Cesar Chavez

Rating: ***

For a bio-pic to be effective it has to be more than Wikipedia entry with some stage directions and dialogue; for a bio-pic to be good it was to make a case why the life of the person it’s about is important, and how that connects to us in the here and now. It’s hard to imagine a more appropriate bio-pic for the times than a film about the life of Cesar Chavez, a pioneering labour leader who went out into the farmers fields of California’s central valley and organized the workers there into the National Farm Workers Association. Issues around migrant labour still exist, and are still deeply felt on all sides. There's also the dwindling returns of the entirety of the labour movement as a whole, so the time seems ripe to remind people just how much blood, sweat and struggle went into workers rights.

The movie Cesar Chavez meets, at least, those goals in a perfectly satisfying way. Director Diego Luna highlights the struggles and successes of Chavez’s five year odyssey to get justice for the California farm workers in the midst of one of the most socially tumultuous times in American history. More than that though, Luna demonstrates that most parties in that struggle, from the poor farm hand to the rich growers, were human people with complex emotions and thoughts and less like the heroes and the villains of the story respectively. The film around those performances is a history lesson and morality play, but when you focus on the people, the message of Chavez and Chavez just might reach you.

The film begins in 1965 as Chavez (Michael Peña) and his wife Helen (America Ferrera) pack up their eight kids into a VW bug and head off for California farm country. Chavez, tired of organizing out of a Los Angeles office, wants to get his hands dirty, and dirty he does get them. Over the years, he struggles not just with the incorrigible growers and a brutally corrupt local police force led by Sheriff Smith (Michael Cudlitz), but with the his own people’s agony and outrage as their movement seems to take one step forward and three steps back. Despite personal cost to himself and his family, Chavez perseveres and in an ending spoiled by historical fact, gets the members of the NFWA the dignity they deserve.

As a screenwriting exercise, this telling of Chavez’s life is paint by numbers. The connect the dots plotting follows the character Chavez as he arrives amongst the downtrodden masses, struggles to establish legitimacy, enjoys some success before the man intervenes, enjoys greater success in spite of that before the end of the second act when everything seems lost. The third act then becomes eking out that victory despite the odds, and although we know those odds were darn near insurmountable, juxtaposing archival footage of Richard Nixon’s presidential inauguration with scenes of police brutality against the union activists was a little on the nose.

Perhaps it’s because of Luna’s extensive acting experience, but it’s the performances that, if anything, will sell you on Chavez, particularly Peña as the title character. Peña is one of those actors who has a face you recognize from some film you've seen; he was Jake Gyllenhaal’s partner in End of Watch, he was Nicolas Cage’s fellow trapped fireman in World Trade Center, and he was Mark Wahlberg’s unwitting co-conspirator in Shooter. As Chavez though, Peña proves himself extremely comfortable and capable going solo in the spotlight.

It can’t be an easy thing being a Mexican-American actor playing such a towering figure of historical significance to especially the Latino community, but Peña shows a lot of confidence playing Chavez in an understated way. Peña lets the film frame the importance of Chavez while he grounds the character as a man struggling to create the circumstances so that people like him can have a better life. The movie tries to force drama by occasionally visiting the growing estrangement between Chavez and his eldest son Fernando, but the movie underestimates the already existing and tremendous drama of the union struggles, and Peña’s ability to portray Chavez’s self doubt and concern without needing a big scene to do it.

If there’s a main villain in the piece, its co-executive producer John Malkovich as Bogdanovich, one of the wealthiest growers in California and the main opposition to the workers organizing. Neither Luna nor Malkovich play Bogdanovich as a moustache twirling villain that’s in love with the idea of putting workers in their place, but as an immigrant himself whose opposition comes from the American ideal that if he can pull himself up by his bootstraps then anyone can. Thankfully, you never see Malkovich scream about teaching anyone a lesson or get hysterical about the workers coming for him like some kind of Farmer Al Capone, and instead he calls upon reserve of calm and chilled logic to play Bogdanovich.

With the actors doing their jobs well, it’s easy to forgive Luna for using a style that’s hard to pin. He sometimes favours something that feels like a docudrama while following the workers out in the field, and then doing something else in scenes at home that feels more staged and purposeful. The director does do a very good job of painting the hard work in the fields using the harshest light possible, and for keeping the story moving briskly and only rarely losing focus on the main story of the union’s struggle. Luna shrewdly avoids the trap of a lot of bio-pics that presume every detail in their subject’s life is a plot point and thus losing the picture to the biography.

If you plan on walking into Cesar Chavez thinking that you’re going to see something that breaks the mould with its technical and structural brilliance, you’re bound to disappointment. Frankly, it’s hard to say that Chavez aspires to anything more than being Capra-esque with it’s intentions and being a true-life story of how sometimes David does beat Goliath. Also, one can’t take away the timeliness of the story. Many would argue that modern labour needs a towering figure like Chavez to lead them in these modern times, but in lieu of that, maybe a towering performance by Michael Peña as Cesar Chavez will do the trick.