SXSW Review: Cesar Chavez and youtube trailer-Looks like it will be a good watch
Sí, se puede.
http://www.slackerwood.com/node/4140
It's not surprising that Cesar Chavez inspired the impromptu celebration of Chavez's legacy. The film is heartfelt and deeply moving, a great tribute to Chavez and the movement he led.
Diego Luna's biopic of the exalted labor leader is tightly focused, following Chavez (Michael Peña) and his family from their move to Delano, California in 1962, the year Chavez co-founded the National Farm Workers Association (later called the United Farm Workers), until the end of the union's successful grape boycott in the early 1970s. Cesar Chavez centers on Chavez and his wife, Helen (America Ferrera), as they struggle to raise eight children while fighting for farm workers' rights. But the movie is as much about the movement as it is about the man.
Cesar Chavez shows Cesar and Helen Chavez, along with their fellow activists, suffering greatly for their cause. The film explores their struggle in intimate and sympathetic detail, showing us the physical and psychological toll of years of exhausting work, constant threats to their safety, arrests, beatings and demoralizing defeats. As the spokesman for the movement, Cesar bears the brunt of it all: dangerous confrontations with angry farm owners, intimidation from racist cops, arrests on specious charges, wearying, endless days leading a vast union, and even a 25-day hunger strike to show his commitment to the cause.
Surprisingly, the film also presents the other side of the farm labor issue, and not entirely unsympathetically. Most of the labor movement's enemies are the expected racists and corporate greedheads; Cesar's nemeses are embodied in Sheriff Galen (Michael Cudlitz), a standard-issue racist law enforcement official who bullies the union at every turn.
But a far more complex foil is Bogdanovitch (John Malkovich), a vineyard owner who grew up in poverty and sympathizes, if only privately and hesitantly, with the workers' plight. He built his vineyard business through his own sweat and sacrifice, and wants it to be his legacy -- but while he's outwardly gruff and callous toward the workers who keep him in business, he does understand their desire for living wages, safe working conditions and a shred of dignity.
Cesar Chavez takes a great risk with this character; audiences might be hostile toward a film that celebrates Cesar Chavez while at the same time humanizing one of his enemies. But Bogdanovitch adds an interesting dimension to the film; without him, it risks being dismissed as hagiographical and biased.
