Balsa Wouldn't

It probably won't do any good to preface this review with a disclaimer, but here goes: I wanted to like The Perez Family. I really did.

May has been a sad month for movies about Latin Americans with the word family in the title. Last week I panned director Gregory Nava's My Family; the talented Nava presumed to tell us something new about the Mexican-American experience and succeeded only in revisiting every Chicano movie cliche of the past twenty years. Now comes Mira Nair, another gifted filmmaker, who, in a case of directorial hubris even worse than Nava's (at least UCLA film school alumnus Nava is part Mexican; Nair hails from India), uses the Mariel boatlift as a vessel for exploring Cuban-American culture clash and assimilation. Unfortunately, the craft Nair builds to navigate these treacherous waters proves less seaworthy than your average balsa.

While the lead actors, none of whom is Cuban, share both Nair's love for her characters and her fondness for Cuban culture, they shed as much light on what it's like to be Cuban-American as The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air shines on life in the inner city. Marisa Tomei plays Dottie Perez, an irrepressible cane cutter and nymphomaniac who wants to escape the repression of Castro's Cuba and travel to America so she can listen to rock and roll music and "fuck John Wayne." How can you argue with a lofty goal like that? (It's 1980, but nobody has informed her the Duke died a year earlier.) Tomei's faux-Cuban accent is too easy a target for this critic; let's just say her Dottie sounds about as authentically Cuban as Al Pacino's Tony Montana. Of greater concern is Tomei's acting, which varies wildly from topnotch to shamelessly over the top. To be fair to Tomei, on balance it's a winning performance punctuated by a few fatuous moments that could be chalked up to seeing too many Iris Chacon movies.

Dottie's judicious flirting and dispensing of sexual favors land her on a crowded boat setting sail from Mariel to Key West. Despite the rigors of the long voyage and her fellow passengers' mixed emotions about leaving home for an uncertain future in the U.S., the little spitfire soon has her fellow freedom floaters dancing as if they didn't have a care in the world. For some unfathomable reason, Dottie takes a particular interest in perhaps the least attractive man on the boat, Juan Raul Perez (Alfred Molina), a soulful ex-political prisoner who hasn't seen his wife, Carmela, in twenty years. Juan Raul is an intellectual idealist from an aristocratic background who went to jail for torching his family's crops rather than allow them to fall into Castro's hands. The only thing he has in common with Dottie is the same last name. This being a movie, that coincidence means they will fall in love.

At her comfortable home in Coral Gables, saintly Carmela (Anjelica Huston, constantly touching herself to remind the audience that Sra. Perez hasn't made love to a man in twenty years) anxiously awaits word of Juan Raul's arrival. Carmela's big shot wanna-be brother, Angel, has paid off Cuban officials to spring her husband from prison and get him onto a boat to America. But a funny thing happens on the way to freedom. A beleaguered INS official mistakenly lists the disembarking Dottie Perez and Juan Raul Perez as husband and wife, then packs them off to await further processing at the Orange Bowl. When Angel arrives looking for a single man named Perez, he is told that none has arrived. The film easily could have wrung bigtime laughs and tears out of the federal government's ineffectual handling of the entire Mariel boatlift here, but director Nair plays the situation strictly for bathos and blows a golden opportunity.

The story lurches messily yet predictably forward. Juan Raul gets lost in the bureaucratic paperwork shuffle. Angel goes looking for him but doesn't recognize the scruffy, hollow-cheeked Marielito he remembers as being a nattily dressed, clean-shaven gentleman. (It boggles the mind to consider what a director such as Lina Wertmller could have done with the sociopolitical potential of this material, and how easily Nair glosses right over it.) After twenty years locked away in a cell chanting Carmela's name, Juan Raul suddenly gives up hope that she will find him. He conveniently falls in love with Dottie, the puta who brushed against his crotch on the boat to Cayo Hueso. At the same time, Carmela inexplicably accepts her dimwitted brother's belief that Juan Raul must not have made it out of Havana. She suddenly finds herself attracted to an attentive cop (Chazz Palminteri). Neither of these new romances is convincing; both feel more like dramatic contrivances than the stuff of real life.