It’s not too difficult to pinpoint exactly where Marisa Ventura went wrong. In director Wayne Wang’s latest depiction of interracial romance, Jenny From The Block fools Ralph Fiennes into thinking she’s from money when he accidentally catches her trying on a society woman’s Dolce & Gabanna couture. He’s a white man aiming for a Senate seat. She’s a Puerto Rican maid aiming for a managerial position at the Bereford Hotel. Together they form a black-and-white cookie, manufactured in Hollywood for middlebrow audiences easily tickled by—though not necessarily afraid of—minorities leaving their hoods.
Screenwriter Kevin Wade ensures that the kids talk funny, everyone has a wise-cracking sidekick (someone please revoke Stanley Tucci’s SAG card) and that Marisa’s gal pals assert their power via song and dance. (The only surprise here may be that the film’s dark-skinned charmers don’t groove to “We Are Family.”) But if Maid in Manhattan is less offensive than one might expect, that’s because its debasement rituals are employed with equal opportunity. If the white people seen here are thoroughly disgusting (they’re Republicans, thieves, loudmouths, racists, etc.), then the Latin folk take their oppression in stride.
In classic passive-aggressive mode, Marisa allows Fiennes’s Senator Marshall to think she does more than scrub toilets and, in trying to shake him loose, teaches him a lesson or two about her people. By film’s end, she swallows her shame and accepts what the film sees as her second-class citizenship with pride while Marshall and America learn to love their exotic asset.
For authenticity’s sake, Marisa calls her son “papa” several times throughout, and while her scenes with the young Tyler Posey are charming, Lopez never doesn’t have much chemistry with Fiennes. She appears less self-involved here than she does in her video for “Jenny from the Block,” though her empowerment in Maid in Manhattan comes not under her own terms but at the sad cost of her repeated humiliation before the beat of the film’s whiteness.
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