SELENA
A film review by Steve Rhodes
Copyright 1997 Steve Rhodes
RATING (0 TO ****): ** 1/2
The young Selena Quintanilla and her sister Suzette crawl on top of the family's modest home. Selena casts her eyes to the full moon which engulfs the screen as Selena talks about her dreams. Positioned as a Mexican-American Horatio Alger story, the movie SELENA tells the true story of a popular singer who was murdered in her mid-twenties.
Although the film has a charismatic lead, Jennifer Lopez, in the title role as the grownup Selena, the picture suffers from an overly homogenized and sanitized approach. Writer and director Gregory Nava takes an all too reverential approach to the persona of Selena. The resulting film feels less like the story of a flesh-and-blood star, than an idealized biography that a fan club might produce. The film has all of the high spirits and the depth of one of the old GIDGET movies.
All of this notwithstanding, I thoroughly enjoyed Lopez's performance. You may remember Lopez from her last role as the Cuban nanny in BLOOD AND WINE. In that movie, her part consisted of walking around looking sexy. In SELENA she owns the show with her luminescence.
The film starts in 1995 with Selena riding into the Astrodome on a horse drawn carriage as her fans go wild. As she sings, the camera dwells on her fans as the spotlights pan through the audience. Although there are numerous songs in the movie, Edward Lachman's glitzy cinematography and Nancy Richardson's fast editing concentrate on flash and dazzle. Why Selena became such a Tejano music star, we never find out. Whether because the songs are filmed in such a distracting way or because the ones they chose for the film are not Selena's best, the film shows us a high energy entertainer whose singing can best be described as, well, pleasant.
The undercurrent of the movie has to do with the struggles of being Mexican-American. After the scene of the idolatrous fans in the Astrodome, the movie flashes back to Corpus Christi, Texas in 1961 where Selena's father Abraham is part of a trio of Mexican-American singers who are practicing "Blue Moon." They discover the inherent conundrum of being Mexican-Americans who sing Gringo music. Both races reject the group for racist reasons.
The show makes another jump to Lake Jackson, Texas in 1981 where Abraham (Edward James Olmos) lives with his wife Marcella (Constance Marie) and their kids. Abraham is the proverbial dreamer who is counterbalanced by his ever logical wife. He wants the moon, but she worries about the mortgage. Both characters stay in pure formula territory. With Dave Grusin's dreamy background music, the film comes near to lapsing into a fairy tale.
When Abraham realizes that young Selena (Rebecca Lee Meza) has a remarkable voice, he makes her stop playing kid games in the backyard and start practicing her singing. He forces her siblings to be her musical accompanists. None of the kids are wild about the idea, but Abraham is one of those old school fathers. He commands; the kids jump. But, Olmos gives us a stage-father with a heart as well as a dictator.
The show skips again to El Paso, Texas in 1989 where Selena's popularity now extends to small crowds at county fairs. Her dad is scandalized when Selena takes off her top and flaunts her body in a Madonna-style bustier. (Actually, Selena could have become rich through diet books if the story is accurate. Although her father and sister are chubby, Selena brags that she lives exclusively on junk food, especially pepperoni pizza, but her svelte figure is the sort teenage girls dream about.)
Her $600 per show makes for a meager existence for her family. Abraham drives a bus, and Selena and the band live in it from gig to gig. Sometimes they stop to spend the night at fleabag motels with signs proclaiming "Direct Dial Phones" as their chief amenity.
One day, they sign a guitarist named Chris Perez (Jon Seda) from a heavy metal band. Although he looks like the character than may provide some creative tension in the film, he turns out to be as sweet as the rest of the family. He does have one funny little habit. He wears a holster that is custom-made to hold a small bottle of hot sauce. When he takes Selena out for pizza, he draws and twirls the bottle like a gun and shoots the sauce, thereby drowning his pizza in it.
With the exception of Tejano music fans, most of us probably first heard about Selena when she was murdered, but the film treats the event with all of the importance of an epilogue. As the film is winding down, she is suddenly killed, and the story ends shortly thereafter. It is as if the movie does not want to destroy its nostalgic ambiance with the brutality of real life. Even the cinematographic techniques change at the end with her murder being revealed in a brief and flashy montage.
Although the show has merit and Lopez delivers a remarkably compelling and extremely likable performance, the picture suffers from terminal blandness and leaves too many questions unanswered. We learn just enough about Selena to want to know more.
SELENA runs much too long at 2:10. It is rated PG for some mild profanity and the off-screen murder. The film would be fine for kids of any age, but those under ten would probably be interested only if they are Selena fans. Lopez's delightful performance is enough for me to be able to recommend the picture and give it ** 1/2.
**** = A must see film. *** = Excellent show. Look for it. ** = Average movie. Kind of enjoyable. * = Poor show. Don't waste your money. 0 = Totally and painfully unbearable picture.
REVIEW WRITTEN ON: April 1, 1997
Opinions expressed are mine and not meant to reflect my employer's.
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