"Under the Same Moon" does a lot of little things on the cheap, emotionally speaking. Yet it gets one big thing right. Through the eyes of its hardy 9-year-old protagonist, the film relays an immigration story heightening the experience of countless subterranean immigration stories written each year in America. An estimated 4 million Latinas leave one or more children behind when they travel north to find work. They deserve a more nuanced film, but this one's often affecting.
Rosario (Kate del Castillo, an honest and vivid presence) heads north from Mexico and finds under-the-table work as a domestic in Los Angeles. What little money she earns, she sends back to her 9-year-old son, Carlitos (the deft sympathy magnet Adrian Alonso), who's living with his ailing grandmother. When she dies, the boy's already fractured world cracks open completely. And he heads, perilously, north himself to join his mother.
He finds a makeshift guardian in the surly migrant worker played by Eugenio Derbez (a bit too much of a scene-stealer). The migrant and Carlitos search to find his birth father in Tucson, Ariz. By the time director Patricia Riggen arrives in L.A., following the schematics laid out by screenwriter Ligiah Villalobos, the audience has been laid out, too, usually with the pathos equivalent of a trowel.
Lou Dobbs won't buy the end result. Nor will anyone else who prefers their tales of undocumented workers to come with a stern reminder that borders are borders. Frustratingly, "Under the Same Moon" hasn't enough artistry or sap-aversion in its telling (as there was in Gregory Nava's seminal "El Norte" a generation ago) to disarm its political opponents. The relationship between Carlitos and the migrant lacks an authentic core.
Yet "Under the Same Moon" cannot help but destroy your defenses at its climax. What does it say about a film when you believe only parts of the journey, yet are moved by the arrival? It says that the film has succeeded to an approximate three-fifths point.
