Spanglish

(James L. Brooks, USA, 2004)

There are two kinds of film critics: those who can see value in the work of writer-director James L. Brooks, and those who cannot.

You would think that a person who had a hand in the classic television series The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970-1977), Taxi (1978-1983) and The Simpsons (1989, ongoing), let alone movie hits like Terms of Endearment (1983) and As Good As It Gets (1997), would have an assured place in the annals of popular culture. But no, Brooks’ contribution is mightily contested.

There are those for whom Brooks’ films are only cheesy, inauthentic pieces of emotional manipulation, glorified sitcom episodes. He is tarred and feathered (by, for instance, Robin Wood or Andrew Britton) as a conservative, a reactionary, an entertainer of the worst sort. His very ability to craft a cinematic narrative is regularly questioned.

But for those (including myself) who have been fascinated by Brooks’ film career since his wonderful script for Starting Over (1979), Spanglish provides fresh evidence for why he should be taken with the utmost seriousness.

It is, paradoxically, a sign of what makes this film so lively that not even the promotional trailers can quite manage to extract a clean, clear, accurate storyline from it. As always, Brooks likes a lot of characters colliding in as many breakaway plot threads as possible – a sensibility that places him within hailing distance of Robert Altman or Jean Renoir.

The sprawling action here is centred in the house of John (Adam Sandler) and Deborah (Tea Leoni). He is a successful chef – a little too successful, for his liking – and she is his hyper-neurotic wife, a real handful. Deborah decides spontaneously to hire Flor (Paz Vega), recently arrived from Mexico, to help with the maintenance of this chaotic household. Eventually, to keep Flor, the family must also take in her teenage daughter, Cristina (Shelbie Bruce).

Brooks’ comedies are at their best when they become excruciating, and there is plenty of painful laughter in Spanglish. Differences in class, race and culture – so often suppressed in mainstream American movies – are relentlessly foregrounded here.

The most agonising scenes concern the battle between Flor and Deborah for Cristina’s heart – a battle that depends on the girl’s hunger to be Americanised and to become middle-class. When Cristina yells at her mother, “I need my space!” and Flor replies, “Between you and me, there is no space”, the film’s insight into the tying and untying of personal bonds reaches an unbearably moving point.

Conventionally, reviewers fault films that seem to have lost control of their storyline. Brooks’ films, however, make nonsense of such a normative proscription. His movies provide a unique pleasure: as they unfold, you can almost hear in your head the echo of the creative thought process that decides to follow now one strand, and now another.

It’s a veritable highwire act. All the possibilities, all the diverse moods and potential complications are left in the air, suspended, able to be activated at any moment.

This form is what gives Brooks’ films their overcrowded feeling (an ingenious voice-over narration for Cristina is thrown in for good measure) and their strangely extended running times – not to mention their often uncertain and arbitrary endings. But it also conveys a hyper-lively, improvisatory atmosphere that connects Brooks’ work to the classic, poignant comedies of Leo McCarey.

I was constantly impressed during Spanglish by Brooks’ ability to invent clever and telling situations. A scene where Flor and Deborah spontaneously engage in a race along the street perfectly conveys the tension between them. Likewise, a vignette concerning how Deborah’s hair blows about when she rides in cars leads to a marvellously surreal bit of business. The dialogue often sparkles – across two languages – in the best screwball tradition, but it is always the bodies in frantic motion that clinch the meaning and emotion of a scene.

Brooks’ approach to mise en scène deserves a long, patient study. Every good director has their own, distinctive approach to scene construction, beginning with some simple but fundamental prompt-questions: what constitutes a scene? What kind of actions, what kind of event? Where should the scene begin and end? Are there many scenes in one (the Truffaut method), or a single, clear, ruthlessly focused aim?

Brooks may, at times, be extracting his scenes in the editing from much larger units transformed (over many takes) during shooting (Jack Nicholson, for one, seems to enjoy working this way with him). Let’s just record, for now, my impression that Brooks likes to focus on unexpected character entrances and exits to shape his distinctive kind of scene – and that these moves, to stay and engage or slip out and leave – form the basis of incredibly elaborate manœuvres. A gesture as simple of lowering one’s feet (from a sitting or lying position) so that they touch the floor (sign of imminent departure) can become amazingly intense in Brooks.

The actors respond superbly to the challenges laid down by their director: Leoni makes herself the epitome of monstrousness, Sandler continues to explore the darker states opened up by his role in Punch-Drunk Love (2002), while Vega (from Sex and Lucia, 2001) manages to breath some individual life into an overly-idealised Latina type.

MORE Brooks: Broadcast News

© Adrian Martin February 2005