Bread and Roses (Ken Loach, 2001)



I'm honestly not sure how to approach this movie. I am a huge fan of the movie that comes directly before it in Loach's corpus, namely My Name is Joe, which made me a Peter Mullan fan for life. Bread and Roses, on the other hand, was--to put it mildly--a trial to get through, and much of what I've read makes me place the majority of the blame on Loach's shoulders; this could have been a fairly amusing comedy-drama with a compelling storyline, but instead comes off as a piece of propagandist trash aimed, if anything, at preaching to the choir; it's certainly not going to move anyone from the other side, even if they can see the validity in the arguments spouted here. The Motorcycle Diaries this is not.



The story concerns Maya (Pilar Padilla), a new, and illegal, immigrant to America, who lands a job with the Angel Cleaning Company, for which her sister works. Their boss, Perez (George Lopez), is, to put it mildly, a sexist, racist brute who likes nothing better than making his employees terrified of him. During her first day on the job, Maya encounters a fleeing Sam (The Pianist's Adrien Brody), being chased by her boss, his boss, and a security guard through the building; she, fond of neither Perez nor the security guard (with whom she had an altercation before getting the job), smuggles him to safety. The two form a tentative friendship, and she learns he's an activist who's fighting Angel, a non-union janitorial service little better than a sweatshop that happens to contract out. The rest of the movie deals with Maya and Sam's clashes with Angel.



There are a wealth of supporting characters who had the possibility to be interesting, but their stories are, for the most part, abandoned in Loach's quest to drive his message home. There are two avenues that are explored--Rosa's husband, Bert (Jack McGee), off work on disability because of his diabetes, and Juan (Eloy Mendez), who works as a janitor in order to save money for his law school tuition--but the pieces we see of their stories are there, as everything else, to drive the plot. When even your three-dimensional characters come off as two-dimensional, there's a problem. The others don't even merit the term "cardboard cutout." Which is a shame, as there's some talent within the ranks here, Lopez especially. The movie, however, is unconcerned.



Bread and Roses is the thinnest of veneers over boring political screed; even if you're of the same mindset as the film's writer and director, you'll have to overlook the film's glaring lack of characterization, threadbare plot, oddly cheap-looking film stock (though I'm willing to give it the benefit of the doubt and assume a bad DVD transfer), episodic formulation, and glacial pace in order to get anything out of it. (half)