Review: La Mission

La Mission at least has the virtue of an intermittent interest in probing the circumstances that give rise to homophobia.

La Mission
Photo: Screen Media Films

A dimly obvious melodrama, Peter Bratt’s La Mission is at least interested in probing the circumstances that give rise to homophobia. Starring the writer-director’s brother Benjamin as tough-guy Mexican-American Che Rivera, an ex-con and recovering alcoholic highly respected in his San Francisco neighborhood (the titular Mission District), the film charts that man’s growth from died-in-the-wool homophobe who denounces his recently outed son Jesse (Jeremy Ray Valdez) to accepting father following an 11th-hour revelation.

Bratt takes pains to show the ingrained culture of machismo that rules Che’s Latino community and leads to a horror of homosexuality, but the writer-director’s one constructive insight—at least to those who’ve never taken a gender studies class or read Robin Wood—is that this same sublimated fear of one’s own masculine vulnerability that leads to violent anti-queer sentiment (“Men who exhibit extreme homophobia are often homosexuals themselves,” Jesse’s boyfriend fatuously informs a gay-baiting thug) is also the root cause of domestic abuse and may even account for the U.S. military’s cavalier attitude toward detainees.

Advertisement

It’s to the film’s considerable credit that it sustains its commitment to linking homophobia with male violence against women until the end (largely via a subplot involving Che’s unlikely romance with a gentrifying feminist neighbor), but this thematic nexus is filtered through so much unsound filmmaking that whatever benefits are to be derived from the story’s modest perceptivity are quickly negated. Following a simple dull-minded trajectory, the screenplay is littered with trite dialogue and padded with at least one too many of Che’s waffles between acceptance and rejection, sobriety, and potential drunkenness.

Similarly, Bratt’s filmmaking is rife with dreadful conceits, such as framing Jesse’s face with the left half distorted through the prism of a nightclub glass in order to emphasize the boy’s fractured identity, and staging Che’s revelation as a rapid cross-cut between Benjamin Bratt’s ponderous visage, images of a Day of the Dead pageant and flashbacks to Che’s abusive behavior. The director’s one happy conceit, at least in theory, is to devote ample time to observing the culture of a neighborhood’s Latino community, but since, in Bratt’s conception, this culture seems to consist exclusively of fixing up cars and engaging in misogynistic chit-chat, this decision winds up registering as one more failing in a film already overstuffed with them.

Score: 
 Cast: Benjamin Bratt, Erika Alexander, Jeremy Ray Valdez, Jesse Borrego, Talisa Soto Bratt  Director: Peter Bratt  Screenwriter: Peter Bratt  Distributor: Screen Media Films  Running Time: 117 min  Rating: R  Year: 2009  Buy: Video

Andrew Schenker

Andrew Schenker is an essayist and critic living in upstate New York. His writing has appeared in The Baffler, The Village Voice, Artforum, Bookforum, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and others.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.