Spanglish review

As he proved in Punch Drunk Love, Adam Sandler has more in his acting arsenal than annoying voices. He possesses a ready charm and unpretentious honesty that make him more endearing than many of the projects he picks. Thankfully it's the more subdued, subtler Sandler who graces Spanglish rather than the annoying Little Nicky version.

In writer director James L. Brooks' cross-cultural comedy, the histrionics are left to Téa Leoni, who plays Sandler's highly-strung, self-obsessed wife, Deborah Clasky. "Are you really that more of a better person than me," she inquires of her impossibly patient husband John, one of the country's leading chefs. "You don't set the bar real high," he responds drolly.

With Terms Of Endearment and As Good As It Gets, Brooks has shown himself an accomplished exponent of emotionally wrought romantic comedy. With Spanglish he has struck a similar tone. Combining an eclectic and ill-matched set of characters thrown together to provide the maximum emotional turbulence, the film possesses a sense of manipulation rather than authenticity.

The film opens with the voice of Christina (Shelbie Bruce), a young Mexican girl, as she extols the virtues of her mother Flor (Paz Vega) in her college application. The story then jumps back to when Flor and her first arrive in America. A reluctant emigrant, the beautiful Flor cocoons herself in Los Angeles' Mexican community before finally crossing the cultural divide and taking a job as a housekeeper for the wealthy Claskys. Wary of privileged American values, Flor is drawn into conflict with her daughter and her boss when Deborah takes a shine to the pretty Christina, seeing in her the image she hoped for her own, overweight daughter Bernice (Sarah Steele).

Caught in the middle is the affable John who is just looking for a quiet life and a level of career success that will allow him to maintain a degree of anonymity. John and Flor find themselves drawn together, though it seems to stem as much from a mutual dislike of Deborah as it does from a fondness for each other. Indeed quite what John and his wife ever saw in each other is one of Spanglish's more inexplicable elements.

Paz Vega is luminous as the fiery Flor, whose presence in the Clasky household only reinforces her fears about the distorted values of American society and confirms that in life there are far more important things than money and privilege. The message, though wrapped in cotton wool, is still delivered with little finesse.

Made palatable by the performances of Vega and Sandler, with the more abrasive edge provided by Leoni and Cloris Leachman as her over-bearing mother, Spanglish's weakness is failing to deal successfully with the very subject it addresses. Although it highlights the cultural divide that separates South America from the North, it suffers from failing to bridge the one separates the world according to Hollywood and the real world.

Kevin Murphy