Washington
Heights, directed by Alfredo de Villa,
is the second film screened this year about Dominicans
in New York City. Whereas Manito involves
an older brother trying to help his younger brother
make it in American society as the family's first high
school graduate despite a stingy father, Washington
Heights is about an older brother, twenty-eight-year-old
Carlos Ramírez (played by Manny Perez) who gets
no help from his family in launching his career dreams.
Carlos is a talented artist waiting for a big break
as an author/illustrator of comic books for Gotham
Press; meanwhile, he inks comic books prepared by others.
His girlfriend Maggie (played by Andrea Navedo), a
dressmaker, is weary of waiting for him to pop the
question after he gets that break. She lives with her
ex-con brother Angel (played by Bobby Cannavale). Carlos's
elderly father Eddie (played by Tomás Milían),
a widower, owns a corner convenience store, but he
is not making money on the store; he would have preferred
to be a professional singer, but he had to pay bills
after his son Carlos was born. One day a thief comes
into Eddie's store; rather than opening his safe, Eddie
tries to argue with him, and the thief shoots him.
Eddie is then paralyzed from the waist down and cannot
run the store until he is physically rehabilitated.
To his surprise, Sean Kilpatrick (played by Jude Ciccolella)
tells Carlos that he loaned $25,000 to Eddie, an amount
that must be repaid. Carlos now must juggle his budding
art career with running his father's convenience store
and serving as primary caregiver for his father, but
he plods on despite his father's lack of support for
his art talent. Meanwhile, Angel's brother Mickey (played
by Danny Hoch), the caretaker of the apartment where
Eddie and Carlos live together, has ambitions of winning
a bowling tournament in Las Vegas, but he needs $3,000
for the entry fee and wants $2,000 for travel expenses.
When Mickey learns that his father gave Eddie $25,000
but will not support his prospective bowling career
to the tune of $5,000, he goes ballistic. Soon, Mickey
visits Maggie, discovers a cache of $30,000 that obviously
belongs to Angel, and puts the cash into a duffle bag.
He then brings the bag with $25,000 to Carlos so that
he can pay off the loan. Next, Carlos visits Maggie
and puts the cash back in the same hiding place. When
Angel finds $5,000 missing, he comes after Carlos just
as Eddie is returning to run the store and Carlos has
completed his first original comic book for a publisher,
thus launching his professional career. Once in the
store, Mickey admits that he, not Carlos, took the
money, whereupon a predictable tragedy unfolds. Thus,
both Manito and Washington
Heights lament that family ties are breaking
down in the individualistic United States while also
saying that the road to success is open to those who
work hard and work honestly. However, only Washington
Heights explains why so many Dominicans left their
country to immigrate to the United States, namely,
that sugar interests were responsible for the American
military invasion and occupation in 1965-1966, following
which the large sugar companies dispossessed small
landowners in order to establish sugar plantations,
thus creating thousands of surplus people. MH
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