Cesar Chavez, the movie.

• Author: Rampell, Ed
• Position: Movie review

It's still early in the year, but Cesar Chavez may very well be 2014 s best progressive feature.

Chavez focuses on the heyday of the United Farm Workers during the 1960s and 1970s. With an epic sweep, the movie follows Chavez (Michael Pena), wife Helen (America Ferrera), and UFW co-founder Dolores Huerta (Rosario Dawson) as they organize in California's lettuce fields and vineyards. With intermittent use of archival footage but mostly through staged reenactments, director Diego Luna skillfully depicts the heroic struggle of farm workers, mostly of Mexican and Filipino ancestry.

Led by the indomitable Chavez, they go on strike, make a 300-mile pilgrimage on foot to the state capital of Sacramento, and launch the famous grape boycott. Chavez fasts for twenty-five days, as the campesinos confront the growers led by Bogdanovich, a son-of-a-bitch played by John Malkovich. California Governor Ronald Reagan is glimpsed and heard in news clips denouncing the strikers, who are repeatedly redbaited.

When the laborers' nonviolent movement for equal rights, fair working conditions, and better wages hits an impasse, an outraged Senator Bobby Kennedy (Jack Holmes), his eyes on the prize of the Presidency, rallies to their cause and shines the media spotlight on the embattled Chavez and the impoverished toilers. At a public hearing, RFK lets loose a fiery denunciation of the owners. Bobby then meets with Chavez, who is near death from his Gandhian hunger strike.

The movie shows RFK winning the California primary, only to be assassinated moments later. Richard Nixon (seen via film clips) takes the White House and proceeds to conspire with the growers to break the farm workers' strike and boycott. But Chavez and the farm workers ultimately prevail, as Chavez triumphantly declares: "Si se puede!"

Luna's well-directed film has a pseudo-documentary, neorealist style. It depicts a sharp dispute between militants and the pacifist Chavez, a vegan who insisted, like his civil rights compatriot Martin Luther King, upon nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience. In one dreamlike sequence, the audience watches the fasting Chavez take his spiritual path.

But the film does not portray Chavez as a flawless saint. His strained relationship with his own son is central to the drama, and shown to be the price activists pay for devoting themselves body and soul to the cause.

The feature ends with footage of the actual Cesar Chavez making a profound statement about...