Casa De Los Babys
''Casa de los Babys'' is something new for its writer, director, and editor John Sayles -- misspelling, and a mean spirit. The latter becomes him; the former does not. But even that title -- a crude and intentionally ignorant way of saying ''orphanage'' -- is part of the movie's absorbingly bad mood.
Six women -- played in various states of dysfunction by Marcia Gay Harden, Lili Taylor, Mary Steenburgen, Daryl Hannah, Maggie Gyllenhaal, and Susan Lynch -- have descended upon an anonymous Latin American town from the United States, each looking to adopt a child.
The ladies are relentlessly touristic, responding to their host country as though they had landed on Pluto. Which is not unintended: Sayles has fashioned the picture as a sort of ''Twilight Zone'' melodrama headed toward existential tragedy, like Jean-Paul Sartre writing a nasty Lifetime movie.
The Americans are in labor to receive children in this south-of-the-border purgatory, this limbo, to borrow one of Sayles's old titles. The adoption procedure stipulates that they have to reside here indefinitely. This is something of a sick joke -- Sayles seems to enjoy these women's miseries -- with a loud political snap.
The red tape concerning the adoptions runs for miles. In the meantime, the women lounge, fret over the culture, and gossip about one another while the town's day-to-day life happens around them. Harden's character, Nan, is a nightmarish middle-class grotesque who's been pumping money into the local economy (hiring a lawyer, dining out, staying in a cozy seaside motel) for two months with no baby. Please. One woman's adoption took nine.
Sayles cuts away from his bickering mothers-to-be to show us the girl (Vanessa Martinez, a Sayles regular) who cleans the motel rooms and Senora Munoz (Rita Moreno), the classy, ageless dame who runs the place. He's also written anti-imperialist speeches for Senora Munoz's radical-slacker son and included side stories of Celia (Martha Higareda), a pregnant 15-year-old; a male tour guide who really wants to get to America; and a presumably homeless street kid who desperately wants money. The picture is schematic and uncharacteristically short (95 minutes) without veering into the preachy territory where Sayles sometimes goes. He does more showing than his usual telling, without forsaking his interest in people and the histories and societies that have created their problems. And Maurizio Rubinstein's postcard-pretty photography makes the cultural disconnections and Sayles's one-sided sympathies palatable. If this is the director's most unbalanced film, it's also his handsomest.
Sayles's unambiguous disdain for the gringas stands in contrast to how complicated the Latins seem. (The same was true for the American-tourist interludes in Sayles's 1998 ''Men With Guns.'') Martinez's cleaning lady, aptly named Asuncion, is gentle and stuck with a life as difficult as, if not more difficult than, the people whose rooms she cleans. In the film's most biting scene, Irish Bostonian Eileen (Lynch) shares with Asuncion her rapt dream of motherhood. And Asuncion reciprocates, in Spanish, with the real story of how her daughter has been taken away from her. For us, Sayles respectfully includes subtitles, but Eileen has no idea what she has said.
Sayles seems to be trying, single-handedly, to correct centuries of First World self-centeredness in Third World contexts -- art that exoticizes rather explores. He even tries to diversify the insensitivities and cluelessness of the American women. Hannah's and Gyllenhaal's dreamers are the most sympathetic, and Harden's and Taylor's the least. Sayles tosses in a last-minute stab at redeeming Nan, who's waited so long that she's vexed she'll have to ''reprogram'' her adoptee.
But it's too late. By that point, Sayles, American movies' most level-headed social worker, has already lost his tolerance.
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