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Attention to detail makes 'Casa de los Babys' worth watching
Marcia Gay Harden stars as one of six women in 'Casa de los Babys'
IFC Films
Maggie Gyllenhaal
IFC Films
Director: John Sayles.
Stars: Marcia Gay Harden, Daryl Hannah, Rita Moreno.
MPAA rating: R, for some language and brief drug use.
Now playing: Squirrel Hill; Denis, Mt. Lebanon.
We enter his "Casa de los Babys" at what seems to be a random point.
At the Casa de los Babys Motel in an unspecified South or Central American country -- portrayed by Acapulco -- six American women of different, but sketchy, backgrounds, wade through a barely functioning bureaucratic process to adopt babies.
Nan (Marcia Gay Harden), who steals incidentals from the maid's cart, is shrill and critical of everything and most everyone. In truth, she is getting the runaround she suspects, but with unresolved childhood issues of her own, she's the least likely to mother well.
Gayle (Mary Steenburgen) is a sober alcoholic and a born-again Christian and the most likely to defend the others to Nan.
Leslie (Lili Taylor), who is Jewish, has exhausted her interest in men but not her desire to parent.
The soft-spoken Skipper (Daryl Hannah) was pregnant three times, losing one to a miscarriage and the other two within a week of their births.
Jennifer (Maggie Gyllenhaal) is barren and of even disposition.
The Boston Catholic Eileen (Susan Lynch), who has so little money she skips meals, has eight siblings back in Ireland and longs to make a home for a child with the warmth she recalls.
The cool Senora Munoz (Rita Moreno), who runs the crummy motel, collects income from each of them for weeks while they satisfy ambiguous residency requirements.
Her brother is the other women's attorney-advocate and asks her which ones to push along. When an American jokes they might as well be praying to Our Lady of Perpetual Red Tape, she could be referring to him.
While the American "yanquis" mark time in limbo, Sayles distills the environment: Babies in a nursery waiting to be claimed; a pregnant teen being coerced by her mother to have an abortion; streetcorner urchins living in boxes, washing windshields, stealing and selling anything they can for a donut or a drink.
The motelier's son, an anarchist of no useful ambition, grouses about the adoptions as if the babies were being kidnapped from some army he might raise.
In the scene most likely to be memorable, Eileen and the maid Asuncion (Vanessa Martinez), speaking in different languages and understanding none of each other's words, convey to each other the depth of their yearnings.
One might wish Sayles were a more gifted screenplay architect, but he attracts gifted ensembles and seems to encourage improvisation within a context. His players earn much less, even, than Woody Allen's casts, but in the best moments achieve a purity of heart worth observing.
