La Bamba (1987)

Luis Valdez came to La Bamba from the Chicano theater movement, and it shows in the best way. The 1987 film plants itself inside a Mexican-American family in Northern California and never treats that family as a sociological exhibit. Lou Diamond Phillips, Esai Morales, Rosanna DeSoto, and Elizabeth Peña carry the picture with the plain authority of people who belong there. For a studio release of its era, that casting was close to radical, though the film wears it lightly, as a fact of life instead of a statement of purpose.

The picture is also, by the standards of later decades, a thoroughly traditional showbiz tragedy. The women exist chiefly as girlfriends, mothers, and objects of male jealousy; Rosie's abuse at Bob's hands is shown but never examined through any larger frame. There is no queer presence, no environmental concern, no body-acceptance thread, and no reading of Ritchie's aviophobia as anything but trauma. The record business, which a more suspicious film would roast, is presented as a kindly patron. Bob Keane signs the kid, nurtures him, and hands him a stage name. Nobody eats anybody.

Where the film does carry social weight, it carries it as biography. Donna's father forbids her to date a Hispanic boy, and the sting lands because it is small, domestic, and recognizable. Valdez shows the prejudice instead of lecturing about it. The result is warm, sentimental, and content to let a life speak for itself, which is presumably why the Library of Congress preserved it. A modest artifact of cultural awareness, then, and an unrepentant crowd-pleaser. The sommelier finds it pleasant, uncomplicated, and entirely of its moment.