Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Casa de Los Babys, October 24, 2003
I found this movie to be very touching and real. It isn't John Sayles best movie, but we've come to expect something totally stunning from him every time. It is however very much worth seeing. It gives a very gritty feeling of being in Mexico waiting to adopt a baby. The women who play the main characters do great acting. They play a cross section of very genuine personality types. No plot, just the drama of daily life in an emotionally volatile situation. Brings up all sides of the issue of adopting babies in foreign countries, including a very moving portrayal of the life of homeless street children.
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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Complex political and social tale that can be viewed on many levels, June 3, 2006
Written and directed by John Sayles, this is the story of six women who go to a Latin American country to adopt babies. As in other films by this master of cinema, it is not a simple story with a simple ending. Instead, it is a complex political and social tale that can be viewed on many levels.
There is poverty in the country and hard working people. Many of them work at a luxury hotel, owned by Rita Moreno, now actually 73 years old, speaking only in Spanish and looking very nipped and tucked and prosperous. Her brother is the local lawyer. Her son is a political radical who hates the fact that the babies are being taken away. The six women who must wait several months for their babies come from varied backgrounds and each has her own story to tell. There's Lili Taylor who's tired of waiting for a relationship to blossom and wants to have a baby right away. There's Daryl Hannah, who looks gorgeous and works out and is into massage and health food. Later we find out that she's been through three traumatic birth experiences with babies who just didn't make it. There's Maggie Gyllenhal, who's only 24 years old and has gone through lots of fertility procedures to no avail. There's Susan Lynch, who comes from a large Irish family but who is unable to conceive. There's Mary Steenburgen who is the oldest and most religious of the group and is a former alcoholic. There is also Marcia Gay Harden who is indeed the "ugly American". She complains about everything, tries to bribe the lawyer and comes across as racist. And then there is Vanessa Martinez who plays a chambermaid who has given up a baby for adoption several years before.
Another important element in this film are all the "extras", the real people from Acapulco, where this movie was made. There are also some important small roles given to some of the little boys who live on the street. I found their plight the most heart wrenching of all and wondered what happened to them after the film was made. We see them living in cardboard boxes, washing windshields and stealing. And then we see them sniffing paint thinner. It made the whole subject of cross-cultural adoption even more poignant because if the babies weren't adopted, they would likely wind up like these poor homeless boys. In one scene one of the women gives a child's book to one of the boys. He's easily 8 or 9 years old, but he can only look at the pictures, because, like his companions, he has never learned to read.
We see some flashes of the babies who are waiting for adoption but basically but we never actually get to see them with their new mothers. Wisely, John Sayles stayed away from that kind of syrupy sweetness. Instead, he gave us a hard look at the many perspectives surrounding this film.
There were no less than three 20-minute extra featurettes on the DVD. I learned that the actresses lived together in one big house during the filming and how wonderful that bonding experience was for them. I learned that John Sayles made a massive effort to show the Latin American point of view. In fact, he even mentioned that he had starting thinking about making this film when he made "Men With Guns" which is a chilling film about cruelty and death. Casa de los Babys on the other hand, is poignant in its own way but it addressed many of the same issues. I applaud his sensitivity and the many dimensions he is able to capture through his art. The problem with these three DVD features, however, is that each of them had most of the same footage. I kept watching and watching, hoping that there would be some new material, but it was the essentially the same material, just reworked in different ways. I would suggest therefore, that if you do see the DVD, that watching only one of these small features would be sufficient.
This is a good film. And an important one. It made me think. And that is good.
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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
fascinating social drama with a dribble-away ending, February 2, 2005
***1/2
John Sayles, always an intriguing filmmaker, has come up with yet another conversation-starting film in "Casa de los Babys," a subtle exploration of the great divide that separates the haves from the have-nots in this maddeningly imbalanced world of ours. Sayles sets his story at a "hotel" in South America, one designed to cater specifically to American women who are waiting to adopt children to take back with them to the States. Due to bureaucratic red tape, many of the ladies Sayles introduces us to have been holed up in the hotel for months. Except for contact with the resort staff and the occasional foray into the local neighborhood, the women are essentially sealed off from the cultural and socioeconomic realities of the world around them.
The thing that separates Sayles' work from that of so many other socially conscious filmmakers is that he is scrupulously fair in his approach, refusing to pigeonhole any one group of people while allowing us to see the imperfections and humanity inherent in those on both sides of the divide. It would have been so easy for him to have portrayed the women as merely spoiled Americans, exploiting the poor of the world for their own selfish benefit. Indeed, one of the men who helps run the hotel decries the ladies as gringo "imperialists," looking to buy Hispanic babies as if they were strolling through the local market. Yet, his mother, who manages the resort and who also resents the imperialistic tone of some of the women, is pragmatic enough to know that this is a "business" like any other, and that the alternative for many of these orphans would be far grimmer if they were forced to fend for themselves out on the streets. In fact, the children in the facility, who are well cared for and who have some hope for the future, are in direct counterpoint to all the youngsters we see who are living in cardboard boxes, forced to wash windshields, beg from tourists, or steal to survive.
Of the American women, the most interesting is Nan (beautifully played by Marcia Gay Harden), who is the most obnoxiously pushy and least culturally sensitive of the group. We get the feeling that the moment she gets her hands on her new child, she will go to work draining every ounce of ethnicity from his or her soul and spirit. The other women are all far more open and tolerant than she is, being mainly concerned with filling that childless void located deep within themselves. The film is, in large part, a series of revealing conversations, in which the women voice their fears, concerns, visions and hopes about life as a parent.
The movie does an interesting job conveying the universality of motherhood, for despite the economic and language barriers that separate them, both the women yearning for babies and the women being forced to give their babies up for adoption are able to meet on the common ground of maternity.
In addition to Harden, there are excellent performances from Mary Steenbergen, Lili Taylor, Daryl Hannah, Maggie Gyllenhall and Susan Lynch as the American women, and Rita Moreno as the hotel manager who understands how the world works even if she doesn't fully approve of it. Each actress manages to create an interesting, fully realized character out of only a limited amount of screen time.
If there's a criticism to be leveled against the film, it is that Sayles leaves a few too many loose ends hanging at the end. As a storyteller, he has never been all that interested in conventional narrative, so this shouldn't surprise us, but we do sense that he could have gone a bit further with his characters here. As it is, "Casa de los Babys" feels somewhat incomplete, more like an exercise - albeit a fascinating one - than a full-fledged drama. Still, for its clear-eyed, three-dimensional and nonjudgmental take on a tricky subject, "Casa de los Babys" is a film well worth seeing.
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