My heart sank a little when Carlos (Demián Bichir), a Mexican working as a gardener in Los Angeles to support his teenage son Luis (José Julián), lays out all of the reasons he should not buy a truck near the beginning of A Better Life: No license, no papers; fear off getting pulled over, or into an accident. On the terms of the illegal immigrant narrative, fulfillment of the worst case scenario is a foregone conclusion.
Films like Babel, Fast Food Nation, and Under the Same Moon have laid out the agonies occurring over the United States' southern border with varying degrees of bathos. Weitz's touch with the subject is only slightly lighter than that of the newly established norm, but the film benefits from its grounding in a nuanced take on a classic storyline. I'm talking about Bicycle Thieves, the Italian neorealist film about a man struggling to support his family in post-World War II Rome. For Carlos, as with Antonio in Bicycle Thieves, the vehicle represents agency, the ability to provide and thrive. But rather than an adoring tyke in short pants for a son, Carlos has the surly product of a divided cultural upbringing. Luis treats his wistful but stoical dad with impatience and sometimes contempt; he represents the wrong cliché. In the film's least successful scenes he is tempted by the ties of L.A.'s Mexican gangs, whose tattooed members look the part but can't survive the script's canned gangsta posturing. (A story by Roger L. Simon was the basis for Eric Eason's screenplay.)
Weitz is more comfortable teasing out the longing animating father and son, and playing them off against each other. Bichir -- who played Fidel Castro in Che -- resists the pathetic impulse, bringing dignity and distinction to a man who wakes up every morning knowing it's not just his burden but his job to be invisible. Julián's proud, impassive face, at first a deflective mask, begins to flicker with compassion for his father, signaling a slow reckoning with the limits they face, along with those of his teenage ego and the American culture's terms for success. The conversation they have at a local Mexican rodeo about why Carlos and his deadbeat wife decided to bring a child into such poverty and uncertainty is the film's finest moment.
Carlos buys that truck, borrowing the money from the sister (Dolores Heredia) who married a stingy gringo and got her papers. The fulfillment of the dread I felt early on is also one of the first unexpected things to happen in A Better Life: Carlos is betrayed by one of his own. From there the film moves into a quest to retrieve the stolen vehicle, with father and son working together and clashing once again over what it means to be a man, and to do the right thing.
Fresh space is cleared in the story and new colors emerge in the characters, but the potential for a better film to break through the mold is mostly that. The confidence that Weitz shows in certain scenes is often balanced by the clichéd sentiment of others. Revealing what seems like non-diegetic music to be the tune playing on Luis's iPod -- a personal soundtrack -- is a nice trick (so nice it happens twice; Alexandre Desplat did the original score), and DP Javier Aguirresarobe captures the blown-out light of L.A.'s low-slung outer neighborhoods. But montages of the city's diversity as viewed from a truck hit you right on the beak, and though a scene of Luis entering his empty home after his father is incarcerated makes its point quite evocatively, Weitz feels the need to cut to a crow pecking desperately at the empty birdfeeder in the backyard. I can understand his impulse: The story is an urgent one and its frame is well chosen. It also has a delicacy that will only suffer from embellishment.