Customer Reviews

Spanglish (Zohan Movie Ticket Offer)

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When movie trailers come out months before the release of a film and movie billboards crowd the malls and other places trying to convince the public of what to expect (read 'how can we guarantee making the most money from the biggest crowd?'), it is difficult to get motivated to step over the hype and decide for yourself the merits and message of a little movie.

SPANGLISH used slapstick approach, beginning with focus on Adam Sandler of the superfluff/toilet mouth 'comedy' genre, to publicize this little story into a COMEDY. That was enough to keep this viewer out of the theater. But seeing James L. Brooks current opus at home without all the hoopla of the theater crowd resulted in a pleasant discovery: this is a well-written little drama, peppered with some comedy, that addresses a lot of issues about parenting, cross-ethnicity, living your dream vs skimming off the top, having loyalty to the inner self, the desperate need for communication in today's loud world, alcoholism, etc. Not the stuff for slapstick, nor is it treated that way.

John Clasky (Adam Sandler in a straight role that allows him to show substance over pratt falls) is a successful chef who is able to support his family with a home in Beverly Hills and a summer home at the beach (obviously Malibu). His wife Deborah (Tea Leoni in a wildly dysfunctional mother role which she handles well), in desperation for breathing room to pursue her lackluster life, hires a non-English speaking Latina maid Flor (Paz Vega) who has immigrated to the US with her young daughter Cristina (Shelbie Bruce, a amazingly bilingual young actress) to make a life for herself after her husband has left her. Deborah's daughter Bernice (Sarah Steele) is overweight and the victim of her mother's misconstrued attempts to correct her problem at the expense of acknowledging Bernice's self worth.

Though busy with his successful restaurant, John finds time to be a loving father, a husband who is as supportive of his wild wife as is possible, and who gradually finds in the new Flor a gentle, honest, compassionate/passionate human being that seems to be a soul mate. Things progress quickly: Flor learns English via language tapes on TV, Cristina moves in with the family when the move to Malibu occurs, Deborah dotes on the bright, attractive Cristina while ignoring her own daughter, Flor tends to the emotions of Bernice, and finally a marital crisis occurs which places into focus the idiosyncrasies of all members of the extended household (including Deborah's alcoholic mother - Cloris Leachman, as brilliant as ever).

The manner in which Brooks brings this chaos to closure does not sell out the way most stories do: there are no pat answers here but altered individual perceptions are suggested and we are given the opportunity to resolve them as we wish. Is this a comedy? No, though there are many cleverly funny lines and situations. This is a pertinent drama, unfortunately mislabeled in name and in media approach. For this reviewer this is a tender film about family needs and personal goals. The cast is excellent, each member taking risks that prove to be successful. Give it a try! Grady Harp, April 05

I don't particularly love Adam Sandler's comedies. Fortunately, "Spanglish" is not one of them! It's more of a James L. Brooks movie. Once again, he writes, directs and produces, as he did with the classic "Terms of Endearment" back in 1983, and more recently, with "As Good as It Gets".

Sandler plays John Clasky, a renowned chef who is in the prime of his professional career. He's the classic "good guy", who loves his family and keeps a great balance between the time he devotes to work and the time with his kids. Plus he loves his insecure wife Deborah, played by Tea Leoni (Deep Impact, The Family Man), one wacky lady who has put her career on hold to raise her family.

Complementing the cast is Paz Vega, who broke into international stardom playing Lucia in "Sex and Lucia". She plays Flor (with rolled "R" at the end), a protective Mexican mom who wants to stay as close as possible to her native Mexican values, even while living in the heart of L.A., cleaning and cooking for the Clasky family.

While the plot does lead into some predictable events (don't mean to spoil the story for you), this is not your "typical" Adam Sandler movie. As a matter of fact, some of the most hilarious moments are not courtesy of the legend from "The Wedding Singer" and Saturday Night Live, but rather the result of the head-on encounter of two cultures, where no side can speak the other's language or easily understand each other's motivations.

With a balance between humor and drama that is preserved throughout most of the plot, the movie stands a good chance of being almost as popular as "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" was a back in 2002.

Everyone in this movie gives an amazingly moving performance. Not only is it Adam Sandler's best performance(because he is not trying to be a fool!), but also Tea Leoni's. She shows herself to be a fine comedic actress with amazingly perfect timing. Also remarkable is Paz Vega, especially when you consider that she learned English in the movie along with the character she plays(life imitating art!). Even the children were perfectly convivncing. I hope you get a chance to see the deleted scenes, many of which should have been left in! Some of them are very funny, and some very touching. A simple way to state the lesson that this story eloquently expresses, is the difficulty people in families have in communicating with each other, whether they speak the same language or not. This is an excellent example of how it is possible for a perfect movie to come out of the great Hollywood machine! All fans of the independent style film will love this movie and it is a great family film, as well.

Spanglish has some intensely quirky performances, and while at times it's a little over-romanticized, the film does raise a lot of hot-button issues about the Los Angeles cultural divide, where the barrio-driven east meets the glitz and upper middle class glamour of the Westside.

A lack of communication seems to be de rigor in this world, where drunken matriarchs are ignored, where husbands and wives don't talk, and where the Latina hired help struggle to overcome the language barrier and be understood. Spanglish portrays an American family on the verge of crisis; they move through their days in a state of perpetual but agreeable sadness, with each loving the other, but so self absorbed and dysfunctional that they're miles apart emotionally.

John and Deborah Clasky (a wonderful Adam Sandler and Tea Leoni) are married and living in a gorgeous home in Beverly Hills. John owns a five star restaurant, but he's recently been able to cut back his hours to spend more time with his family - he's a nice, affable, and genial fellow who deeply loves his slightly overweight daughter Bernice (Sarah Steele).

John is the emotional opposite to the highly-strung Deborah, who spends her days shopping, streaking her hair, and fanatically jogging to keep her svelte figure intact. Deborah is spoilt and self-absorbed; she treats sex as an aggressive sport and her comfortable life is a daily challenge.

When young Mexican single mother Flor (Paz Vega) takes her daughter, Cristina (Shelbie Bruce) to Los Angeles in search of better opportunities, she gets a job as housekeeper at the Clasky family home. The family immediately welcome her into their midst, with Deborah quick to gush "your gorgeous!" while her wine swilling Mum, a former jazz singer (a riotous Cloris Leachman) observes in knowing silence.

Flor is shocked at the level of family competitiveness: at first she's content just to observe the family's antics, but soon she begins to get involved. John, estranged from Deborah, gradually becomes attracted to Flor; he respects and admires her niceness and sense of motherly duty. And Flor, only ever experiencing Latin macho men, has never come across a sensitive new age guy like John, who has all his priorities sorted and bares his emotions easily.

When Deborah brings Flor and Christina to stay at their summer beach house, Flor soon becomes resentful when Deborah begins to take Cristina under her wing and introduces her to the affluent, moneyed life. Deborah's endlessly errant behaviour begins to causes friction, and the household begins to spiral out of control.

Vega gives a linguistically masterful performance as Flor; she's a wide-eyed neophyte, a bravely dedicated mother, and a love-stung girl. Sandler is also perfect as the soft-spoken John, who is just as fearful of his overwhelming success as a chef, as he is of Deborah's uncontrolled, frenetic outbursts.

The film, however, belongs to Tea Leoni, she's a gifted physical comedienne, who plays a woman who just can't seem to handle the demands of modern life; she's constantly frazzled, continually overwrought, and often wound tighter than a knot. It's a pitch perfect, vivid, and fully realized portrait of well-heeled, upper middleclass mayhem and dysfunction.

The central players are like real people touched with a faultless dose of comic exaggeration and the viewer cannot help but empathize with them all. Spanglish says much about the art of belonging, whether it's within a loving family or the often-painful, moneyed American class structure. With cultures colliding, and the social stratum transforming, actually knowing where you belong, and who you are, is in the end, probably far more valuable and beneficial to the soul than assimilation and integration could ever be. Mike Leonard April 05.

Another reviewer here calls the movie "an absolute work of art encapsulating the deepest and most significanty fundamental ideas of giving up that which we love, or which we yearn to become for the sake of our children." I agree. But I think it's about even more besides the mother/daughter, generational/cultural values tug-of-wars.

Spanglish "opens the serape" on glaring American manias and cruelties that we seem to have become blinded to: the driven, masculinized American white woman who has lost the power of feminity and unintentionally but inexorably torments herself and her family; the ethical and cultural dilemmas posed by the Grand Canyon socioeconomic divide between Anglos and Latinos. Especially in California, a Latino "underclass" props up every corner of the affluent middle-class lifestyle. Who cleans the sprawling houses, buses tables and washes dishes in restaurants, mows the lawn and tends the garden, builds the subdivions and strip malls? I could go on and on. It's a new caste system that whites, as top dogs, seem oblivious to.


Spanglish reveals all the messy realities with a compassionate eye, humor and visual gloss. Balancing on the tightrope between pure entertainment and profound human and social insight while making us laugh is what makes this a masterpiece. The movie's flaws, like it's characters, are ultimately forgiveable because they are so universally human. I buy few DVDs, but this will be one of them.

The problem with SPANGLISH is that it doesn't seem to know which characters it's really "about." The film can't decide whether the Klasky family is its focus or if the focus is their maid Flor, played by the beautiful Paz Vega.

Adam Sandler and Tea Leoni play a successful couple with a bad marriage.

Sandler plays his character as a charming but befuddled doormat who only occasionally asserts himself, though he never does that with his wife.

Deb Klasky, Leoni's character, is a particularly unpleasant character. She's horribly insensitive, totally neurotic and makes some awful, awful choices. And then, for some reason, the film offers her character no ending whatsoever.

I was waiting for there to be some resolution. I wanted to know what happened to the Klasky marriage. I wanted to know where the movie went from its central confrontation.

But nothing happened.

I don't know why the movie can't be about both Flor AND the Klaskys - giving all the plots a proper resolution, but director James L. Brooks apparently thinks, at different points in the film, that it's about one set of characters or the other.

So we're left with some characters that get no definition at all (the Klaskys have a son who gets almost no screen time), some plotlines that are just left dangling (when does the young girl stand up to her mother?) and some confrontations that the movie seems to build toward that just never happen (Deb and Flor should have one more conversation).

Also, the movie is told by a narrator who CAN'T know all the things the movie is telling us.

On my way out of the theater after SPANGLISH, I heard one woman tell another that they liked it and liked, most of all, that it didn't have a traditional "Hollywood ending."

I found it uneven, and I found its ending a cheat.

I always think of Adam Sandler as silly but he has surprised me. 50 First Dates was quite a surprise which I enjoyed sufficiently to purchase the DVD. I then received Spanglish on our Netflix account and again was surprised by the lack of silliness; in fact I thought it had great depth if a bit slow. I just purchased the DVD at Fry's Electronics to add to our collection of our favorite movies.

To me the best thing about this movie was how it held to good moral standards in the face of temptation. There were a few really good lines as well and I found the entire movie quite plausible. Even my 15 year old son thought it was good.

James L. Brooks' latest movie, Spanglish, seemed to fly right under the critical and commercial radar despite the presence of Adam Sandler. Perhaps it was the misleading trailers that pegged the movie as some kind of goofy Sandler comedy. This couldn't be farther from the truth as the story is told by a young Mexican girl named Christina about her mother, Flor and their misadventures in America.

Those expecting Spanglish to be a typical Sandler movie will be disappointed. Brooks prolongs his first on-screen appearance for as long as possible and when it does happen it is in a subtle, understated way with no fanfare. For the first half of the movie, Sandler plays a supporting role, allowing the other actors room to do their thing and then, in the last half, he comes to the foreground as the drama between him and Leoni's character comes to a boil. As brilliant as he was in Punch-Drunk Love, Sandler is even better in Spanglish, dropping most of his usual schtick by playing a nice, normal guy who loves his family. He hits all the right comedic beats but in a quiet, restrained way and ably handles the serious moments too.

Ultimately, Brooks' films are about tolerance and optimism in a time when our society is so cynical and jaded. His movies happen in spite of the world outside. Very few mainstream American films deal with class differences and Spanglish tackles it head on as Flor and her daughter's Mexican heritage clash with the Clasky's upscale world.

There is an audio commentary by writer/director James L. Brooks and the film's editors, Richard Marks and Tia Nolan. He speaks eloquently about Spanglish with the editors chiming in occasionally.

There are 12 additional scenes, totaling 30 minutes, with optional commentary by Brooks and his editors. We see some of the footage of Flor and Christina in Mexico and a funny scene that gives Georgie more screen-time and pays off an earlier gag where Evelyn was teaching him jazz songs. With most cut footage it is readily apparent why they were cut but most of this footage is excellent and could have been kept in if it hadn't extended an already fairly long movie.

"HBO First Look: The Making of Spanglish" is a standard press kit featurette with soundbites from Brooks and the cast mixed with clips from the movie.

"Casting Sessions" features footage of some of the supporting cast auditioning for the movie with optional commentary by Brooks. It becomes immediately obvious that these actors were perfect for their roles and that Brooks is a genius at casting his movies.

"How to Make the World's Greatest Sandwich featuring Thomas Keller" features footage of the chef (and film's technical advisor) showing Adam Sandler how to make the killer looking (and apparently tasting) modified BLT that his character makes in the movie. Brooks narrates this extra which, in a nice touch, includes written ingredients and instructions so that you can make it on your own!

If you were like me and just thought Adam Sandler was only good for romantic comedies, this movie will make you rethink everything! He was exquisite in this witty, sweet and thought-provoking picture. To me this movie was about the unappreciated members in families that do all the work at keeping it together. Two characters find solace and some much needed appreciation from each other. It really makes you aware of the hard work families can be, but how much it is worth it, when you put forth the effort. There's a point in the movie where these two characters share this wonderful moment with each other, and it became apparent to me that that's all life is, a series of moments that help to define who you are. This was an absolutely excellent movie and I highly recommend you enjoy the experience!

The reason so many people talk down this movie is due to seeing what we take for granted. People saw Sandler in the previews, they thought they were going in for a few chuckles and sat through it saying 'what is this'. It was way over their heads, the movie was an absolute work of art encapsulating the deepest and most significanty fundamental ideas of giving up that which we love, or which we yearn to become for the sake of our children. This explicit message is carried through the entire film until the very end where it becomes another mother-daughter spinoff. The overall illustration is the personal sacrafice one must make when raising a child.