MOVIES: Spanglish

While on vacation, I watched the DVD of Spanglish. It's one of those Adam Sandler movies for people who don't like Adam Sandler movies, like Punch-Drunk Love and, to a lesser extent, The Wedding Singer. I like Adam Sandler in pretty much anything, I'll admit that right off the bat. I think Billy Madison is one of the funniest movies of all time. So it's no surprise that I liked Sandler here, too.

But Spanglish is less about Sandler than it is about Paz Vega, who makes her English language debut here. (Writer/director James L. Brooks even hammers home the fact that it's not really a Sandler vehicle by not even showing Sandler until at least ten minutes in.) Vega's character doesn't speak English at the beginning of the film, but that doesn't detract from her charms; she's so animated and expressive, it's always clear what she's communicating -- and her beauty doesn't require translation. However the names may be listed in the credits, she's the star of the film, and she does a fine job. I expect to be seeing a lot more of her in the near future.

Vega plays the live-in maid to an eccentric American family, headed by Sandler, his abrasive wife (Tea Leoni), his two kids, and his hard-drinking mother-in-law (Cloris Leachman in a very funny performance). Shelbie Bruce plays Vega's daughter, and the best scenes of the film are between the two of them. There's a fantastic confrontation scene between Vega and Sandler, in which Bruce must translate between the two of them, and she plays it beautifully, with fire and humor and emotion; it's the highlight of the film, and almost worth the rental just for that scene. Brooks lets Bruce down a little in other parts of the film, making her too shallow and petulant, and Bruce's performance falters, but from that one great scene, you can tell she's got a career ahead of her.

The highlights of the rest of the film are the tentative friendship, building toward romance, between Vega and Sandler. Sandler's character is a wildly successful man who is nonetheless beaten down by his wife, and life in general; Sandler plays it quiet and real, for the most part, with his trademark enraged outbursts limited to the times when he is alone in his car with Vega, away from everything that has crushed his spirit.

Where the movie fails, and fails spectacularly, is with the Tea Leoni character. She's awful. She's just awful. I suspect the movie wants us to view her as quirkily uptight and/or humanly but humorously flawed, but she's not. She's an irredeemably vile and repugnant woman, from beginning to end. She's thoroughly hateful to everyone in her life, from her children to her husband to her mother to her maid. She doesn't give even the slightest glimpse into what a sweet and caring character as Sandler's could ever have found to love in her. The movie makes it appear that Sandler will stay with her, rather than pursuing his romance with the maid, but it's a vague enough ending that I prefer to think that Sandler dumped Leoni's ass immediately after the end credits and ran off to the Spanish Riviera with Vega.

Also a bad idea is the framing device of the film, in which the story is told in flashback via a college application essay written by Vega's daughter (who is only 12 during the flashback). It's hokey and unnecessary, and it's simply bad; any application reviewer would shift it to the bottom of the pile, if not just throw it in the trash.

Still, when it's good, it's very good. More than worth renting.