Mary: “Didn’t we!”
The sentiment that Curtis is trying to convey is apparent, but it really doesn’t come across.
Curtis and Noyce are nothing if not consistent in their doggedly un-nuanced portrayal of Mary and Martha’s travails. When we first meet Mary, she’s dissatisfied with her son’s schooling. We know this because during her pilates class, she complains that too much of her son’s grade school curriculum is oriented around testing. So when Mary learns that her son is being bullied at school, she takes drastic action. She tells her husband, Peter (Frank Grillo), that she wants to, “go on an adventure,” with George in South Africa, and teach him herself. The idea may seem well-intentioned but whimsical, particularly since Mary initially describes Mozambique as, “nice, but real.” But Mary’s clearly committed to bonding with George, even if George is too absorbed by his iPod, and his Lego-related computer games to notice (kids these days!). Meanwhile, in England, Martha’s twenty-something son Ben wants to teach local children in Mozambique. This worries Martha (she insists that he brings socks!), but she actively supports the idea, unlike her non-committal husband, Charles (Ian Redford). After both Ben and George die, Mary and Martha travel back to Mozambique, and inevitably try to help fight the spread of malaria.
Curtis and Noyce are both blame-worthy for Mary and Martha’s shortcomings because while most pivotal plot points are almost always established through Curtis’s hackneyed dialogue, sometimes they’re established by Noyce’s auto-pilot-like direction. We know that Ben’s tragic death is ostensibly really moving because there’s a generic scene where Mary rushes him to the hospital in slow-motion while a mournful African vocalist sings on the film’s soundtrack. On the plus side, hand-held camerawork during the subsequent, brief hospital footage isn’t too jittery. But, as if to make up for this creative decision, the extremity of this scene is represented by the cameraman’s blurriness. So because Noyce’s cameraman refuses to keep a shot in focus for more than a second or two, we also know that this scene is quite intense!
Noyce is likewise not blameless for signing off on Curtis’ more tacky dialogue, but Curtis’ contributions are definitely more flagrant. He doesn’t seem to trust viewers to either remember details, or just to feel the feelings he’d like them to feel without nakedly asking viewers to feel them. So throughout Mary and Martha, supporting and main characters are equally offensive in their own inoffensive ways. Some examples of this are relatively negligible, like when Micaela (Nokuthula Ledwaba), one of Ben’s colleagues and also his lover, shows Mary and Martha a ward of sick children, and concludes her tour by saying, “And like your sons, Paul has malaria.” Nervousness and/or stress might partially excuse Micaela’s insensitivity (pretty sure they know that their sons’ had malaria, Micaela). But nothing can explain the tackiness of the scene where Peter texts, “He was my son too,” to Mary though she’s just a few feet away from him in another room. Peter may be incredibly sad, but what purpose does having him text his frustration to Mary serve? Is this some weird kind of product placement? Don’t just talk to your loved ones about how aggrieved you are about your dead kid, say it in a text, that kind of thing?
Mary And Martha becomes especially unbearable once Mary is determined to convince a senate sub-committee to devote more money to malaria relief in Africa. The speech she delivers, with the help of Martha and the photos that Ben took of his students, is especially cloying, as it relies heavily on the assumption that knowing that real children with real interests (“Brandon here played the clarinet!”) have died makes increased malaria awareness a necessity. But Mary And Martha’s biggest problems can be seen in the scene where Mary storms out of her pilates class after telling off her fellow soccer mommies, currently kibitzing about their husbands’ new cars. “We spend every minute of our lives angry or obsessed over things that don’t even matter, when I just stood in a room where children are allowed to die of a mosquito bite.” Mary’s probably right, and she may, in fact, care more about real world problems than her peers, but Curtis and Noyce do a piss-poor job of showing it.
