Mi vida loca
aka My Crazy Life First screened and reviewed in August 2024
Director: Allison Anders. Cast: Angel Aviles, Seidy Lopez, Marlo Marron, Nélida López, Jacob Vargas, Gabriel Gonzalez, Julian Reyes, Arthur Esquer, Magali Alvarado, Bertila Damas, Jesse Borrego, Salma Hayek, Danny Trejo, Jessica Estrada, Gloria Gibson, Carlos Rivas. Screenplay: Allison Anders. VOR:③
Vision and commitment outshine execution at pretty much extra step, though it's hard to deny that Anders isn't averse to soapy contrivance.
Look, there are all kinds of movies that live in the canyon between an urgent and honorable need to get marginalized stories and characters on screen and the undisguisable unreadiness of the actual project and of several collaborators. Gas Food Lodging had already proved that Allison Anders is a more talented writer-director than Mi vida loca/My Crazy Life suggests on either side of that hyphen. We're seeing a trained gymnast wobble on the beam. It happens. Plus, it's a pretty punk gesture for Anders to leverage her one moment of real industry attention to make and market a working-class, Echo Park-specific, Latina-driven ensemble film that no studio would ever have greenlit.
In Mi vida loca, Anders has written a series of potentially juicy storylines for six or eight principal characters and the important satellites in their lives. Friendship, adultery, grief, birth, duels, imprisonment, release, secret pen pals, public feuds, that one faulty idea on which people who have little are nonetheless betting almost everything... it's all popping, inside a pretty concentrated social space. There's plenty for the cast to play, and as incidents accrued, I got more absorbed than I'd predicted after a rocky start.
That said, Mi vida loca is starved for more sophisticated writing. It takes melodramatically predictable turns every few minutes, with too many flat exchanges and ungainly pauses in between. I think the screenplay suffers more than it gains from being partitioned into three chapters when all of them are densely interconnected anyway; the ending feels like it would amass more force if the whole feature were coming to a head, as is actually the case, and not just the plotlines that took precedence over the prior 30 minutes. The writing is at its worst when Anders, a non-Latina white woman, intersperses her almost exclusively English dialogue with the occasional bato or ese as a conspicuous but failed quarter-bid for authenticity.
It's fair but also disingenuous to wonder why Anders didn't wait until this script had been more thoroughly workshopped. Is a director in her position, much less a woman director, supposed to bank on outfits like HBO still being as invested two or four years later in her risky third feature, following her one critical breakout? Kimberly Peirce told me she waited almost a decade after Boys Don't Cry until a fully up-to-par project had ideal momentum in every department—and of course that never happened, and suddenly nine years had gone by where she hadn't made anything. I question Mi vida loca's script and execution on a few levels, with its Griffith- or Micheaux-style trust in crude mechanics of pathos and fate. But I also applaud Anders for jumping when the safer option, for better and worse, might have been to defer.
While watching, I pined a little for the actors, few of whom I recognized beyond Jacob Vargas, who's made a way out of no way for almost 50 years, a very early walk-on for Danny Trejo, and a barely-known Salma Hayek in a mostly wordless bit part. Much of the cast feels way, way too green and further misserved by being so showcased right at the outset (Angel Aviles, Seidy Lopez) or so instrumental to the big finish (Magali Alvarado), pushing for emotions they don't seem to feel and speaking lines that still sound like run-throughs of someone else's words. But Aviles and Lopez have stayed at this for three decades now, expanding their portfolios to include the odd directing job. Marlo Marron, who already had soap experience and a prime-time series concurrent with Mi vida loca, and Bertila Damas, who's averaged two screen projects a year alongside a parallel theater career, convey that level professionalism in Anders's central chapter, which benefits a great deal from their more grounded and textured playing. What I'm saying is that Anders wasn't putting a bunch of newcomers into a spotlight for which they were ill-prepped; everyone involved was taking an all-too-rare leap together. And when you don't have the benefits of a rehearsal-friendly budget or a regular diet of work, the edges might still be rough when a big opportunity does roll around. We know this.
I can't say my estimation for Mi vida loca rockets upward by placing what I saw in its societal and industrial context. And there's just no gainsaying errors in judgment that should have been fixable. For example, Mi vida loca seems to end with one climactic death but then sneaks another into the closing minute, and both are so clumsily blocked and cut together that it's tricky to work out exactly what happened. (I will say, though, one of those climaxes follows a character outside the space where deadly fire soon gets exchanged, and Anders generates a good effect from how dangerously close but also far away this dénouement feels for a character nursing another wound entirely.)
Anyway, we've all seen movies that fall short of their potential in ways that just alienate us, especially from privileged participants who had every opportunity to do better work. Others fall short in ways that keep you rooting for them—cognizant of the duress under which the whole project probably labored. And even if Mi vida loca fails to convey a more convincing and rounded impression of day-to-day truths in the life of early-90s Echo Park, the truth, or many truths, feel somewhere close by. Anders hasn't caught lightning in a bottle, but it's flickering out there on a horizon, while most people aren't even looking in the right direction. Grade:C
