What Language Does This Film Speak?

It's hard to know what to make of the 2004 film Spanglish. My husband and I recently decided to see it based on the recommendation of some friends who assured us it was great. We had almost no knowledge of the film at all going in, which I'm beginning to think was actually a plus. Because make no mistake about it, this film is zany, uneven in tone, and in some ways about as confusing as you might expect it to be given its title.

Oddly enough, it's also interesting, enjoyable, funny in some places and charmingly poignant in others. The storyline and characters were not at all predictable. As I watched it, I guessed wrong several times about what direction this film was ultimately taking. While that doesn't make for the easiest first viewing experience, I can definitely say it wasn't boring. And while the creative choices were not all ones I would have made, they were almost always provocative choices.

I confess the opening credits set us up with rather high expectations. Once we saw that it was written and directed by James L. Brooks ("The Simpsons," Broadcast News) and that the cast included Tea Leoni ("The Naked Truth" and The Family Man) and Cloris Leachman (Young Frankenstein and a million other funny things), we had high hopes for some good comedy. We were even willing to hope that Adam Sandler might deliver one of the good performances he's been known to deliver (amongst the many inane ones). Sandler definitely did deliver, but in surprising ways I for one didn't expect. More on that momentarily.

The movie follows the fortunes and misfortunes of Flor Moreno (played by Paz Vega, known mostly for roles in Spanish films), a young and beautiful single mother in Mexico. Her husband has left her and her young daughter Cristina (played for most of the film by Shelbie Bruce) and she decides to seek a new life in the United States. After they cross the border, they find a comfortable existence with extended family in Los Angeles, in a neighborhood so Mexican that Flor doesn't even bother to learn English. This proves to be a challenge when she discovers, a few years down the road, that she needs to venture out to find better paying work with more flexible hours so she can spend more time with her daughter, who is rapidly approaching adolescence. She ends up as a housekeeper for an incredibly wealthy and ridiculously dysfunctional Anglo family, the Claskys. And before she knows it, she finds herself in the position of needing to move in with the family, bringing her impressionable daughter into all this rich American craziness. As you can imagine, the cross-cultural clashes inherent in this situation are almost endless.

The Claskys are one of the weirdest families I've seen in a movie in a long time. If Eugene O'Neil had ever written a sitcom, this family would have starred. The father, John (Adam Sandler) is a warm and loving dad but a worn out husband. He's also an impressive chef with a restaurant that's getting rave reviews from city food critics. The mother, Deborah (Tea Leoni) is a neurotic, domineering, stressed out yuppie. She's an exercise freak whose attempted control of her children (and everyone and everything else in her life) is about to split the family to smithereens. The children, Georgie (Ian Hyland) and Bernice (Sarah Steele, who lives up to her name and almost steals the whole film) are almost as worn out as their dad. They want to please their mom, but it's darn near impossible, so sometimes they just do their best to stay out of her way or else they cope with odd bits of humor and chutzpah. Also joining the dysfunctional family circle is Deborah's elderly mother, Grandma Evelyn (Cloris Leachman) a sweet and bumbling alcoholic who spends most of her time trying to keep the peace and crooning old songs she used to sing as a well-known jazz singer many, many years ago.

We see most of the film through Flor's eyes and she's very confused by what she sees. So perhaps it's fitting that we are too. It's hard to say exactly who our "point of view" character is, however, because from the opening scene we're given a voice-over narration by the (now supposedly college age) daughter Cristina. The whole film is supposed to be a fleshed out flashback in the guise of a college admissions essay Cristina's written about her mother, and why her mother was the most influential person in her life. It's a nice "in" to the story originally, and I think Brooks was right in his instinct to give the confusing storyline some sort of needed scaffolding, but it doesn't quite work as a framework throughout. I think there are several reasons for this: the fact that we never see the now-grown Cristina, the fact that she seems to know a lot of intimate details about this season in her mother's life (details that it's hard to see how she might be privvy to, even if her mother decided to tell her everything later). Then there's the fact that the voice-over is used somewhat infrequently: enough stretches of time go by that you forget it's supposed to be a flash-back/essay, so that the voice startles you and feels intrusive. Clearly Brooks wanted Cristina's "coming of age" voice to be the voice that tells us "what the story means" so she makes wise and pithy comments about relationships and the challenges of cross-cultural communication. It's all just a tad too heavy-handed, especially since this movie mostly sprawls all over the place.

One reason for my relatively high rating for this film -- the four stars I decided to give it even surprised me -- is that I'm not sure that the storyline isn't cluttered and chaotic on purpose. Brooks knows how to tell a good story. One could choose to believe he had a momentary lapse here and just forgot how, or one could say he took the bold and experimental path of trying to make a movie whose tone and flow felt as surprising and off-putting as the dysfunctional family and cross-cultural relationships the actors portrayed. After mulling it over, I'm going with the latter.

The second reason I ultimately liked so much of this film was because of the interesting acting performances. Cloris Leachman managed to bring humor and pathos to a character who could have been just an oddball caricature. Tea Leoni manages to actually look awful in some scenes, (I thought that was impossible) as she screams and fusses and cajoles and manipulates. You can practically see her temples pulsing and her blood pressure rising. In Deborah she creates a character who is hard to be around, and yet at the same time she's really funny and in the end, truly pitiable. Actress newcomer Sarah Steele, as the bright, slightly overweight and understandably sensitive daughter Bernice, is a wonder. She almost made me wish that the filmmakers had decided to tell this film from her point of view, or perhaps jointly from both Bernice and Cristina (perhaps they could have ended up as college roommates?). Paz Vega anchored the film with her lovely smile and warm (sometimes hot-tempered) maternal instincts. So much of what she chooses and doesn't choose is directly tied up in her role as Cristina's mother.

And Adam Sandler...well, he plays a grown up. An honest to goodness grown-up. If that wasn't enough to put the weird factor over the top, then I don't know what could. He not only plays a grown-up, but he does it well. The droop of his shoulders and the tone of his voice communicate almost everything you need. You understand his soft-hearted love for his kids and his weary inability to deal with Deborah except in platitudes and half-hearted gestures. You understand how easy it would be for a man like this to fall in love with his housekeeper, whose exotic beauty is matched by a fiery personality, a zealous commitment to finally learning English, and a calm and patient maturity that's completely lacking in his wife.

And now we come to the final reason why I decided to give this movie four stars. In the end, oh so surprisingly, this is not a movie about cross-cultural communication, or family dysfunction, or assimilation to American culture, or even romance. All those things are there, yes, but they're not the bottom line. The bottom line is that this funny, wacky story is about fidelity. It's about the ways you can choose to do the right thing, even if the right thing seems ridiculously hard and unrewarding. It assumes there is a right, responsible way to act in order to honor commitments and be true to yourself, your family and heritage. At so many places along the way, this story deals with temptation: Cristina is tempted to join the rich, white kids and leave behind her Mexican heritage; Bernice is tempted to define herself by her mother's outbursts; Deborah is tempted to have an affair and to try to fix everything and everyone within reach when she knows she can't; John is tempted to fall in love with Flor; and Flor (who loves him in spite of the fact that she doesn't understand his "softness" over against the male machismo she's used to) is sorely tempted to just crook her little finger and have him coming running, knowing he'd leave his wife in a heartbeat.

Some of the characters succumb to temptation, but in those instances the movie almost always shows their deep regret and the painful repercussions involved. And in one of the most interesting scenes of the movie, you see John and Flor involved in an admittedly romantic evening where they struggle mightily not to give into the temptation to simply fall into each others' arms, especially in light of the fact that John's marriage has just been dealt a terrible blow. John listens when Flor implores him to keep a clear head: his hand visibly shakes when he puts down an alcoholic drink without tasting it. And Flor herself shows amazing restraint, despite the fact that she would love to be loved by a good man. 9 out of 10 Hollywood films would have ended this scene in bed. This unpredictable film does not, and in my book that makes it highly unusual, far more rewarding, honest and interesting.

In the end, it is hard to tell just what language this film speaks. It's a comedy with some really funny moments; it's a drama with some heart-rending touches. All in all it's an odd mix, just like the characters it throws up on the screen. Like a sentence in a language you don't speak well, it can be hard to understand, but if you pay attention to non-verbal clues, you get a lot more of it than you think. And in the end I was glad I tried.

~~befus, 2006