‘Cesar Chavez’ Is A Bland Look Into An Amazing Man’s Life
By Wesley Emblidge 03-28-14
Michael Peña in Cesar Chavez. Photo Credit: Pantelion Films
Taking a well-known public figure and turning their life into an interesting film usually ends up being more challenging than one might expect.
Look at last year’s “Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom” as a perfect example of a fascinating political figure made boring by a bland film that does not bother to give a truly good look at the man in the title. But at least “Mandela” had a good lead performance, sadly Diego Luna’s new film “Cesar Chavez” does not even get much of a performance out of star Michael Peña and has an even worse script than “Mandela.”
Most of these biopics function as a sort of “greatest hits” selection, showing us all the well known iconic moments of a person’s life, but Chavez does not really have any of these. Instead we get a film made up of what feels like all the scenes but those key moments. It is a film severely lacking any sense of who the man was and what drove him. Aside from some turmoil with one of his eight children, there’s no insight into his relationships with other people.
Peña, an actor well-liked for his charisma in the past, is not able bring much to the overly serious role. Keir Pearson and Timothy J. Sexton’s script really just takes us through Chavez’s revolution step by step, showing us Chavez unionizing farmers, boycotting the companies’ food, his 25 day fast, and more throughout his eight year campaign. The man did great things for workers rights, and the movie respects him for it, but it’s as if the writers are afraid to show us Chavez as a complex human being and revert to just depicting him as an important figure.
In his second feature outing Luna doesn’t do much of interest with the camera, one might expect the Y Tu Mamá También star to be more of an actor’s director but there are no interesting performances here. The best person in the film is John Malkovich as one of the executives Chavez is going up against, but he’s really just doing the same (admittedly delightful) work he does in most films.
The movie certainly admires Chavez but the man deserved better than this. “Cesar Chavez” doesn’t even serve as a very good history lesson; you would be better off just finding this man’s story in the history books.