Beautiful Quinceañera a Magical Gathering

Mexican-American Magdalena (Emily Rios) is fast approaching her fifteenth birthday. That means it is almost time for her Quinceañera, a lavish party celebrating a young girl’s transition into young adulthood. All Magdalena can think about is her dress, her boyfriend Herman (J. R. Cruz) and Hummer Limos (which she hopes her preacher father will rent for her). Everything else; school, friends, family; not near as important as those, a second thought to any of them a delicacy she’s just not going to taste.

The girl’s cousin Carlos (Jesse Garcia), a tough cholo living with their great-great uncle Tio Tomas (Chalo Gonzalez) after his parents threw him out, has far more to think about than parties and limousines. Working at a local carwash, his life is nothing like what he hoped it would be. Complicating matters for him are the two affluent Caucasian gay men (David W. Ross and Jason L. Wood) who recently purchased the property Tomas happily lives upon. Through them both, he’s able to answer vexingly complicated questions about his own sexuality, but in doing so the good he does his own soul has emotional complications he’d never anticipated.

For a variety of reason, Emily, Carlos and Tomas are suddenly thrown together, the elder of the trio trying his best to get the others to stop quarrelling and start being thankful for what they have. At first this is difficult, especially when the teenager’s problems start bubbling out from underneath her clothing and her cousin’s relationship with the men in the adjacent house bursts into the open. But the animosity between the relatives passes and even with major problems staring them straight in the face the group becomes the one thing none of them expected: a family.

The beauty of Sundance award-winner “Quinceañera” is how simplistically universal the story at its center is. While this intimately layered cultural melodrama is about the emotional interactions of a tight knit Hispanic family in California, it could just as easily have been about an African American one in Georgia or my very own raising three kids in the suburban wilds of Spokane, WA. Its themes resonate across borders, across social and cultural barriers. This could be any family living just about anywhere in the world, and while the mores and customs are unique to the one experiencing them the conflicts facing each and every member are practically universal.

Not bad for a pair of Caucasian filmmakers, one of whom hails few thousand miles from the core action and calls England home, who wrote this film almost on a whim. Yet Richard Glatzer (“Grief”) and Wash Westmoreland (“The Fluffer”) have managed to construct the remarkable, this film a sublime treasure showcasing the pitfalls, possibilities, perils and wonderment we call family.

It goes without saying that it certainly helps their cause to have three giftedly splendid actors in the central roles. Rios, Garcia and Gonzalez are borderline brilliant, the latter, without a doubt, a certified living legend, his character work toiling for director Sam Peckinpah in films like “Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia” timeless. He’s magnificent here easily delivering one of 2006’s greatest supporting performances. Tomas is a bastion of love, living such a long and bountiful life he’s able to look beyond a person’s mistakes to still embrace the human being begging to be released inside of them.

Garcia and Rios nearly match him. The former is so intensely focused as the conflicted Carlos it is impossible to not find yourself moved when he realizes the ramifications of his own painful quest to find true love. It is Rios, however, who makes the most striking impression. In her motion picture debut, the girl manages to give a hauntingly internalized performance, the cascading emotions bubbling up inside her trapped behind a pair of intense, almost sad, eyes that when they finally start to cry the actress almost broke my heart.

Glatzer and Westmoreland’s script is the real deal. Complex, layered, three-dimensional, funny and emotional, they plumb depths and go into inspired directions I didn’t always see coming. While the central story isn’t particularly imaginative, the intricacies they use to bring their characters home are. This is a richly detailed story that doesn’t go in for sap, doesn’t take the time to wallow in hokum, instead looking for truth and honesty and most times finding it with such precision I couldn’t help but want to watch it again.

There are moments here and there that come off a bit false. Magdalena’s battles with her father are far too brief and cliché to ever be as effective as I’d have liked, and the central conceit of a modern day, scientifically explainable virgin birth is almost too contrived and cute for the movie’s own good. But these are minor problems, unfortunate pinpricks minutely denting Glatzer and Westmoreland’s grand design. Overall I have nothing but praise for both them and their film, the beautiful “Quinceañera” undoubtedly one of the finest dramas I’ll see this year.