James L. Brooks’ movie Spanglish is a heart-warming tale retold by a daughter through her Princeton college essay about her mother. Essentially, the movie’s main “what if” could be summed as: what if a Mexican woman, who doesn’t know English, is hired as a maid by a wealthy family, whose members can’t speak a word of Spanish? There, you have a conflict to make a movie out of it. The result is miscommunication, a major clash of cultures and a passable comedy drama.
In this movie, a beautiful Latina single mother Flor (Paz Vega) had crossed the Mexican border illegally as she’s bent on securing a stable future for her 16 year-old daughter Cristina (Victoria Luna). Unfortunately, she never learned English as she works and lives in a place populated by Latinos. That’s a passable condition that makes viewers feel this is not Maid in Manhattan, a film that starred Jennifer Lopez. In order to survive, she needs a better-paying job and she’s compelled to work as a housekeeper in Malibu for the successful Southern California chef and restaurateur John Clasky (Adam Sandler). The laid-back though quietly-suffering John is married to the beautiful yet neurotic Deborah (Tea Leoni), who insists on raising her two kids with the help of the trendy methods concocted by best-selling psychologists (Scott, 2004).
Strangely, they hire Flor on the spot and it leads to several awkward and comedic employer-employee relationships. Deborah is a well-meaning boss who wants Flor’s daughter to fit in the family. Flor, in contrast, prefers separating her private life from her professional life and she comes close to losing her daughter to the all-American ways of life of the Claskys. Things get more complex as the Clasky marriage hits the rocks. As the maid, Spanish actress Paz Vega is tremendously beautiful who can put away the likes of Jennifer Lopez. However, she’s too young for the part and it’s hard to imagine her falling for somebody who looks and acts like Adam Sandler. It’s been established that Flor is no gold-digger and she prefers to earn a living the honest way, which would remind its viewers that it is a similar plot in Maid in Manhattan.
In the movie, it seems odd that Flor has been living in the United States for about 5 or 6 years still could not speak English well, unlike her daughter. Maybe, it was due to the fact that she was working hard enough to take two jobs in the Latino community that she did not have the luxury of time to learn the language. Upon bringing her daughter Cristina in the Clasky’s beach house, Flor felt worried about her daughter that she might imbibe the lifestyle of the Claskys. For example, on the second day after Flor took Cristina to the Clasky residence, Deborah took little Cristina off to have her hair streaked pink without permission from Flor, humiliating her own unglamorous daughter in the bargain. Because of this humiliation, Flor was angry at herself and at the thought that her daughter will become corrupted in the American culture, where upper-middle-class white parents are so generous but undisciplined and careless towards their children. She feared that, one day, when Christina is already a mother, she will do the same thing to her future son or daughter. Then, what really made Flor angry with John Clasky is that he gave Christina a large sum of money for the sea glass she found. It made Flor angry because she believed that people should acquire money from an honest day’s job and not as a reward. She is angry because Flor feels the guilt of her daughter exposed to a lifestyle she could barely afford to give to her. This is the same way that she felt after Flor learned that Christina is going to school with Bernice.
In the end, John Clasky explained that her daughter worked hard to find that glass on the beach. Eventually, Flor decided to learn English because she wants to communicate well with her employers. This occurred when Flor realized that she was just paranoid enough about the ills of American living and that she failed to account that there are still good American people who are there to help them. In the end, the feuding mother and daughter reconciled as Christina recognized her mother that all she had become was because she was her mother’s daughter.
Works Cited
Scott, A.O. “Triangle: Dad, Mom, Housekeeper”. New York Times, 154.53066 (2004): E24-E24.