On Tubi, I watched Language Lessons, a 2021 dramedy directed by Natalie Morales and co-written by Morales and Mark Duplass. The film was produced while in lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic, and Morales and Duplass, who had worked together on the TV series Room 104, and made the film in the style of "screen life," where the POVs are all from webcams on computers and phones, and the characters interact with each other through video chat and video messaging. It's a style that is experimental, and varies on quality. I liked it a lot in Searching as a detective story, using social media and saved desktop files as clues, but found it boring and stale in Open Windows. Here, due to the charming and warm performances of Morales and Duplass, I enjoyed it a lot, and got into the story.
Adam (Duplass) lives a wealthy life in Oakland, CA with his husband Will (Desean Terry), and by surprise, Will got him Spanish lessons via online videochat with Cariño (Morales), who lives in Costa Rica. Adam is confused and taken aback, but goes along with the lesson, speaking in advanced beginner/intermediate Spanish, saying how he had lived in Mexico as a child and missed speaking Spanish, and is a little embarrassed by his wealth with his large house and pool, making the common mistake of saying he is "embarazada," which means "pregnant" in Spanish. Will wanted him to get back into speaking Spanish, and signed him up for 100 weekly lessons for $1000. Despite his hesitancy, he promises Cariño, who finds the whole interaction amusing, that he will return in a week.
A week later, Cariño logs on to find Adam depressed and despondent in bed, and he tells her that Will died the night before, having been hit by a car while jogging, and he is grieving and in disbelief, at one point vomiting off-camera. Cariño is saddened by the news and is trying to comfort Adam, but doesn't know what to do since they only just met through videochat and don't know each other in real life. When Adam begins panicking about having to tell people about Will's death and handling logistics, Cariño calms him down by switching the perspective on her cameraphone to show him the gardens where she lives, speaking to him in Spanish and describing the plants and flowers, lulling him to sleep.
Cariño, in her limited capacity but deep empathy, offers homework assignments to Adam as a way to busy him and distract him from his grief, and while at first he declines them, he gets into it, and they develop more of a friendship, speaking mostly in Spanish with some English, playing guitar and piano with each other, and she helps him to be able to connect with another person after Will's death, sharing stories about Will, and learning more about Cariño's life, though she wavers between being a friend and wanting to keep a professional relationship.
I turned on this movie because I've always liked Natalie Morales, and felt like she's a comedic actress who is warm and beautiful and funny, but didn't have the luck of having a breakout role or being a standout star, more so the supporting actress in various TV series (Dead to Me, Parks & Recreation, Santa Clarita Diet), and any show she was the lead on didn't last more than a season, like The Middleman or Abby's. In recent years, she has been on The Beast in Me, The Morning Show, and Grey's Anatomy, so she has been busy in TV work. She not only directed this film, but she directed Plan B, a 2021 teen comedy about two teen girls going on a road trip to get the Plan B pill from the nearest Planned Parenthood a state away after being denied at their local pharmacy. I really liked that film a lot, and thought Morales was a really empathetic director in her portrayal of the girls.
I went through a long period where I couldn't stand Mark Duplass as an actor, because I didn't like him as a romantic lead in films, and I wasn't a fan of the shaky-cam zooming in and out style of filmmaking that he and his brother Jay would do in films like Jeff, Who Lives at Home and Cyrus. It felt like this irrational dislike I had for someone who seemed so inoffensive, and who didn't seem bad as a person, but I found it hard to get past my dislike. But in this film, I liked him much more, and the fact that he spoke good Spanish made him more likable, and even through the screens, he and Morales shared a lovely friend chemistry that made the film really enjoyable to watch, getting past the video chat gimmick to be connected to the story and characters.
The film is definitely a relic of the pandemic era, which already seems so far past from nearly six years ago, but since video chatting is very common, and Zoom and Teams chats are still being conducted long past the lockdown days, I didn't mind that the characters became friends online, across countries and cultures and shared languages. This was a sweet movie to watch, and I'm glad I came across it.
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