Closer to Home

Joseph Nobile's "Closer To Home" is a sprawling drama, compactly told. The director begins by performing a service: he shows how Filipino working people, both urban and rural, really live. Vulnerable and preyed upon, their insecure lives lead them to take desperate risks in the hope of improvement. Dalisay, (Madeline Ortaliz) a pretty, upright, determined young woman who works in a textile factory in the city, but whose family owns a tiny sharecropper's rice paddy in the countryside, seeks to emigrate to America. When a man tells a New York agency he is willing to marry her, based only on her photo, she tells her parents she has an offer of a job as a nanny. As her younger sister needs an operation, and a cousin already lives in New York, her father reluctantly pledges his farm and two water buffalo to the local loan shark to raise the bribe she needs to get her travel papers. The portrayals of her illiterate parents as dignified and personable reinforce the monstrousness of their situation. These are people you would be happy to have to dinner.

The American man is Dean, a forty-ish jaded veteran of the Merchant Marine whose inheritance, the 3-story walk-up tenement building where he lives, is entangled with his embittered sister and petty merchant cousin. Working as a taxi driver, Dean has the air of a loser who might once have had a happier outlook that he now wants to get back. Aware of his own limitations, he has arrived at an uneasy compromise between cynicism and optimism which leads him to posture as more savvy than he is. John Michael Bolger's portrayal of a decent working class guy whom life continually trips up is nuanced and affecting. Despite his flaws you root for him.

In New York the two misfortunate strangers, each seeking to use the other, awkwardly try to begin a long-term relationship, something neither has ever known. Where one might expect their efforts to immediately collapse, they surprisingly don't. Dean leans over backward to make his fiancée feel comfortable, but his own lack of culture and perspective more often than not leaves him flatfooted. "Wait," he tells her on her first night as she falls asleep over the expensive meal he has prepared, "I have Champangne. I think it's French!" He promises to bring her family to the wedding but can't currently afford it. Since she will not sleep with him until they are married he chivalrously takes to sleeping on the couch over her objections. They even have a fun outing, and his open-hearted Uncle Ralph, who lives upstairs, does his best to make Dalisay feel welcome. For her part, Dalisay takes up domestic duties, and reconnects with her more worldly cousin. Slowly, however, her family's need for money and his family's quarrels take their toll, and Dean begins to crumble though he tries, fumblingly, to hold it together. The buildup to the crisis happens gradually so that when it comes it resonates powerfully for having been understated all along.

The differing expectations of the would-be spouses is smartly underscored by condensing Dalisay's journey from the aqueous beauty of the rural Philippines directly to a moving windshield under a Brooklyn elevated subway track, with only a brief stop at JFK airport in between. The contrast speaks volumes, not only about the characters, but also the relative class nature of the two societies. Many of the film's scenes are relatively short, economical and informative, and although the technique risks seeming choppy at times it drives the story forward at a steady pace. The film is enhanced by the strong but conflicting motivations of their various relatives. These provide minor sub-plots that are integral to the main story, and add to its punch. By the end of the film the multiple strands in the story arc have been tied up with a satisfying, and surprising, emotional kick.

© Michael Sturza July 16, 2009

(Note: Over 500 of my movie reviews are now available in my book "Cut to the Chaise Lounge or I Can't Believe I Swallowed the Remote!" Get it at Amazon.)

Much of the effectiveness of this deeply affecting and ultimately tragic film is due to what is not shown and what is not said.

Dalisay (Madeline Ortaliz) is a young and pretty Filipino girl who--perhaps among other strategies--puts herself up as a mail order bride in order to get to America to make money to help her family and get medical help for her younger sister who has a heart condition. Maybe that is her motivation. What makes this movie so beguiling and intriguing is the ambiguous nature of Dalisay's desire. She is a "good girl, a proper girl but...(I am reminded of an old song)...one of the roving kind." She tells her family that she will work in America and send them money. She doesn't tell them that she is a mail order bride. This is the essential duplicity that Dalisay enters into. She has a cousin in America who will help her with the details. Perhaps this is planned. We really don't know. Perhaps she is waiting until she sees her intended and will play it by ear from there. Again, the ambiguity of her desire--and indeed the ambiguity of anyone's desire, especially that of a young girl from a poor rural family in a poor country who has been making her living sewing clothes in a sweat shop--is what intrigues us. No one's motives are completely pristine. There is always an element of self-service involved, even in the most humanitarian ventures, even if it is only that of being the one who is doing good. Dalisay is being good, but one gets the sense as the film develops that she is being good partially for Dalisay. She has seen what it is like to work in a sweat shop and she has seen what happens to the girls who give their bodies away. She is wiser than that. She has a plan.

Director Joseph Nobile who co-wrote the script with Ruben Arthur Nicdao overplays the idyllic rural setting in the early scenes--the good father and family, their hard work, the happy, if poor, children, the bright and ambitious daughter in whom they believe. They are of course preyed upon by middle men and money lenders, but they hold their heads high. I think Nobile would have been wise to cut out about half of these opening sequences in the Philippines because they are too cloying, they too much recall the clichés of the good and noble peasants being used by the evil power structure.

However, there is something to be said for the build up. We do see that although Dalisay brings gifts to her siblings when she visits, and she seems delighted to see the children run alongside the bus, there is some restraint in her affection, some slight distance from the little ones and from her father and mother. The family affection, although seemingly demonstrated, struck me as lukewarm. Perhaps that was the intent so as to account for Dalisay's leaving them.

The film begins slowly. I would have given up on it had I not known of the film's reputation. I stayed with it and I am glad I did because once Dalisay gets to America about halfway through, the story becomes riveting and develops into a powerful tragedy of conflicting desires, told in stark realism and beautifully acted by Ortaliz and John Michael Bolger who plays Dean.

He is one of live's pathetic losers who has a dream, an island girl of his own, to love him and to serve him and to be his wife and constitute the loving family that he doesn't have. Ah, but the intrusion of reality! We see that although Dalisay is good and non-exploitive herself, she has her own dreams and they are not likely to include an over-the-hill, broken-down and drunken cabbie, a guy with a dysfunctional family, a guy who can't keep a job and wears too much cologne. When he says he loves her we know there is no way she can say she loves him.

An important scene that foreshadows the end catches Dalisay and her cousin Tess at the kitchen table in the apartment. They are joking in Tagalog about Dean's physical attributes. We can see how cozy they are, the two women in their shared culture, and how alien Dean is as he comes upon them and doesn't understand what they are saying. Ultimately we feel sorry for Dean. We pity him. Yet we understand and appreciate Dalisay's decision. She does what she has to do, and she does it with dignity and honor.

A final point: When Dean is seen crying near the end, we the viewers know why he is crying, but his family does not. For the audience the tears are ambiguous and his tragedy is twofold, just as Dalisay's motivations are ambiguous and twofold.

This is very close to masterpiece. It is original and faithfully done without choosing sides or assigning blame one way or the other. Like a Greek tragedy, the end is fated and due to human frailty rather than any conscious iniquity.