As staged by Nava, photographed by cinematographer Edward Lachman, and performed by Smits and Carillo, the scene is so intimate and emotional that it's almost too painful to watch. We feel that we're spying on the most important union of these lovers' lives; we're witnesses to the fusion of two souls. As they face each other, weeping and embracing, their coming together transcends sex. They're like two halves of a broken locket finally reunited.
The scene is indicative of Mi Familia's economy of means, and of its determination to reveal its characters in the most basic, emotional terms possible. The film is a masterwork of populist storytelling that manages to be simultaneously epic and intimate, artful and accessible. All the big events in life are represented along with plenty of smaller ones, from Pop Sanchez' conversation about the life cycle of corn with young Jimmy to a hilarious scene near the end in which a visit to the Sanchez home by a son's white future in-laws is interrupted by a naked grandchild dancing on a coffee table.
Yet the film never feels overstuffed or overdone because it's all leavened with a refreshingly earthy sense of humor, and because Nava, who cowrote the screenplay with Anne Thomas, displays astonishingly precise judgment as a dramatist, giving each scene its proper length and weight, making his points and moving deftly on. His love of his characters is based on their will to survive and persevere against the worst America can throw at them--racism, poverty, governmental injustice, family strife, even war. Nava doesn't draw a line between moments of deprivation and contentment. The two are always intertwined.
This idea is resonantly expressed in the film's final scene. The elderly Jorge and Maria Sanchez sit on their front porch, thinking back over their lives and the lives of their children and grandchildren. They've endured so much misery that we're primed for a big speech--for some kind of acknowledgment that life has been cruel to them and that they deserved better.
They don't say anything of the sort. Such an impulse barely crosses their minds.
Instead, Maria says, with disarming brevity, that the Sanchez family has had a good life. Her husband thinks about it for a moment and then agrees.
"Yes," he says softly. "We have had a good life."
Beneath the simplicity of their words is a message of extraordinary complexity. It's not the sort of thing you can summarize in a lifetime, let alone a single film. The scene recalls the much-debated finale of The Deer Hunter, in which the survivors of a Pennsylvania steel town torn apart by Vietnam gather together and sing "God Bless America." When that movie was released, three short years after the war's end, many critics argued the scene was facile and vague--too ironic, or not ironic enough. But what probably frustrated them was the idea that loyalty--to one's family, community, and nation--could transcend the most horrific catastrophes imaginable.
The Sanchezes say they've had a good life for the same reason that those steel town inhabitants sang a song of patriotism--because they are alive, in good health, and surrounded by friends and loved ones, and because you have to be brave to live in a brave new world.
My Family (Mi Familia). Fine Line. Jimmy Smits, Elpidia Carillo, Esai Morales, Jenny Gago, Edward James Olmos. Written by Gregory Nava and Anna Thomas. Directed by Gregory Nava. Now showing.
The Perez Family. Samuel Goldwyn. Marisa Tomei, Alfred Molina, Anjelica Huston, Chazz Palmintieri. Script by Robin Swicord, from Christine Bell's novel. Directed by Mira Nair. Opens May 12.
