Beyond the Multiplex

"Quinceañera": A virgin birth, a kinky three-way, and a rapidly changing neighborhood (through the eyes of those who are changing it)
Nobody wants to read any further grumbling from me about the Sundance Film Festival and its effects on the indie world, but with "Quinceañera," from the writing-directing team of Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland, I will rest my case. This picture won both the grand jury prize and the audience award at Sundance this year (a rare occurrence), and it's an engaging, sweet-yet-sad neighborhood slice of life, anchored by pretty cinematography and a couple of nice performances. Glatzer and Westmoreland offer an unhurried, affectionate portrait of Echo Park, an attractive area of East Los Angeles that has long been home to the city's Mexican-American middle class and is now being rapidly gentrified by white newcomers.

"Quinceañera" is a pleasant little picture that tries to capture the ambiguities of its world. Magdalena (Emily Rios), an innocent teenager about to celebrate her quinceañera -- a Mexican girl's traditional coming of age -- is kicked out by her evangelical preacher dad for getting pregnant, even though she insists she hasn't gone all the way with her studious boyfriend, Herman (J.R. Cruz). She's taken in by her tolerant great-great-uncle, a neighborhood institution named Don Tomas (Chalo González) who lives in a history-encrusted house surrounded by a beautiful garden. Don Tomas' magical domain also shelters Magdalena's cousin Carlos (Jesse Garcia), who looks the part of a hard-ass East Side gang-banger but has secrets of his own.

Carlos, in fact, is becoming embroiled in a complicated three-way with the white gay couple who just moved into the big adjoining house and are now Don Tomas' landlords. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of "Quinceañera" is that these guys, Gary (David W. Ross) and James (Jason L. Wood), seem awfully close to an unflattering self-portrait of the filmmakers. Glatzer and Westmoreland also live together in a house they recently bought in Echo Park, and as in the film, one of them has an extensive reality-TV career (Glatzer) and one is English (Westmoreland).

One assumes, however, that the directors did not lure a neighborhood kid into their world of sexual and material freedom and then betray him, and didn't evict a delightful old rake like Don Tomas from his house of 30-odd years so they could build a sauna. All these twists and turns would be enough for most movies, but "Quinceañera" throws in an utterly unconvincing subplot about how Magdalena might indeed be a pregnant virgin, along with some pedestrian intra-family drama. (This will matter to almost no one, but "Quinceañera" is at least in part a remake of English director Tony Richardson's "A Taste of Honey," which launched the "kitchen-sink" realism of the 1960s.)

Garcia is terrific as the semi-closeted Carlos, and González (a veteran of Sam Peckinpah's films) gives the film its heart as Don Tomas. To say the other actors are hit-and-miss is being generous. Rios is a newcomer and it shows; she can't deliver any line effectively that isn't sarcastic, and Magdalena's love scenes with Herman are earnest, well intentioned and profoundly embarrassing.

As docudrama, "Quinceañera" will engage your attention most of the way. Its portrait of Echo Park is complicated and interesting: As gays, artists and other real-estate pioneers flood in, the neighborhood's kids, mostly second- or third-generation Americans, look toward a larger society that still mistrusts them. Glatzer and Westmoreland clearly mean to confront the devastating impact people like themselves can have on a place like Echo Park.

"Quinceañera" is exactly the kind of unambitious, faintly didactic indie film with redeeming social values -- I'm sure I won't be the first to call it "My Big Fat Mexican Birthday Party" -- that audiences flock to and critics grumble about. Hey, I've got to play my part, right? Glatzer and Westmoreland offer some decent sociology, some pretty pictures and a lot of mediocre, movie-of-the-week storytelling. If I expect something slightly more adventurous from movies that win awards from formerly supposedly cutting-edge festivals, I guess that's my problem.

"Quinceañera" opens Aug. 4 in New York and Los Angeles, with a national rollout to follow.

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