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Bread And Roses

2000, Movie, R, 105 mins

Bread And Roses: Review

BREAD AND ROSES
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The opening sequence of director Ken Loach's latest piece of well-meaning agit-prop is ominously headache inducing — a montage of Mexican migrant workers crossing the California border, shot with some of the most annoying hand-held camera moves since THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT. Fortunately, the film quickly becomes something more enjoyable, if not necessarily more original: It's a 21st-century, barrio update of NORMA RAE (1979). Here the initially politically unformed heroine is young migrant Maya (Pilar Padilla), whose reunion with her tough, Los Angeles-based sister, Rosa (Elpidia Carrillo), gets off to a rocky start. Maya is almost raped by one of the creeps who run the border-crossing racket, but thanks to the screenwriting gods she's able her to bluff her way out of the encounter so skillfully that viewers will doubtless find themselves quietly mouthing the word "plucky." Soon after, the Ron Liebman-style labor organizer makes his appearance in the person of Sam Shapiro (Adrien Brody), an intense young man with Woody Guthrie posters on his apartment wall. He and Maya meet when security guards chase him around the ritzy high rise where both she and Rosa are working as janitors, under sweatshop conditions. From here on, the story follows the NORMA RAE template rather faithfully: Workers reluctantly unionize, workers are threatened and dehumanized by scumbag boss (George Lopez), workers sing songs of solidarity, workers eventually beat the system. The characters also have a similar sort of stock quality, the propagandistic equivalent of commedia dell'arte archtypes, in particular Maya's Latino boyfriend Ruben (Alonso Chavez), a brooding would-be intellectual who's working his way through law school, and stepfather Bert (Jack McGee), whose lapse into a diabetic coma serves mainly to illustrate the lack of affordable health care in our society. It's easy (perhaps too easy) to be a little cynical about a film like this; in some ways, it feels like a throwback to the '30s, like an Odets play with Spanish subtitles. Still, it's not as if the situations Loach is dramatizing don't actually exist, and despite the never-in-doubt triumph of the union there are also enough unexpectedly dark moments scattered throughout to keep the whole thing from lapsing, fatally, into kitsch for progressives. Meanwhile, keep a sharp eye out during the film's pivotal party protest scene; you'll be rewarded with brief (and somewhat ironic) glimpses of Benicio Del Toro, Ron Perlman and Tim Roth as themselves. leave a comment --Steve Simels
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