Spanglish
One reason I can’t regard Pauline Kael as a great film critic is her unshakable belief that she needed to see a movie only once–that she could immediately form an opinion and never have to revise it. She was thought of as an industry gadfly, but her blind faith in first impressions often fit industry calculations perfectly, helping to validate things like test-marketing and seeing movies as disposable.
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I recently saw Spanglish, Brooks’s latest feature, and came away thinking it was gripping despite its plausibility gaps. I knew I had to go back to As Good as It Gets. This time when I watched it I saw an intricate interweaving of truth and falsity that often made it almost impossible to distinguish between the two–the same thing I’d found in Terms of Endearment (1983), Broadcast News (1987), I’ll Do Anything (1994), and Spanglish. I’m now inclined to think that all of Brooks’s films are adept cons–which makes him both fascinating and infuriating.
Yet people who criticize Brooks for test-marketing alternate endings to some of his pictures may have forgotten that movies as prestigious as King Vidor’s The Crowd (1928) and Frank Capra’s Meet John Doe (1941) emerged from the same kind of tinkering–though nothing in the careers of Vidor or Capra rivals Brooks’s insane mutilation of his musical I’ll Do Anything until it had no musical numbers left. Whatever his faults, I have to admit I always learn something from Brooks’s films. Self-destructive neurosis remains one of his thematic standbys, and test-marketing is one of the major subjects of I’ll Do Anything: there are personal implications in his films that make their flaws as expressive and instructive as their virtues.
Brooks should get credit for making a bilingual movie without subtitles that people who don’t speak Spanish, like me, can follow, and for focusing on a segment of the American population that’s rarely dealt with directly in the mainstream. It’s not the first time he’s had a character like Flor; in I’ll Do Anything Nick Nolte has a Latina neighbor who’s a mother and sometime babysitter. Brooks should also be praised for taking on another American unmentionable, class difference, which is also central in I’ll Do Anything and As Good as It Gets. He doesn’t show us Flor doing housework, but he does give us a funny if highly implausible scene in which she negotiates her salary with secret coaching from Deb’s mother.
