MOVIES

'El Norte' finally gets the attention it deserves

By John DeFore
SPECIAL TO AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Friday, January 23, 2009

Given the thousands upon thousands of films available on DVD — and the ridiculous number that have been released two, three, or even more times in only occasionally improved "special editions" — it can be baffling to note which titles the home entertainment industry simply hasn't gotten around to yet.

How can it be, for instance, that "Our Man in Havana," which pairs the writer and director of "The Third Man" (Graham Greene and Carol Reed) with star Alec Guinness, has never been released? Surely the curiosity value of those three names alone would make it more salable than a lot of the dross filling new release shelves.

That particular injustice ends two weeks from today, with "Havana" joining a fairly random handful of other new-to-disc titles in a series Columbia has labeled "Martini Movies." The theme of the series (which also includes Stephen Frears' spoof "Gumshoe," starring Albert Finney) might be dubious, but at least it's an excuse for the studio to put the film out at last.

Other themed excuses for vault-cleaning reissues make more sense, like Warner's upcoming "Natalie Wood Collection," which bundles the actress' famous outings with obscure ones, or the unusual "Lost & Found RKO Collection," a set sold only through the Turner Classic Movies Web site (www.tcm.com), which gathers six RKO titles believed until recently to be lost forever.

When the Criterion Collection locates a neglected landmark, though, it doesn't wait around to promote it with other films. For a large number of cinephiles, the Criterion imprint alone is enough to say that, though it may be unfamiliar, a film is worth their attention.

"El Norte" is the latest such orphan, a work that is meaningful to enough different kinds of audiences that one would expect it to have been reissued long ago. (If it's late to DVD, at least it's early to another format: Criterion is releasing it on Blu-ray simultaneously.) It's almost heartbreaking that the movie wasn't readily available at the start of this country's latest round of controversy over immigration: The most xenophobic participants in the debate may be impervious to arguments made via fictional narrative, but fence-sitters (sorry) could easily be moved by this movie's identification with the needs and dreams of its immigrant protagonists.

Directed by Gregory Nava (who co-wrote it with producer Anna Thomas), the story follows a brother and sister who make the arduous journey from Guatemala to Los Angeles not because they want to sponge up precious American resources but because they'll be killed if they stay where they are. Their father has just been murdered by soldiers for trying to organize his fellow peasants against the rich men who exploit them, and young Enrique, upon discovering his father's mutilated corpse, has killed a soldier in a fit of shock. Enrique's mother is quickly kidnapped in reprisal, so he sets out with his sister Rosa for the land where, according to battered copies of "Good Housekeeping" his relatives have seen, even the poor have access to flush toilets.

Some of the difficulties Enrique and Rosa face — the "coyotes," for instance, who promise to get people across the U.S./Mexico border but are just as likely to rob them — have become familiar over the past two decades. (Richard Linklater's "Fast Food Nation," for instance, effectively ties the dehumanizing traffic in illegal labor into the low price of a Happy Meal). But such problems weren't well-known in 1983, when "El Norte" wowed audiences at the Telluride film fest.

Although the movie might draw criticism on a couple of small fronts if it were released today — the dialogue makes its message unnecessarily explicit once or twice; action scenes aren't wholly convincing — "El Norte" still excels at its main goal, which is to force Anglo viewers to see Latino immigrants as individual human beings rather than as the generic menace Lou Dobbs rails against. As Enrique and Rosa, David Villalpando and Zaide Silvia Guti?rrez manage (despite having little or no screen-acting experience) to make their earnest, innocent characters believable, to shift the film's balance from liberal agitprop toward the fablelike territory its makers intended. More than most films its age, "El Norte" continues to speak directly, and movingly, to our time.