The Straight to Video Art House : Bread and Roses
By Eric Allen Hatch

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[The first in an ongoing series reviewing noteworthy films that had limited or no theatrical runs. The loose criteria for this series will be films that didn’t play theatrically in Baltimore - admittedly a third-tier movie town (even if it is video heaven) - and that I did not review for the Baltimore City Paper (www.citypaper.com).] Ken Loach’s Bread and Roses.

Ken Loach’s first American film, Bread and Roses, ironically received much less attention here than many of his British-made productions. To say that this neglect is undeserved is not to say that Bread and Roses stands among Loach’s best work. Indeed, Loach fails here to coach from his actors the wrenchingly naturalistic performances that has long been his hallmark. Still, the film is significant in two primary ways. First, it remains consistent with Loach’s evolving political concerns as a filmmaker. Second, this is an American film about class issues in America, and any domestic film that dares speak that dirty word demands our attention.

Bread and Roses begins with the clandestine transport of Maria (Pilar Padilla) and several relatives across the U.S. border with Mexico. After a few complications, Maria is reunited with her sister and her family in L.A., where she begins work as a janitor for a large non-union management company. Her boss here proves himself a real scumbag early on, ogling Maria on her first day, and harshly reprimanding workers for the slightest infraction of company policy. The company he represents pays minimum wage and offers no benefits, but has an unending supply of workers due to their willingness to hire illegal immigrants.

Maria soon encounters Sam (Adrien Brody), a young organizer for Justice for Janitors, who urges Maria and her coworkers to unionize. While Maria herself is enthusiastic, her sister and other coworkers prove very suspicious of Sam. However, when an elderly coworker loses her job for being a few minutes late, they relent, and protests begin. Sam’s tactic is to try to embarrass the wealthy law firm and banks occupying the building where Maria works, thinking these tenants will then pressure the building owners to meet the protesters’ demands. To this end, he has picketers show up at fancy L.A. restaurants and parties to make their cause known. Meanwhile, we’re also privy to the inner conflict of many employees: one fears that participating in a strike will endanger his chances of going to college, while others turn to recriminations when they find that someone has snitched to the management.

The end result, artistically, is eerily akin to Erin Brockovich. That is to say, the film has its heart in the right place politically, but is aesthetically crafted in manner simplistic enough to be understood by a five-year old. Let us therefore enumerate its artistic faults before exploring its political theses.

The acting is especially free of nuance. Both Brody and Padilla handle themselves well enough; Brody is an actor increasingly noteworthy for his versatility. However, most supporting actors and bit parts come off as far too cartoonish to carry dramatic weight. Particularly, all the actors playing rich white suits give performances that barely qualify as one dimensional. No other factor does less to shake the sense of realism Loach brings to all his other recent films: it’s hard to hate these criminally negligent characters - with plenty of real-life criminally negligent corollaries - if we can’t get past the bluntness of their performances. Sorely missed is the dependability of Loach mainstays like Ricky Tomlinson, whose working class warmth brings humor and dignity to each of his Loach roles, regardless of size.

Similarly, the narrative also develops at a much more conventional pace than is the norm for Loach. Loach and screenwriter Paul Laverty (who penned two other Loach films) hold our hand as they unveil each plot point, making sure that we know not only what has happened, but also what is about to. The basic structure is very familiar: the union arrives, met with skepticism until a transforming event sends workers into the arms of the organizers, soon after which success is or is not attained. It’s the same structure of any film that would allow American institutions to be questioned - the same pattern, for instance, which greets Woodward and Bernstein as they gather information in All the President’s Men. (Of course, there are sound real-life reasons why American citizens fear deviating from the norm, given harsh repercussions that predate the McCarthy years, with recent reminders in how anti-globalization protesters, or Free Mumia protesters, or current anti-war activists are treated; that is, repercussions not quite as severe as in the Third World, but more severe than in many Europeans countries, and certainly more severe than in the illusory “ideal” democratic society America aspires to being. I reference specifically the current treatment of Arab-American prisoners with alleged ties to terrorism, “disappeared” and held by Ashcroft without basic civil rights in classic, C.I.A.-supported Latin American style)

Detail is also lacking. In a film like Riff Raff, for instance, Loach’s camera shows us quiet minutia about his characters’ lives, allowing us to both see the directors’ perspective and form our own ideas and attachments. Here these poetic holes are filled with unnecessary dialogue and repetitive action. Worse, even though the actors try, the superfluous romance between Sam and Maria feels like an anemic afterthought.

What can we conclude from the fact that Bread and Roses feels so much more staged than any prior Loach film? We can see it as a failing of the director to successfully translate his working methods into American idiom. Indeed, there are moments in the film that feel tentative and unsure, which might lead us to that conclusion; it might be harder, for instance, to detect and eradicate wooden acting when you have to reorient your ear to differing dialects. However, the staginess of this film seems so deliberate that it could be argued that it is Loach’s intent to be blunter than ever before. The film feels like a piece of propaganda, and when it cuts for a full minute into a Justice for Janitors promotional video, this premise seems confirmed.

In fact, I would argue that Bread and Roses is Loach’s tentative attempt to work in a sagging genre: the American political film. American popular culture is notoriously unsympathetic to open dissidence. The mood that resulted in the the banning of Salt of the Earth tapered off briefly in the ‘60s and ‘70s, but returned with a vengeance in the 1980s, with class issues even more rigorously silenced since the Reagan years than ever before. Take again Erin Brockovich (please!). Steven Soderbergh has shown himself capable of crafting sophisticated entertainments such as Out of Sight and positively subcultural creations like Schizopolis, yet when he tackles a class issue - even from a very specific perspective that chooses not to universalize its dissidence - he dumbs himself down.

Further investigation shows us that films about class issues in the U.S. have existed in a state of arrested development for several decades now. If we compare either Bread and Roses or Brockovich to Paul Schrader’s great Blue Collar (a 1978 film that took union membership and the right to struggle as its starting point, not its melodramatic end), it is the recent films that feel simplistic and antiquated. It is as though American political film has existed in a state of arrested development for decades. Perhaps this is not a coincidence, as we reflect that this has happened over the same decades that U.S. blue collar wages in real (inflation-adjusted) dollars have declined at a greater rate than ever before, dating back to the beginning of the industrial revolution and including the Great Depression (refer to Zinn of Chomsky if you don’t believe me). If the giant corporations that control film screening and distribution in this country do their jobs, the masses will not receive any communiqué that attempts to wake them up to this deplorable fact.

As a measured response to such atrocious sociopolitical trends, we have intelligent artists simplifying their messages to appeal to a wider audience . Sometimes, as with Brockovich, this compromise works: the masses receive the message, even if there is some debate about whether the message is now too diluted to make a lasting impression. In other words, Bread and Roses may be Loach’s intentionally simplified attempt to make his message of working class solidarity (far more acceptable in Europe, where normal people apparently freely use the word class instead of resorting to impotent euphemisms) reach millions of Americans - an aim made more ironic by the film’s paltry distribution in the U.S. (Indeed, if this was Loach’s aim, he can be criticized for failing to understand the process by which all non-domestic film protect is ghettoized in urban art houses in the U.S.). It’s an ongoing debate about the American populace: can a culture that deifies revisionist histories like Pearl Harbor and reactionary goons like James Cameron appreciate subtle works of political art? We can’t blame an outsider for deciding that we cannot until our own filmmakers dedicate themselves to proving otherwise.

Loach fans will still want to see this film. In his choice of subject material, if not in his handling, Bread and Roses is a consummate Loach film. His choice to make his American film about Latinos, the largest growth demographic in this country yet arguably the most underrepresented on film, shows that he remains a perceptive critic of systems micro and macro. As with Sayles’ Men With Guns, making a North American film in Spanish at a watershed moment in one’s career makes a strong statement about solidarity to the reality of pan-American culture over the corporate whitebread illusion.

It also refuses to completely efface complications from its narrative. In Loach’s excellent next film, The Navigators (which I was lucky enough to see at the 2001 Toronto Film Festival), Loach prevents sweeping generalizations by showing us that all workers aren’t saints and all bosses aren’t assholes (even if these are the roles society regularly asks them to play). In Bread and Roses, too, we see the institutionalization of American unions criticized at moments when another film might tiptoe around this troubling reality. At one point Sam is told by his boss to desist from using unconventional tactics of social disobedience, fearing a lawsuit. Sam responds by identifying his overseers’ true fear, that “You’re not going to have your 40 million dollars to give the Democrats this year, so you can see them piss it down the toilet like last time.”

It’s a tantalizing detail, one we can only imagine would be further developed in other Loach films. In one moment, we are confronted with the distance between union executives and the front lines, and the complicity of union leadership with a troubled political party that has largely abandoned its progressive promises of years past. The backbiting between workers is another authentically Loach detail which harkens back to Blue Collar, reminding us that corporations have many tools with which to quell dissent: playing racial cards, for instance, or creating subclasses of differences by promoting informants over their protesting coworkers. Loach also hammers home the issue of health care, with many characters voicing his disbelief that the richest country in the world doesn’t provide that service to 40 million needy citizens.

Credit Loach with being brave enough to pursue issues that few American directors are willing to acknowledge exist within their own borders. That the film is an aesthetic disappointment seems almost besides the point. Loach’s tremendous body of work contains numerous individual masterpieces like Poor Cow, Ladybird, and My Name Is Joe, but these works are always better contextualized within the mounting consistency - the unfailing humanism and political astuteness - of his oeuvre. As he ages, his films have also become more specified, more “issue-driven” - an attempt, it seems, to cover all the bases while he still has time. In these respects, Bread and Roses is completely consistent. One never questions that he loves his heroes (even if we wish they were more fully realized) and hates their oppressors (even if, in his understanding of class war and the roles it forces upon us, he does understand their motivations). In the end, we can only hope that films such as this one form a primitive precedent, a foot in the door of American theaters that Loach, or other qualified directors, can pursue with greater detail and artistic grace in the future.