Review: 'A Mouthful of Air' is a well-intended but narratively muddled story of postpartum depression
If good intentions were all it took to make a great movie, novelist-turned-filmmaker Amy Koppelman’s depression drama “A Mouthful of Air” would be a masterpiece, instead of the awkward, uneven film that it is.
Koppelman makes her directing debut and writes the adaptation of her own novel — as she did co-writing 2015’s “I Smile Back” (starring Sarah Silverman as a suburban drug addict) — that centers on Julie Davis, a young mom played by Amanda Seyfried. When we first see her, she’s struggling to keep her composure while caring for her baby boy in the New York City apartment she shares with her husband, Ethan (Finn Wittrock). At one point, while the baby watches “Sesame Street,” Julie takes an X-acto knife and slits her wrists.
Koppelman doesn’t show the act, but keeps the camera trained on Julie’s face and the single tear that runs down her cheek as she does it. At first, the restraint is admirable, but soon it becomes something of an avoidance habit, keeping us from fully grasping the full measure of Julie’s postpartum depression.
Julie is a children’s book writer who draws and creates a character called Pinky Tinkerbink, who is able to unlock the fears that her creator, Julie, still struggles with, weeks after the attempt at suicide. Julie’s mother, Bobbi (Amy Irving), is a regular babysitter — of both the couple’s baby and of the fragile Julie. An attempt at a double date with Ethan’s sister, Lucy (Jennfer Carpenter), and her husband Kevin (Darren Goldstein) becomes an emotional struggle, because Lucy was the person who found Julie bleeding on the bathroom floor, and still can’t fathom why Julie would want to kill herself.
Lucy’s harsh tone feels off-the-charts nasty, until the movie eventually reveals that it’s set in 1995, a time when the medical knowledge of postpartum depression was thin. (One not-so-subtle hint of the timeframe is that in one of Julie’s Pinky Tinkerbink drawings — drawn by Koppelman — there’s an image of the twin towers of the World Trade Center.)
Julie is lucky to have a psychiatrist, Dr. Sylvester (Paul Giamatti), who seems sensitive to Julie’s postpartum issues — he even reads Sylvia Plath to her — and puts her on anti-depression meds. The complication of the film comes when Julie is pregnant again, and she wants to discontinue the meds, against Dr. Sylvester’s advice.
For a movie about a mental-health ordeal, as this one is, two elements have to be in sync: The main actor’s performance, and the emotional beats in the script. Seyfried, whose big eyes express a wealth of emotions, fulfills her end of the bargain, showing Julie as both broken and resilient, seeming to bounce back from her suicide attempt.
Koppelman’s script doesn’t give Seyfried enough of a foundation. It strings together too many “close call” vignettes, while laying in some screamingly obvious plot points about Julie’s long-absent and abusive father (Michael Gaston). Then comes a third-act plot complication that gives an overly simplified explanation for Julie’s mental state that feels forced and inadequate to the important issues about postpartum life that Koppelman wants to impart. By the time the ending finally hits, the viewer isn’t sad so much as worn out.
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‘A Mouthful of Air’
★★1/2
Opens Friday, October 29, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for some language. Running time: 105 minutes.