EARTH MAMA - Mark Reviews Movies

Earth Mama, A24

Follow on Facebook | Follow on Twitter | Become a Patron

Review by Mark Dujsik | July 13, 2023

Writer/director Savanah Leaf, making her feature debut, takes a poetic, elliptical approach to social realism with Earth Mama. The filmmaker's technique is striking, to be sure, but in cutting narrative and thematic corners to create the haunting atmosphere of a young woman trapped within a system, the resulting story comes across as too melodramatic to make a real impact.

Leaf's tale revolves around Gia (Tia Nomore) a single mother of two children who's nine-months pregnant with a third. The government has determined that Gia is financially unfit to raise her kids, so they are currently living in a foster home.

Meanwhile, their mother is struggling to stay afloat, working a part-time job at a photography studio, living in low-rent housing with a self-involved roommate, and keeping up with government-mandated classes intended to teach her how to be responsible for herself and her kids. If the father or fathers are around, he or they aren't helping, and the way Leaf's screenplay (based on a short she co-wrote and co-directed) eliminates question and concerns that no longer matter to Gia, such as the identity/identities and absence of that man or men, is admirable in how tightly the story then focuses on our protagonist.

The entire situation is difficult, mainly because those classes take up so much time that she could be working and are out-of-the-way of her home, and inherently demeaning. We don't learn much about Gia, beyond the frustrating nature of her situation, over the course of the movie, but it is clear that her determination to regain custody of her kids, Trey (Ca'Ron Coleman) and Shaynah (Alexis Rivas), is resolute.

Indeed, it borders on stubbornness when it comes to her participation in those classes—or the lack thereof—and how she responds to the demands of her case worker and the seemingly helpful advice of her instructors. The character feels real and is instantly sympathetic, mostly due to Nomore's impressively reserved debut performance.

For a while, the story serves as a slice-of-life portrait of this 24-year-old woman, whose existence has become intrinsically, inescapably attached to a system that demands everything from her and offers little in return. That system quickly reveals itself to be a complicated, contradictory web of expectations and requirements.

Gia needs to work, in order to prove that she can afford to care for herself and her kids, but she also needs to attend those assorted classes, which take away time that she could be using to get more hours at her job or find additional employment. She has to be exactly on time to scheduled meetings with her children at a facility, lest her tardiness be held against her on her record, but driving to and from those classes means San Francisco Bay Area traffic that doesn't accommodate tight schedules. Meanwhile, she still has soon-to-be-arriving baby for whom to prepare, and if she can't find time for that, the baby might become part of the foster system almost immediately after birth.

This picture of constant motion and anxiety is strong and frightening, mainly because Leaf frames it in such succinct, unmistakable terms. With that established, though, the movie continually finds ways to keep a certain, unfortunate distance from who Gia is, what she has been through, and how she sees herself outside of these terrible circumstances.

That's the essential definition of melodrama, which might be a fine approach to this material if Leaf retained the story's focus on the constant rushing, the continual falling into the old traps and new ones established by this system, and the dread of realizing that there very well could be no escape from this kind of life. Instead, the story takes on a slightly new direction, as one of Gia's teachers, named Miss Carmen (Erika Alexander), suggests that setting up her newborn for adoption might be best for her, the child, and strangers looking for a new or extended family.

Whatever of Gia's experience and thinking might have been present in the early section of the story slowly disintegrate over the course of the rest of it. Taking over are the mostly unspoken debate between giving up her child and risking familiar consequences, a couple of friends—Mel (Keta Price) and Trina (Doechii)—who have distinct worldviews and opinions of what Gia should do and expectations of the role she plays in their respective lives, and an attempt to transform the main character's internal life and place in the world into a visual metaphor of nature.

As for what Gia has gone through in the past and how she perceives herself, the quiet, restrained character's voice is handed over to others—namely other women in those classes, who speak in depth about histories that are almost certainly similar to Gia's own. It's also difficult to avoid sensing a certain tone of judgment toward the character, not only from those who assume to tell it to her straight, but also from the movie itself—especially in the way a third-act development suddenly arises with only minimal establishment. Whether or not that's intentional is difficult to fully determine, because Earth Mama ultimately comes up so short in its narrative intentions and goals.

Back to Home

Buy Related Products