The movie "A Better Life" is structured around several journeys. These involve not only the quest for economic progress according to the classical understanding of every migrant’s journey, but also a cultural journey (in the sense of discovering one’s roots) as well as, in a very powerful way, an emotional journey that will bring two people together. There are many obstacles encountered along the way, coalescing around emotions and the experience of fear, intimidation, anger and the general impulse that is best expressed by the father toward the beginning, an innate instinct for self-preservation that leads people to hunker down and not take chances. The undocumented immigrant in particular strives to fade into the background, tolerating conditions that most people would find intolerable, striving to becoming invisible because the alternative might be worse. But these obstacles are all overcome by the persistence of hope, by something that has lured immigrants to the country from the very beginning. It justifies the gut-wrenching dislocations that are always involved when someone decides to leave their home country and start a journey, crossing vast geographical and emotional distances. There is the hope that they can rewrite their histories and achieve a different, hopefully better, ending.
Carlos Galindo is a middle-aged Mexican immigrant who lives with his teenage son Luis in a desperately poor neighborhood in Los Angeles.It is a cramped house with what appears to be only a single bedroom, and it feels lonely and besieged. Despite the humble garden that he cultivates outside, one that makes the place seem just a little brighter and more inviting than the sum of these dispiriting concrete surrounding, he lives in a neighborhood that is volatile and dangerous. The house is perched on a slope and as a consequence things seem to be off-kilter and out of balance, like the emotional landscape within. His relationship can best be characterized as one of emotional austerity. There is little friendly conversation between the two, little informality, and Carlos seems shell-shocked most of the time, with a limited emotional vocabulary. Despite living together they barely communicate, and neither one appreciates the experiences of the other.
To reiterate, it is a gritty neighborhood of old houses and limited open space. The streets have many potholes, and there is the pervasive sound of police helicopters which of necessity circulate continually overhead add to the sense of being besieged. There are double sets of locks on the doors, and the curtains are always drawn closed, making it feel as if they live within a dimly-lit cave. The inhabitants, frustratingly, live within sight of a glittering downtown Los Angeles that seems dreamlike despite being so near.
This sets up a contrast, for the father is forced to scale heights on a daily basis as he and his employer (an elderly man named Blasco) drive from one part of town to another in a rickety old truck. Carlos works as a landscaper, pruning not the glittering skyscrapers of a teeming city of dreams but the palm trees that are emblems of wealth and desire. The owners of the many beautiful and luxuriant gardens found throughout Los Angeles seem to have little appreciation of the workers who attend to their needs. In all probability these workers can be seen as belonging to another world, a labor force best ignored.
Of course, immigrants always have to start out in the lowest rungs of the economic ladder. They are cooks and dishwashers, they gather on street corners at times to look for work, they perform hazardous work at construction sites, they work bent over in searing heat in the agricultural fields, and of course, they work as janitors and as landscapers. It can’t help but provoke in me a measure of vertigo to see these workers climb these tall trees, wearing only a modicum of gear, risking falls that could be fatal. These tragic accidents are a common occurrence, particularly among landscapers who are paid little and have to find creative ways to cut corners. They rely, as so much of the American economy does, on the work of unskilled laborers, particularly, on undocumented workers. What must it feel like for workers such as Carlos, an undocumented worker who has no safety net, no legal protections, no savings, no insurance, nothing to protect him?
His son Luis has to deal with dangers of a different sort. He attends a crumbling high school in his neighborhood, one beset by drug dealers and as heavily monitored by police officers as his neighborhood. There is no respite from this feeling of being contained and monitored, for this is an inner-city school. It is overcrowded and characterized by high dropout rates and low academic achievement, and it would seem to be a place where dreams crumble. It underscores the ironies involved that so many immigrants who undertake perilous journeys to the United States find themselves in precarious circumstances that seem fully as dispiriting as the ones they left behind.
Their respective circumstances are perilous and yet neither father nor son seems to understand the common difficulties they are facing. They are both reaching a crossroads, a moment when important decisions will have to be made, and the father is also undergoing what for him will be a gut-wrenching transformation. Will he continue to be a laborer without any hope of achievng a "better life"? Things can’t continue the way they have, because to do so would risk leaving a promise unredeemed.
It seems that Carlos’ boss Blasco will be retiring, and he has offered to sell the truck and the business to his employee. Carlos has a tantalizing prospect before him, that of becoming an owner and not an employee, with all that it involves about completing a psychic journey and finally gaining a measure of independence. But things are complicated. (When are they not so?). He needs the support of his family, since he needs a loan from his sister and he also needs to find a way to inspire his son with this dream, to make it all worthwhile again before he risks losing Luis forever. With so much invested in this decision, it is inevitable that further complications would arrive, namely, that the truck would be stolen.
I am struck by the blind and searing faith of Carlos, played powerfully by Mexican actor Demián Bichir. He has a universal quality in his demeanor and expression, one that I am sure would be familiar not just to a son of Mexican immigrant parents such as myself, but to anyone who had immigrant forbearers. Whether pioneers on the newly-settled plains of the American Midwest, or meatpackers in Chicago, or fishermen on the coasts, these parents sacrificed everything and endured punishing workdays, performing work so exhausting that it left them in a daze at the end, barely able to collapse into chairs or onto bed and sofas, as is the case with Carlos in this film who sleeps in his workclothes. Is it not the case, then, that these parents might be mistakenly seen to be lacking in a certain vitality by their children who are unable to understand why their parents might settle into an alcoholic stupor when they return home? Is it any wonder that they are perceived as being distant and uncommunicative, gruff in manner and unable to offer a word of encouragement to their children that isn’t accompanied by a threat? There is frequently an emotional desert that seperates the generations and that is just as arid and forbidding as the one that separates the United States from Mexico.
Forced as they are by circumstances and by the unsettling sight of his father’s panic, both father and son undertake a journey to find the stolen truck. In so doing they descend into a netherworld. This journey seems very reminiscent of classical mythology, for it is a descent into Hades, into a sort of underworld of starving and lost souls, one fueled by the perhaps irrational hope that they might be able to retreive something that had disappeared forever. (Trust? A renewed relationship between father and son?) They enter into this dark world searching not for Eurydice but for Santiago, the elderly and frail immigrant who stole his truck and lives in South Central Los Angeles, in an apartment complex teaming with tri-headed Cerberus figures who guard the entranceways, and who might not let them leave (the gangsters who lounge around the tenements, challenging all newcomers). They enter one apartment only to find a crowded warren filled with many single and desperate men, almost all of whom are undocumented immigrants like Carlos. It is a measure of his own emotional detachment that Luis is not able to see these men as analogues to his father, and it brings out the worst in him, a fury that his father tries desperately to contain. It is a scary journey, but it signals the start of a reencounter with his own father, and an evaluation of why the son has become so poisoned.
Is it any wonder that these sons and daughters find so little hope in their surroundings? They didn’t share in that great dream that drives so many migrants from their rural villages to the cities, from one country to the other, in overflowing boats and hidden in leaking trucks, crossing searing deserts with a few cans of tuna and a gallon of water. These sons and daughters of immigrants who don’t manage to make the initial climb up the socioeconomic ladder find themselves in circumstances that can't help but be considered degrading, dangerous, desperately unfair and at times hopeless. That is one of the things that distinguishes Carlos from his son. The father still holds on to hope, and he is the one who feels the burden of rekindling this dream in his son who is on the verge of becoming enmeshed in the gang culture that pervades these areas and that sees life as a form of perpetual warfare.
Father and son are thus undertaking a journey together, with the father recapitulating his role and perhaps functioning as a guide as he tries to rescue his son from his own netherworld. It leads to a cultural awakening on the part of Luis, to a realization that he isn’t that different from other Mexican-American kids, those who have managed to retain a firmer connection with their parent’s culture. It is also evident in the lesson of forgiveness, for they will find Santiago, and they will have to find another way out other than to engage in an act of violent retribution.
This is not a formulaic movie with a happy Hollywood ending, however. It is a movie that is emotionally honest, because it also captures the real-life perils faced by all people, by Carlos and Luis and by we ourselves as we try to understand our loved ones and try to cope with the confusion provoked by difficult circumstances. The most gut-wrenching scene is the final dialogue between the two, held in prison, when Carlos is finally able to answer the desperate question that had been posed earlier by his son: Why did you have me? It is a powerful scene, and Bichir captures the sense of hesitation but also the urgency involved in providing an answer to the son he may possibly no longer see. The pain is roiling across his face like temblors from an earthquake, and we can see how much it pains him to break through that barrier of restraint, that feeling that so many of our parents retained from cultures that are much more emotionally restrained, especially in their interactions between parents and their sons and daughters.
My parents were certainly the same way, feeling very uncomfortable expressing their feelings with us and being what we came to think of as emotionally-crippled. Perhaps we were too judgmental, and perhaps we didn’t understand that it was a reticence that comes from a certain mindset, one that is rooted in rural stoicism, in the certainty that, as in a Juan Rulfo story, tragedy was always around the corner for those who were born poor the way our parents were in their ranchitos in Mexico or other parts of Latin America. In their framework perhaps the best way to deal with it was not to give expression to your feelings but instead to internalize them, to repress them, to bind them into a knot and bury them deep down inside.
My parents were certainly the same way, feeling very uncomfortable expressing their feelings with us and being what we came to think of as emotionally-crippled. Perhaps we were too judgmental, and perhaps we didn’t understand that it was a reticence that comes from a certain mindset, one that is rooted in rural stoicism, in the certainty that, as in a Juan Rulfo story, tragedy was always around the corner for those who were born poor the way our parents were in their ranchitos in Mexico or other parts of Latin America. In their framework perhaps the best way to deal with it was not to give expression to your feelings but instead to internalize them, to repress them, to bind them into a knot and bury them deep down inside.
It is a searing culmination to a film about journeys, and it is more honest because of it. Both characters have come to a crossroads and, while they may have to separate, they are closer than ever. The journey is complete, and the father has managed to communicate his hopes to his son, believing as he does in the inevitability of an eventual reunion, and in the promise of a "better life". The father has redeemed his son. They have redeemed each other.
OGRomero © 2013
OGRomero © 2013
No comments:
Post a Comment