanessa Martinez, "Lone Star"), a woman who has previously given up a daughter for adoption. Eileen is the purest character, making an ill-afforded gift of a book to an illiterate street kid who was about to rob her. Nan is Eileen's opposite and it is through her that we encounter the running of the hotel and the bureaucracy of the adoption process (the two are linked via Rita Moreno's hotel owner and her brother Ernesto (Pedro Armendáriz Jr., "Once Upon a Time in Mexico"), Nan's local attorney). Gay Harden is a cliched obnoxious American, although Sayles attempts to give her some depth with kleptomania and childhood abuse that seems sickeningly sure to be repeated. Moreno, in her few scenes, gives a good account of a woman from the upper class now forced to labor for her livelihood and put up with a no account son who dabbles in anarchy, infuriated that his country's children are a commodity but doing nothing constructive in response. Sayles also counterpoints his adoption tale with a group of homeless kids, but it adds up to little but the obvious.
"Casa de los Babys" assembles a great pool of female talent to tell us that the children of poor countries are adopted by the rich which its remaining residents continue to suffer, and does so with little emotional involvement. It's a curiously flat film, little more than a female gabfest.
C
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