I realize that the trailer for Chris Weitz‘s A Better Life (Summit, 6.24) has persuaded some that it’s more or less a white man’s movie about a Hispanic father’s issues (i.e., struggling within the LA immigrant workplace to retrieve a stolen truck and save his teenaged son from a gangbanger life).

The reason, of course, is that the trailer is showing too much English-speaking among Latino characters who, in reality, almost always speak Spanish to each other in casual conversation.

And yet L.A. Times reporter John Horn wrote last February that the film “contains a significant amount of Spanish dialogue” and that Weitz employed “any number of Latino crew members” (which presumably means he hired more than a few). For all I know A Better Life might be 30% or 40% Spanish-speaking. (I have a call into Summit about this.)

So let’s try to forgive Weitz’s deplorable direction of New Moon and give him the benefit of the doubt and presume that he’s made every conceivable effort to avoid any sort of culturally ungenuine flavoring in this Bicycle Thieves-inspired drama.

And yet — here’s the marketing rub — the trailer does convey a kind of sensitive white man’s perspective. This, naturally, is because the Summit team is looking to reach Anglo and Hispanic moviegoers. Marketing people have a job to do, and that job almost always entails some kind of lie or distortion. Or perhaps it’s telling the absolute truth. I’m presuming in either case that A Better Life doesn’t have authenticity of, say, Cary Fukunaga‘s Sin Nombre.

And to be perfectly honest, the Spanish-accented speech of the father (Demian Bichir) does sort of half-remind me of Jack Palance‘s Spanish-accented English in Richard Brooks‘ The Professionals (’66).