When Flor's daughter Christina (Shelbie Bruce) is six years old, her mother decides it's time to leave Mexico and head north to greener pastures, across the border to the U.S. One tear, no more, is what the loving but stern mother allows her girl. It's an emotional yet not suffocatingly dramatic start for a movie. To me, a movie is defined much more by its style than its plot, and Spanglish has all the style you can ask for: a masterful combination of drama, subtle humor, and serious takes on the conflicts brought by cultural differences.

A darling in the beginning of the movie, Christina takes your breath away after the movie skips the six years that Flor spends solely in Los Angeles' Hispanic community. Now twelve, she attends her first dance. Witnessing how her dance partner can't quite keep his hands in check, Flor decides she must give up her second job in order to keep a watchful eye on her child, and finds a better paying day job outside the Hispanic area.

This brings us to the rest of the main characters, Flor's new employers, a well-off white family with two children. The mother, Deborah, is an extremely high-strung overachiever, and just about as sensitive as a rock to the feelings of others. Her husband John, played surprisingly well by Adam Sandler, is a renowned chef and the owner of a successful restaurant, and almost the opposite of his wife in character. Their 13-year-old daughter Bernice is likeable and very outgoing, but she is also slightly overweight, which is something that is handled tactlessly by her mother and younger 9-year-old brother. In addition, their borderline-alcoholic grandmother is also living in the house.

The deliciously amusing cultural differences get a good start right from the job interview. Flor speaks not a word of English, so has her cousin translate. "You're gorgeous," is the first thing Deborah blurts out to Flor, who does considerably resemble her beautiful daughter. "That's not a compliment, but more of an accusation," explains the grandmother. The dialogue is a delight to listen to throughout the movie. It's intelligent, surprising, and funny. The language barrier helps to bring out the humorous side of all those little things that people take for granted.

Christina is a central character throughout the story. Many of her lines are her translating for her mother, a job she does with great expressiveness and emotion. One of my (many) favorite scenes with Christina is her first introduction to Flor's employers. Seeing Christina standing and smiling in the doorway of the beachside summerhouse, Deborah's first words are a breathless statement of the obvious: "Look at this child! Oh my god! You could make a fortune in surrogate pregnancy." Not the best thing to say in front of your overweight teenage daughter, of course. Christina escapes the awkward task of translating with a disarming I-have-no-idea-what she-just-said shrug.

The plot revolves around Flor's struggle to raise Christina in America without forsaking her cultural heritage. Are a scholarship and a good education in a private school, with all their benefits, more important than Christina's past and identity as her mother's child? It's a tough question. The emotional outcome led into a spirited exchange between Alex and me, a rare achievement for a movie. Other subplots involve relationships between various characters, foremostly the romance between Flor and John.

What I personally enjoyed most were all the minor conflicts caused by the clash of the cultures, especially when Christina was in the middle of them. Spanglish is a great movie, and would have been a good one even without Shelbie as Christina.