HARSHLY INHARMONIOUS

SPANGLISH
Written and directed by James L. Brooks; cinematography by John Seale; editing by Richard Marks; original music by Hans Zimmer and Trevor Morris; production design by Ida Random; art direction by Tom Reta; set decoration by Leslie A. Pope; costume design by Louise Mingenbach
With: Adam Sandler, Téa Leoni, Paz Vega, Cloris Leachman, Shelbie Bruce, Sarah Steele, Ian Hyland, Cecilia Suárez, and Thomas Haden Church. Rated PG-13 for some sexual content and brief language. Running time: 130 Minutes



Reviewed by Joel Johnson

James L. Brooks has had a long career in film and television, first as a writer, then as a producer, and finally as a director. Spanglish is, however, just the fifth film that he has directed. Terms of Endearment, Broadcast News, and As Good As It Gets have collectively won seven Academy Awards and have been nominated for nineteen more. (I’ll Do Anything was shut out of the Academy Awards.) Brooks himself received three (Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Picture) for Terms of Endearment. He has been very successful in bringing intimate stories about families and quasi-family relationships to the screen. So it should not surprise anyone that this film is about blending a Mexican housekeeper’s family into her employer’s family. Unfortunately, this film will probably not add to his films’ Academy Award totals. Like the mongrelized language from which the title comes, the film is a mix of story ideas that don’t quite fit together—some might call that a mess.

The film’s problems start with the writing. The film begins in the form of an application essay for Princeton University. The writer is the Mexican housekeeper’s daughter looking back and telling why her mother is her hero. This conclusion is certainly not unusual—especially for families headed by single mothers. However, the film that is supposedly the story being told by our Princeton applicant about her mother ends up focusing more on the Clasky family that her mother worked for than it does on the mother-daughter relationship. The film does begin with a long shot of a man walking down a street. The daughter’s voice-over explains that the man is leaving his wife Flor (Paz Vega) and his daughter Cristina. John Clasky (Adam Sandler) later opines that no man would leave a “drop-dead crazy gorgeous” woman like Flor unless he died, but no reason is ever offered. Flor eventually decides to move to the United States for a better life. She settles into a Los Angeles barrio and works in her cousin Monica’s (Cecilia Suárez) dry cleaning business. Fast-forward six years when Flor decides to seek more lucrative work outside the Hispanic enclave. While it is certainly credible that Flor would not have acquired English fluency living entirely within a Spanish-speaking community, it stretches belief that she would have learned no English at all or at least some Spanglish of the film’s title. Flor needs a full-time interpreter. Her cousin plays that role for her job interview, but her now twelve- year-old daughter Cristina (Shelbie Bruce) gets that assignment the rest of the time. The comic potential of these interactions has been greatly overestimated.

Once Flor gets hired by the Claskys, the focus switches to the Anglo family and particularly to Debbie Clasky (Téa Leoni). The film’s lead character is a frightful mix of neuroses, needs, and aggression. Debbie is embarrassingly desperate to welcome Flor to the housekeeper interview. There is no doubt that Debbie will hire Flor. It appears that anyone showing up for the interview would be offered the position. The wisdom of accepting that offer is immediately dubious to everyone in the audience. Debbie is self-absorbed. She manages to turn acts of altruism into self-aggrandizements. She brutally undercuts her own teenaged daughter Bernie’s (Sarah Steele) self-esteem. She, in essence, seeks to replace her plain-looking, slightly overweight, and modest scholar daughter with Flor’s beautiful, slender, and very bright daughter. She is totally oblivious to the feelings her actions trample upon. She blames her mother Evelyn (Cloris Leachman), a former high-living jazz singer, for all her problems, and her husband John is continually trying to defuse her emotional time bomb. Despite that description, the film aims for comedy and not for intense family drama à la Ordinary People. Téa Leoni manages to exude warmth and cheerfulness, giving a human dimension to what could be a monstrous portrayal. Her dialogue especially is exceedingly high on the cringe-and-groan factor. Audiences may definitely find this flawed and unlikable woman to be beyond belief, but real human beings can be amazingly blind to the harm they do. The Debbie Clasky created by Brooks and Leoni may not be that far off the mark as a human being, but it is an enormous challenge for the audience to identify with her.

John Clasky is, of course, a rare dramatic film role for Adam Sandler, who has been extremely popular making lowbrow comedy films. Despite top billing, Sandler doesn’t have a lot to do in the film. Mostly, he simply reacts to whatever happens around him—primarily the emotional fireworks and waterworks of his female costars. He successfully portrays a supportive and sensitive family man. This family involvement is somewhat at odds with the very intense profession (four-star restaurant owner-chef) to which Brooks has assigned him. It does, however, set up the film’s pivotal scene when he prepares Flor a meal. One can easily accept that John would be attracted to the kind and “drop-dead crazy gorgeous” Flor, and that Flor would admire the thoughtful and generous John. The film is less successful in establishing early that a mutual attraction exists against which the characters resist.

Resisting an attraction is not a new film concept, but films that show characters succumbing to temptation greatly outnumber films with temptation rebuffed. The ground in which an illicit romance could flourish has rarely been as fertile as it is here. That is, of course, helped by Thomas Haden Church’s (Sideways’s Jack) fleeting appearance as—naturally—a Lothario for Debbie.

Her daughter and son-in-law’s marital crisis gives Cloris Leachman’s failed mother character a rare opportunity to come to the rescue. Since she has been around and done it all, she knows, from painful experience, how to and how not to deal with this type of crisis. Leachman, providing the film with both comic relief and wisdom, is the only actor whose career will likely be enhanced by this film—she has even been mentioned as a dark-horse candidate for the Best Supporting Actress Oscar.

Though Paz Vega’s Flor eventually does learn English, her inability for half the film to communicate directly to the audience undermines the audience’s capacity to identify with her. She does have that meal as well as a heart-to-heart talk with John. This is one of the film’s best scenes, although the audience may have ambivalence as to its outcome. Ms. Vega is a talented actress and, in a profession full of attractive women, she stands out as a most striking beauty. Unfortunately, she just isn’t given the tools to succeed in the film’s conception. Her character ultimately makes a difficult decision, disrupting her daughter’s life. It is not fully compelling that Cristina had to make this sacrifice, and it is definitely not compelling that any teenager whose life had been similarly affected would be so easily assuaged by what her mother tells her.

The thesis that the Princeton applicant’s mother is her hero ends with an unconvincing rationale for why. Two very nice people who are attracted to each other don’t pursue that attraction, preserving, for the time being, a marriage that likely will continue to ask all observers “can this marriage be saved?” While her mother gave her one critical piece of advice, it is not clear that Debbie has learned enough to truly be a better person and, more importantly, a better wife and mother. With no reassurance that Debbie has grown, there is no satisfying resolution to the two-plus unpleasant hours we have spent watching this woman cheerfully abuse those around her, thinking there is no harm to what she is doing.

James L. Brooks has specialized in writing and directing work featuring sympathetic female lead characters. He was the creator of and a writer for the Mary Tyler Moore Show. The three films mentioned above all relied on a female lead to be the emotional anchor of the film. Holly Hunter provided this for Broadcast News as did Helen Hunt in As Good As It Gets. In Terms of Endearment, the audience so identified with female leads Debra Winger and Shirley MacLaine that after Winger’s young mother dies from cancer, MacLaine’s grandmother is more preferable as a parent than the children’s father (Jeff Daniels). Male characters in Brook’s films tend to be either well-meaning and ineffectual or outright cads. In Spanglish, it is the lead female character who is bad. Neither Flor nor John, as the film’s sympathetic characters, is able to effectively counterbalance Debbie’s discordant character. Neither are the film’s few comedic moments nor some heart-felt ideas about families and relationships able to overcome her central role. This departure from Brook’s usual vision of women may resonate for some, but most will find it harshly inharmonious.  

 

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