John Sayles usually swings for the fences, but no one can accuse him of being too ambitious here: this halfhearted drama about six white women lounging around a Latin American hotel waiting to adopt local infants may be his least committed film. Marcia Gay Harden plays a cartoonish ugly American, while most of the other actresses are lazily typecast (Lili Taylor is a hip New York lesbian, Daryl Hannah a soulful swimmer, etc). As usual, Sayles’s dialogue scenes are as shapely as blown glass, but none of the characters’ predicaments has been adequately explored, much less resolved, when the final freeze-frame arrives. Sayles pulled off a more audacious nonending in Limbo, but that one was an existential statement; this one seems more like a shrug. With Mary Steenburgen, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Susan Lynch, and Rita Moreno. In English and Spanish, most of the latter subtitled. 95 min.
