American Adobo summary S. Smith

Review by Shawn Smith

American Adobo tells the story of 5 Filipino-Americans friends living in New York and the events that unfold through a year. The film begins with a dinner cooked up by Tere, a single religious woman who is lonely and shy about romance, with worries about becoming a spinster. The dinner features adobo, a traditional Philippine pork dish cooked with a marinade of a variety of ingredients. The rest of the group consists of Marissa, an extroverted lively woman with a cheating boyfriend, Raul, a playboy, Mike, a Filipino newspaper editor who is considering leaving his self-absorbed wealthy wife and return to the Philippines, and Gerry, a closet homosexual.
The cast frequently switches between English and Tagalog, seemingly to remind the viewer that, yes, this is a Filipino-American film. However, if they were replaced with an all white cast, there would be nothing that distinguishes this film from any other formulaic soap opera-like comedy-drama. The plot is extremely thin, and the ending of the film is transparent from the very first scene. The religious overtones are also apparent, as the characters only find peace when their lives follow accepted Judeo-Christian norms. Raul receives notice of being possibly HIV positive, Gerry's lover dies and his mother rejects him, Marissa, with her love of modern life and wealth, lacks an honest relationship and is repeatedly hurt by trusting an unfaithful lover, while only the virgin Tere finds true happiness, after being rescued by a firefighter. Of course, this fire fighter was "marked" in the beginning of a film by a religious idol that Tere knocked out of her window, an obvious foreshadowing of what would be an "acceptable" match.
Despite these faults, the film did succeed in portraying Filipino-Americans as the ideal model minority. The characters were easy to relate to, having moderate views that would be easily identifiable with any family across the United States. The events that happened to each of the friends were predictably solved, but again, there was nothing out of the ordinary. It was a safe, middle of the road film that could appeal to a wide variety of people across the U.S., however, the individual performances and script ultimately failed to strike a chord with me, as the film felt incredibly formulaic and the script uninspiring. The decision to idealize Filipino-Americans as these middle class people with concerns and hopes similar to a broad spectrum of people was admirable and showed how similar the cultures were, but this approach has been overused and in the end this became a forgettable movie.

-S. Smith