There are thousands – nay, tens of thousands – of true stories out there that are more than prime for being made into a feature film, but still haven’t primarily because they are about people with more melanin than Hollywood is comfortable with. One such story is the fight of the United Farm Workers union to obtain better conditions for laborers during the 1960s and 70s. Cesar Chavez is the kind of movie we need more of, in that it grants greater representation to Hispanics, a drastically underserved demographic (despite accounting for a quarter of movie ticket sales last year). But it’s also the kind of movie we don’t need any more of, in that it’s not terribly good.
Featuring Michael Peña as the civil rights icon, the film follows Chavez from his helping to found the UFW through to 1975, mainly focusing on the Delano grape strike and the Salad Bowl strike. Chavez, seeing the terrible conditions under which migrant farmers worked, often for dismal pay, organizes them into a force that can agitate for equality. The white establishment, represented by John Malkovich as a farm owner whose name I could not remember if you held a gun to my head, isn’t yielding so easily. The strikers face constant harassment and even physical assault.
If this sounds like a rather generic social justice yarn, that’s because it is. If anything that made Cesar Chavez great or the efforts of the UFW historically vital is present, it’s mainly as an allusion. Peña’s Chavez is a cipher, not even interpreted through the kind of overly affected imitation of the real figure’s mannerisms that we’re used to seeing in biopics. America Ferrera and Rosario Dawson round out the cast as Helen Chavez and Dolores Huerta, two more equally fascinating people who similarly come across in the most blandly heroic way possible. These are all actors whom I love, their abilities neutralized by scripting and direction whose chief intent appears to be making sure that the story is told. This is understandable. It’s a shame that this story hasn’t been told before now, but just giving the audience this information isn’t enough. We need to feel.
Various scenes that illustrate what Cesar Chavez is known for feel like scribbling tick marks on a checklist. There’s a section where he goes on a fast for no other reason than this is one of the things we remember about him. The film’s one big subplot (which is still underdeveloped) has Chavez advising his son against fighting the discrimination he faces on a daily basis with violence. The nighttime, halogen tone-bathed father-son chats serve as the least subtle way possible of conveying Chavez’s philosophy. There are already scenes in which he and his colleagues resist returning the brutality visited upon them by their adversaries. Telling instead of showing is the oldest mistake there is.
There’s little sense of time or place in Cesar Chavez. Like almost all period pieces, it believes that putting on appropriate production design and washing out the colors will be sufficient enough to transport the viewer. It’s just one of many cliched approaches taken by actor-turned-director Diego Luna. It’s not that his work, or the work of anyone else on the film, is incompetent. It’s just that there isn’t a single thing that distinguishes Cesar Chavez from any other biopic, period piece, or labor film. It insists its importance, but is all too ignorable. Cesar Chavez deserves so much better.
