“The Surrogate” feels like the vexed progeny of an elevator pitch and an ethics advice column. Written and directed by Jeremy Hersh, the movie begins with a scene of its heroine, Jess (Jasmine Batchelor) on a date. Her suitor is ardent, and she’s trying to make clear that what he takes for ambivalence is something different. One senses she gets this a lot, appealing as she is. There’s a hard cut to black and then Jess is rejoicing over the positive results of a pregnancy test.
Has she had a change of heart? No. She’s carrying the child of her best friend, Josh (Chris Perfetti), for him and his husband, Aaron (Sullivan Jones). Jess is black, as is Aaron, and Josh is white. Anyway, everything is fine in idealistic liberal Brooklyn until the fetus tests positive for Down syndrome. The trio’s agreement did not take this possibility into account, and the development raises tough questions for them.
Hersh then bears down on the viewer with varied weighted observations. The movie visits a community center specializing in education for children with Down syndrome. It also alights on the home of Jess’s upper-middle class parents, who have very upper-middle class aspirations for the daughter as she weighs her options. All the while, Josh and Aaron pause, and dither and pause again. Eventually Hersh drops the hammer and shows them as the glib and shallow bourgeois brats he clearly had conceived them as all along.
In the hands of a deft satirist, the movie’s punchline — because that’s really all it is — might have been mordantly funny. But as it stands, the whole enterprise feels like something the classic-Hollywood problem-filmmaker Stanley Kramer might have come up with, if he were a sadist.
The Surrogate
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. Watch through virtual cinemas.
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June 11, 2020 at 06:57PM
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‘The Surrogate’ Review: Carrying a Baby, and Much More - The New York Times
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