Movies may be empathy machines, as Roger Ebert once observed, but Earth Mama has no time for that.
Consider the jarring opening to this quietly confident debut feature from writer-director Savanah Leaf. A young woman (Tiffany Garner) stands in a blandly bureaucratic meeting space, looking toward the camera. From offscreen, a voice asks, “Why should we care that you make it?” Her response is direct and surly, something that feels like a survivor’s statement:
“I don’t care if you all don’t care if I do make it. It’s my journey. It’s not nobody else’s journey. Nobody’s going to walk with these shoes I got on my feet. Only one that can walk with these shoes is me.”
Earth Mama then shifts its attention to Gia (newcomer Tia Nomore), another woman in that room. A 24-year-old mother trying to reclaim her two young kids from the foster-care system, all while expecting a third child, Gia juggles her job at a strip-mall photography studio with the many classes required for her to earn back her children. Gia slumps passive-aggressively in her chair at her appointments and returns the instructors’ questions with sullen stares. (The only smiles she offers are during her all-too-brief visits with her children.) During one tense conversation with a social worker, she slaps away the paperwork handed to her. Gia is not likable; Earth Mama doesn’t grind any gears to get that empathy machine going. You begin to wonder if—like the woman we meet in the movie’s opening—the film means to reject the very notion of empathy.
In fact, the movie engages in an empathetic project of a rare kind. We don’t come to understand Gia because she’s sweet, sympathetic, or trying her best to jump through the governmental hoops placed before her. We don’t even come to understand her because of the societal forces aligned against her. Instead, Earth Mama taps into a primal understanding of motherhood that’s true for Gia, whether she is a “good” mother or not. The movie captures what it means to be a mother of any kind, faced with watching your children being torn from their roots.
In keeping with its title, Earth Mama has a contemplative style, attuned to the natural world. (In this, Kelsey Lu’s pensive score is a nice match.) The camera moves softly and often finds its way to the leaves of trees; there’s a particularly delicate transition from a shot of greenery to one of Gia standing in thought before a forest backdrop at the photo studio. These are instances of respite from the hustling that otherwise defines Gia’s life: buying a crib with missing parts to get 15% off; taking her shirt off while driving to hang it in her car window and block the sun, because she can’t afford to get the air conditioner fixed; stealing diapers from the bottom of a stroller at a park.
I suppose those moments could be orchestrated to engineer empathy. But neither Leaf’s introspective filmmaking nor Nomore’s uncompromising performance make such gestures. If we have empathy for Gia in Earth Mama, it’s because she’s a mother—nothing more, nothing less.
(7/26/2023)
