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GLENN KENNY'S REVIEW (posted 3/19/08)

Carlitos Reyes is one plucky kid. He hasn't seen his mom in almost five years — half as long as he's been alive — but lives for her Sunday morning calls, which he takes at a public phone. Mother Rosario (del Castillo) is in Los Angeles working for the day she can send for him; the single mom left Carlitos behind in Mexico with his grandmother, and sends them money regularly. But grandmothers don't live forever, and when Carlitos' passes away unexpectedly one morning, Carlitos — beautifully and energetically played by Alonso — decides to head out to reunite with Rosario. Under the Same Moon — the title is from something Rosario told Carlitos about where to look on the nights they are apart — shows what takes place in between the two Sundays between calls, as Carlitos makes his dangerous, incident-filled journey north while Rosario ponders returning to Mexico. Carlitos first travels courtesy — well, it's not really courtesy, as the kid pays, with money he's been saving for as long as his mom's been away — of two Mexican-born U.S.-citizen students (Ferrera and Jesse Garcia), just the type to make a predictable botch of people-smuggling. A terrifying encounter with a junkie finds him rescued by a Good Samaritan, and soon Carlitos has cast his lot with the surly-but-we-know-he's-gonna-come-around Enrique (Derbez); the two wind up making an appealingly odd couple of table-bussers, trying to get bus fare to L.A., Carlitos is almost preternaturally optimistic and purposeful, despite moments of doubt and fear. In the meantime, Rosario is fired from one of her housekeeping jobs by a quite stereotypically neurotic, sterile, frigid Angeleno rich bitch, and contemplates the romantic attentions of a smitten security guard who has papers and can get her same. Still, the ache of being away from her son is acute, and as he strives to get closer to her, she's all but on a bus back to El Paso and then beyond.

The use of paralleling narratives in which the main characters, unbeknownst to each other, take actions that are in fact contrary to their common goal — one of them zigging while the other zags, with the audience saying "No!" all along the way — is a strategy more common to the screwball comedy or suspense film than the heart-tugging family drama. But it turns out to be one of the strengths of Moon, making it a little more unconventional than the average heart-tugging family drama. But what's really central to the film's vision is the detail with which director Riggen, who makes her feature debut here and whose last film was a documentary short, chronicles the experience of being an undocumented, or, if you prefer, illegal immigrant from down Mexico way. Scenes where day laborers harvest tomatoes under conditions of dubious (to say the least) safety, flee in panic from INS enforcers (aka "La Migra"), and subject themselves to humiliating condescension bristle with outrage. It's overplayed at times, as the scenes with Rosario pleading with the aforementioned boss from hell, but it mostly feels earned. And the acting is superb, with Derbez due for special mention. His character is a stock one, but he's got a presence that makes it feel fresher than it should; there's something in his bearing and gaze that's appealingly off-kilter, rather like early Tomas Milian.

Under the Same Moon is accomplished and well-intentioned to the extent that one wants to accentuate the positive, but the positive isn't the whole, alas; for every moment in the film that evokes classic neo-realism, there's another that's commonplace or overly sentimental, and the too-emphatic score by Carlo Siliotto is, like most film scores these days, more often an intrusion than an enhancement.

— Glenn Kenny