Rating summary

Movie		2.5
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		1.0
Overall		3.0

Cesar Chavez Blu-ray Movie Review

The Grapes of Wrath, sixties style.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman July 17, 2014

If you live in or near a major American city, chances are you’ve seen two major street name changes over the past few decades. While attended with a bit of controversy here and there, metropolises across the fruited plain started renaming major arterials after Martin Luther King, Jr., in honor of the slain civil rights leader. Frequently the streets named after King would pass through largely African American neighborhoods and in fact the renaming became a source of civic pride for these neighborhoods. Some years later, a number of major cities started efforts to rebrand an avenue here or a highway there after Cesar Chavez. Perhaps surprisingly, opposition to these renamings was somewhat more vocal. Why? Here in my hometown of Portland, there was a news report I still remember seeing where a woman was interviewed about the proposed name change here, and she rather intensely asked, “Why are we doing this? Why are we renaming a street after someone nobody even knows about?” And that may be at least one salient lesson to be learned about not just the street name changes which swept our country, but also about the rather bland if occasionally moving Cesar Chavez, a film that purports to detail the farm worker unionizer’s efforts in the late sixties and early seventies. Unlike Martin Luther King, Jr.’s struggle, however, Chavez’s is simply not as well known to the general public, even to those who are old enough to have (probably dim) memories of Chavez’s epic grape boycott maneuver which ultimately brought a host of growers to the bargaining table to guarantee better working conditions for the largely peripatetic migrant working class pickers who populated the fields of California and other states. Cesar Chavez starts then with a deficit of general awareness of its subject, and unfortunately the film simply assumes that viewers will either know or be able to infer enough context to make sense of what’s going on. That’s a fatal flaw in a film that serves more as a hagiography of its very worthy subject than as any kind of relatively objective film biography.

While Cesar Chavez attempts to give at least some cursory context courtesy of superimposed title cards which occasionally orient the viewer to where and when certain things are happening, there’s simply a general deficit in the public at large’s knowledge of Chavez’s history and efforts that makes even this approach less helpful than usual. Even those who consider themselves blissfully ignorant of world events can probably recite at least the bare outlines of some of the Civil Rights era’s biggest struggles, whether it be Rosa Parks’ courageous stand (sit?) or the attempts to integrate lunch counters and the like. But is there really any general reservoir of knowledge about the migrant farm worker community of the sixties and what they went through? Unfortunately, Cesar Chavez seems to join the story in media res, with Chavez already pounding the pavement (and/or dirt), trying to rustle up interest in a farm workers’ union.

Chavez (Michael Peña) is shown to be a noble, resolute if occasionally stubborn leader who only wants the best for the migrant farm workers. In fact, Chavez’s only real peccadillo in the entire film is his lack of bonding with his teenage son Fernando (Eli Vargas), something that’s shown to be the result of Chavez’s single minded devotion to improving the lives of the migrant farm worker community (in other words, it isn’t that bad of a character flaw). Otherwise, he’s a devoted husband to his wife Helen (America Ferrera) and at least a passably good father to his brood of kids. He also has a strong relationship with his brother Richard (Jacob Vargas), a sibling who joins Cesar in helping to unionize the workers. But even this brotherly backstory is inadequately dealt with, leaving little anecdotal elements (like their odd nicknames for each other) unexplained or undeveloped in the film.

This odd tendency to just assume that the audience is going to know what’s going on and who these people are also hobbles the inclusion of Dolores Huerta (Rosario Dawson). Huerta is almost as iconic figure as Chavez himself in farm worker circles, and yet here’s she’s barely even introduced (you have to listen closely to even catch her name), and then her story is never even remotely dealt with. She’s simply a hanger on, there to banter playfully with Chavez, but offering little in the way of actual dramatic impetus.

Cesar Chavez manages to work up at least a little emotional impact in the last third or so of the story, once Senator Robert Kennedy (Jack Holmes doing a rather commendable impersonation) gets involved and Cesar goes on a hunger strike. But yet again, the film simply coasts over important information—one minute, Cesar is close to death after not having eaten for three weeks, and the next, he’s miraculously healed, back on his feet and evidently getting his three squares while putting the screws to grape growers.

The film is not very subtle in its political leanings, and a more measured depiction of the antagonists’ point of view might have helped make the film feel like less of a screed. The villains here are all Bad Guys (capital letters), without an ounce of nuance and at times seeming to have been ported over from a cartoon. John Malkovich tries to invest his Croatian immigrant grape tycoon character with a little depth, but the writing works against him. As with so much else in the film, one moment he’s an immovable nemesis, and the next, he’s sitting next to Chavez signing an agreement and joking about their shared “outsider” ethnic status. Montages featuring real life footage of Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon only serve to paint the two as dark hearted buffoons in league with the devilish grape growing consortium.

Screenwriter Keir Pearson received a much deserved Academy Award nomination for Hotel Rwanda, and he’s still listed in several sources as the sole writer of Cesar Chavez. In one of those strange little synchronicities that are probably de rigeur in Hollywood, but which hardly ever happen here in my little backwater of Portland, I was hosting a fundraiser for my sons’ high school and was working on a review for this very site when some other parents showed up. One of those parents asked me what I was doing, and when I told her, she amazed me by saying, “Oh, my brother wrote Hotel Rwanda.” She then told me about the still in production Cesar Chavez and how it had taken Keir literally years to finagle the screen rights to Chavez's story. The fact that Timothy J. Sexton is now given a writing credit as well on the film may indicate that some retooling was done to the original version, but if the intent was to clarify things, the result only manages to make them more confusing quite a bit of the time. The fact that it takes an absurdly long almost two and a half minutes for various production entities' logos and credits to unspool before the film actually starts gives further credence to the suspicion that in this particular case too many chefs were in the kitchen fussing around with food lovingly picked by (now) unionized workers.

Cesar Chavez Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Cesar Chavez is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Lionsgate Films with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.40:1. Though some sources are stating this was digitally shot, it sure looks like film to me, especially when director Diego Luna and cinematographer Enrique Chediak push some of the darker sequences, making grain more apparent and adding a slight fuzziness to the look of the film. There's a nice filmic texture overall to this piece, one that feels suitably "thick" (for want of a better term). That said, contrast is sometimes lacking, leading to murkiness that is only exacerbated by the frequently dust blown outdoors locations. A lot of the film is bathed in amber, a choice which suitably offers a visual analog to the sun drenched (and usually parched) working conditions of the pickers, but which minimally depletes fine detail. Colors are accurate looking, though are frequently not very vivid. The overall appearance of Cesar Chavez is quite soft most of the time. There are quite a few archival sequences here culled from old news reports. These look like they were sourced from ancient (interlaced) video, and frequently suffer from pretty bad softness and issues like ghosting. There are no image stability issues, and similarly no overt signs of aggressive image manipulation.

Cesar Chavez Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Cesar Chavez offers a lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 mix that presents some nice ambient environmental sounds in the many field based scenes. A couple of tumultuous meetings offer a wealth of surround activity as tempers flare out of control, and there are even occasional gunshots which perk up the LFE channel. Dialogue and the ethnically tinged score are both presented very cleanly and clearly in this problem free track.

Cesar Chavez Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Making Cesar Chavez (1080p; 19:05) is an above average EPK with interviews and scenes from the film.

Cesar Chavez Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Unfortunately, the story of Cesar Chavez has simply not redounded to the extent that Martin Luther King, Jr.'s has, and that lack of general knowledge probably doomed this effort from the get go. We simply jump into a story not knowing much if anything about the main characters and perhaps even less about the general state of affairs in the migrant farm worker community. Cesar Chavez's heart is in the right place, and the performances are genuine enough, but more time should have been spent explicitly detailing Chavez's background and the plight of the afflicted whom he struggled so valiantly to help. Technical merits here are very strong and fans of the film should be well pleased with this Blu-ray release, despite the paucity of special features.