Mickey Sabbat
May 2003
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Sayles Sells
With his trademark dramatic cultural panorama, John Sayles demonstrates, yet again, why he is the most ambitious and accomplished director in American films.
Whether it's Casa de los Baby, Sunshine State, Men with Guns, Lone Star, Matewan or City of Hope, Sayles characters always move within a complex, interwoven social tapestry; their conflicts and predicaments, at once, singular and representative.
In Casa de los Babys, Sayles returns to a recurrent preoccupation of his-- the culture clash between Spanish-speaking American and the colossus of the North, the U.S.
Five American women, each recognizable American archetypes, (none stereotypes however)-- the belligerent bitch (Marcia Hay Harden); the abrasive Jewish intellectual (Lili Taylor); the born-again, recovering alcoholic (Mary Steenburgen); the tortured, New Age disciple (Daryl Hannah); the noblesse oblige patrician (Maggie Gyllenhall); and the poor Irish immigrant of the lyrical soul and copious heart (Susan Lynch)-- venture South of the Rio Grande to posess that one commodity in which Mexico surpasses its Northern neighbor-- orphaned infants.
And alas, as Sayles, depicts, not only infants. The streets of Mexico teem with abandoned, destitute children, who spend their days begging, borrowing, stealing, just so they can afford to spend their nights sniffing paint, falling asleep on public beaches gazing upward at a vast indifferent sky.
The unapologetically radical son of the Casa where the women reside while impatienly awaiting an available infant sees it all as yet another example of American imperialism.
Why do these would-be mothers journey South to adopt? "Because Americans spend so much time making money they have none left to procreate."
If Casa de los Babys ultimately lacks the dramatic catharsis and seamless unity of Lone Star and Sunshine State, it still impresses. As a neorealist American filmaker, Sayles has no equal.
Last edited by Mickey Sabbat on 02-19-2004 at 06:28 PM
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02-15-2004 06:51 AM
