 Good, not great. 7 of 8 people found this review helpful.
It's a very sweet, well done movie. It's written and directed by James L. Brooks which means three things.
1. It's very long.
2. It makes you feel good.
3. It's tremendously well written.
Adam Sandler stars as the world's greatest dad, who was named the "best chef in the country" by the LA Times. He runs a highly successful restraunt, and has a good enough staff that he can spend time with his family in their gorgeous home. He is married to Tea Leoni, and his mother in law is the hysterical Cloris Leachman. They have a daughter as well, though the focus is on the married couple and their nanny, who I'll mention shortly.
The film is narrated by the daughter of the nanny as if she is writing this story as an admissions essay to a prestigious university (Princeton I believe?) the school name is irrelevant though. What we see is a story that began probably 7-10 years earlier, as she briefly goes through the details of her family immigrating from Mexico to America for a better life. The mother worked two jobs to make ends meet in LA, and they were happy. She could speak fluent Spanish and get away with it, and she rarely ventured out of the neighborhood.
Until her daughter got interested in boys. Then she realized that she couldn't work nights, and applied for a day job as the nanny of the Kaskeys (Sandler and Leoni).
The rest of what we see is a blending of great lines from Sandler, who gives arguably his best performance here. He plays what can best be described as a serious version of the lovable doof he plays in his comedies. Not quite the character in Punch-Drunk Love, but the same sort of quiet seriousness that he does very well. Leoni is respectable as his incredibly low self-esteemed wife, who seems to be obsessed with keeping in shape after the birth of her child, and one of the better scenes in the film comes when she buys clothing a size too small for her daughter as a way of encouraging her to keep the weight off. You can tell she means well, but it doesn't succeed, and Sandler is outstanding here, conveying a father who wants to be on the same page with his wife, but can't agree with many of the things she does with their daughter.
On the other side is Flor the nanny. She is a strict guardian of her daughter Christina, who is brilliant and bilingual. Flor is very strict, but very loving at the same time, and she is exactly what Sandler is looking for in a woman.
We'll leave it with that.
Mrs. Kaskey lets her insecurity get in the way far too often, and she eventually begins to adopt Christina as her own daughter of sorts. She pulls strings to get Christina a scholarship to a very prestigious private school, and the girl loves it.
Eventually, for reasons we can't discuss, she has to leave that school, and she's furious with Flor, who gives my favorite line of the movie in response.
"Is it everything you want to become nothing like me?"
This is a film about parenting, about marriage, about communication, and about love of all forms, and it's all done very well with many comedic moments to boot.
A-
Review ID: 10000000003016919  Thank you for voting. If your vote meets our guidelines, it will be posted within 24 hours. You cannot vote on the helpfulness of a review you wrote. Your request cannot be processed at this time. Please try again later.   Spanglish .. Not a bad movie 11 of 18 people found this review helpful.
At it’s heart, Spanglish is about two women who might have the best intentions, but due to cultural differences, end up at odds over how to raise their children. Deborah Clasky (Tea Leoni) is your stereotypical SoCal mom – obsessed with fitness, money, and stature but that fails to mask what a basket case she is when it comes to her family, whom she is too selfish to bother to understand. Flor Moreno (the beautiful newcomer Paz Vega) is a struggling single mom that speaks no English but is hired on a whim by Deborah to be her family’s new housekeeper.
From here, some tame and typical cultural comedy ensues as the Clasky’s get to know Flor and vise versa. Deborah’s lush, ex-Jazz singer mother (the underused Cloris Leachman) is nice but clashes with her daughter on her life. The kids are spearheaded by the pudgy Bernice (Sarah Steele) who can’t seem to meet her mother’s expectations. And there’s John (Adam Sandler), the celebrated chef who can’t seem to connect with his wife. The plot starts to move as Flor, whether she tries to or not, becomes all the things to the family that Deborah is not. Things get compounded, however, when Flor’s bi-lingual daughter Cristina (Shelbie Bruce) lives with the family at their beach house over the summer. Cristina and Deborah connect due to Cristina’s becoming enamored with the wealth and opportunity that Flor can’t provide.
While on paper, the plot seems intriguing – the film seems to hit all the wrong notes. Deborah’s character becomes unbearably ignorant and annoying that she weighs the film down. On the flip side, Sandler’s John is so annoyingly perfect as a parent and a person that his one character flaw of being non-confrontational made me want to root against him. Sandler’s performance is the only one that isn’t up to par as he seems a bit overwhelmed by the straight drama aspects (although his dramatic performance in Punch Drunk Love is my favorite performance by him, so I know he can be dramatic when he wants to be). Everyone else seems to do a good job with what they are given.
The Extras
One of the more ironic things about the DVD is that it doesn’t offer subtitles or an audio track in Spanish. That’s giggle inducing material right there. You can get both English and French though.
On the deleted scenes front, you get twelve of them. None would have added to the film in my opinion and Mr. Brooks tells you why in his optional commentary for each.
If you have a DVD/ROM, then you can read the screenplay. I don’t, so I can’t tell you how good or bad it was. For film buffs, any time you get a copy of a screenplay, it’s a good thing and I like that this is becoming a more available option on DVD’s. Bonus points for that.
There is a commentary track with both Brooks and other crew members. That’s pretty standard. However, you also get optional commentary on some casting sections which I found more interesting.
On the “fill the DVD with fodder” front, we have a featurette entitled, "How to Make the World's Greatest Sandwich featuring Thomas Keller of French Laundry." And no, I really don’t know why it’s there either. Also, you can watch the promo “Making of” featurette where everyone talks about how great it was to work with everyone else in case you missed it when it was run in-between movies on HBO.
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