Kelly Wand"Spanglish" review (by special request): A romedy for noveryone
July 11th 2008 13:05
Don't be fooled.
Dear Princeton University Admissions Board,
I just watched “Spanglish,” which is about eccentric white people as told through the eyes of a Princeton admissions board member reading the application essay by a 12-year-old Mexican girl named Cristina hoping to attend your university someday. I’m not sure what her grades were or what major she’s applying for, and at the end she says that her essay “doesn’t define her” so I guess she doesn’t really want to go to you, after all. We don’t find out at the end whether you like her words, presumably since writer/director James L. “Simpsons” Brooks wants to leave room for a sequel.
Cristina and her excruciatingly hot mother Floor (Paz Vega) are illegal aliens, which may also disqualify her from going to Princeton. They left Mexico after Floor got jilted by Cristina’s father (whom we never see, for reasons we’re never told). Floor loves Cristina so much, she lets her cry only one tear before leading her into the desert with some carry-on luggage. Luckily, instead of getting shot or dying of dehydration, they find a nice comfy bus that transports illegal aliens across the border. The bus takes them to Texas, but there’s too many white people there, so they go to L.A. where the mom hopes to score a job with some white people. I’m not sure what “Floor” means in Spanglish.
When they get to L.A., the little girl “starts to blossom,” as she puts it, and when the mom sees a boy put his hand on Cristina’s “bottom” at a dance, she’s shocked and horrified. Puberty isn’t really common knowledge in Mexico. The only solution, she clearly sees, is to move out of the barrio, find some rich white Anglos, and hope they don’t have boys.
Floor answers a housekeeping ad at a stylish gated house where the people are so rich, they keep twenties in their change-boxes out on the kitchen table, just in case company drops by. Floor’s job interview goes pretty well even though she speaks no English and has no references, since she brought along an English-speaking cousin named Sonia who, upon entering and responding to the deceptively beckoning gestures of the tenants, bashes face-first into the glass door and breaks her nose. “I’m not mad,” the lady of the house, a tightly-wound neurotic trainwreck named Deborah Clasky played by Tea Leoni, reassures her. (For those of you Princetonians too young to remember, Tea Leoni was the really hot chick from “Flying Blind” and “Bad Boys” who starting with “Deep Impact” began her second career playing crying hysterics, but at least she can’t be more annoying here than in “Jurassic Park III.” Right?) Floor’s other new bosses include Deborah’s sassy, tell-it-like-it-is alcoholic mom Evelyn played by Cloris Leachman (Olympia Dukakis called in sick), and a chubby little girl with braces, Leoni’s daughter Bernice. There’s also a son who sings but he’s not important (think teenage-daughter-in-“Polterge ist”) and of course the benign patriarch: Adam Sandler as a “top chef” who “works nights.” Jowly and curly-haired, Sandler looks like a cross between his fat-suited “Click” character and Albert Brooks (no relation) and acts like Ned Flanders.
Floor decides to celebrate her new life of more up-scale servitude by wearing a low-cut purple dress and taking Cristina to an expensive restaurant. Since she’s stunning and dressed to the nines, some dudes send a waitress over to her table to buy her a drink but Floor has her daughter tell the waitress to give those sleazos what-for. The waitress approves.
Tea Leoni gets mad at Adam Sandler for telling their son that he’s not mad at him (for unspecified crimes). Then she gets mad at him for cupping her boob. Then she gets mad at him for being “stark raving calm.” Why is Sandler married to this person? And how did the Cristina who’s writing this Princeton essay know about all these conversations when she wasn’t even in the house?
Though understandably stoked that there’s a hot Latina maid now hanging around polishing his doorknobs six days a week, Sandler’s nervous when he heads off to work (during the day, curiously) because a New York Times food critic is flying across the country that night to review his culinary skills and he’s terrified that he’ll get a four-star review. He used to work at a place in New York that “lost its soul” after a critic loved it, which caused “the accents” to change. Sandler decides to whip out the big guns for this East Coast gourmand: a tiny square of fried fish with some parsley on it.
Meanwhile, back at the mansion Granny sings some ribald show tunes she learned back in the Navy. “Thank god for the language barrier,” she tells Floor. “Keeps you from getting bored with me.” Floor looks away uncomfortably. Granny’s excited because a hip-hop star whose name she can’t recall saw her at the liquor store and knew her by name and told her that “whenever life is a mother******,” she puts on one of Granny’s records; “Oh my god!” the pudgy girl exclaims admiringly. Granny drinks some wine.
To “inspire” Bernice to lose weight, Tea Leoni buys her some clothes that are the wrong size. This upsets Sandler, so he takes a drive with Floor. “Bernice didn’t need this the night before finals!” Sandler yells, sobbing. Via Cristina’s voiceover, Floor confides to us and Princeton that Sandler strikes her as similar to “a Mexican woman” in temperament. And possibly genitalia.
Floor steals Bernice’s size-eight clothes and alters them in secret so that they’ll fit. Leoni never seems to notice. Just as Sandler feared, the review’s glowing. Tearfully Bernice reads aloud to the family the NY Times critic’s declaration that Sandler is “the best chef in the United States” based on that one meal. “Look how great you read it!” Sandler tells his daughter proudly, even though she’s at least twelve. Guess she has dyslexia. Or a learning disorder. Everyone slyly wonders aloud how Tea Leoni will react to the “news.”
Spoiler alert: with bad sex! More specifically, the most cringe-worthy scene between two actors I’ve ever seen on celluloid. It’s kind of like how in “Cannonball Run II”, they shot the Frank Sinatra lines separately, but if Sinatra had suddenly started humping Dom DeLuise using the same “trick” photography techniques. It’s also kind of like watching two actors who hate each other praying for death. It was so bad I watched it twice. At the end you believe Leoni’s tears are real (it’s her only cinematic sex scene in existence) and suspect the Princeton admissions board feels likewise.
Tea Leoni meets a slick real estate guy named Thomas Haden Church, played by the actor of the same name. He shows her his convertible and the effects of sunroof aperture settings on hair.
Leoni hires a paunchy stranger in a tank-top to teach Floor how to speak English, the better to understand her constant freak-outs. To seal the deal, Leoni tells Floor she and her daughter need to move in with her for the summer. It’s the only way.
Though dubious of having her daughter fraternize with affluent Anglos (“I didn’t know God had a toy-store for the rich,” Cristina exclaims at the sight of the ocean), Floor agrees to this arrangement. Right away her fears prove well founded: Sandler gives the kid six hundred bucks for collecting broken glass on the beach. Leoni takes Cristina to have freakish pink streaks painted into her hair (“You’re the most amazing white woman I’ve ever met!” the daughter gushes; “That’s so nice to hear!” Leoni sobs). Floor’s outraged by all this kindness to her daughter. She writes Leoni an angry note and has a ten-minute argument with Sandler while he’s trying to eat a fried-egg sandwich, which he rebuts by charging her with making his daughter happy through tailoring. Things get ugly. Slowly. And resolved. Instantly.
Floor drops a couple grand on English-language tapes, even though the whole reason she moved in with the family was to get lessons from the tank-top guy. She learns how to say commonly used phrases like, “I really enjoyed the Star Wars trilogy by Mr. George Lucas!”
Sandler sits in a freezer and eats some cheese. He falls in an alley. He visits Floor one night and starts to hit on her but gets tired and stumbles off.
Leoni takes Cristina to the same private school Bernice attends (even though it hasn’t seemed to help), where Cristina woos the headmistress by being “gorgeous.” Floor takes Sandler to the beach, where he tells her to “get out of the damn wind”.
Floor is saddened to see her daughter get on the school-bus, so she tries to out-jog Leoni on the way back to the house, but loses. “I love you for trying!” Leoni waves back cheerily.
Granny quits drinking and tells Leoni to stop sleeping with Thomas Haden Church or she’ll lose Sandler. Leoni takes this advice one step further and confesses her infidelity to Sandler in a geyser of phlegm. Sandler says he needs some time to think, then goes downstairs where Floor starts to announce her resignation (again) but farts, or the dog does something with a tennis ball. Impressed, he asks her to “hang out for a while,” so they drive off. He takes her to his restaurant and fries her some meat with asparagus. She’s enchanted. He’s enchanted. “They should name a gender after you,” he pleads. They kiss a little but instead of sleeping together they take their shoes off and have what Cristina tells Princeton was “the conversation of her mother’s life.” The only onscreen scrap of this we catch is Floor saying, “It’s getting late…” “You’re great,” he tells her.
Sandler comes home and moves into another bedroom, thus resolving the marriage storyline.
Floor goes to the private school to have a sobbing Cristina dragged soaking wet from its swimming pool, withdrawn from the school, and then to trail after her for the 1.3 mile hike to the nearest bus-stop.
“I am my mother’s daughter,” our young narrator concludes happily.
Signed,
Applicant
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