105 min | R | October 29, 2021 | Stage 6 Films
A children’s book author survives a suicide attempt and tries to raise her newborn while postpartum depression hunts her. Amanda Seyfried gives the illness a devastating face. The performance is braver than the film built around it.
Julie Davis is a children’s book author with a new baby and a mind that wants to kill her. A Mouthful of Air opens in the aftermath of a suicide attempt and follows her effort to live inside motherhood while postpartum depression pulls her under. Amy Koppelman adapts the film from her own novel and treats the illness as a physical fact rather than a metaphor. The film insists that Julie’s love for her son and her desire to die occupy the same body at the same moment. That insistence is the most honest thing in it.
Amanda Seyfried plays Julie with a flat affect that conceals a person fighting to perform wellness. She smiles for her husband and her mother and the smile reaches nothing behind it. Seyfried builds the role out of small failures of attention and the long pauses before she answers a simple question. Finn Wittrock plays her husband Ethan as a man who mistakes vigilance for understanding. Paul Giamatti appears as Dr. Sylvester and grounds the clinical scenes in plain talk. Amy Irving plays Julie’s mother Bobbi with a politeness that functions as denial.
Koppelman directs her first feature and writes it. The film favors tight framing on Seyfried’s face and lets the apartment go soft and underlit around her. That visual choice locates the illness inside Julie and not in the world she moves through. The same restraint flattens the drama. The camera observes Julie’s suffering without finding a way to transmit its weight to the audience. The score reaches for emotion that the staging declines to earn.
The film carries a serious subject and a lead performance equal to it. What it lacks is form. Koppelman documents Julie’s decline in episodes that accumulate without building toward anything. The structure keeps the viewer at the same distance Julie keeps everyone around her. A Mouthful of Air respects its subject and stops short of dramatizing it. The honesty is real and the impact is muted.