Arkansas Online

Documentary says there’s a lot more to Rita Moreno

MICHAEL PHILLIPS

Trailblazer or sellout? Which is it? The binary thinkers among us demand an easy, simple answer, even though little in Moreno’s 89 years has been either.

The Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony award winner is the subject of an illuminating new documentary, detailing among other things the steady stream of racist, humiliating Hollywood employment she put up with on screen since the 1950s, while fending off drooling, entitled white power brokers off-screen. That was then. For many, it’s also now.

This week Moreno wandered out onto a cultural tightrope in defense of Lin-Manuel Miranda. On Tuesday’s “Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” she defended her friend, the creator of “Hamilton” and “In the Heights,” also co-executive producer of the documentary “Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go for It,” against charges of “colorism,” cultural blindness and a lack of Afro-Hispanic speaking roles in director Jon M. Chu’s “In the Heights” film adaptation.

In a June 9 story and video on theroot.com, Felice Leon confronted the issue. Her story’s headline: “Let’s talk about ‘In the Heights’ and the erasure of dark-skinned Afro-Latinx folks.”

In the accompanying Zoom interview, director Chu notes the inclusion of dark-skinned Afro-Hispanic performers in the dance sequences. Not enough, Leon responds. “A lead, you know? That’s the breakthrough. We want to see Black people in the Heights. We want to see Afro-Panamanians. Black Cubans. Black Dominicans. That’s what we want to see.”

APOLOGIES AND DEFENSES

On Twitter Monday, Miranda apologized, acknowledging that “many in our dark-skinned Afro-Latino community don’t feel sufficiently represented within (the movie), particularly among the leading roles.” He recognized that as a result, to many “the work feels extractive of the community we wanted to represent with pride and joy. In trying to paint a mosaic of this community. We fell short. I’m truly sorry.”

The next night, Moreno brought it up with Colbert. She praised her fellow Puerto Rican, Miranda, for making the cultural inroads she could not. She pushed back against those calling out “In the Heights” for colorist casting practices (though some of it’s baked into the material), especially after a wobbly opening weekend at the box office.

“I’m simply saying, ‘Can’t you just wait a while and leave it alone?’” Moreno asked. Colbert, nonverbally, looked like conflicted liberal whiteness incarnate. Then he changed the subject.

And then Moreno became an insta-pariah on social media, leading to her own apology Wednesday.

“I’m incredibly disappointed with myself,” she tweeted. “While making a statement in defense of Lin-Manuel Miranda on the Colbert show last night, I was clearly dismissive of Black lives that matter in our Latin community. It is so easy to forget how celebration for some is lament for others. In addition to applauding Lin for his wonderful movie version of ‘In The Heights,’ let me add my appreciation for his sensitivity and resolve to be more inclusive of the Afro-Latino community going forward.”

IT’S COMPLICATED

For those who now see Moreno as a traitor or a living, breathing blind spot, thanks to this week’s media cycle, “Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go for It” may complicate that viewpoint even if it doesn’t change it.

Born in Puerto Rico in 1931, as a preteen Moreno moved with her mother (she never again saw her brother) to New York City. She grew up there, she says in director Mariem Perez Riera’s documentary, “learning and believing that I didn’t have much worth.”

She was dancing in Greenwich Village nightclubs by age 6, quit school at 15 and made her first picture by 19, a reform school melodrama called “So Young, So Bad.”

She played a lot of bit-part Latinas that screamed “spitfire.” Under contract with MGM, she nabbed a small role in “Singin’ in the Rain” in 1952 as Zelda, a notable and promising break from the native girls and fiery temptresses in grass skirts or headdresses. But MGM, followed by 20th Century Fox, didn’t have much interest in Moreno’s range. In the documentary, George Chakiris, Moreno’s fellow Oscar-winner from “West Side Story,” recalls her saying: “I got so tired of having to say ‘Why you like white girl?’ or ‘Why you take gold from my people?’”

Off camera she had a long, torturous relationship with Marlon Brando and a quicker one with Elvis Presley, and her career endured every variety of typecasting, dry spells, comebacks. For those of us whose childhoods were made better by the PBS series “The Electric Company,” she was simply a gas, a triple threat and really funny. On the recently canceled “One Day at a Time” reboot, she garnered a new generation of fans.

In the documentary, Eva Longoria speaks to what it meant to see Moreno’s Anita take charge of her scenes in “West Side Story.” That 1961 film, for millions of Hispanics and millions more beyond, remains a landmark mixed blessing. The 1957 Broadway show was extremely bold for its time. Today, for many (including the 15-year-old in our house), it’s full of dated stereotypes and brownface for, among others, Natalie Wood and Moreno.

‘FLOWER DRUM SONG’

Another Broadway-to-Hollywood adaptation, “Flower Drum Song,” came out that same year — also problematic. The role of San Francisco hepcat Sammy Fong, played by Jack Soo in the movie, was played by Larry Blyden on Broadway who replaced Larry Storch in tryouts. Another 1961 title, “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” features Mickey Rooney in appalling yellowface casting. There are thousands upon thousands of similar examples throughout cinema history.

When “M. Butterfly” playwright David Henry Hwang rewrote “Flower Drum Song” for an LA (and, briefly, Broadway) stage revival in 2001, he told me that the ’61 movie version “always loomed large in my life. As a boomer Asian American, you didn’t often see people that looked like you on TV …. Growing up, the musical represented one of the few positive portrayals of people that looked like me.”

And then, he acknowledged, “at another point in my life, it became something to be demonized.” Hwang told me he was struggling to “accept it as an artifact of its time, to appreciate what was useful and important about it, and what was creaky and stereotypical about it.” With so much commercial entertainment, that struggle is the essence of cultural criticism.

This nation reveals itself to itself anew, with each generation’s stories. Who gets to tell them, and how often, lies at the heart of inequities we’re only recently addressing.

“In the Heights” opened with a tremendous burden of representation on its shoulders. I think there’s genuine sincerity and soul-searching in what Miranda has said about the limitations of his story’s lens.

TRUE COLORS

Miranda has his flaws. He is also a tremendous talent. So is Moreno. That doesn’t change, even if she was quick to dismiss those in and outside the Afro-Hispanic community and their frustration with “In the Heights.” The neighborhood, the real one and the pretend, deserved truer colors and a fuller spectrum.

Any film promising to represent even a fraction of an under-represented population can’t win, in the end. The problem is weirdly simple: There aren’t enough of those films getting made. There are too many wasted hours designed to find ways for a studio to make something more palatable or an easier sell — you know, whiter.

While many found Moreno’s contrition insincere, I think everything she lived en route to this week — every obstacle, every personal demon, every reminder of her boundless talent — earned her some grace. See what you think of “Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go for It.” Her story is also the story of how Hollywood worked, and the work it doled out to so many who deserved better. The best we can do now is widen America’s lens — a movie, a generation, an apology at a time.

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2021-06-25T07:00:00.0000000Z

2021-06-25T07:00:00.0000000Z

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