When Alejandro met Elizabeth
In Julio Torres’s debut feature, visa problems are funny except when they’re not
Julio Torres has done a bit of this and a bit of that: writing for “Saturday Night Live”; co-creator of an HBO series, “Los Espookys”; work as a comedian and actor. He makes his feature directing debut with “Problemista.” He also wrote the script and stars. The movie’s a kind-of comedy: inventive, generally sweet, rarely predictable, too uneven for its own good. You can see Torres’s talent. You also can see his lack of experience.
He plays Alejandro, a Salvadoran immigrant in New York who wants to design toys. Where other creative young people dream of Broadway or Hollywood, Alejandro dreams of Hasbro. “Toys these day are awesome and wonderful,” he says, “but they’re a little too preoccupied with fun.” His ideas include a Slinky that won’t go down stairs and a Barbie with fingers crossed behind her back.
As he waits for Hasbro to call, Alejandro supports himself by working for a cryogenics company. One of the bodies in the firm’s care is that of a painter (RZA, seen in flashbacks). His widow, Elizabeth (Tilda Swinton), clashes with the company. Elizabeth is big on clash. Alejandro loses his job. This means he has a month to get a new employer to sponsor him or he’ll be deported. Perhaps Elizabeth can help.
Many words might describe this woman. “Helpful” is not one of them. “Problemista” may be Alejandro’s story, but it’s Elizabeth’s movie. Swinton has made a career out of frequently playing oddballs and grotesques. Elizabeth may be the character of no return. She’s Cruella de Vil on a (very) bad day. Remember those teeth from dental hell Swinton’s character has in “Snowpiercer” (2013)? It would seem she brought them out of storage to play Elizabeth, so heartily does the actress chew, chomp, and otherwise munch the scenery. Wearing a magenta-colored fright wig, Elizabeth alternately rants and hectors in a Scottish burr. Her idea of good manners is to say “Oh, El Salvador: pupusas and those nuns they killed in the ’80s” when Alejandro tells her where he’s from.
In contrast, Torres plays Alejandro with an almost recessive politeness. “Uh, no” is his default response to questions, and his walk is a sad shuffle that’s like a full-body shrug. One oddity of “Problemista” is that the character seems to be in his early 20s, and acts even younger (he calls his mother, back in El Salvador, an awful lot), yet Torres is 37.
He makes Alejandro quite appealing, in a sad-sack way. Yet Torres the writer-director would seem not to trust Torres the actor. The former keeps introducing elements that distract from the latter. It’s not just the scene-smothering presence of Elizabeth (whom Alejandro occasionally dreams of wearing a dragon suit). Isabella Rossellini provides an intermittent voice-over. A set of fantasy sequences center on a heavyset, preening Black man meant to personify Craigslist. Another fantasy sequence sends Alejandro into ATM hell, leading to a face-off with a pistol-packing Bank of America employee. Various extraneous characters are introduced, then fail to come back.
So Torres keeps a lot of balls in the air. But he tends to downplay the most important one: Alejandro’s immigration plight. There are recurring shots of upturned hourglasses — more distraction — as a reminder that time is running out. But his desperation is played for laughs, and the heartbreak that looms is shied away from. It’s not as if Torres is afraid of tonal risks. But the deep melancholy that “Problemista” has at its heart, and which is affecting as none of the broad comedy and idiosyncratic flourishes are, is like those crossed fingers of that Barbie doll Alejandro wants to make. It stays out of sight.