"Spanglish"

Want to know why Bush won? Watch James L. Brooks' smug message drama, which tries to skewer clueless liberal do-gooders but only succeeds in impaling itself.

By Charles Taylor

Dec 17, 2004 | In Douglas Sirk's 1959 "Imitation of Life" a homeless, widowed black woman and her small daughter are taken in by a widowed white woman with a little girl of the same age. Years pass. The white woman, Lora (Lana Turner), has become a successful actress. The black woman, Annie (Juanita Moore), works as her maid. She would have been destitute without Lora's beneficence and yet the movie shows us the divide that charity can't cross. In one scene, Annie envisions the friends who'll come to the funeral she has saved for and Lora says, "It never occurred to me you had many friends." In the least reproving tone imaginable, this woman, who has worked for and lived with her white employer for years, says, "Why, Miss Lora, you never asked."

That invisibility isn't lost on Annie's daughter, the now grown Sarah Jane (Susan Kohner). Sarah Jane is light-skinned enough to pass for white, and that's just what she does. She tells her mother that she doesn't want the only boys she meets to be "busboys, cooks, chauffeurs." Implicitly, she's telling Annie that she wants something better than to be a maid like her. All Sarah Jane finds is a job dancing at a sleazy nightclub -- but at least, she reasons, it's her choice, not a destiny she never asked for.

"Imitation of Life" is often snickered at as one of those soapy, sappy '50s movies we're supposed to have grown beyond. But Sirk's film is the toughest, most irresolvable movie ever made about race in this country. It depicts an America where denying your racial identity is a dodge and acknowledging it is a trap. It's a portrait of the differences that cannot be bridged by liberal good intentions.

As a measure of how much our movies have regressed, this holiday season brings us James L. Brooks' "Spanglish." Toward the end of the picture, the heroine, Flor (Paz Vega), a Mexican maid who works for a wealthy white Los Angeles family, takes her gifted daughter, Cristina (Shelbie Bruce), out of the exclusive private school to which Flor's employers have helped the girl win a scholarship. The reason, she tells her daughter, is that Cristina has to decide whether she wants to be a different person from the one her mother is.

In other words, the character set up as the film's moral compass tells her daughter that affluence and success are the province of corrupt white people with no sense of family or hard work or decency -- and accepting favors from them is the first step on the road to becoming as bad as they are. From a dubious heroine who tries to lie her way out of the trap of race to an unabashed heroine who teaches her daughter to accept the economic trap she exists in as a matter of cultural pride in just 35 years -- that's progress.

Doesn't Brooks realize that there are plenty of working-class people -- Latino, black, white, Asian, Arabic -- who'd risk their kids becoming people different from themselves if it meant that those kids would get to live a more secure, less backbreaking life than they have? The heartbreak of raising kids (or being someone's child) is that the success you wish for them often, if they achieve it, takes them beyond you. That's one of the sacrifices good parents make. It doesn't follow, however, that children who are more successful than their parents inevitably become bad people and leave the values they've been raised with behind.

Next Page: The movie is just as blinkered as what it's supposed to be exposing

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