90 min | PG-13 | June 18, 2021 | Roadside Attractions
Rita Moreno wins the Oscar, the Emmy, the Grammy, and the Tony, then spends decades watching Hollywood reduce her to an accent and a flower in her hair. This documentary lets her tell it her way. The woman is more interesting than the format that contains her.
Rita Moreno is one of a handful of people to win an Oscar, an Emmy, a Grammy, and a Tony. The documentary tracks her path from a Puerto Rican childhood through her arrival in a Hollywood that had exactly one role for a woman who looked like her. That role was the dusky native girl with a fake accent. The film is built around Moreno at eighty-nine, sitting for interviews and narrating her own survival. What it is really about is the cost of being the only one in the room and refusing to disappear.
Moreno carries the film by refusing to sand down her own story. She describes the abuse and the typecasting without self-pity and without letting the industry off the hook. She talks about Anita in West Side Story as the part that won her the Oscar and then closed every other door. Lin-Manuel Miranda frames her as the door-opener for everyone who came after. Eva Longoria and Justina Machado speak as the generation that grew up watching her, and their admiration sharpens the stakes of what she endured.
Mariem Pérez Riera directs in the standard talking-head and archival mode. The interviews sit against a black backdrop, and the clips do the chronological work. The strongest technical choice is the editing of the film footage against Moreno’s present-day commentary. The old studio images of her in brownface play while she names exactly what the makeup department was doing to her. The cut between the archival lie and the living woman who lived it gives the conventional structure its only real charge.
The film does not reinvent the biographical documentary, and it does not try to. It hands a long microphone to a subject who has earned it and trusts her candor to carry the runtime. Moreno’s account of the casting, the racism, and her own near-erasure lands because she tells it plainly. The format is familiar and the result is warm rather than searching. The woman at the center is the whole reason to watch, and she is reason enough.