A Better Life Review

Demián Bichir’s performance helps make up for a ropey script.

Considering the raw ingredients – an undocumented Mexican single father working all hours while struggling to keep his teenage son away from the local gangs – and the faintly didactic air of its title, it would be easy to dismiss About a Boy and New Moon director Chris Weitz's latest as a yet another trite, manipulative message movie. But that would only be partially true.

Granted there are few surprises throughout the 98-minute running time and great swathes of the dialogue seem to have been lifted from archived Oprah Winfrey Show transcripts; but at times the strong central performance and evocative sense of place succeed in transcending the somewhat shopworn script.

The film opens with said father, Carlos (Demian Bichir), twisted up beneath a frayed blanket on his tiny living room sofa with the eardrum-piercing sound of pneumatic drills and police sirens acting as an unwelcome surrogate alarm clock.

Outside the front door is the sort of down-at-heel multicultural LA neighbourhood that Tom Waits used to sing about, but we are soon taken to the other side of the tracks where Carlos spends his working day spraying weeds, shinning up palms and wrestling with topiary on the immaculate lawns of the city's wealthier residents.

His son Luis (José Julián) shows little gratitude for all this hard work, instead viewing his old man as the embarrassing embodiment of the racist stereotypes he is confronted with daily in the imposing concrete panopticon of his schoolyard.

Carlos sees the chance to improve his lot, and perhaps win back the respect of his son, when his boss, fellow Mexican émigré Blasco (Joaquín Cosio), offers to sell on his truck and client list before heading back south of the border. After reluctantly accepting a loan from his sister, Carlos takes on the business but with no papers and no driving licence the threat of deportation is constantly hanging over his head.

As soon as the initial setup is in place, things play out like a somewhat ham-fisted update of Vittorio di Sica's The Bicycle Thieves, with modern-day LA standing in for post-war Italy, and four wheels for two. And while the film inevitably suffers by so overtly inviting comparisons to such an illustrious forebear, Bechir's strong performance provides compensation of a kind.

Buffeted by fortune and circumstance from one mishap to the next, his Carlos is less a man than a deep, rasping sigh wrapped in a frown, and the dignity and hard-won pride Bichir imbues him with is surely worthy of stronger material.

Regardless of the several missteps there's no denying that lying beneath the clichés and plot contrivances is an all too real social problem that's profoundly affecting the lives of countless desperate families across Central America. In its straightforward representation of this, at least, the film can be considered something of a qualified success.