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Film Review: A Better Life

Olly Mann enjoys a different sort of Chris Weitz film in which no one puts their dick in anything.

By Olly Mann

28 Jul 2011, 21:34

Chris Weitz is having an unpredictable career. With brother Paul he directed American Pie, the teen caper that’s widely credited with reviving the frathouse genre, but that actually created a new one – the feelgood romantic comedy about putting your dick in things. So lucrative was the formula that it generated no less than two sequels (aka Dick in Superglue and Dick in a Grandmother) and four straight to video spin-offs. Apparently American Pie 4 is coming soon (Dick in a Cement Mixer, perhaps?). But Weitz went his own way after the very first piece of Pie, helming the bittersweet and charming About A Boy, the disappointing fantasy The Golden Compass and, most recently, the True Blood For Kidz money-machine, Twilight: New Moon.
 
Pretty eclectic. Still, I wouldn’t have predicted his next move would be A Better Life, a low-key, low-budget drama about illegal immiagrants in California, with no star attached and a script that’s half in Spanish. But what a superb job he’s done. He’s created an involving and emotional story about one man’s struggle to achieve the American dream as the odds stack ever higher against him.
 
That man is Carlos (Demián Bichir, previously seen as Castro in Che), a gardener working day and night to make ends meet, despite the threat of deportation hanging over his head. Caught in a catch 22, he needs to buy a truck to support his teenage son Luis, yet if he attempts to buy one legally he’ll be sent back to Mexico and his son will have to fend for himself. Meanwhile, Luis (José Julián, an excellent debut), is facing his own tough choices: should he join the tattooed ranks of the futureless, mindless neighbourhood gangstas, or follow in his father’s footsteps, working hard but to no avail? It seems whatever he chooses he will, in some sense, be hustling on the streets; streets daubed with grafitti saying, ‘too many Mexicans, not enough bullets’.
 
If all this sounds a bit polemical and sentimental, that’s because it is. At times A Better Life feels like it has been whipped up by West Coast liberals purely to be shoved in the face of Tea Party-supporting anti-immigrationists; a riposte to those who endorse the controversial policies in Arizona and California that tighten regulations against border-hoppers and separate them from their US-born children. But, whilst it is indeed very sympathetic -  heartbreaking, at points - it’s never unconvincing or trite. Another film can and no doubt will be made which is more hard-headed about illegal immigrants, highlighting their links to the criminal underworld, or caricaturing Mexicans along similar lines to Richard Hammond’s racist joke on Top Gear, as ‘lazy, feckless, flatulent, leaning against a fence, asleep, looking at a cactus.’  

This is not that film. This is a compelling, brilliantly acted film that makes you yearn for its prinicpal characters to succeed. And no one puts their dick in ANYTHING.