Annette Bening on Mother and Child, Taking Risks, and Getting Wrong Right

If ever there were a year for Annette Bening to have "Her Year," 2010 might be it. The 51-year-old actress has a relative windfall of projects arriving in theaters, starting Friday with the drama Mother and Child and continuing this summer with the Sundance darling The Kids Are All Right. But one thing at a time: Mother features Bening as Karen, a nurse haunted by her decision as a teenager to give up her baby for adoption.

A brittleness aged over 35 years comes to the fore when her own mother passes away, forcing Karen to reconsider her self-imposed alienation. Will she ever truly connect with the ready, willing and able suitor (Jimmy Smits) at work? Will she ever reach out to the daughter (Naomi Watts) she gave up decades earlier? How does her story intersect with that of another young woman (Kerry Washington) who can't have children of her own? Writer-director Rodrigo Garcia's painstakingly tasteful, deliberate execution doesn't leave a lot of room for uncertainty, to be honest -- which makes it all the more to his ensemble's credit that the dramatic journey is worth it.

Bening spoke with Movieline about finding just the right notes of bitterness for her role, what (and who) helped round out her character, the properties of risk and why you shouldn't get your hopes up for a prolific streak.

How did Mother and Child come to you?

Rodrigo [Garcia] sent it to me. I had met him; I didn't know him well. I knew his work, so I had that context to put it in. Sometimes when you're sent something, you don't know the person, or maybe they haven't directed something. But I knew his work. And he's a wonderful person. I don't know if you've met him.

I have!

He's a lovely man. So I knew that. And I read the screenplay and just thought it was really unusual and intricate and deeply felt and funny. And surprising. I still find that amazing how he constructed it -- or it's pretty much how he constructed it. He changed things here or there. We shot some things he didn't use. That always happens. But by and large, he had worked it out. I came to learn later that he was a camera operator and a DP, which I think is a very unusual... Well, maybe DP isn't unusual, but few DP's go into directing and it's a successful match. A lot of them don't for whatever reason. I don't know why. But he's so at home in the role of the director.

They definitely hardly ever go into screenwriting.

Well, that's the important thing: the writing. I mean, he's an educated guy and obviously he was writing all the time. He said this took 10 years for him to write. So this was a labor of incredible time and diligence on his part, and by the time it landed in my lap, this very interesting character had been very well thought-out.

One credit a lot of people pay Rodrigo is the attention to detail he gives to his women. What was your reaction to that element of Mother and Child?

I love how complicated they are. And imperfect. If there's any complaint that women have had for the last, oh, 40 years, it's that they talked about how they didn't want to be portrayed in this stereotypical way. We wanted as much dimension and complexity and faults and virtues as anybody else.

Hey, why not?

Exactly! Why not? So now we're firmly there in the culture, where narratives can express all this gray area. I mean, Ibsen did a pretty damn good job, and Shakespeare, too. But by and large, there are types of women you see in a story, and I've certainly seen a lot of them. So he finds a way [to apply] detail and nuance -- not only in character, but in these dramatic situations that reveal so much about people who feel real. They have contradictions within them, like all of these moments in our real lives do. If someone saw this in most movies, they wouldn't believe it. Two people fight because one gave something to the other? I loved that in the script. I remember reading that and thinking [snaps fingers], "I love this scene!" Because you're like, "What?"

Karen acknowledges she's a difficult person. But it's a curious kind of difficulty: She's not mean, she's not aloof--

She gets it wrong!

Exactly. She's redeemable, but lives right at the edge of irredeemability. How did find the balance?

I worried about it, because I did want to find this fine line. Especially because I knew where she was going and that Rodrigo had written these incredible changes that I knew partly happen to her and others that she designs -- things and acts she does that make her life better. I tried to walk that line. At the beginning, I very much wanted to tell the story of a person who gets it wrong, who is rude, who wants to connect and doesn't know how. I have compassion for that. I feel like we meet these people all the time, you know? The person at work who's irritable. Or more like random interactions with people: The clerk at the grocery store, or the person you have to schedule something with who's rude. And you think, "There's something going on in this person's life that's bringing them to this moment."

That's what I really wanted to find. I felt like it was really in the writing. And then, of course, when you're shooting, you don't know. "Am I finding that balance?" I trusted Rodrigo to give me a sense of, "Is this too awful?" I tried not to worry about it and just play the truth of the moment.

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