When Bella screened at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2006, it won People’s Choice Award. It is a good film. Complex characters with some good dialogue convey a positive vibe without being maudlin. Bella is the story of Jose (Eduardo Verastegui) a cook working in his brother’s restaurant and the young waitress, Nina (Tammy Blanchard), who is fired for being late. Jose is not a happy camper. He hallucinates when scraps go down the garbarator, and then he purposely sticks his hand in a gas flame. He is hiding, hiding in his brother’s kitchen and hiding behind a huge black beard that makes him look like a nineteenth-century Russian anarchist. For her part, she says she cannot get her life together, and we notice that she cannot avoid getting pregnant and cannot take a pregnancy test and still get to work on time. At the same time, both characters seem, above all, to be decent people.
The complex motivation of the characters keeps the story from being a formulaic love story. The many good things Jose does for Nina on their day away from work he does not because he is a knight in shining armour saving a damsel in distress but because he is damaged and for his own reasons wants to adopt the child she is carrying. He thinks this will make amends for the young girl he accidentally killed in a traffic accident. When Jose takes Nina to visit his family, his motivation is entirely unclear, but we might guess a) he wants Nina to see what solid family support he has, b) he wants some of that support himself, and c) he wants his parents to meet the woman who may play a big part in his and their lives. His father is not the stereotypical wise old patriarch, but an immigrant who refuses to learn English, a father who has issues with his son driving again, and a husband who gracefully shares parenting with his wife. She begins by castigating Jose but winds up giving him the kind of deep support most people would love to get from a mother. Part of this support is revealed in a nice bit of dinner table dialogue where she says something like this in front of Nina and another guest: “I don’t usually share this, but when we were first married we tried and tried to get pregnant, and just when we were about to give up we heard of a baby up for adoption. As far as we are concerned that is the only difference between Manny and our other two sons.” So we know that Jose has confided in his mother and that she is on his side.
Now, it is perfectly possible to hate this movie. But as discerning viewers, we should be clear what our standards are. This takes some self-examination. There is a strong bias against looking inward because we live in a consumer culture, movies are something we consume, the customer is always right, and therefore movies had better please us or else it is their fault. If we do not examine ourselves as well as the movie, we may well be unaware of why we don’t like Bella. To take a hypothetical example, if I am unaware that I demand all excellent movies to be serious dramas with lives full of fury and signifying nothing, then I will be unaware why I dislike Bella and the gentle kindness people show each other. If I am unaware that I have my feelers out for even the slightest hint of a controversial issue, then I will be unaware why the abortion sub-text gets my goat. If I don’t realize that I consider all happy endings Hollywood pap, then I’ll have no idea why the largely positive outcome in Bella seems like a cop out. I’m not saying that viewers should not hold views like those above but rather that they should be aware of them and, if they criticize a movie, to acknowledge them. David Thomson, the long-time movie critic, provides a good example when he declares his bias: At his age, he prefers comedies and good stories, which, not incidentally, he thinks are what Hollywood does best. With that declaration out in the open, we know how to take his reviews.
Myself, I tend to apply the same standards to movies as I do to novels. I love movies ranging from Princess Bride to Spy Game to The Age of Innocence that have tight, well-thought-out stories. And this is where Bella falls down, in two places. Although the film wisely creates suspense in both Jose’s story and Nina’s story, the suspense in Nina’s story is specious. In a flash foreword, we see Nina go into what appears to be an abortion clinic, flop back on the table, and emerge in tears to be comforted by a waiting Jose. Has she had the abortion as planned? The film unfairly withholds the answer in order to create a more impressive ending. In addition to this weakness, the ending goes way too fast. The entire film up to the last scene essentially covers one day, and then in the last couple of minutes we cover about four years and most of the stuff we wanted to know: She did not have an abortion, she had a child, Nina apparently left, Jose has raised the girl, and after about 4 years Nina sees her daughter and asks to be let back into Jose’s life. Whew! Although Bella has narrative problems, they are not serious enough to stop even a plot-obsessed guy like me from enjoying the film.