* * *

Under the Same Moon

In English and Spanish with English subtitles

Director: Patricia Riggen

Cast: Adrian Alonso, Kate del Castillo, America Ferrera, Eugenio Derbez, Carmen Salinas

Running Time: 1:49

Rating: PG-13; language, mature themes

Where: Grand Cinema, 606 S. Fawcett Ave., Tacoma; showtimes, Pages 31-32 The boy wants his mom, but she’s very far away. He’s home in Mexico, and she’s in L.A.

And 9-year-old Carlitos (Adrian Alonso) intends to do something about that sad situation. When his beloved grandmother and caregiver dies in her sleep in “Under the Same Moon,” the boy hits the road. He heads north, toward the states, toward L.A., and toward, he dearly hopes, his mother (Kate del Castillo) whom he hasn’t seen in four long years.

It’s a long, perilous and ultimately revelatory journey, and it’s chronicled with a perceptive and compassionate eye by director Patricia Riggen.

Riggen, a native of Mexico, and her screenwriter and countrywoman Ligiah Villalobos develop the tale in episodic fashion via parallel narratives. As the 9-year-old boy navigates through an obstacle course of hazards, including avaricious relatives, muggers and an evil pimp, his mother grapples with the uncertainties of life as an undocumented housekeeper ever fearful of being deported. Back and forth between the two the story goes, and with each vignette the power of the bond between mother and son becomes ever more clearly defined.

The kid is an intrepid trouper. He may be only 9, but he’s resourceful and incredibly persistent. Young Alonso conveys a remarkable sense of self-possession that allows Carlitos to go forward with an unshakable sense that somehow, some way he will find his mother, even though he has no idea where she lives in the vastness of Los Angeles.

All he has to go on is the number of a pay phone in East L.A. from which she calls him once a week, and her description of the businesses on the busy corner where the phone is located. If he can somehow find that geographical needle in that sprawling urban haystack he figures, nave kid that he is, that he’ll get there in time for her next regular call.

Del Castillo does a touching job of conveying the conflicted feelings of a single mother who went north in hopes of finding the kind of work that will pay well enough to give her son a comfortable life that she wouldn’t be able to provide if she stayed in Mexico. But the ache of separation, which remains acute despite the passage of years, makes her wonder every day if the sacrifice is worth it.

Supporting characters are vividly drawn, none more so than a cranky illegal migrant laborer named Enrique (Eugenio Derbez) whom the kid latches onto as a traveling companion. “Ugly Betty” star America Ferrera is also effective in the role of an amateurish smuggler who reluctantly agrees to drive Carlitos through the border hidden in her minivan.

The underground network of professional smugglers, boardinghouses for migrants and work sites where migrants perform the menial but vital labor – fruit picking, scullery work and the like – that keeps the economy chugging along are all stops along the way for Carlitos.

The picture is unabashedly on the migrants’ side, and it offers a nonpolemical and very human perspective on what impels people to uproot themselves from their homes and risk everything they hold dear to try to make a better life for themselves and their loved ones.

Soren Andersen:

253-597-8742, Ext. 6235