A Better Life

With a track record than ranges from American Pie to New Moon, it’s seems odd for a director like Chris Weitz to get behind the camera to tell the story of a poor undocumented gardener from East LA working hard to try and make a better life for his son. The scale of the story told in A Better Life somehow just feels too small.Although there is some humor in it, A Better Life is not an inherently funny story, and certainly isn’t filled with the kind of bawdy humour that made American Pie such a huge hit. And although it’s a simple story, it’s doesn’t have the kind of mega-franchise millions behind it that guarantees an audience no matter how simple it is, like the Twilight sequel did. Maybe the unexpected is just what Weitz needed to do to revive his career following his flopd with big budget book adaptations (one of which, The Golden Compass, failed to win critical favor or find an audience), because A Better Life is his best film to date.