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.
I don't think enough people give you credit for the risks you take. This is a risky role. The Kids Are All Right is a risky role. Do you think of the characters that way?
I guess I'd like to. You never know.
I guess what I'm asking is how risk applies to your choices, if at all.
I don't know. I guess what I tend to respond to is something that's new and different that I don't know if I can do. I find that when I'm then drawn into a human being, I try as best I can to get all the colors. That includes flaws and other things that are not as palatable as others. I've played parts that were just likable people, and there's a certain pleasure in that. And that's that. It depends on the writing that you're being asked to do. In these characters, I'm drawn to the complexity and those imperfections. Somebody said something really smart: It's like you end up being the defense attorney for your role. Your job is to defend their point of view. You're fighting for what they want. You learn that in acting school -- it's Acting 1A: What do you want? What's in the way? Karen's got a lot of stuff in the way -- internally, externally, things that have happened to her, things that she did, all that history. But she wants to connect. She just doesn't know how in the beginning. And through a series of events she gets to better place.
I think that happens to people in middle age. It happens to a lot of women, and those stories don't often get told. I think you can learn; you can figure something out that's been a burden, and I think certainly she's someone who's been paralyzed by what happened to her: Getting pregnant when she was a kid and having to give the baby up. Not all women who went through that are like that. Many go on and raise children and have families. But it was an incredibly difficult experience for women who went through that -- giving up a child. Even when they're kids. This character was a kid when she did it. But the way that it was handled or mishandled? Going through childbirth? Signing the papers? A lot of the work I did learning about this specifically, many of them talk about the day they had to "sign the paper" -- signing the baby away. I found that very compelling, and I wanted to figure that out as best I could.
How much research can you do with something lik
e this, where confidentiality is by definition the nature of the system?
There are people who have been interviewed, and some books that are first-person accounts of people who say, "I went into labor, and my mother and father weren't there. I was alone in the delivery room." Or, "I spent two days with the baby, and then they took the baby..." Lots of specific stories about what women and girls went through. And I knew girls in high school who had gotten pregnant. I knew girls who had disappeared. Where did they go? Suddenly no one's talking about them. Or people are talking about them and they're gone. Girls who had secret abortions; by the time I was in high school, Roe v. Wade had passed, and there were girls having secret abortions. In many cultures, it's just not acceptable. So many girls go through this mistake of 20 minutes, and then the rest of their lives they're left with this experience.
Having had children, too, what that would physically be like to go through pregnancy as a young girl and then give a baby up? As I really began to think about it, I began to feel more sympathy for Karen. And I know other people [for whom] maybe this isn't the thing that paralyzed them, but who have really been stymied by things that have happened that rule their lives. A lot of people figure a way out of it; part of it's luck, part of it's will, part of it's mystery. I don't know that I can explain that, but I can see it. That's where the story is.
You've been doing one film a year for a while now, but you have two films this year and several more in development. Do you expect to work more frequently going forward?
Probably not. I have four kids -- three teenagers and a 10 year old. It's really that. I did two plays last year; I've actually worked more in the last year than I have recently. But these movies were both done last year in Los Angeles, so I could handle it. I have all these conditions on which I can work. But I've been able to pretty much keep my craft and -- just from a selfish point of view -- do something that I'm interested in doing. And I love it, and I find it very intriguing and difficult.
It's very odd in a way. We're sitting here talking about this movie, but when I'm there doing it, there's lots of uncertainty. you're trying to find these tiny little moments where you look up and... You just never know. "Is this working?" You don't know. So it's gratifying when something comes together and people are interested in it or moved by it or at least stimulated by it. So I've been able to find enough stuff to do, and plus I do theater. I can't do plays here in New York, not for a while. Hopefully I can come back when my kids are bigger and I can get away. But I like not being in the business. I like doing other things, and getting away, and reading, and seeing my friends. I mean it's always "busy" with four children; it's chaos. But it's different than trying to work all the time. And I have friends who do, and it's really hard. So I feel lucky that I can stop and start.