An ambitious bid for realism
“ARE you free, dead or in jail?” a character asks in Life and Nothing More, neatly summing up the existential situation of its characters and perhaps of all of us.
The trials and tribulations of a 30-something single mother and her son are the focus of Antonio Mendez Esparza’s stylistically different follow-up to his well-received Mexican immigrant debut Here and There.
Sitting somewhere between family drama and social criticism, the quiet but intense Life and Nothing More stands out mainly for the compelling naturalism of its non-professional performances and for a script which teeters dangerously on the edge of preachiness.
Despite losing its poise over the last half hour, it looks set to enhance its director’s reputation as a compassionate chronicler of so-called “marginal” lives.
The grandiose title suggests an over-ambitious piece that will try to say it all, but Life’s dramatic focus remains tightly on its three central characters.
The early part of the film focuses on Andrew (Bleechington), a 14-year-old hovering somewhere between freedom and jail.
He’s had a brush with the law and is surrounded on all sides by people telling him to stay out of trouble.
Andrew’s father is in jail. But at the insistence of his tough but insecure mother, Regina, played with power and sensitivity by Regina Williams, Andrew is forbidden from seeing his father.
The focus then switches for most of the rest of the film to Regina. She works as a waitress and tries to raise not only Andrew, but his 3-year-old sister (Ry’Nesia Chambers).
Embittered with men in general after the breakdown of her marriage, Regina violently takes out her frustrations on Andrew. As a result, he’s sullen and unsmiling, a passive boy who feels his father’s absence; it’s an absence embodied in one powerfully moving scene in which Andrew reads to himself a letter from prison.
When silver-tongued Robert (Williams) walks into the restaurant and starts hitting on Regina, her initial reaction is a big, cynical “no”.
But after some effort she breaks down and soon Robert is living with them. Further tensions ensue, and there’s one Big Event too many through the film’s relatively incident-heavy, less nuanced second half.
Esparza has done terrific work with his cast and several exchanges – particularly between Regina and Robert – have an engaging realism that can only have been the result of guided improvisation.
There’s the real sense that the viewer is privy to scenes of a private family life unfolding.
But, stylistically, Esparza and cinematographer Barbu Balasoiu have forgone the cliched hand-held camera so beloved of intimate dramas like this, opting instead for elegant, unobtrusive still shots, often from the middle distance across framing spaces, which seem to keep us at a respectful distance from events and which invite contemplation rather than involvement.
The phrase “it’s just what it is” is repeated a couple of times, like a motto and perhaps in the end, Life and Nothing More is about the obligatory resignation to circumstance, the inability to dream, which is so much a part of its characters’ lives.
This is why its quietly optimistic final scene, earned by Regina, is, for all its slow staginess, so moving.