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The movies that are hardest to watch for emotional or personal reasons—those that walk right up to anguish and look it straight in the eye—are also the ones that are almost impossible to get made. It’s a small miracle that writer-director Amy Koppelman’s A Mouthful of Air—which Koppelman adapted from her novel of the same name—exists at all. Amanda Seyfried plays Julie, a young New York City mother and children’s book author who, in the early moments of the movie, attempts suicide. She has been struggling with postpartum depression, her suffering too much to bear. Her husband, Ethan (Finn Wittrock), is supportive but bewildered. No one around Julie seems to know how to help, because no matter how deeply they care for her, they really can’t.
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That’s a lot of intensity for a movie to carry, and Koppelman—making her debut as a director—approaches the task with sensitivity and discernment. (The suicide scene is a case in point—it’s so discreetly shot that the event becomes harrowing only in retrospect.) That’s essential, because postpartum depression—a subject no one wants to talk about, often least of all the people suffering from it—is infinitely complex and manifests itself in myriad, insidious ways. The problem, maybe, is that movies—or any kind of narrative—can’t help searching for answers, and A Mouthful of Air is no exception. The film suggests that Julie’s tendency toward depression was somehow inherited from her troubled and possibly abusive father (Michael Gaston), or perhaps intensified by memories of some childhood trauma. It’s a sort of vague hand-waving in the direction of an explanation that the story doesn’t need. The reality, even more troubling than any possible cause and effect, is that postpartum depression can emerge seemingly from nowhere.
But A Mouthful of Air makes it past those potential flaws on the strength of Seyfried’s performance. To look at her face—to watch as her delight…
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Source : time
