“I’m gonna find my mom before she forgets about me,” says nine-year-old Carlitos (Adrian Alonso) to his best friend. It’s been four years since his mother left Mexico to find work in Los Angeles, promising to bring him over as soon as she saves up enough money. But after his grandmother becomes unable to care for him (and with a sleazy uncle eager to put him to work doing something we probably don’t want to know about), Carlitos decides it’s time to make the trip by himself. Thus begins Under the Same Moon, a movie I’m willing to bet was pitched as the story of the indomitable spirit of a young boy, though on film it plays as an exercise at treading the line between heartwarming and heartburn. Directed with great earnestness by Patricia Riggen, the movie cuts between Carlitos journey and the efforts of Carlitos’ mother Rosario (Kate del Castillo), who doesn’t know that her boy has hit the road, to break out of what seems like an endless cycle of earning just enough money to pay the rent for her garage apartment. This is rendered doubly difficult that the Anglos for whom she works are such nasty caricatures that Rigen seems to be hoping for us to his at them. (One of them, nicknamed “Cruella de Ville” by her staff, lives in a house so barren of physical warmth that it looks to have been carved out of ice.) Carlitos, who has to get from Texas to California by Sunday for reasons that are too artificial to recount, runs into his own share of creeps along the way. The actual problems of immigrants are atrocious enough that you have to wonder why the screenplay by Ligiah Villalobos insists on throwing so many cardboard villains (like a junkie who tries to sell Carlitos as a sex slave) into the mix. These stereotypes are balanced by the casting of the distractingly beautiful del Castillo, who looks like the star of a soap opera rather than an overworked maid. Under the Same Moon contains good performances by young Alonso, and by Eugenio Derbez as a gruff migrant worker who becomes Carlitos’ reluctant companion on his journey. But the film is far too willing to substitute heart-tugging melodrama for a more realistic portrait of immigrant life.
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