Drama

The fact that we haven’t gotten a movie about Cesar Chavez until now is both surprising and not all that shocking. It’s surprising because the Mexican American labor leader was arguably as big of a civil rights icon to Latino workers as Martin Luther King, Jr. was to the country’s black community in the 1960s. On the other hand, the extended wait for a Chavez movie isn’t all that shocking when you consider his efforts took place in the largely un-cinematic realm of grape boycotts. The bland, well-meaning Cesar Chavez makes the case for his impactful deeds, even if it doesn’t totally present him as a vibrant, complex man worthy of the biopic treatment.

The film opens with Chavez (Michael Pena) explaining his life story to an unseen interviewer; so he’s really addressing us in the audience. He talks about being born in Yuma, Ariz., and his family losing its farm during the Great Depression. They subsequently migrated to California, where Cesar began working the fields at age 11. (Farmworkers had been excluded from the National Labor Relations Act, which had been enacted in 1936.) This sort of “tell-don’t-show” sequence is not what you’d typically want to see out of a movie. But here it’s a brisk way of running through the early part of Chavez’s life and sharpening the film’s focus.

It's a sad state of affairs. The road that Blood Ties has taken to get to this Blu-ray release is far more interesting than the film itself. It all starts with a French film Les liens du sang that was itself a reflection on the American cop drams genre. One of the original French screenwriters collaborated to bring the idea full circle to become an American cop drama. The film made the film festival circuit with mixed reviews and results. For some reason Director Guilaume Canet decided to go back to the editing room and remove nearly a half hour of the original film's running time. I didn't see the movie in its original form, but it seems to me Canet gutted the film for its American home video release. The result is a story that is difficult to follow, contains numerous plot holes and hanging plot threads and displays an uneasy pacing at best. I wish I could see what is missing. I can't help but feel that this could have been and in fact once was a better movie than it is now.

This is essentially the tale of two brothers. Chris (Owen) is coming home after spending years behind bars. He's on a furlough and keeps his freedom only if he can maintain steady employment and a place to live. Frank (Crudup) is an NYPD police officer who has taken some heat for his criminal brother. There's a lot of bad blood between them, but family is family, and Frank is allowing Chris to live with him and their father (Caan). Chris's attempts to go straight literally go up in smoke, which takes us to that oldest of crime drama cliché's, the "one last job".