“Don’t be such a dreamer,” says Bob (Esai Morales) to his younger brother, to which soon-to-be teen star Ritchie Valens (Lou Diamond Phillips), né Richard Valenzuela, quickly retorts, “My dreams are pure rock ‘n’ roll.” It’s the kind of blunt, overearnest exchange found in countless music-based biopics, but it also exemplifies La Bamba’s penchant for the cartoonishly archetypal. Indeed, everyone surrounding Ritchie is stripped of both nuance and agency as their roles in the film rarely extend beyond fueling or antagonizing the future icon.
Ritchie’s girlfriend, Donna (Danielle von Zerneck), the namesake of one of his biggest hits, is little more than a poodle skirt and a cheery smile, while his doting mother, Connie (Rosanna DeSoto), is the quintessential ultra-supportive parent. Bob is certainly the most fully fleshed out of this trio, but even most of his personal ups and downs are presented as being directly caused by his jealousy of Ritchie’s rise to fame. This would perhaps be forgivable had the filmmakers drawn Ritchie himself with any degree of complexity. And despite Phillips’s spirited and charismatic performance, Valens remains wholly defined by his implacable drive for success and stardom.
The most compelling aspect of Valens’s incredible popularity in the late 1950s is his Mexican-American heritage. But even this is only given lip service in fits and starts across La Bamba, such as an early scene with Ritchie and his mother working on a Southern California farm or a brief exchange where Ritchie barely puts up a fight when his manager, Bob Keane (Joe Pantoliano), wants him to Americanize his name. The film offers little insight into Ritchie’s roots or how they inform his music, and the family drama that makes up a large chunk of the film is the stuff of caricature, managing to be equally overheated and undercooked.
Calling a film La Bamba is practically a promise of a complicated look at Valens’s attempts to braid Mexican culture with rock ‘n’ roll and how it was met with resistance. But, it turns out, it’s only a well-chosen title in the P.R. sense, a promise of a danceable groove. Indeed, La Bamba is more than willing to play the hits that took Valens to the heights of fame. The result is a film that may move briskly, even efficiently, but feels curiously devoid of passion and lacking in curiosity as it hits every predictable beat from start to finish.
Image/Sound
La Bamba looks fantastic in the Criterion Collection’s HD presentation, with great detail and depth in the image throughout the film. The range of colors is also impressive, whether in the numerous sun-dappled exterior scenes or the neon hues of the Tijuance sequence. But the real highlight of this release is the 5.1 surround audio, which features a well-balanced mix that has considerable depth during each of the musical performances.
Extras
In the first of two archival commentaries, director Luis Valdez is joined by producer Stuart Benjamin and actors Lou Diamond Phillips and Esai Morales. It’s a fairly light-hearted and entertaining track, with the foursome trading on-set stories at length and Valdez discussing his strategy for dramatizing Ritchie Valens’s life. The second track, featuring Valdez and producer Taylor Hackford, is considerably more detail-oriented, especially their conversations about the film’s research process and the evolution of rock ‘n’ roll in the 1950s.
Valdez appears again in a new interview and in a 2015 episode of The Director’s Chair with Robert Rodriguez. These conversations are both quite lively and focus more on Valdez’s roots as an experimental and political theater director, as well as the influence of commedia dell’arte on his various works. The package is rounded out with a making-of featurette, audition footage of several actors, and a foldout booklet with an essay by critic Yolanda Machado, who nicely contextualizes Valdez’s film and Valens’s music within the history of Chicano art.
Overall
Criterion has outfitted Luis Valdez’s seminal biopic of Ritchie Valens with a strong slate of extras, including two audio commentaries and some fascinating interviews.
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