Mark Reviews Movies: RITA MORENO: JUST A GIRL WHO DECIDED TO GO FOR IT

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 17, 2021

Rita Moreno worked hard to get where she is now—and harder, perhaps, because of cultural and social expectations, stereotypes, and discrimination. Near the end of Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go for It, a professor of media studies wonders how much more the actress could have accomplished without those obstacles, and yes, Mariem Pérez Riera's documentary is one that actually makes a point of asking and examining such questions.

To be clear, this is also a fairly typical documentary about an artist/famous person's life, in that it tracks Moreno's personal and professional chronology in straightforward order. It's more than that, too, in that the film examines what Moreno's evolution as an actor—mainly in terms of what kind of roles she took and, more importantly, was offered—meant about the movies, television, and the stage then and now.

There's little denying that Moreno has triumphed in her career. She is one of only 16 people (as if this writing) to achieve the so-called "EGOT" (winning at least one of each of the competitive Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony awards), has been awarded multiple lifetime achievement awards, and has received both a Kennedy Center Honor and a Presidential Medal of Freedom.

At the age of 89, though, she's still working (soon to appear, for example, in the new, forthcoming adaptation of West Side Story). At the time Pérez (who, like Moreno, was born in Puerto Rico) was following and interviewing the actor for this film, Moreno is occasionally backstage and recording the TV show "One Day at a Time." It's 2018, so Moreno is also paying attention, with personal and political investment, to hearings about a man nominated to become a justice on the Supreme Court—and about the allegations of sexual assault against him.

She's angry about that for assorted reasons. Moreno is politically active, championing the rights of women and others throughout her life (We see footage of her at the March on Washington in 1963, as she beams at the memory of being feet away from Martin Luther King Jr.), and she also knows about sexual assault, being a survivor herself.

The actor is blunt and honest about all of this and more, as she's interviewed in her home and behind-the-scenes of her television show by Pérez. She has little left to prove to herself and nothing left to prove to anyone else, but Moreno also knows that she has a lot teach us about the way things were and, while a lot has changed about the world and Hollywood in particular, how much has remained the same.

Pérez knows the film's subject is the strongest, most convincing voice on the topic of her own life, and Moreno, obviously, features prominently in the documentary about her life and career. We learn of her childhood in Puerto Rico, as a shy and insecure "Rosita," before her mother moved to New York City with the girl—leaving her father and younger brother, whom she has never seen since, behind. Moreno learned to dance, earned money for herself and her mother by doing local gigs, and caught the attention of a talent scout, who arranged a meeting with Louis B. Mayer of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) fame. She became a contracted actress with the studio, just near the end of Hollywood's Golden Era, and the rest, one could say, is history.

It is history for Pérez, who treats it as such by giving voice to academics who have studied the era and other actors, who either lived it or grew up seeing Moreno as an icon, an idol, and an example. Moreno didn't have such an icon, an idol, or an example getting into show business, and at the start of her career, she likely didn't see herself becoming one, either.

Relegated to "native" roles in adventure tales and covered in skin-darkening makeup and adopting a non-descript dialect, she and the characters she played were treated as an "other," subservient or sexualized and nothing else. She was abused off set (recalling a man grinding against her at a party and being raped by her agent, whom she retained because she believed no one else believed in her at the time) and on shooting locations (One director scolded her for moving while playing dead, not caring that swarming jellyfish were stinging her).

Through Moreno herself and those other interview subjects (the scholars and fellow actors, such as Eva Longoria and Hector Elizondo), Pérez puts all of this in a damning social and cultural context. There was an entire period of Moreno's career, until her role in 1961's West Side Story, that kept her potential to the background (One actress recalls being shocked to realize that Moreno was also in Singin' in the Rain, although Moreno herself is grateful that particular part was a notable exception to the rule, thanks to, she gleams, Gene Kelly). After the success and sudden stardom that came with the 1961 screen musical, she decided to do things her own way and work to put behind the doubts of the "Rosita" she still carries with her.

While the narrative of the documentary starts to become a bit too straightforward at this point in Moreno's biography, the actor remains unwavering in her honesty about her personal life (her tumultuous romance with Marlon Brando, which led to a suicide attempt), career, and struggle to be herself on screen and off. That frankness goes a long way in Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go for It, a documentary that gives us a true sense of an icon as a much more.

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