Selena

National Review, April 21, 1997 by John Simon

WHAT makes a star? Why do crowds fall in love with A rather than B, when the sober observer can see no difference, and may even find both insipid or distasteful? Two new movies, however obliquely or indeed unconsciously, address this topic.

Private Parts, based on Howard Stern's first quasi-autobiography, is amusing and goes down all too smoothly. It is the story of a father-bossed, gangly Jewish youth from Long Island, who evolves into an enormously popular disc jockey. I am at a disadvantage here, never having seen Stern on TV or heard him on radio; the more outrageous, Sterner stuff is soft-pedaled in the movie. Some find this craven and dishonest; I myself am not sure whether, in the case of Howard Stern, less isn't more.

Though the screenplay is by Len Blum and Michael Kalesniko rather than Stern himself, he and many members of the Stern gang play themselves. Still, the terror is not political, merely against political, or any other kind of, correctness. It is really sophomoric sexual and scatological humor, but amid the doldrums of radio this can feel robust and prophylactic. The racial jokes which I gather also figure in the Stern repertoire are conspicuously absent.

What remains does have one spikier aspect than what's heard on the air: visibility. When a woman who calls herself the Kielbasa Queen and is famous for "deep-throating a 13-inch sausage" appears, the stunt becomes more blatant on camera than on radio. However, what makes such crude shenanigans feel anodyne is Stern's gee-whiz ingenuousness. We know that this beanpole is happily faithful to his charming and patient wife, Alison, with whom he has three beloved daughters, and that he only barks, never bites.

So the joke is that this iconoclastic braggadocio is practiced by a goofy, jovial lout with big baby-blue eyes straddling a fleshy beak -- a beak patently incapable of catching a fly, and good only for sticking into other people's lives. Even all that curly, shoulder-length hair that would instantly admit Stern to the British bar or the court of Louis XV is really only a disguise, a pretending to be Mick Jagger or the Earl of Rochester. Or, perhaps, to frighten his father, Absalom.

Under Betty Thomas's television-fostered direction, the film abounds in gags, many of which pay off. Especially those that involve Howard's battle with his superior, Kenny, an NBC executive, whom Stern affectionately calls Pigvomit, and who is played with true comic gusto by Paul Giamatti. Kenny's attempts to hamstring Howard, and Howard's ingenious counterattacks, are the verbal equivalent of Charlie Chaplin's physical duels with his huge and ferocious comic adversaries. The film also gains from Alison's being portrayed by Mary McCormack, who could charm birds, including buzzards, out of the trees. Robin Quivers, Stern's chief radio sidekick, is delightful, too: in fact, the entire supporting cast is in fine fettle or feather.

There is at least a weird canniness to Howard Stern, but what accounted for the popularity of the Mexican-American singer Selena, killed at age 23 by a crazy woman who had worked for her, is less easy to fathom. I must stress that no type of today's pop music pleases me, and it may be that Selena Quintanilla Perez, the queen of tejano music, had genuine merit for others. She certainly packed them in at the Houston Astrodome and elsewhere, including a Mexico hostile to Mexican-Americans. And she was an American success story.

Still, one would have preferred a film biography of her whose executive producer was not her father. In Selena, written and directed by Gregory Nava, whose two previous movies I managed to miss, we get a typical musical "biopic" with all the visual and verbal cliches, but put together with a certain artiness. The image format keeps expanding and contracting, there is much use of the split screen to show Selena from different angles and with different hairdos, and Edward Lachman has contributed moody cinematography replete with filter work.

The film begins with the struggles of a youthful Mexican-American trio, the Dinos. One member, Abraham Quintanilla Jr., much later starts up Selena y los Dinos, with his then ten-year-old daughter Selena as the lead singer, a son on electric guitar, and another daughter on drums. Over the demurrers of his loyal wife, Marcela, he gives up his regular employment to shepherd and drive about the family band, taking time off only to start, and fail with, a restaurant. Abraham is portrayed as a lovable loser, taking literal pratfalls, but one whose energy and faith in the American Dream raises his musical family to Latino success, and daughter Selena into a Grammy-winner. On the verge of crossover stardom, she is gunned down by a fan-club president she rashly appointed to run her fashion boutiques. Yes, fashion design was the multi-talented Selena's sideline, and the unhinged Yolanda had been caught embezzling.

There is nothing in the movie you couldn't have gotten from the newspaper accounts -- perhaps not even that much. All the cliches about the kids wanting to play games instead of practicing to play music, but Mr. Q. keeping their noses to the grindstone, are there, as is the one about puritanical Mr. Q. trying to stop Selena from performing in a bustier. (For a while, I considered titling this review "Ta-ra-ra Bustier.") Also about how the group, despite Selena's imperfect Spanish, conquers Mexico. Because Mexican-Americans are viewed with suspicion by both Anglos and Latinos, "We've got to be twice as perfect as anybody else," reflects Mr. Q. during one of his periodic ethnic musings that deepen the film's impact by several millimeters. Selena becomes the champion of integration: "All those barriers in the past -- you walk right through them as if they didn't exist!" Yet Selena worries: "I've been thinking about the crossover tour a bit. It's a whole different world for us. Are they going to love me, Mama?"