A Better Life – review

Jose Julian and Demian Bichir in Chris Weitz's tense A Better Life.

Chris Weitz is nothing if not eclectic. Having worked alone or in collaboration with his brother, Paul, on the envelope-pushing American Pie, screen versions of Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass and Nick Hornby's About a Boy and one of the overwrought Twilight teen-vampire films, he's now made what is in effect a transposition to California of the 1948 neorealist masterpiece Bicycle Thieves, the work of another highly eclectic moviemaker, Vittorio De Sica.

A Better LifeProduction year: 2011Country: USACert (UK): 12ARuntime: 97 minsDirectors: Chris WeitzCast: Bobby Soto, Chelsea Rendon, Demian Bichir, Josie JulianMore on this film

The oppressed hero is now an illegal immigrant from Mexico (played by leading Mexican actor Demian Bichir) and the bike has become a pick-up truck, an essential tool for his job as a gardener in Los Angeles. The thief is again a pathetic figure in as desperate a position as the hero. The son, however, is no longer an adoring little boy but a surly teenager estranged from his father. In many ways, the protagonist's situation is worse here than in the Italian original, because any false move could put him in the hands of the immigration department, with the almost certain prospect of deportation. It's a small, convincing, tightly constructed movie about an urgent, seemingly insoluble problem.

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