‘A Mouthful Of Air’ Review: Amanda Seyfried Stars In A Overly Simplistic Look At Depression & Motherhood

“A Mouthful of Air” opens with vibrant animation that looks as if it were hand drawn by a child – a whimsical if awkward sequence that gives the impression that the film we’re about to see may stylistically surprise us. But it’s meant more as recurrent visual juxtaposition to the artist and lead character’s inner turmoil. These crude drawings and their purpose in the film end up paralleling the all-around simplistic approach to the demanding subject matter of director Amy Koppelman’s film. As the camera guides us in to the lavish, New York City apartment of children’s book author and new mother Julie Davis (Amanda Seyfried), it’s hard to not immediately feel like the filmmaking of “A Mouthful of Air” is on par with the slapdash drawings that steered us into the film. Sterile, empty, and devoid of true character, the cinematography gives the impression of stock footage that could have been filmed by anyone: a surface-level approach to a film that is met with the same vacant, haphazard thematic handling as its form.

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Julie Davis had struggled with suicidal thoughts for years – in fact, as far back as the first grade, a time when things otherwise become mostly hazy in her memory. It’s an offhanded comment that implies some particular trauma but which is never actually confronted or revisited again. These suicidal feelings were amplified following the recent birth of her son, Teddy, and her regular depression ostensibly became post-partum depression. She relays this information to the doctor (played by Paul Giamatti) who tends to Julie after this first attempt on her own life, during which she entered her bathroom with a box cutter while her husband, Ethan (Finn Wittrock), was at work, and left the door ajar to watch over her baby boy while she slit her wrists. When she emerges from this incident, she’s met with varying degrees of sympathy and patience. Ethan expresses unconditional love but simmering resentment, his dormant bitterness articulated mostly by his sister, Lucy (Jennifer Carpenter). Lucy is largely uncompassionate to Julie’s depression and more concerned with its rippling implications should she have succeeded in her suicide attempt. Julie’s mother, Bobbi (Amy Irving), worries about leaving Julie to shower alone but can’t keep her attention away for too long from the various cosmetic surgeries she wants done to her face.

Julie is put on anti-depressants which allow her a newfound agency from her addled mind, but she soon discovers that she’s pregnant again. As her medication comes with the slight chance to complicate a pregnancy, Ethan urges Julie to get an abortion so she can instead stay on her medication and mend. The two eventually come to the agreement that they’ll allow the pregnancy to go to term so long as Julie goes back on her meds as soon as the baby is born. They move out of the bustling city and into an ample suburban domicile, a change that Julie initially resists due to her “fear of houses” and the open space within them that could breed disaster. Julie’s mind is plagued by internalized worry, self-doubt, and shame. But the move is another life-altering decision that Julie ultimately relents to; a superficial fix to her internal anguish like putting a band-aid over an open fissure.

In her feature directorial debut, Amy Koppelman attempts to tackle her own source material, both directing and adapting to screenplay based on the well-received novel she penned back in 2003. Being unfamiliar with the source material, it’s hard to discern exactly what’s missing or has been changed from the original text, or if Koppelman stayed as true as she could to her own prose. But as the film stands on its own, it conveys a largely shallow articulation of depression and of Julie’s increasing struggle between her love for her family and the remorseless pull of her mental illness. There are obvious gaps in story and character, places that we’re forced out where it seems we should have been invited in. Julie is kept at a distance from the audience even as we’re let into her head with her children’s book drawings where she finds respite, and with her fleeting, obscured memories from her childhood in which her now-absent father had a much larger presence. Did her father do something to her? Or was his abandonment of her and her mother enough to instill trauma at a young age? This ambiguity comes across less as if it were being left to audience interpretation, and more just a careless omission in storytelling. Because of this, Julie manifests as less of a person with depression, and more just an idea of a person with depression.

Seyfried chews the scenery as Julie, playing her character with an over-the-top, doe-eyed hamminess that tends to distract from the emotional depth of her scenes, while Paul Giamatti shows up a couple times to deliver monologues of fatherly life advice that are engaging by virtue of his presence. The bewildering camerawork in this film – from veteran director of photography Frank G. DeMarco – could have been handled by anyone. There is no bravura at play unless you count the crude animated sequences, otherwise scenes are shot with the artistic weight of a means to an end. Overall, the film unfolds like a story that wasn’t worth putting to film. Perhaps, it would have been more elegant in the hands of a different director, but coupled with Koppelman’s co-writing credit on another film adapted from her own work (“I Smile Back”), that was also produced by her husband, Brian, it makes the decision to allow the novel’s writer – and also the film’s producer – to adapt and direct, feel a little clearer.

The strongest aspect of “A Mouthful of Air,” however, is in its bleaker portrait of mental illness, and it’s something that Koppelman’s novel was praised highly for. The film illustrates quite wrenchingly how the ground that depression sows in someone is not something from which true happiness can always thrive, and that the internal battle one wages with themselves is inaccessible to those on the outside. But, in the instance of Julie Davis, it’s also inaccessible to the audience. Because of our lack of access to Julie as a character, her internal progression is kept something of a mystery until the very last minute, at which point it only serves to bewilder. And when compared to a film like Lars von Trier’s “Melancholia” – in which a severe depressive named Justine (Kirsten Dunst) comes face-to-face with end of the world – Koppelman’s film can’t help but come across as small potatoes to such a profound artistic rendering of mental illness, where the immensity of despair is validated through an all-encompassing, world-ending planet. Instead, “A Mouthful of Air” is a Lifetime Channel take on a delicate subject. [D]

“A Mouthful of Air” is available now in theaters.