Because so many biopics are formulaic—reducing a great person’s life to a familiar rise-then-fall-then-rise-again narrative—it can be tempting to overrate those that stand in opposition to the conventions. But then we have a case like Cesar Chavez, which has been made with care and an eye toward preserving the essence of the man it’s depicting. Unfortunately, director Diego Luna’s muted drama so consciously avoids theatrics that it never really comes to life. Oddly enough, a little conventionality might have helped.
Cesar Chavez avoids the temptation to offer a birth-to-death look back at the Mexican-American labor leader, instead focusing on a crucial period during the 1960s when he led a boycott of grape growers in Delano, Calif., to protest the paltry salaries for immigrant workers. Chavez is played by Michael Peña, who put on weight for the role but steers clear of the sort of ostentatious performance we’re used to seeing in a biopic. To the contrary, Peña’s Chavez is a likable but mild-mannered man—a nuts-and-bolts community organizer without the oratorical flair of a Barack Obama. As depicted in Cesar Chavez, Chavez wasn’t an inspirational leader who rallied crowds with his rousing speeches. He was just the guy who got stuff done—with persistence, with sweat, with whatever means that he had.
That’s inspirational in its own way, a reminder that real social change often occurs thanks to a thousand diligent small actions rather than one extravagant flourish. But Cesar Chavez, which was written by Keir Pearson and Timothy J. Sexton, bypasses artificial flash for an overly drab procedural-style drama that chronicles how Chavez and his organization, the United Farm Workers, were able to outmaneuver the grape growers (primarily personified by John Malkovich as a fictionalized character named Bogdonovitch) and secure higher worker wages. There’s no reason that such a story can’t be riveting: Lincoln similarly zeroed in on a specific period in its subject’s life and investigated the minutiae of precise political machinations, to great effect. But Cesar Chavez too often fails to draw out the potentially compelling elements within the material.
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