“Motherhood” lets Uma Thurman remind everyone what a naturalistic actress she is, capable of becoming a character with easy conviction.

The same cannot be said for “Motherhood,” an extended essay on maternity and its many conflicts that is hampered by its failure to convincingly create a contemporary West Village family or offer any kind of narrative drive.

Thurman’s Eliza has given up writing fiction for full-time parenting of two youngsters and a husband (Anthony Edwards) whose eccentricities make him seem hardly a grownup.

“Motherhood” charts the day when Eliza’s eldest, Clara (Daisy Tahan), turns 6.

While the family has two adjoining apartments and a car, Eliza’s life is hurried, harried and exhausting.

There’s walking the dog (and not picking up its poop), a quick smoke on the street and finding the car towed when their picturesque street is once again used as a film set.

Eliza’s best friend Sheila (a pregnant Minnie Driver) is a single mom and sounding board whose life Eliza details on her blog.

Eliza blogs on parenting’s many indignities as well as her fears of encroaching middle age. Some women are never without a purse; Eliza is never without her Mac laptop.

Online she sees a contest that asks for 500 words about motherhood, a subject that consumes her. Can she make the deadline? Does she have a chance to win and change her life if only slightly?

Along the way to her daughter’s 5 p.m. birthday party, Eliza overspends at a birthday shop, finds the custom-ordered cake has misspelled Clara’s name and lets a messenger - a 22-year-old aspiring writer - come in for a visit.

This interlude, with its unspoken sexual overture, offers Eliza a chance to re-evaluate her marriage.

Writer-director Katherine Dieckmann could be congratulated for a movie that lacks any kind of contrived scenario. After only 20 minutes of Eliza’s pell-mell day you wish Dieckmann had either gone the comedic Lucy-Ricky route or invented something, anything, to make an entertainment rather than this docu-style portrait.

The finish, all too predictable with hugs and uplift, finds Eliza valuing the life she lives.

Rated PG-13. At Kendall Square Cinema and suburban theaters.

(“Motherhood” contains some adult language.)