The title of the film is derived from the eponymous protagonist’s dual personality. Tom is a nine year old with ADHD. His Mexican mum, Elena, is raising him on her own in a small town in the USA, where she has to work long hours in order to pay the bills. Tom is an impossible child. Restless, destructive, getting into fights at school. Elena, at her wits’ end, seeks medical help and Tom is given a whole array of pills to control his behaviour. But the pills seem, if anything, to be counter productive. Tom doesn’t get any better, he actually gets worse and ends up making a suicide attempt. Elena is informed by a kindly neighbour that this is a possible side effect of the medication Tom is taking. Together, she and Tom decide to stop him taking the pills, but when this gets out to the school, she is told that this is abusive behaviour and could lead to Tom being taken out of her custody.
The film ends with a trip to Mexico, as Elena comes to the conclusion that what her son needs, more than anything else, is a reunion with his father, the kindly but feckless Julian, and his patria. As this narrative development unfolds, we realise that the Other Tom also refers to the bipolar experience of being a Latino/a in the USA. Tom seems like another person in Mexico, as indeed does his mother. The film concludes with a dreamy, hypnotic shot as Elena’s cares seem to be literally washed away. Tom’s ADHD, which never quite takes centre stage, ends up feeling like a metaphor for the immigrant experience. Switching constantly between Spanish and English and highly reminiscent of Samuel Kishi’s Los Lobos, El Otro Tom is one of those films that speak to the little known other in the USA, the barely visible Latino diaspora.
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