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‘The Best Mother in the World’ Review: Another Study of Maternal Resilience From Brazil’s Anna Muylaert
Brazilian director Anna Muylaert returns with 'The Best Mother in the World,' a story of a loving mother enduring abuse and poverty in São Paulo.
Conscientiously addressing a national crisis of domestic abuse while also lunging for the heartstrings, the film is an uneven balance of grainy social realism and crowd-pleasing uplift, but Cruz’s resolute performance just about holds it together. It opens on perhaps its sharpest, most layered scene, as an addled, swollen-eyed Gal sits tensely in a police station, preparing to file a complaint against her boorish partner Leandro (Seu Jorge) after the latest of many violent physical altercations. There’s an unspoken history of repeated struggle and disappointment, meanwhile, in Cruz’s weathered physicality and burnt, wary vocal delivery: Where the film sometimes takes short cuts, the actor provides cracked, wounded subtext.
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