Welcome to Tubi Tuesday. An ongoing experiment where we dig into some of the weird, underrated, and downright abysmal movies we don’t think our real life friends would let us talk at length about. At the time of writing, this movie is streaming for free on Tubi, the home of Super Bowl LIX!
Spanglish, James L Brooks’ maligned follow up to 1997’s As Good as It Gets, released in 2004 to little critical or commercial success. The 2004 dramedy follows two families; the first is Flor Moreno (Paz Vega) who relocates to Los Angeles from Mexico in search of better opportunities for her daughter Christina (Shelbie Bruce). The second family is the Claskys: Chef John (Adam Sandler), recently laid-off Deborah (Téa Leoni), and their kids Bernie (Sarah Steele) and Georgie (Ian Hyland) – along with grandmother Evelyn (Cloris Leachman). Two households, both alike in dignity, in fair Los Angeles where we lay our scene.
Flor comes to work for the Claskys for the princely sum of $650 a week, to alleviate the burden of Deborah – who is, one could charitably say, going through it as she is dragged into a new phase of her life. Despite Flor’s inability to speak English she is hired as a housekeeper and maid for this well-to-do Hollywood couple. That neither party can speak the other’s language is the premise one must accept for this movie to work – each literally in their own bubble until the moment their worlds collide. Even celebrated chef John has somehow managed to make a career in kitchens on both coasts without learning a word of Spanish.
Quickly the families merge in thorny and natural ways; Bernie and Christina strike up a quick and genuine friendship and John and Flor grow closer as Deborah strikes up a secret relationship with a realtor played by Thomas Haden Church. The messy and complicated ways that the Claskys take Flor and Christina for granted, and the sweet but misguided attempts by Flor to show love to Bernie all pile up until a climactic blow up involving $640 cash, the most beautiful sandwich ever put to screen, and Christina live translating between English and Spanish that you might have seen in an AI-narrated Youtube short called something like “She Finally Tells Him the Truth… It Changes Everything.”
Brooks’ languid LA epic that is less about cultural differences and it more about parenting differences, despite first appearances. Each of the primary parents has given up something to give their children a better life – Fleur gave up her home country, Deborah gave us her career, and John gave up a significant share of his restaurant’s earnings to spend more time with his kids. Even Evelyn stops drinking cold turkey to be there for Deborah and her grandkids.
If the film is remembered at all it is for Téa Leoni’s character, widely derided in both character and performance. But what is on screen belies a deeper wealth of pathos. The manic performance, the rash decisions, the refusal to compromise, all paint a picture of someone being dragged into a new phase of life kicking and screaming. The portrait is painted with broad strokes, sure, but her character is the lynchpin of this film. James L. Brooks asks the audience to recognize themselves in her, to accept without judgment the characters. Brooksian cinema, then, is about seeing the best and worst parts of ourselves all at once and being asked to embrace it all.
