'Spanglish': The twain meet, saucilyLatin and Anglo cultures meet, and embrace
It is easy to dismiss James L. Brooks - and many do - as a sentimental sitcom guy who brought the humanist humor and group hugs of The Mary Tyler Moore Show to the big screen. Less easy is to parse his offbeat, emotion-charged comedies Terms of Endearment, Broadcast News and the exceptional Spanglish. While it's being marketed as a movie in which a Latina domestic comes to clean up the mess in a dysfunctional Anglo family, that's not the movie I saw. Brooks' fifth feature in 21 years stars Adam Sandler as John Clasky, an L.A. chef whose raddled wife, Deborah (Téa Leoni), hires as a nanny the wholesomely sultry Flor (Paz Vega), a Mexican illegal who doesn't speak English. It doesn't take long before Maria Poppins rocks the Clasky household, winning the hearts of John and his kids while anxious that she's losing her own daughter to Deborah.
It is easy to dismiss James L. Brooks - and many do - as a sentimental sitcom guy who brought the humanist humor and group hugs of The Mary Tyler Moore Show to the big screen. Less easy is to parse his offbeat, emotion-charged comedies Terms of Endearment, Broadcast News and the exceptional Spanglish. While it's being marketed as a movie in which a Latina domestic comes to clean up the mess in a dysfunctional Anglo family, that's not the movie I saw.
Brooks' fifth feature in 21 years stars Adam Sandler as John Clasky, an L.A. chef whose raddled wife, Deborah (Téa Leoni), hires as a nanny the wholesomely sultry Flor (Paz Vega), a Mexican illegal who doesn't speak English. It doesn't take long before Maria Poppins rocks the Clasky household, winning the hearts of John and his kids while anxious that she's losing her own daughter to Deborah.
A pepperpot bubbling with pungent insights and sharp wit, Spanglish is about how people, like cultures, are more alike than not. Its characters find that parenting is a universal language, that a temporary cure for an overextended family is the extended one.
Brooks comedies are not funny-ha-ha. At their best, they are funny-ouch. When the so-highly-strung-she's-unstrung Deborah first meets the supremely serene Flor and squawks, "You're gorgeous!" it inspires her mother, Evelyn (Cloris Leachman), to interpret: "She didn't mean it as a compliment. It's more of an accusation." Deborah is cutthroat competitive. Leoni plays her as a human eggshell on the way to an emotional crack-up.
Those uneasy with Brooks' interweaving of tears and laughter knock his movies as "dramedies." He assumes that stories, like people, defy categorization.
Spanglish boasts vivid performances, of which Leoni's is the showiest, that emerge despite the filmmaker's flat visual style. The unusually subdued Sandler, who conveys mood through the way he modulates his voice to an angry whisper or playful gurgle, does his best work since The Wedding Singer. Beguiling Vega, curvaceous star of the Spanish soft-core film Sex and Lucia, gets by on vivacity.
We see the characters mostly through the eyes of Vega's Flor. But we see Flor through the eyes of her daughter, Cristina (Shelbie Bruce), whose narration is in the form of a college-admission essay. (Both Bruce and Sarah Steele, who plays the Claskys' daughter, Bernice, are such gifted actresses that you think "real teenagers.")
Initially the film contrasts the narcissistic Deborah, recently downsized from her job, with the nurturing Flor. Is Brooks reprising the conflict between control freak and earth mother played out in Terms of Endearment?
His intent is different; in Spanglish, he's charting changing male and female social arrangements and an unchanging mother-daughter dynamic. At a time women have increasing professional opportunities, girls still want to be the opposite of mom. Deborah, like most control freaks, tries to manage everything, including her daughter's weight, because she can't manage anything.
She is a nightmare, one who measures self-worth by professional and not personal success. John is the feminist fantasy husband: He cooks! He carpools! He helps with homework! He cries! Flor is astonished. For this woman with firsthand experience of Latin machismo, "John seemed to have the emotions of a Mexican woman."
Once Brooks establishes his characters, he loads the narrative buffet with character-defining temptations. Will Flor resist Deborah's offer to pay for Cristina's private school tuition? Will Cristina resist Deborah's false values? Will Bernice resist self-pity? Will Evelyn resist that cocktail? Will John resist Flor's charms? The big question, though, is whether it is better to live life for oneself or one's child. Or whether it is best to stay on the balance beam. I don't understand why so many people I respect disrespect Brooks. His films brim with the qualities we admire in Jean Renoir and Cameron Crowe and Alexander Payne. Namely, people are inconsistent, that tears intensify laughter and vice versa, that shared experience can just as easily bring people closer as estrange them. While so many films end on a rueful note that people never can change, the hopeful Spanglish suggests that people do change one another.
Contact movie critic Carrie Rickey
at 215-854-5402 or crickey@phillynews.com.
Spanglish
*** 1/2 (out of four stars)
Produced by Julie Ansell, James L. Brooks and Richard Sakai, written and directed by James L. Brooks, photography by John Seale, music by Hans Zimmer, distributed by Columbia Pictures.
Running time: 2 hours, 11 mins.
John Clasky. . . Adam Sandler
Flor.. . . Paz Vega
Deborah......................................Téa Leoni
Evelyn. . . Cloris Leachman
Bernice. . . Sarah Steele
Cristina.................................Shelbie Bruce
Parent's guide: PG-13 (sexual content, mild profanity)
Playing at: area theaters.