Chavez's struggle to unionize exploited farm workers - his long marches, his hunger strike - make for moving moments, but rarely achieve grandeur. It's the commonplace organizational struggles, the Gandhi-like obsession with on-violence and the stubborn refusal to be bullied by the bigoted, the rich, the armed and the powerful that stands out in "Cesar Chavez."
Michael Pe? ("End of Watch") has the title role, a farm worker whose family once had land but lost it in the Depression. He has labored in the fields. He knows the back-breaking, knee-bloodying work of grubbing up onions or cutting grapes. He knows the campesinos who do that work, with few breaks provided by the growers, and no toilets "because Mexicans don't know how to use 'em, anyway."
The film picks up his story in the early 1960s. He's already trying to organize the pickers.
"Do you own anything?" he asks one, in Spanish. "Can you read or write?" And finally, the tipping point question, "Do you want more for your kids?"
His union bosses in Los Angeles (Rosario Dawson plays one) have been trying and failing to get headway by leafleting and the like. Chavez says, "I wanna get my HANDS dirty."
And with his wife Helen (America Ferrara), he loads their eight kids into a tiny Volvo and moves to Delano. They work in the fields by day and have meetings, trying to convince workers to hold out for better pay, better working conditions and "human dignity," by night.
Pena, a low-heat actor in most films, uses that to his advantage here. Chavez was famous for holding his temper, following Gandhi and Martin Luther King's ethos of non-violent protests, legal obstruction (pickets, boycotts) and passive resistance.
The reserved Pena finds humor in the confrontations with billy-clubbing cops, who call him and the union "communists." "Communists? We're Catholic. How can Catholics be communists?"
Ferrara gets to be the fiery one, playing a willful woman who brushes aside her husband's patriarchal sexism, vowing she can get herself arrested just as easily as the next organizer. When California makes it illegal to say the word "huelga" (strike) in the fields, Ferrera's Helen screams it with a wild-eyed passion that is positively chilling.
John Malkovich plays the face of the opposition, a rich, landed grape-grower who is passing his business on to his son and who leads grower opposition to "giving in" to "dirty foreigners." He himself is an immigrant, but he's willing to ally himself with his more bigoted peers to get his way.
A lot of the names of the companies and foes of this civil rights movement have been changed. But not the politicians. Ronald Reagan, then governor of California, does all that he can to break the union, and is seen on camera calling the grape boycott "immoral."
Richard Nixon finds slippery ways to undercut the nationwide boycott and keep the workers from winning a living wage.
Like "42," "Cesar Chavez" lacks the budget to feel truly epic in scope. The violence is scattered, shocking and personal, the struggles within the union muted but the outrage - cops rioting against picketers, thugs shooting and running over organizers, sheriffs arresting protesters because they "fear for their safety" - is palpable.
Senator Robert F. Kennedy (Jack Holmes) shows up midway through the movie, ostensibly to grandstand for the cameras and give the growers cover. Holmes, in a spot-on impersonation, shows that rare politician who dared lose his temper, expressing the audience's fury at the Constitutional rights we see being violated by a legal system that the growers own and control.
Luna wrestles this story into shape and in the process, much gets shortchanged. Chavez's neglected family is further neglected to make way for more in the long "pilgrimage" march from Delano to Sacramento.
But Pe?, in the title role, finds the simple dignity in a very basic struggle, to give "these people" faces and names, to make America notice them and to teach a culture one simple, elemental lesson: "Once a social change begins, it cannot be reversed."
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