Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go For It
**Seen at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival.
While there’s certainly a ways to go when it comes to representation in modern Hollywood, there’s a passage in “Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go For It” that shows that, all things considered, progress has been made. It’s as we are moving through Moreno’s career in the 1950s prior to her Oscar-winning role in “West Side Story,” and she is being asked again, and again, and again, to play the “native woman” in movies against white leads. At one point, she basically uses the same accent from role to role, and no one even questions it. At least we try to take filmmakers to task when it comes to getting an ethnicity or accent wrong, nowadays.
This sort of documentary is vital to see made. There is not a lot to them from a filmmaking standpoint, but when it comes to hearing about the lives of legends, told by those legends, I think there’s a profound value to that. Especially when it comes to someone like Rita Moreno. The daughter of a Puerto Rican immigrant, and star of stage and screen, discussing her life in frank, poignant terms that reflect not just the way she lives her life, but the way her life through challenges at her, and she never backed down. Certainly, there is regret in some of what she discusses, such as the fact that she kept taking those roles I discussed in the first paragraph, and didn’t challenge people to write better ones. But when she found an opening, such as when she played Anita in “West Side Story,” she seized upon the opportunity to do something that would cause people to take notice of her. That’s when the work mattered, and in the end, that’s when the rest of the bullshit roles were worthwhile.
When she is discussing herself is when Mariem Perez Riera’s wonderful documentary hits its most emotional, and impactful, moments. Moreno recalls a moment where she was raped by her agent that is as heartbreaking as any time a woman has been strong enough to discuss such painful moments over the years; seeing Rita watch Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony during the Brett Kavanaugh hearings as she is filming “One Day at a Time” makes for a powerful juxtaposition with Moreno’s revelation, and with her activism over the years. Her stormy relationship with Marlon Brando results in an openness about her going to therapy that helps remove the stigma of living with emotional issues, much less acknowledging them, for a great many people. And, of course, we get the words of peers and people she inspired and loved ones that help complete the picture, and illustrate why she means so much to so many. That’s the final reason a documentary like this one matters- it helps present a life in context of those for whom it might serve as an inspiration in the future. There won’t be another Rita Moreno, but there will be plenty more who follow in her footsteps by learning about her life.
