The Perez Family
With Marisa Tomei, Alfred Molina, Chazz Palminteri, and Anjelica Huston.
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Director Mira Nair begins The Perez Family promisingly, on a white beach where we see two nuns drifting across the frame in slow motion. A large family dressed in their Sunday best are picnicking in the blinding sun. The sound of crashing waves swells on the sound track, and with the next shot we’re out over the water looking back at the figures onshore. In one cut Nair has communicated a sense of how fragile the family’s pleasures are, how the forces of history are waiting to swallow them up. When Nair cuts back to the shore, the camera cranes up and over a barren tree. The whole clan have entered the water in all their finery and are gazing at the horizon. Are they looking for Cuba or America, for the past or the future? When a wave washes in, soaking the shoes of Juan Raul Perez (Alfred Molina), his shoes are so polished and pristine that the indignity is funny. When the wave recedes, a crab is clawing at the leather.
After arriving in the promised land, Juan and Dottie are welcomed and quarantined in the Orange Bowl. Families are given priority in the process of assimilation, and Dottie wants to speed things up, so she begins assembling her own Perez family, with Juan as her husband and a homeless street urchin as her son. Juan considers Dottie low-class, but we in the audience can tell she’s the whore with a heart of gold he’s looking for. To give him time for his love to blossom, Juan is continually frustrated in his efforts to contact his wife, who is conveniently falling in love with a cop. This is Hollywood, so a happy ending is required–which we get, however illogically, with the requisite gunfire.
This is distressing, because Nair’s previous work (Salaam Bombay, Mississippi Masala) was remarkable for its compassionate vision of fully rounded characters. Even in The Perez Family there are occasional hints of Nair’s intelligence. When Juan hears for the first time that Elvis Presley is dead, he remarks in wonder, “So many assassinations!” When all the refugees are going to be shipped out of the Orange Bowl, an official informs them, “The Miami football teams are beginning their practicing, so you have to get out tomorrow.” And when Juan finally decides to make love to Dottie he tells her, “Sometimes you start out with this moral impulse. But hell is waiting for your execution, and it never comes. Hell is waiting for the best, and it never comes. Our only deliverance is to stop waiting. To expect nothing, to love desperately without hoping for another.” Alas, Dottie’s response is “Jooo smell like roses.” As if to prove that this unlikely comment isn’t as ridiculous as it sounds, an effects specialist proceeds to dump rose petals on her stomach.
