“La Misma Luna” is an emotional and entertaining road picture about a little boy who crosses the Mexican border into the U.S. on a quest to find his mom. She works “without papers” and off the books in Los Angeles. It’s a warm drama that humanizes America’s illegal immigration debate even as it sentimentally stacks the deck in favor of the undocumented.
*** 1/2 RATING | Immigration Drama
On Sunday mornings on a street corner in East Los Angeles, a pretty young woman named Rosario (Kate del Castillo) makes her way past the pizza joints and tattoo parlors to a pay phone. Sunday is when she calls home. That’s when her little boy, Carlitos (Adrian Alonso), knows to stand by the phone in a neighbor’s house in their Mexican village.
Rosario hasn’t seen her son since she was smuggled across the border four years ago. He lives with his grandmother, anxiously waiting for mom to save up enough cash to get her legal status changed and Carlitos sent to her.
Whenever you miss me, mom reassures him, just look up at the moon.
She’ll do likewise, because however far apart they are, at least they’re “Under the Same Moon,” the English translation of the title of this Spanish-language (with English subtitles) film.
Then comes the fateful week that Grandma dies, that Rosario loses her job and, desperate to get her boy back, decides she should hastily marry a willing man who has his U.S. citizenship. Carlitos, rather than fall in the clutches of the family of a father he has never met, resolves to go to mom. He pays inept American college kids (America Ferrera of “Ugly Betty” is one) masquerading as “coyotes” (smugglers) and his odyssey begins.
Courageous poor people endure danger, venal coyotes and “La Migra” (the INS Border patrol) to make it to the land of milk and money. Sending a child on this journey creates a wonderful empathy that earlier versions of the quest lack. At every turn, we fear for the boy’s safety.
Will he survive the crossing? Will “La Migra” catch him? Is a junkie he meets friend or foe?
The movie has too many unsympathetic “gringos,” venal employers, scary Border Patrol agents and the like. But the engaging mother-son story invites us in.
And its larger theme, that America’s great historic immigration narrative has merely changed accents from Italian or Irish to Latin American, is what we remember.
Wherever we came from, however we got here, we have more in common than we think. We’re all here under the same moon.
“La Misma Luna” (“Under the Same Moon”)
PG-13 for some mature thematic elements. 1 hour, 49 minutes. Directed by Patricia Riggen. Written by Ligiah Villalobos. In Spanish with subtitles. Photography by Checco Varese. Starring Adrian Alonso, Kate del Castillo, Eugenio Derbez, Maya Zapata, America Ferrera. Opens today at the Esquire.
