Directed by Antonio Méndez Esparza
Country: USA / Spain
Starring non-professional actors, “Life and Nothing More” was shaped as a docudrama, telling the story of an African-American single mother who struggles to provide for their children and keep things together in northern Florida. Regina (Regina Williams), 30, works extremely hard in a diner but her income is still very low. She cannot stop worrying about her 14-year-old boy Andrew (Andrew Bleechington) whom she advises the best she can to prevent him from going to prison like his father. In fact, mother and son are in probation and their relationship is not always easy. Lonely and tired, this woman lives under a constant pressure, oscillating indefinitely between the strict and the protective when dealing with her delinquent son. When Robert (Robert Williams), her new partner and a stranger in town, somehow shakes the bond of the family with his strong temper, she doesn’t even hesitate to put him in the right place.
But the problem doesn’t drop out of sight since Andrew becomes more and more isolated and furious with life while considering to finally connect with his absent father. A curious and contradictory aspect regarding Regina is that she believes her son isn’t capable of doing anything harmful to other people despite saying recurrently that he is the son of his father.
In his second feature, Spanish writer/director Antonio Méndez Esparza emulates a credible portrait of African-American lives with a great dose of realism. Yet, if the story is thoughtful and promising, then the editing needed some polishing to avoid unconsidered cuts and precipitate image transitions contrasting clumsily with the sluggish development. It’s weirdly watchable but not necessarily satisfying in the end since it sinks its teeth in a horde of topics such as the judicial system, race, education, parental responsibility, parental absence, and social/economic inequality without making a fully satisfying portrait of the family. It’s like if the huge potential of the script had been consumed by a wobbly direction.
The ‘real’ people, here transformed into real actors, are the heart and soul of a painful drama whose creator, maybe too concerned about not diverting from the desired reality, forgot to exert a bit more emotional bite and set an adequate pace to fulfill its promise of going places.
