Language Lessons

Touching, important, and surprisingly inspiring, this movie is a testament to the power of dialect and how it shapes our worldview and fuses and unites us. Willingness to dive in deep past surface level schisms broadens the range of our accepted capabilities and ambitions. Morales may be working with bare bones in her first feature, but she manages to say a lot with a little.

As a performer, Morales is laughably smart, sympathetic, and engaging, and what’s so clever about Language Lessons is the deployment of that allure.

The film gets heavy-handed about its premise sometimes, exaggerating the online-ness of it all with artificial glitches and voice modulations, but beyond that, Language Lessons is gorgeously, uncomfortably real.

Even in the film’s third act lurch into sheer melodrama, with brittle conversations carried out on eggshells, Morales and Duplass are wholly immersed in character. The twists are believable because they’re totally credible in their roles.

Films explicitly about the formation of friendships are rare, and Morales and Duplass have fashioned rather a perceptive one, adapting the push-pull dynamics of a romantic comedy to more delicate psychological terrain.

Unfortunately, Zoom movies do not really benefit anyone, Morales or otherwise (but hopefully this means, she gets another opportunity to do it for “real” out in the world). Duplass’ Spanish is good (a nice plus), and the movie’s intentions are in the right place; it’s warm, warm-hearted, and even mildly bittersweet, but in short, no more Zoom movies, please, and thanks.

Had the film trusted its self-imposed minimalism a little more, it might have been a lot more successful as a character study.