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SPANGLISH unfolds with Mexican immigrant Flor Moreno (Paz Vega of SEX AND LUCIA and TALK TO HER) applying for work as a housekeeper with L.A. chef John Clasky (Adam Sandler) and his wife Deborah (Téa Leoni). John is a superlative culinary talent, but he is so unassuming that he fears receiving a four-star rating from a food critic will turn him too elitist. Deborah is a former career woman who has been downsized into full-time motherhood to Bernice (Sarah Steele) and Georgie (Ian Hyland). Flor’s interview has to take place with a translator at the table, and the only real meeting of the minds that happens is that Deborah, after several attempts, learns to roll the “r” in Flor’s name. Deborah is so juiced after this dubious triumph that she hires Flor on the spot. From there, Flor finds herself spending the summer with the Claskys at their Malibu beach house, and she brings along her impressionable daughter Cristina (Shelbie Bruce) despite grave misgivings about introducing her to this heady sphere.

An uneasy mixture of intimacy and discord ensues as each parent gets entangled in the heartaches and aspirations of children who are not their own. When Deborah buys Bernice’s clothes a size too small to goad her into dieting, Flor takes it upon herself to let them out. Deborah, disappointed in her daughter’s pudgy plainness, focuses on the unadorned but beautiful Cristina, who makes an avid makeover subject and an ideal candidate for a scholarship to Bernice’s ritzy private school. Flor and John warm to each other as they both worry about how a blue-blood education will shape their daughters’ identities, but she is underwhelmed by him as Man of the House: he addresses his wife as tentatively as one might speak to a caged beast while the tranquilizer dart takes effect. SPANGLISH fulfills a lot of the story’s potential as it examines affluent people and their live-in domestic help navigating treacherous relationship boundaries.

But Brooks doesn’t have the film firmly in his grasp. He’s having more and more trouble conjuring the complex, sympathetic female leads of his earlier films. TERMS OF ENDEARMENT is all about men struggling to keep pace with the backbone and verve of Aurora and Emma Greenway. BROADCAST NEWS (my pick as Brooks’s crowning achievement) is ruled by the lovably workaholic Jane Craig, who upholds professional and personal integrity by sidestepping romantic relationships with two male colleagues, one a little too willing to be false and one a little too willing to be cruel. AS GOOD AS IT GETS has a stalwart, wisecracking single mom in Carol Connelly, but she is written less winningly and she is further blunted by the limitations of Helen Hunt, who can’t create any characterization more than a stone’s throw from Jamie Buchman (the only reason I don’t begrudge Hunt her Oscar is that I didn’t like any of the other nominated performances in 1997 any better). With SPANGLISH, we have in Deborah Clasky a singularly repugnant rich white woman. Every moment she is on the screen she is the epitome of oblivious insensitivity and hyper-verbal self-involvement. Watching her has its rewards because of the sheer wealth of nasty detail and because Leoni plays her with such brilliant shrill abandon, but you wonder why her creator didn’t give her a few virtues.

Brooks also does Flor a disservice, in a way. OK, he intends her to be the total package as a woman and as a mother, and she is, but the character could just as easily have been played by an Anglo actress. All the interesting points being made here are solely about a socioeconomic divide; there’s no delving at all into Latino culture specifically or ethnic differences in general. So the title of the film and the language barrier that is milked for so much of the first half (Flor eventually learns English via a series of commercial audiovisual aids) fall a bit flat. As Flor rattles on in Spanish and tries to interpret her employers’ English instructions, Paz Vega takes us through an admirably diverse repertory of quizzical gestures—shrugs, drawn eyebrows, head cocks, and chin juts. The rest of her performance is everything one could wish for in luminous indignation.

This outing will not derail Adam Sandler’s plans to integrate more dramatic work into his resume. He’s very engaging and genuine in this part. But John is not a very formidable foil for either woman, and that’s at least partly a Sandler issue. He can only benefit from more practice on characters that have stepped fully into adulthood. Yes, there are some elements in the character of John that should echo the put-upon, maladroit man-child that Sandler usually plays, but there are too many times here when John loses stature because Adam shifts into that Muppet-like version of his real voice. What would someone like Brooks alum Greg Kinnear, or Sam Rockwell, or even John Corbett have done with this part?

Cloris Leachman, a Brooks collaborator during their “Mary Tyler Moore Show” years, plays Deborah’s mother Evelyn, a retired chanteuse. She is the perfect mouthpiece for the movie’s most insouciant lines. Sarah Steele has very individual presence as Bernice, making her wry but not terminally disaffected, and vulnerable but not Damaged Goods. Shelbie Bruce’s Cristina also seems very natural, more girlie without being more vapid.

I think SPANGLISH could have salvaged many of its story problems if it had aimed higher with its ending. Instead, the last half-hour is unforgivably lowbrow. It turns out that Deborah has been cheating on John with her real estate broker (a fleeting cameo by Thomas Haden Church), but surely her failings are numerous enough already, and she and John have plenty to resolve without adding illicit sex to the mix. Anyhow, with that provocation, John entertains the idea of an affair with Flor. But having the two of them engage in a cheap will-we-or-won't-we debate tramples the satisfying ambiguity of the other layers of affinity between them. Well, at least the extreme and specific nature of Deborah's transgression startles Evelyn into putting aside her vodka tumbler and mustering some sage maternal advice.

I have to go with fours stars here, since, in the local parlance, that translates to "worth a look." James L. Brooks is always worth a look, even slightly off his game. But the trend in his movies toward the heavy-handed seems to be cause for concern--I'd be curious to see if he would do better next time out adapting someone else's material, as he did with ENDEARMENT. A great novel with the Brooks knack for the screen is a nice prospect.

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originally posted: 12/29/04 22:13:55
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