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Ken Loach has made a career of directing films that feature scrappy, blue-collar protagonists that deal with class conflicts and other inequities rooted in money, power and politics. He has always worked outside the Hollywood system, and one of his early documentaries (Cathy Come Home) was so powerful, it actually led to a change in England's laws concerning the homeless.
Having apparently tapped every possible unjust social issue in the U.K., Loach loaded up his truck and moved to Beverly. Or Los Angeles, that is. Bread and Roses is Loach's first American film, but don't be fooled by its shooting location. It's still packed full of rah-rah social commentary, and even though Roses takes place within spitting distance of Tinseltown, it was still independently financed.
No matter what anyone tells you, Roses isn't the name of the ballyhooed return to music by Axl Rose. The film takes place in the spacious glass towers of downtown Los Angeles, where multi-million-dollar deals are routinely made every day. But when darkness falls, the empty buildings are taken over by dirt-poor cleaning crews, largely made up of illegal aliens from south of the border. They make very little money and have no benefits. Miss a day of work, for any reason at all, and you're fired. Hey - not all of those downtown businessmen are as nice as Leland McKenzie.
Pilar Padilla plays Maya, a recent import from Tijuana who gets a cleaning job through her older sister Rosa (Elpidia Carrillo). They work their fingers to the bone for a few measly dollars and the privilege of having the people they're cleaning up after look down their noses at them. But the grueling, repetitive world of office cleaning is set on its ear when a union organizer named Sam (Adrien Brody, Liberty Heights) arrives on the scene. He heads an organization called Janitors for Justice and has just successfully negotiated benefits for cleaners in Chicago. He tries to get the L.A. janitors to unionize, but they're all too scared about silly things like losing their jobs and being deported. Eventually they come around and become Sam's army of picketing, sign-wielding minorities.
Roses comes to a head during an emotional, well-acted battle between Maya and Rosa, the former finding herself falling in love with Sam, while the latter is firmly anti-union. There's also a pretty cool protest scene where the J for Js crash a party full of big Hollywood stars, like Gary Busey, Ron Perlman, Tim Roth, that guy from Deuce Bigalow and Benicio Del Toro (Jesus - can he give it a rest already?).
Yeah! Go union! Fight the Man! Disrupt his business meetings! Crash his parties! Generally raise a lot of - what? What's that? Hmmm. That's a good point. What rights are you due when you're not supposed to be here in the first place? Maybe that's why I had a problem mustering sympathy for the protagonists. We're talking about folks who keep quiet and fly under the radar to avoid getting booted out of a country they entered illegally. Michael Moore can do a much better job of making potentially unsympathetic people more likeable in his pursuit for truth and justice.
Roses reminded me a lot of Haskell Wexler's documentary called Bus Riders Union. Like Roses, it was set in Los Angeles, but pitted the poor community against the city's Metro Transit Authority. It's probably because Loach's directorial style gives Roses a bit of a documentary feel. The film's dialogue is great and rarely seems scripted, even though longtime Loach collaborator Paul Laverty's story is kind of weak as a whole.
1:52 - R for strong language and brief nudity
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