‘Earth Mama’ Turns a Social-Issue Drama Into Something Heartbreakingly Special
The baby is gently cooing, nestled in a tiny bed against a cloud-flecked blue sky. Gia, a young woman, is tending to the newborn, adjusting clothes and tickling toes. The camera slowly pulls back, further and further. Soon, it becomes clear we’re in a photo shop, the kind you see in hundreds of malls across America. This is Gia’s job. She leaves the scene, and the baby’s parents take her place. Watching on the sidelines, Gia gently smiles as her boss takes the shots. A mother herself — her baby bump suggests she’s due any second — she seems to share in the family’s happiness. But other emotions quickly play across her face: longing, sorrow, anger. Mostly, Gia seems to clock that the blue sky behind that baby, serving as a backdrop for a memory to last a lifetime, is nothing but an illusion.
This is how Earth Mama introduces us to its hero: a quick glance at an ordinary person going about her day that fills in zero backstory and somehow tells us a lot of what we need to know. Savanah Leaf’s slice-of-life movie is full of these revelatory moments — sometimes lyrical, sometimes gritty, often swirling the two together — and the former Olympian-turned-filmmaker‘s feature debut pitches itself somewhere between the detail accumulation of cinéma vérité and the feeling you’ve stepped into someone’s dream. We get to observe Gia, played with a jagged sense of grace by Oakland underground rapper Tia Nomore, attending addiction-recovery meetings, getting drug-tested in doctor’s offices, and wandering East Bay avenues in scenes that don’t feel composed so much as captured on the fly. And we watch as this young woman wanders naked in a lush green forest, a momentary picture of a paradise that offers respite from her pain. One tone slides into another. But the camera is always focused on one very important person, and one person alone.
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Because Gia has to make a choice. She has had two kids, both of whom have ended up in the foster-care system; her weekly visits with them are as emotionally wrenching for her as they are joyous. She keeps running into Catch-22s regarding the reunification process (the system requires her to take courses on mothering but also need her to be more fiscally stable… except she can’t pick up extra hours at her job due to time spent taking the courses). And though she’s surrounded by friends, fellow expectant moms, and a few mother figures in her life, Gia is also part of a system that, as her Black social worker Miss Carmen (Erika Alexander) reminds her, is designed “to work against women like us.”
Gia knows that the baby growing inside of her is likely to end up within that system as well, and though Earth Mama is ambiguous about Gia’s life before we meet her, you get the clear sense that she’s seen some shit and gone through a lot. She may be familiar with more than one side of this experience, if not directly then definitely through second-hand accounts; confessional asides from two men who visit the photo shop attest to the trauma involved with being taken from parents and put into other homes in the name of their “well-being.” It helps to know that Leaf partially adapted this fictional story from a 2021 documentary short, The Heart Still Hums, that she co-directed with Taylor Russell, and integrates a lot of nonfiction filmmaking techniques into her storytelling here. Participants in Gia’s group sessions have a habit of directly addressing the camera, or are framed in a way that suggests a broken fourth wall. It’s not just a way of adding IRL authenticity, but also a way of reminding you how the real world really works in many of these situations. A hint: Not always well or fairly.
Which is why Gia starts entertaining the idea of adoption. Luckily, Miss Carmen has found a local family that’s interested. The couple (Bokeem Woodbine and Dune‘s Sharon Duncan-Brewster) already have a tween (Kami Jones), then tried for years for a second child and, well, no dice. Gia knows that this middle-class family will give her baby a good home. It also means that she’ll have to give it up. Miss Carmen understands the dilemma. Gia’s best friend, Trina (Doechii), who’s also expecting and thus expecting that they’d “do this together,” is less enthusiastic. As for Gia, she’s scared, conflicted and confused, even if she knows what needs to happen.
A quick sidebar on this initial family meet-up sequence: It takes place in an Olive Garden-style chain restaurant, with Gia seated in the corner next to the wall. Her social worker, the prospective adopters and their daughter, who Gia bonds with during a brief moment with her alone, are all around her. As the conversation takes on a convivial air, Leaf essentially stages the reverse of her intro to Earth Mama‘s tour guide: The camera slowly tracks in toward her, until Gia’s face fills the frame. What makes this formalistic touch work, however, is Nomore — you can see her reacting and listening to all of this familial love around her, drinking it all in like someone who’s been 30 days in the desert without water. You can almost detect jealousy in her darting eyes, as if she’s recognizing what she never got growing up. And you can tell she’s thinking that this is what she can now give her unborn child, as tough as that decision might be.
It’s scenes like these, in addition to a dozen other stand-out moments, that help you understand how well-suited this filmmaker and her lead are in terms of a team, and how they seem to be working completely in tandem to tell Gia’s story in the most humane yet unvarnished way possible. Even the detours into surreality don’t detract from the goal of showing sympathy without sentimental heartstring-pulling or rose-colored easy resolutions. “I don’t care if y’all don’t care if I make it or not,” one of Gia’s fellow moms says early on during a group meeting. “This is my journey. None of you can walk a mile in these shoes.” Movies, of course, can let you do just that, and often down unfamiliar (or long-neglected) roads. Gia isn’t always a “nice” or easy-to-like character. She is a fully fleshed-out, living and breathing person, however. And the more time you spend with Earth Mama‘s main mother, the more enraged you get at the institutional dealers stacking the deck against her, and the more you feel the gap between who’s on that screen and who’s sitting in the seat, watching her, begin to close up.
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