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Movies & TV Movies & TV Reviews

A Better Life

A BETTER LIFE (Chris Weitz). 98 minutes. Some subtitles. Opens Friday (July 15). See listing. Rating: NN


After the grandiose fantasy of The Golden Compass and the tween-pandering Twilight sequel New Moon, director Chris Weitz tries to reinvent himself as his generation’s Stanley Kramer with A Better Life. Stranger things have happened.

Echoing Kramer’s moralistic 60s dramas, A Better Life is an unapologetically melodramatic look at Los Angeles’s immigrant culture as seen through the eyes of middle-aged, undocumented Mexican Carlos Galindo (Demián Bichir).

Carlos – whose eyes shine with the goodness in his soul – works as a landscaper so that his American-born teenage son Luis (José Julián) might have, well, a better life. Finally able to afford his own truck, Carlos immediately loses it to a shifty worker, sending father and son through the underworld of immigrant culture to find the thief and retrieve the vehicle.

I had the feeling I was supposed to marvel at the authenticity with which Weitz constructs his mawkish Bicycle Thieves update, but instead I kept noticing how utterly one-dimensional all the characters are, including the noble Carlos and the resentful Luis, who slowly grows to appreciate his father’s constant sacrifices.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that it’s just that Weitz insists on highlighting the process, the better to make sure we don’t miss it. It’s as though he’s suddenly realized that the people who mow his lawn have inner lives, too.

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