Spanglish **** (2004, Adam Sandler, Téa Leoni, Paz Vega, Cloris Leachman) – Classic Movie Review 8447

Writer-director James L Brooks’ enjoyable and edgy 2004 rom-com drama Spanglish manages rare bite, truth and humour – and is just that little bit different.

Adam Sandler makes a very good job indeed of a straight role – and a difficult one since he is a totally good man – as a popular top LA chef and loving husband, tempted to leave his troubled and increasingly hysterical wife Deborah (Téa Leoni) for their lovely new Mexican live-in housekeeper, Flor (Paz Vega), a single mother who has been welcomed in with her young daughter.

The culture clash is decently explored in a well-observed, honest story, in which – bravely – there is a great deal of fairly posh talk but nothing actually happens. Spanglish is sentimental and girly, but it is also extremely touching and intelligent. And it does ramble, but it always comes back into focus.

Leoni does well with the largely unsympathetic wife role, making her credible and understandable, even appealingly vulnerable, and Vega is the fiery siren to the manner born. After too many years of dotty old lady parts, Cloris Leachman is rewarded with a chunky role she greedily eats up as Deborah (Léoni)’s all-seeing, nice-drunk, ex-jazz-singer mom. A knockout, she relishes this part and provides most of the film’s humour and warmth.

Brooks worked with Leachman on TV’s Mary Tyler Moore Show and Phyllis. She inherited the role from Anne Bancroft, who had to withdraw from the film for health reasons. Bancroft died of uterine cancer on 6 June 2005, aged 73. Her last feature was Heartbreakers in 2001.

Also in the cast are Shelbie Bruce, Sarah Steele, Ian Hyland, Victoria Luna, Cecilia Suârez, Ricardo Molina, Eddy Martin and Brenda Canela.

Spanglish is a dialect hybrid of Spanish and English spoken by 40 million Latinos living in the US.

It is Seville-born Vega’s US debut, speaking mostly in Spanish. Vega did not speak English and Brooks did not speak Spanish so there had to be a translator on set.

It was shot in sequence. The producers were nervy and conducted 13 public previews. But these test audiences disliked the ending so two new scenes were shot. The chefs in the kitchen scene are Le Cordon Bleu students from the cooking school in Pasadena, California.

By 2019, How Do You Know (2010) is Brooks’s most recent film, following Terms of Endearment, Broadcast News, I’ll Do Anything, As Good as It Gets and Spanglish.

© Derek Winnert 2019 Classic Movie Review 8447

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