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.
