Spanglish


by Shari L. Rosenblum

Adam Sandler is sweet, Paz Vega is beautiful, love is comfort, marriage is hard, and parenting is near impossible -- such are some of the indisputable truths made plain in Spanglish, the most recent emotionally correct fairytale from writer/director James L. Brooks.   Teary eyes replace raised fists as validation of righteousness in the Brooksean vehicle, and this is a watery effort, brought to us, after all, by the man who brought us As Good as it Gets and Terms of Endearment. On the screen and in the audience -- strings effectively pulled, buttons ardently pushed -- everybody cries, and everybody hurts sometimes. This is an emotionally righteous work and it should make us better people.

And if the characters's tears don't tell you when to cry, the framing voice-over will. Spanglish unfolds in flashback, as the "my hero" narrative of a college entrance essay, to tell the story of Flor, a young mother in Mexico (Vega), who, abandoned by her husband, makes her way across the border to find a better life (insert for the hell of it a would-be comedic swipe at illegal immigration).  After years in the barrio, ready for yet a better life than that, she crosses the border once again, into Anglo territory (insert self-aware spotlight on border doubling) -- to be housekeeper to the well-to-do somewhere near Beverly Hills. She is stunning, proud, tender, insightful, bright, loving and unable to speak a word of English -- no one asks her if she's skilled at housework, or chores of any sort. But of course she is (she can even alter a bagful of clothing overnight without measuring the subject). In the tradition of treacly social statements everywhere, she is the ideal woman hidden in the underclass, heaven-sent for $650 a week. Spanglish  is the story of her assimilation. 

In need of a different kind of adaptation, her employers are quite as unrepresentative as she is. Deborah Clasky (Tea Leoni) is a nastily neurotic newly unemployed she-devil obsessed with weight, beauty, and things unnamed. Horrible to her overweight daughter, tough on her almost absent son, and at a constant imbalance, she tends to start sentences with the phrase "don't worry, I'm not mad." She is a bad mother, has no respect for her own mother or for other people's motherhood. She is selfish in sex, and even more so in love. When forced to confront her inner demons, she blames everyone else. And she thinks that the world of Anglo wealth is preferable to that of ethnic poverty. Obviously, she has no redeeming qualities. John Clasky (Sandler), her husband, is a sensitive new age star chef who listens to his children and is indulgent of his wife and her alcoholic mother (Cloris Leachman); he is perfect. He has no prejudices, no vices, his employees and the food critics adore him, and he makes all the right choices for all the right reasons, even when it's clear he'd be in the right if he chose to do wrong. You believe in him and you want him. He is all the soft goodness of every Adam Sandler role, without any of the dark side, melted down and molded to make a mensch of a man. Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, George Clooney and Colin Farrell can all move over -- Sandler's Clasky is the fantasy John that will keep women awake this Christmas season.

Not surprisingly, Flor's entry into John and Deborah's home shakes things up a bit. And while Deborah is the one that has the most dramatic scenes and the most emphatic acts (look for a quick cameo from Thomas Hayden Church) -- she is almost always either hysterical or in some manic state -- the drama the film focuses on is in the quiet exchanges between Flor and John, two souls that find each other across a language barrier and a cultural divide. He, the antithesis of Latin macho, compels her with his honest vulnerability -- she, the antithesis of his wife, compels him with her compassion. While in the background the children struggle with standards of beauty and standards of wealth, acceptance and belonging, the good father and the good mother are in the foreground learning each other's language and difference, and behaving as best they can. 

You find yourself rooting for them to be bad.

Spanglish is the kind of film that lures you in -- but it never takes you all the way away. The acting is far better than you might expect -- quite good, even, all around, even for such unreal characters, but the story itself is bathed in implausibility. When the final crisis comes with admissions of infidelity, as the screenplay formula requires, every bit of it is unbelievable.  Deborah's choices, John's choices, and Flor's all ring untrue (although some of the scenes are quite moving). The motivations are unpersuasive, if mentioned at all, and the consequences are not what anyone would advise.  I wanted to stand up and yell at the screen, but I didn't have the strength. 

I was crying, you see.

©2004 Shari L. Rosenblum
CineScene