Born in the 1930s in a rural, sugarcane-growing region of Puerto Rico, Walter Mercado says he knew he was different from a young age. He wasn’t interested in working in the cane fields or in outdoor activities. And fortunately for him, his mother encouraged his creative endeavors, like playing the piano. After training in dance and theater, he began acting in telenovelas. But in 1969, already a devoted amateur in reading the stars, he was pressed into service by a Puerto Rican television station to present a brief segment on astrology, and the rest of his story suddenly unfolded before him. Though many non-Spanish-speaking Americans may still not know his name, over the next 30 years Walter Mercado became a legendary fixture on the televisions of viewers throughout the Americas and around the world, delivering daily horoscopes and engendering hope through his relentlessly positive messages. Further, as we learn in Cristina Constantini and Kareem Tabsch’s new documentary, Walter became perhaps not so much a fashion icon as the innovator of an iconic and ever-bewildering look, that of golden-haired sorcerer dressed in bold, jewel-toned capes and pantsuits, every finger beringed, his face a supple mask with prominent lips and cheek bones, his eyebrows arching provocatively before he delivered his patented sendoff: “Mucho, mucho, mucho amor!”

It seems clear that Walter’s style and mannerisms are deeply linked to what, during his interviews with the filmmakers, he refers to as his youthful difference, which we might interpret as indicative of young Walter’s understanding of himself as gay, or at least not typically masculine. Images of him as a young man with the longer hair typical of his later years suggest an intriguing androgyny (as well as images of a blond Jesus), which persisted throughout the rest of his life. Impersonations of Walter (which he hated), tended to emphasize gay stereotypes, but he seems to have deflected speculation and harassment both by his success and by his privacy, politely declining to discuss his sexuality or his personal relationships, outside family, the longest of which was with his assistant of over 50 years, Willie Acosta. And it’s this as much as Walter’s wild, worldwide fame, that we’re told has made him beloved, even now, by so many Latinx viewers who once watched him with their grandmothers. His grand display of genderbending flamboyance was, in fact, essential to the global embrace of his unique persona, and provided hope of acceptance for all his viewers.  

Mucho Mucho Amor is essentially a very entertaining celebrity documentary, tracking Walter’s career to its greatest heights in the 1980s, through professional struggles in the ’90s, and a subsequent peaceful and comfortable retirement and nostalgic resurgence in more recent years. He is pure pleasure to watch and to listen to, and the film treats us to extensive interviews, and copious costume changes, at Walter’s baroquely cluttered home in San Juan and elsewhere. We quickly understand Walter’s attraction. He’s a great storyteller and he’s also an indomitably positive force. In other hands, his pastiche of faiths and astrology might strike us as hokey or cynically opportunistic, and if we got more deeply into them, they might still seem so. But, generally, we’re inclined to embrace his message of peace and positivity. They seem to continue to work quite well for him as we never see him in a bad mood, and he remains mostly active and astonished. 

All that said, one of the film’s more intriguing claims about Walter’s appeal is his connection with fans of a certain age—those grandmothers—as well as with Puerto Rican immigrants more broadly, for whom Walter is suggested to have represented a strong link to the culture of the island. It’s certainly understandable why the filmmakers would focus so much on Walter himself, particularly given the substantial access they had to him, his family, and his home. But it would have been nice, too, to hear even more from those fans who never met Walter on whose behalf these claims of connection to home are made. That story, told by individuals, of how a local celebrity’s rise to spectacular media fame (also a kind of immigration, perhaps) instilled pride, identity, and comforting nostalgia in a frequently marginalized population, is equally as interesting as the story of the star’s ascent into the highest constellations. Nevertheless, what we get in Mucho Mucho Amor is delightfully transporting and highly recommended.

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In the early 1950s, a young couple arrive in a small Vermont college town and make their way to a creepy, decaying, ivy-covered manse where they are to spend the night. The house is not haunted. Rather, it’s roiled into chaos in the midst of a bacchanal presided over by its owners, an established and voluble college professor and his more sedentary, owlish wife, who’s just had what will become one of her most famous stories, “The Lottery,” published in The New Yorker. The new arrivals, the fictional Fred (also a professor) and Rose (whose college career is on hold), have been invited to stay for few nights, while Fred settles into his new position at Bennington, shadowing Shirley Jackson’s husband, the peacocky literary critic Stanley Hyman. Though Jackson is the better known today, at the moment of Josephine Decker’s Shirley, Stanley, for all his encouragement of his wife, is shown also to be the gatekeeper of her creative output, her most ardent fan, but also the powerful arbiter of whether her latest work is worthwhile, whether she’s “up to it” or not. 

By this, Stanley may mean intellectually, but he’s also responding to Shirley’s seemingly pathological reclusiveness. What is never called anxiety, depression, or even agoraphobia keeps Jackson confined to the house, not writing. But with Fred and Rose’s arrival, Stanley essentially orders them, in the guise of invitation, to stay on for a while, instead of finding their own place, so that Fred’s “wifey” can care for Shirley, until she gets better. Nothing could be more important than Stanley and Shirley getting their respective work done. So Rose will cook and clean the house, fulfilling all the housewifely expectations that she’s just starting to realize she has little interest in fulfilling, and that she thought her husband would help her avoid. Wasn’t breaking tradition the foundation of their relationship? 

Still, despite Shirley’s early prickliness, Rose accepts the assignment, in part because Fred needs Stanley’s support, but more because she’s smitten with Jackson, with the power of her personality and the violence of her imagination. The two traits come together at an early dinner, where Jackson, to Stanley’s delight, viciously probes Rose’s seeming innocence, ruffling the young couple into kitchenward retreat. But the enforced proximity between the two women eventually reveals Shirley’s own vulnerabilities and fears as she begins to develop her next book, Hangsaman, based on the true story of a young Bennington student’s mysterious disappearance. 

Cherchez l’homme is the well-developed theme here, with Sarah Gubbins’ excellent, layered script (based on the novel by Susan Scarf Merrell) working through numerous variations on the suffering imposed by patriarchal power structures at home and in the halls of academe, and countering these with the liberating solutions developed by two independent and competitive women confined together in a house. There’s more than a touch of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in Stanley and Shirley’s sparring and manipulations of Fred and Rose, giving pleasure with substantially less cruelty and bleakness. Elizabeth Moss and Michael Stuhlbarg provide excellently complex portrayals of Shirley and Stanley, and the twitchy cinematography and editing (risking a bit too much temporal and spatial disorientation in the final third) create an effective sense of psychic and domestic horror as a visual context for the film’s probing character studies.

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Jeanne is a bit of an odd duck. More than a bit shy, when she’s not working the night shift alone, cleaning up a local amusement park, her favorite pastime is building replicas of the rides in her room out of scraps of wire and Christmas lights. They’re pretty impressive actually, but her mother, Margarette, a raucous, loving bartender, wishes her daughter would meet a man, that she’d grow up, in a sense, though the two seem at their best and their most compatible when they both skew younger than they are.

And then he shows up. Marc, Jeanne’s sympathetic new boss? No. Hubert, who puts a light in Margarette’s eye? No. 

No, he is Move-It, the new Tilt-a-Whirl at the park, a handsome and thrilling stranger who gives Jeanne feelings she’s never felt before. Even before they meet, she’s been experiencing ecstatic dreams of being engulfed in colorful lights. And now, here he is. The one. She nicknames him Jumbo. 

For a while, things are good. Jeanne and Jumbo spend time chatting, getting to know each other. They experiment a little. But, naturally, Jeanne doesn’t want to hide their love. She wants her mother, her guide and model in such things, to meet him, even though she knows it’s a little weird, a little different, that this relationship might be hard for some people to accept.

Jumbo is a bit of a tonal mish mash. This is not necessarily a problem, but here the pastiche maybe confuses a bit too much. The film doesn’t fully embrace the concept of human-machine romance, as we might expect in science fiction or posthuman fantasy. Let’s face it, Jumbo is a brute, a simple machine not an android. And yet the film does allow for some interesting thinking and imagery around new erotic mechanics, as it were. Jumbo is male, but his performance with Jeanne involve no piston-like agitation. They are unique, both terrifying and innovative. 

But he is also a manifestation of the man her mother wants for Jeanne and the mystery of the love Margarette says she felt for Jeanne’s father, a man who left them and that Jeanne seems not to have known. The machine is the magnification of her hobby, a simpler love, and a stand-in for the real, human complications of Marc. But the possibility of Jumbo’s sentience is such a dominant visual reality that we may not be quite inclined to read his activity as fantasy, a psychic projection, or, more troublingly, the result of mental illness. This is, unsurprisingly, how some in Jeanne’s life view the attachment, showing themselves deeply inadequate to care for her. If she is indeed ill, the pathos of that reading is beyond the capacity of the current film.

Or we might read Jumbo as a semi-comic allegory about cross-cultural love. We might imagine Jeanne’s same arguments for acceptance if Jumbo were a human woman, or trans, or nonwhite, etc. But this doesn’t seem to be what the film is after either. Its success really depends upon Jumbo’s machine-ness. So it’s really hard not to argue that this is a movie about anything but a woman who loves a Tilt-a-Whirl who loves her back. That is the only reality presented with sufficient depth. And yet, the traces of other possible readings, including the reality of a fairy tale, trouble the surface reality of human-machine love enough that we’re left wishing the film had been invested more in any one of its possibilities. Nevertheless, there’s enough pleasure and promise in Jumbo‘s images, performances, and light show to enjoy the watch and then dream about what else might have been.

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