It doesn't happen often – in fact, it's downright uncommon – but once in a while, I'll become so completely engrossed in a movie, I'll forget I'm watching it in a theatre full of people.  It happened with Casa de los Babys, the latest flick from eclectic American independent filmmaker John Sayles, which I caught at the Toronto International Film Festival.  I only mention the Toronto aspect because the theatre Sayles screened Babys in held around 1,000 people and was packed to the gills.  But none of the thousand made a peep, so I can only assume they were all just as mesmerized as I was.

I'm a big fan of Sayles, but his last two efforts came up way short in my book.  I'm still waiting on the final reel of Limbo (it couldn't have ended like that, right?), and Sunshine State was such a bore, I actually had second thoughts about seeing Babys.  Thankfully, those thoughts were fleeting.

Babys was shot in Acapulco but set in a nameless South American country (one different than the nameless South American country used as a backdrop in Men With Guns, Sayles explained as he introduced the film).  The story is about six white American women from very different backgrounds who have decided to adopt infants from this particular country, only to find themselves bogged down by a seemingly endless supply of bureaucratic red tape created solely to keep the women pumping money into the local economy for as long as humanly possible.

So the women sit around and eat and gossip and bitch about how long the adoption process is taking (I'm sure it's less than nine months, so their complaining seems pretty irrational).  They pair off into different combinations in order to say catty things about each other, especially when it comes to expressing reservations about So-and-so actually deserving a child of their own (and heaven forbid she get hers before I get mine).

They're actually not quite as unlikable as I've made them sound.  Only one is truly a monster (or "la bruja," according to Rita Moreno, who plays the owner of the hotel the women call home), and that would be Nan (Marcia Gay Harden, Pollock), a super-snooty kleptomaniac who doesn't have anything nice to say about anyone else...ever.  The rest all want kids for a myriad of different reasons, ranging from inability to conceive (Maggie Gyllenhaal, Secretary), inability to carry to term (Daryl Hannah, Northfork), and inability to get along with men long enough to get pregnant (Lili Taylor, Six Feet Under).

If you're familiar with writer-director-editor Sayles, you already know there's no way in hell he's going to make a movie about a bunch of women adopting Latino babies without telling the other side of the story.  Babys is very much a film about different halves of society that fail to understand each other.  This is brilliantly displayed in a heartbreaking scene where Irish transplant Eileen (Susan Lynch, from Sayles' The Secret of Roan Inish) and diminutive native hotel maid Asunción (Vanessa Martinez, from his Limbo and Lone Star) unload their regrets about motherhood to each other, even though neither of them understand what the other is saying.

Asunción is only the tip of the iceberg, as Sayles shows us what might happen to the babies if they don't go home with nice American families, as well as the impact adoption has on young local mothers.  He also briefly lays into a couple of different scams that affect the rich (US healthcare) and poor (lottery), but Sayles never really takes sides or attempts to draw any conclusions about the adoption issue before the credits roll.  What he does do, however, is elicit a bunch of very strong, memorable performances from eight equally strong, memorable women who never once make it sound like they're reciting Sayles' script.  Don't let the (mostly) all-female cast or foreign-sounding title scare you off from one of the better films you'll see this fall.

1:35 –

for some language and brief drug use