Epic in miniature.(Sin Nombre)(Movie review)

IF you wrote a capsule summary of Sin Nombre, a riveting melodrama set in Honduras, Mexico, and (ever so briefly) Texas, it would be easy to make the movie sound like an earnest snooze. "In a film made without professional actors and shot entirely in Spanish, Central American migrants experience hardship and solidarity in their long quest to reach the United States" would do the trick, I think--especially if you threw in the film's backstory as the thesis project of a precocious half-Japanese, half-Swedish northern Californian named Cary Joji Fukunaga, and noted that it earned raves and prizes from the socially conscious jet-setters at last year's Sundance Film Festival.

But if you ignore the movie's provenance and just translate the title into English, you'll have a better sense of what Fukunaga's movie is all about. Sin Nombre means "Without a Name," three words that conjure, tersely, the archetypes of the American West, and the long shadow of Clint Eastwood and Sergio Leone. And the movie vindicates these allusions. The gritty social realism that its subject matter promises is interwoven with a bloody, Biblical narrative about honor and brotherhood, love and murder, in which cycles of revenge and redemption churn like the wheels of the train that carries the migrants toward the Rio Grande.

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Sin Nombre starts slowly, in the Honduran capital, Tegucigalpa, and the dirt-poor Mexican state of Chiapas, taking its time introducing the two families whose unexpected intersection drives the plot. The Honduran family belongs to the teenage Sayra (Paulina Gaitan), whose widowed father (Gerardo Taracena), gone from her life for years, has just been deported home from the distant promised land of New Jersey, where he'd acquired a new wife and several children. Their reunion is awkward, but not awkward enough to dissuade Sayra from accompanying him and her uncle Orlando (Guillermo Villegas) when they set out for the United States once more, slipping across the borders into Guatemala and then into Mexico, where a trainyard in Chiapas provides a jumping-off point for the host of migrants heading north.

It's also where their paths cross with the story's second family, which is tighter-knit and considerably more terrible. This is the Mara Salvatrucha gang, known to many Americans as MS-13, which rules the barrios from Los Angeles--where it got its start in the 1980s, among Central Americans far from home--all the way to Nicaragua. In Chiapas, it's enfolded the brooding Willy (Edgar ...