Casa De Los Babys(2003) 

John (Eight Men Out, Lone Star) Sayles’ latest in a line of unsettling, atmospheric, penetrating otherworldly delights makes me a little sad. Not because it is unsatisfying, but on the contrary - because it is so moving and sublime. The film reminds me of how filmmakers have, with the exception of a rare Kramer v. Kramer, ignored or merely patronized fathers everywhere for so long – playing us for laughs if playing us at all. For every Terms of Endearment there is a Daddy Day Care. For every story that touchingly relates the spiritual, indescribable bond between a mother and her child there is an Over the Top or Iron Eagle to make us men look like dolts who can only offer our children a solid education in beer guzzling and arm wrestling.

I have been a father now for one year and when I look at my daughter… crying for her mother at the mere sight of my evidently distressing mug when I walk in the room at the end of the day, I know that Hollywood got this one right. Fathers are useless in real life. But that doesn’t mean we don’t deserve at least a fictional movie as beautiful as Casa De Los Babys to make us feel needed and connected to that generational chain, that timeless miracle of procreation.

And so I felt somewhat disenfranchised while viewing the exotic textures and nuances of the immaculately written tale about six white women, privileged in many ways, but with accursed wombs that stubbornly refuse to comply with nature and the fierce maternal will.

We find these women, previously strangers but grown familiar with one another’s quirks and circumstance, inhabiting a small hotel in an unnamed South American tropical paradise, as they wait, both eagerly and with desperate impatience and hope, to purchase a newborn, dark-skinned child from the empowered local bureaucracy. The film thankfully does not want to get tangled up in subplots or side stories (beyond a running “ghost” film about the tragedy of living in an impoverished country where women, with the same instinct and devotion to raising children as anyone with white skin, are forced to occasionally sell their children to support the rest of the brood. Uncompromisingly raw stuff handled without sentimentality.)

Sayles gives us six splendid actresses: Daryl Hannah as the Amazonian recluse with a gaping wound, Marcia Gay Harden as an obnoxious lioness more than willing to step on a few toes, Mary Steenburgen playing a regal lady of ethics, Lili Taylor being her usual thick skinned, tougher than thou (to mask vulnerability) self,  Maggie Gyllenhaal as a virtual newlywed trying to make a marriage work in a terrible and terrifying situation, and Susan Lynch who lights up the screen as a British woman with the purest of intentions. The women admirably zero in on and maintain that uncomfortable line that lets us know throughout that although they are all in it together, they are in it for themselves. Each has only one goal in this lifetime – become a mother to someone.  The writing and acting have enough depth to fill the time without inserting any significant overarching conflict or climax. Sayles lets the befuddlements and ordinary complications of life take its course like a winding, sunlit stream.

His one outside character is the hotel owner and manager played by the legendary Latin actress Rita Moreno who must pander to the rich Caucasians despite her own thoughtless, criminal child and disenchantment with motherhood. This angle only enriches and widens our scope of the hotel guests. What’s so great about being a parent anyway when your kid can turn into a no good louse?

The script allows this near-perfect assemblage of talent to explore the depths of the political and social issue of baby buying, all while draining and exhausting our hearts until we are left sympathetic fools and helpless.  

These barren women are unfortunates, but not any more so than the local women who can produce a baby at the drop of a hat but are too poor to care for them? Why does money make it right? How do we rationalize the difference between a woman wealthy enough to purchase someone else’s offspring and a mother, lucky enough to reproduce, but reluctantly giving up her child to not only give that child the gift of a better life, but to simply survive?

Casa De Los Babys is a tribute to mothers, albeit in a backwards and unhealthy way. It is a film that not only surveys tremendous and impossible issues with acute intuition, but it also wears us down with grief for every second that the clock ticks off while a woman somewhere remains frustrated and childless

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