There’s something
about a white director and a white screenwriter making a film about an
immigrant Latino family in Los Angeles that doesn’t sit right, like Steven
Spielberg or Norman Jewison directing movies about the African-American
experience. That director Chris Weitz was able to make such a simple and moving
family drama that portrays real characters without resorting to stereotypes shows
willingness and empathy on his part to get it right. He could not have been
successful without the touching screenplay by Eric Eason from a story by Roger
L. Simon and surely it helped that it was financed by smaller independent
studios, freeing the filmmakers to work outside the constraints of the studio
system that otherwise might have insisted on a story in which a white character
achieves self-actualization by helping non-white characters. Not that we’ve
seen that before in a popular film nominated for the Best Picture Oscar.
