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Thursday, December 15, 2011

Available on DVD: “A Better Life”

José Julián and SAG nominee Demian Bichir in A Better Life
At one point in A Better Life, an emotionally resonant film about how we live now, the director Chris Weitz opens a scene with a pair of adorable, gap-toothed little girls belting into karaoke microphones, giving their charming all to a song with un-self-conscious gusto. He then cuts to three bald men, crammed tattooed arm to tattooed arm on a couch, who are beaming at the girls with barefaced and shared delight, lighted up by the grace of children behaving like children. It’s touching and startling to see these men show such tenderness at this innocent spectacle, especially because all three are gangbangers.

What gives the scene punch isn’t that Weitz has the ostensible courage to show that gangsters delight in their children like everyone else; their humanity is a given, as is their visceral threat. Rather it’s the ordinariness of the interlude, its everyday quality that makes it so good and points to what, at times, distinguishes A Better Life from the overly blunt social-issue tract it could have easily become.

For the teenaged Luis (José Julián), an outsider hovering at the edge of the room and watching the children sing while he shyly cozies up to his girlfriend, Ruthie (a vivid Chelsea Rendon), this isn’t a gangster’s paradise. It’s a place of conviviality and safety, of loving fathers and doting mothers; in other words, a home.

Set largely in East Los Angeles, an area that doesn’t often pop up in movies except as a scary, nominally exotic backdrop (or unless Cheech and Chong are going up in smoke), A Better Life involves a struggle to hold onto a home of one’s own. For Luis and his own father, a gardener, Carlos (Demian Bichir, who just received a best actor nomination from the Screen Actors Guild for his work in this film), that means the United States, though home is also — as laid out rather too neatly in the sentimental script by Eric Eason from a story by Roger L. Simon — the relationship between father and son.

For Luis, who’s all-American from his birth certificate to his accent, Carlos isn’t just his father, he’s also a periodically embarrassing ambassador from a foreign land, a Mexican immigrant as seemingly unassimilated as he is undocumented.

A Better Life is a blunt turnaround for Weitz, whose previous gigs were at the helm of The Golden Compass and the last installment in the Twilight juggernaut. Compass had its moments, but The Twilight Saga: New Moon was dutifully impersonal hack work, and it’s hard to remember what happened in it or to care why it did.

The same can’t be said of his best films (both directed with his brother, Paul Weitz), the exuberantly vulgar comedy American Pie and About a Boy, a near-seamless adaptation of the Nick Hornby novel. It’s unusual for a director to scale down again as dramatically as Weitz has with A Better Life (that polymath Steven Soderbergh makes it a habit), but it’s done him good.

There are hitches, including a narrative structure that mechanically keeps Carlos and Luis more or less apart, laying out their worlds — Carlos awake, Luis asleep, Carlos at work, Luis at school — until the strands are braided together, and the two have become one. A single father, Carlos worries about his son but is so wrung out by dawn-to-dusk labors, rising with bird songs and jackhammers, he barely seems to know him. When offered a chance to buy a truck, he sees it as a path to the promised life of the title. Bichir, a Mexican actor with a long list of credits in his country, and Julián (who was 16 during the shoot), are both very sympathetic, and they hold your attention despite some awkwardly directed patches.

Weitz at times struggles, including with his actors, and the film’s scale doesn’t always fit its story; all the crane shots and a score performed by the London Symphony Orchestra suggest he hasn’t scaled down enough. Yet he also gets plenty right, including a school that could be a prison and a shabby bungalow with old paint and a verdant garden.

His Los Angeles looks like the real deal instead of a tourist’s postcard, and in one memorable scene Carlos rides in a truck and watches as its richly diverse, multi-everything population races by. Later he takes Luis to a nearby rodeo, where they listen to the oompah oompah of norteño music in a place that looks like another country but is just around the corner.

As is sometimes the case with movies that take on civil and political rights without force-feeding the audience, A Better Life plays the human interest angle hard. It tries to put a lump in your throat and a tear on your cheek (it succeeds), pumping your emotions doubtless in an attempt to look nonpartisan. "We don’t really have a political agenda," Weitz told NPR.

O.K., sure, there’s nothing political about the hardships endured by a Mexican immigrant eking out a subsistence living as a gardener in Los Angeles, mowing lawns for jittery white ladies and motoring around without a green card or half a prayer. It’s just a story about a father, a son and the bicycle — oops, truck — that helps bring them together. If you say so!

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