Spanglish

Spanglish is an insightful, passionate story about the relationships between a mother (Flor) and daughter, both immigrants from Mexico, and the family that hires Flor as their housekeeper.

In spite of numerous lines of dialog, and even whole scenes in Spanish, I never felt that the movie was straining to make us Anglos understand. The script was cleverly written so that there is always some sort of logical translation--usually a bilingual character translating for an English-speaking character. The sole exception is, unfortunately, in the climactic scene, where the film resorts to a rather mundane voiceover that detracts from the emotion of the scene.

My favorite scene is one in which the Hispanic daughter translates for her irate mother. Not only is the girl an amazing actress, imitating first her mother, then the man she's talking to, but I was shaking my head in amazement at the hilarity and poignancy of the situation; a daughter forced into the middle of a fight between adults, but dutifully translating, even when it hurts her.

Spanglish looks, at first glance, like a typical romantic comedy. It is in fact a realistic look at the complexity of interactions between and within two families, and across language and cultural barriers.