Spanglish

It's no fun for me to trash James Brooks. The guy produces my favorite show of all time, "The Simpsons." He was a major creative force behind what I feel is the most significant television show of our time. So, you know, I like the guy. I think he's made some good movies. And I think he's probably a well-intentioned sort who wants to entertain people and make them think at the same time. Admirable. But his much-lauded As Good As It Gets sucked, and his significantly less-lauded 2004 release Spanglish sucks even harder.

It gives me no pleasure to bash the man. I'm just calling it as I see it.



When you hear the premise, you can tell Spanglish will be a tough film to pull off. It's a comedy-drama about the cultural and social collision that occurs when a recent Mexican immigrant and her daughter move in with an upper-class and dysfunctional white family in Los Angeles. Certainly, there is a lot to say on this topic from both perspectives. These are the situations that go on in Los Angeles and other American cities every single day, and it's about time a mainstream filmmaker tried to tackle the issue of Mexican-American social relations.

But James Brooks just isn't the right guy. A story like this requires both compassion and removal. You need to be able to see the perspective of both sides, but with a discerning, cynical eye. And Brooks is just too compassionate a filmmaker. He falls in love with all his lead characters, and winds up making them too cuddly for their own good.

Think Jack Nicholson in As Good As It Gets. At the start of the film, he's supposed to be a monster. A nebbishly loner with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, a mysogynist, a homophobe, a racist and a hater of animals. The whole purpose of the film is to show his transformation into a sensitive romantic. But Brooks just doesn't have it in him to really make the Nicholson character mean. He makes him a bit rude. Slightly malevolent but not evil. And he renders the real disease OCD so feebly, it seems more like an eccentric tick than a potentially crippling psychological disorder.

This goes back to a lack of subtlety that likewise doesn't serve Spanglish well. It's a film that cares about entertainment above observation. Rather than realistically render his scenario, to give us people with whom we can relate and come to learn from, he sketches caricatures and sets them against one another. It's an ultimately shallow exercize.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. I should at least tell you what happens in the film. Right away, things get off on the wrong foot as we hear a voice-over from a girl named Christina, relating the story of her mother in a college admissions essay.

I'd like to state for the record that I have no problem with voice-overs in movies. In fact, I like them. Many films use voice-over narration to great effect, including this weekend's thrilling Sin City. But what I don't like is over-explained voice-overs. Writers who feel that they must use a voice-over to bookend a story. These are almost always cheesy, overcooked and overlong prologues and epilogues that do nothing to enhance the overall film.

Take The Green Mile, for example. That movie would be a lot better if we didn't have to bounce around in time to meet the Tom Hanks character as an old man. The movie's so long anyway, and all the best material is reserved for the flashback. Why include it at all?

Why not just never bother to explain the voice-over? A character is telling us a story. Fine. Done. It's a movie, so we'll accept that. Double Indemnity is narrated by a character who's dead before the movie begins, and no one ever questioned that. And that movie's a classic.

And having Christina (played in the film by Shelbie Bruce) narrate the story barely makes sense, considering she's not really involved in 80% of the action. Not to mention that the story she tells is hardly appropriate admissions essay material, and doesn't have a bit to do with her interests, motivation, drive or scholarship.

You get the idea. Anyway, Christina relates the story of how she and her mother Flor (Paz Vega) immigrated to America and eventually found their way to the home of the Claskys. John Clasky (Adam Sandler) is a world-renowned chef running his own LA restaurant. He's married to Deborah (Tea Leoni), who is the most insane, neurotic, evil woman on the planet Earth.

Seriously.

Once again, Brooks proves he has no sense of subtlety whatsoever. Eventually, the film will develop a restrained romance between John and Flor, and the rivalry between Flor and Deborah is the conflict that drives most of the story, so I suppose Brooks felt he had to make her somewhat unlikable. But did he really have to go so far?

This is clearly not Leoni's fault. She's actually kind of magnificent in the role, clearly not holding anything back. But the stuff of social satire this is not. This is like some BBC sitcom about a normal, likable guy who starts a family with a beautiful yet psychotic woman. In fact, if their name in the show was Pew or Hew or something like that, you could call it "Taming of the Pews."

Oh, wait, I forgot Cloris Leachman, who plays Deborah's alcoholic ex-jazz singer mother! Only she's not really an alcoholic, because she's an old lady with no discernable health problems who can stop drinking whenever she likes. So it's another Brooksian adorable disease like Debra Winger's in Terms of Endearment or Jack Nicholson's OCD in As Good As It Gets.

So, you see where I'm going with this. Eventually, Deborah and Flor discover their massive shared cultural differences, particularly as concerns raising children. I'm not sure what Brooks was trying to say here exactly. I think the idea is that people shouldn't interfere with other people's children, which is a fine message, I suppose.

The movie takes a very odd turn in its final third, however. I don't want to give anything away, but...

John and Flor develop a mutual attraction and...

Eventually, Deborah tries to get Christina into a good private school with her own daughter Bernice (Sarah Steele...more on her in a bit...), and Flor gets very angry.

This strikes me as very odd, and a bit condescending, particularly from a white male writer/director. Brooks seems to argue that Flor's pride prevents her from wanting the best for her child. On Christina's first day of school, she's excitedly getting on the school bus, and Flor, after giving a meek wave, stomps away, pouting. She's angry; Deborah's exerting too much influence over her child.

But would most Latina women really let something like pride keep their child from getting the best education possible? I don't know...maybe Brooks does. I can't say I know what most Mexican mothers would do when faced with this decision, but my gut tells me all moms want what is best for their kids. Though inside she may not like it, Flor would likely do what's best for Christina, which would probably be to let her go to the best school she can.

But for Brooks to make this position so forcefully and clearly, to state without doubt that it is the superior position for a proud mother to raise her child in poverty if that means maintaining cultural heritage and dignity, oversteps his bounds as a middle-aged white guy.

Also, the John-Flor romance seems a bit of a liberal white guy fantasy. A rich white guy has a beautiful Latina come into his home, take care of his kids and clean for him, and while she's doing his laundry, she falls in love with him. Puh-leeze. Has this ever happened? Maybe...but I'm not convinced. And, sure, John seems like a pretty cool guy. In arguably the best scene in the movie, he makes a delicious-looking egg and tomato sandwich.

But the entire thing just rings false. Brooks wants to have it both ways. He wants Flor to represent the proud Mexican culture that doesn't need the charity or pity of white Americans, but only a fair opportunity to rise up and succeed on their own. But he also wants her to go all soft when a white guy takes care of her and treats her right.

And he also wants to sugarcoat the hard details of his story. Remember, Brooks is both a writer/director. He's the one that chose to tell the story of a single mom who shuttles her child into America searching for a better life. So why not tell the immigrant story truthfully? Instead, we get a cutesy sequence, played for laughs, in which Flor hurries Christina across the border. Why not show the poverty in which Flor and Christina lived accurately? Instead, we get a dream-like sequence in which Christina describes how perfect and happy their lives were prior to meeting the Claskys?

Because children having to cross the border illegally and live in poverty just doesn't play. It's not funny and entertaining. There's no opportunity for snappy one-liners and over-the-top sketch-comedy charicterizations. So Brooks skips it, and gets to the part where the girl walks into the closed sliding door and bonks her head (yeah, seriously, he trots that one out...)

That's lazy and insulting. If you want to make that movie, go for it, but don't pretend it's social commentary. Don't tackle real-world issues in such a flippant, mindless manner. Leave that to the professionals, please.

Okay, one final note. There's an abandoned subplot here about Bernice, the Clasky's daughter, who has something of a weight problem. Deborah, in full-on harpy mode, purposefully buys her new clothes that are too small, so she can "grow into them." I thought for a while that Brooks might have something ambitious in mind for this subplot. Maybe he really had something to say about the recent American panic over obesity, or about how we teach kids nutrition. But he's just using this as a way to bring Flor and Deborah into conflict, it's just plot fodder, and we never return to this subject.

IMDB as well tells me that Sarah Steele, the high school student who makes her film debut with Spanglish, gained 15 pounds in order to play the role of the chunky Bernice. How sick. Why not really hire an overweight girl to play the part of an overweight girl? Why get a thin girl and then make her get fat? Talented young actresses with a few extra pounds on them are probably desperate for work. And this guy force-feeds some waif?

Also, it can't be healthy for a girl at that age to cram on 15 pounds in a short period of time. Come on, Jim! I hope that tidbit isn't true...

Weight issues aside, Steele's good in the role. She's quite possibly my favorite character, the only one who truly feels like she might exist outside in an objective reality, outside of a James Brooks movie.

One more thing I failed to bring up...

Where are all the Mexican men? Sure, it's Flor and John's story, and it's about how they find themselves falling for one another, but surely Flor knows some Mexican men? She has a few female friends, and her daughter, but that's it. I can recall one single Mexican man in the entire movie, and he's a rather off-putting caricature, again played for non-existant laughs. A little guy in a wife beater working on his car whom Leoni asks to translate for Flor. Of course, he pauses halfway through to start hitting on her.