![]() To baldly state the movie’s simple scheme, Juan is a walking corpse, killed by his 20 years in prison. This is Hollywood, so a happy ending is required–which we get, however illogically, with the requisite gunfire.ĭottie represents the life force, and like most life forces in movies she’s crude, foulmouthed, unfettered by the repressions of civilized folk, and sexy. To give him time for his love to blossom, Juan is continually frustrated in his efforts to contact his wife, who is conveniently falling in love with a cop. Juan considers Dottie low-class, but we in the audience can tell she’s the whore with a heart of gold he’s looking for. ![]() Families are given priority in the process of assimilation, and Dottie wants to speed things up, so she begins assembling her own Perez family, with Juan as her husband and a homeless street urchin as her son. I woke up.” Perhaps the constraints of Hollywood storytelling–the need to spell out the obvious so nobody in the audience is (heaven forbid!) confused–made it impossible for Nair to follow the almost subliminal storytelling pattern the opening promises.Īfter arriving in the promised land, Juan and Dottie are welcomed and quarantined in the Orange Bowl. When we’re told that the opening sequence is a dream, it’s almost like hearing a campfire horror story that concludes: “And then. All too quickly the mysteries are explained, and the magical universe becomes prosaic. ![]() Though this scene convincingly conveys a sense of magic realism, that sense evades Nair for most of the rest of the film. When the wave recedes, a crab is clawing at the leather. Are they looking for Cuba or America, for the past or the future? When a wave washes in, soaking the shoes of Juan Raul Perez (Alfred Molina), his shoes are so polished and pristine that the indignity is funny. The whole clan have entered the water in all their finery and are gazing at the horizon. When Nair cuts back to the shore, the camera cranes up and over a barren tree. In one cut Nair has communicated a sense of how fragile the family’s pleasures are, how the forces of history are waiting to swallow them up. The sound of crashing waves swells on the sound track, and with the next shot we’re out over the water looking back at the figures onshore. A large family dressed in their Sunday best are picnicking in the blinding sun. One can imagine her prepping for her role as a Cuban prostitute by consuming vast quantities of junk food (to add 30 voluptuous pounds to her skinny frame) while lying on a tanning bed (her body glows with irradiated heat) watching Carmen Miranda videos (to acquire that Down Argentine Way accent).ĭirector Mira Nair begins The Perez Family promisingly, on a white beach where we see two nuns drifting across the frame in slow motion. ![]() Continuing in Hollywood’s great tradition of “ethnological studies” is Marisa Tomei in The Perez Family. In a recent Hollywood romance, Don Juan DeMarco, Johnny Depp’s Latino part apparently required a tiny Ritz Brothers mustache (circa The Three Musketeers) and a Ricardo Montalban Fantasy Island accent. With Marisa Tomei, Alfred Molina, Chazz Palminteri, and Anjelica Huston.Īlmost 50 years ago, when fair-skinned Oklahoman Jennifer Jones played a Native American in Duel in the Sun, her makeup artists went overboard in their efforts to attain authenticity, taking the “redskin” slur literally: Jones looked as if she’d been dipped in a vat of red paint. Best of Chicago 2022: Sports & Recreation.
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