B-
It would be easy to dismiss “Under the Same Moon” as a manipulative tearjerker, because that’s what it is. But it’s a manipulative tearjerker that works, which makes it rather a rarity. Even those whose political agenda should cause them to find it objectionable will find it difficult to resist.
The film centers on a darling young Mexican boy named Carlitos (Adrian Alonso) and his single mother Rosario (Kate del Castillo). But though they love one another, they’re living apart. She’s in Los Angeles, having crossed the border illegally four years before and working as a cleaning woman ever since. He, meanwhile, lives with his grandmother (Angelina Pelaez) in Mexico, where he goes to school and works for stern but compassionate Carmen (Carmen Salinas), who runs a people-smuggling operation but refuses to break her promise to Rosario not to help Carlitos, who misses his mother terribly, to cross illegally.
When his grandmother suddenly dies, however, Carlitos arranges with a young Mexican-American couple (Jesse Garcia and America Ferrera) to cross to the U.S. in the trunk of their car. Unfortunately, the car is impounded at the border in a tense scene, and the boy is forced to extricate himself from it at the impound lot, unhappily losing his bankroll in the process. Thus begin adventures that lead him from a drug addict who offers to help him for money, to a woman who takes in illegals out of a sense of duty, to a supportive young worker who wants to help him get to his mother, and finally—and most importantly—to Enrique (Eugenio Derbez), a gruff, solitary illegal to whom he attaches himself, against the man’s will, after an INS raid. Naturally as the duo continue their travels toward Los Angeles, they bond through a series of episodes that see them taking jobs together in a diner, hitching a ride with a Latino band, and even arranging a hopeful meeting with the boy’s long-absent father.
Meanwhile Rosario has difficulties of her own. After losing her job with a snooty, well-to-do housewife (Jacqueline Voltaire), who refuses even to pay her the wages she’s owed, she considers marrying a likable security guard named Paco (Gabriel Porras) to regularize her presence in the country. But when she learns that Carlitos, whom she talks with on the phone every week, has fled across the border, he becomes her only concern, and she plans to return to Mexico to hunt for him. Meanwhile Carlitos and Enrique, unaware that she’s learned of his departure, have reached L.A. and are searching for the phone booth from which she calls every Sunday morning.
There are two strong threads at work here, one the natural mother-son bond and the other that that develops between the boy and Enrique, a man initially resistant to the role of father-figure but ultimately embracing it. And both are very effective in tugging at the heartstrings, especially because Alonso, del Castillo and Derbez are so good at rescuing the material from mere mawkishness. And in the relationship between Carlitos and Enrique, it adds a goodly quota of warm humor as well, of a sort that might seem sitcomish were the interplay not so charming. The supporting cast is generally good, too (though Voltaire comes off very stiff), and the film, while a low-budget project, boasts solid technical credits as well.
Of course “Under the Same Moon” isn’t subtle, and in terms of the issue of immigration that’s recently become such a political hot potato, it doesn’t attempt any kind of balanced view—it’s evident from the first frame where the makers’ sympathies lie, and the assumptions that underlie the story may turn off some whose opinions differ from them. But the picture is a human tale, not a political statement, and if you’re willing to take it on those terms, you’ll find it engaging and touching—a manipulative tearjerker, but an effective one.