A Better Life

A Better Life stars Demian Bichir as Carlos, a hard-working Mexican single father who is finding it increasingly difficult to raise his 14 year old son Luis in low-rent Los Angeles.  He makes what little money they do have by doing landscaping jobs around the city.  Each day, he gets in his boss’ pickup truck and goes to an expensive home and trims hedges, climbs palm trees and cuts grass.  When his boss tries to convince him to buy the pickup truck off of him so he could begin working for himself, Carlos tells him that he doesn’t have any money to purchase the vehicle and, even if he did, he would lose everything if he were to get pulled over by the police since he doesn’t have a driver’s license or proper paperwork to be in the United States. 

            Luis is at that point in a teenager’s life where he is battling with difficult decisions on a daily basis: Do I join a gang? Do I drop out of school? Do I chase the dream of making easy money on the streets rather than earning an education and a legitimate career?  Despite some brutally terrible acting by the young people who play his friends, Jose Julian does a fantastic job in the role as Luis.  As a teacher, I see first-hand what teenagers can be like at their worst – and Luis is, for most of the film, pretty easy to dislike.  He is ungrateful, apathetic and disrespectful.  Carlos tries to instill in him some work ethic and respect, but it falls on deaf ears.  Luis seems destined to be another drop-out in the long line of young people who feel that school is an unnecessary waste of their time. 

            I thought about how difficult it must be to get quality acting from teenagers for a smaller film like this one and am willing to give a pass to the overall quality of the movie since Julian does such fine work.  If you go with more famous faces, then you lose something in the authenticity of the story and if you go with unknown people who may not even be actors, then you run the risk of getting poor performances, which was the case here.  It can’t be easy casting a movie like this.

            Carlos ends up getting a loan from his sister to buy the truck from his boss.  He takes a few extra dollars and buys something nice for Luis, which goes unappreciated.  Carlos talks to Luis about how having a truck will change everything for them – how it will allow them to develop their landscaping business into something truly great, thus providing them with the opportunity to move out of their neighborhood and get Luis into a really good school.  This seems to sink in to Luis, but only for a moment.  A pickup truck (and the necessary tools to run a landscaping business) is the key to a Mexican immigrant’s true independence in this unforgiving country.  Carlos now is in possession of it all – but not for long. 

            After Carlos loses the truck, the film’s plot turns into a bit of a revenge/mystery/thriller, which I found riveting – especially since the stakes are so dramatically high.  We finally get to see if Luis is going to grow up enough to try and rebuild his relationship with his father and it’s at this point where the movie really hits home.  Many great scenes between father and son fill out the final 30 minutes.  One particularly poignant exchange between Carlos and Luis takes place, symbolically, in a doorway. 
            Demian Bichir earned a well-deserved Oscar nomination for his leading role and I would have loved to see him win it.  Oldman's performance was too muted, Pitt's was unspectacular, and Dujardin's was a joke.  George Clooney was really good in The Descendants, but still not as good as Bichir was here.  

            A Better Life is an amazing film that will probably make you ruminate on how the American government manages immigration policy.  For me, it offered a very personal look into how the pursuit of the American dream can oftentimes be a difficult and tragic journey.  But mostly, I loved this film because it tells a story of the undying devotion a father has for his troubled son.