Synopsis

The true story of novelist and poet Reinaldo Arenas who came of age in his native Cuba as Castro's dictatorship took control of the island. A homosexual, Arenas is persecuted by Castro's Communist regime and eventually finds his way to America.

Pros:

• Javier Bardem is excellent (mostly) in the main role.


• The movie doesn't flinch with it's honest portrayal of Castro's government.

Cons:

• The story is hard to follow and sometimes seems disjointed.


• Cameos from Sean Penn and Johnny Depp provide absolutely nothing other than distractions from the film itself.


• The movie is too long, and yet it spends too little time with the most fascinating elements of it's story.

Generally:

Two and a half, maybe three, on a five scale. The potential for a five-star movie is here ... but it seems to have slipped between the cracks.

Extended Review:

Julian Schnabel's 2000 film Before Night Falls is a frustrating movie. The film is sometimes brilliant but it's often condescending. It's too long in cinematic terms, and yet it feels short on story. The whole is less than the sum of it's scenes and performances. I can't imagine any audience or any film fan who'll see it without registering at least a few major complaints ... and yet there are elements here that are profound and beautiful enough to touch the heart of the most jaded moviegoer.

Javier Bardem turned in my favorite performance in my favorite movie from 2007, No Country For Old Men, and I've been intent on seeing his earlier work ever since. If for no other reason than to get an idea of Bardem's range, No Country... fans might want to check out Before Night Falls. As Reinaldo Arenas, the deeply troubled but talented focus of this movie, Bardem is the polar opposite of No Country's brutal assassin. Here, Bardem plays a gay poet, and at times his performance is way over the top. He stops shy of RuPaul-type shenanigans ... but he gets close enough to justify the mention of RuPaul's name in this review.

Then again, that seems to be the kind of performance the movie wants from him. At least in the first half. For the first hour or so, Before Night Falls is an extremely flamboyant movie. I can't help but wonder, when I see movies like this, what gay people must think of what's on the screen. Some of the performances here drift into what must be crude stereotype. At times, it seems that Before Night Falls wants to send the message that homosexual men are defined by their homosexuality ... and that they're all flirtatious, promiscuous, and overt. Let me be clear; for the first hour, Before Night Falls makes Brokeback Mountain seem like The Searchers.

But at about the half-way point the movie changes direction radically and becomes a story about a man who's made a political prisoner in a country ruled by a brutal communist dictator. I'm a political conservative, so it was at this point that I became more comfortable with the movie. As you'd expect. But it was also at this point that the main character became far more interesting.

In the second half of the movie, Arenas is falsely accused of molesting a pair of teenagers and spends some time on the run, trying to evade capture by Castro's thugs. When he finally is captured and thrown in jail he finds, much to his surprise, that his talent as a writer is cherished by his fellow prisoners. Arenas writes letters home for his cell mates, crafting minor masterpieces that they'd never be able to write on their own. And he spends some time doing his own writing and daydreaming; escaping the prison's walls and into worlds constructed within his mind. Some of these sequences are the movie's strongest, and I wish that the film had allowed us more time with Arenas during his incarceration. It was then that the character was most sympathetic, most likable, and most interesting.

Eventually Arenas is released with relative ease, and I found myself scratching my head over the circumstances of his new found freedom. And this wasn't the only time the movie confused me. There were sequences that seemed to intermingle Arenas's fanciful poetry with his biography, and I was fine with that. I can recognize poetic license when I see it on the screen, and I enjoy it when it's done well. Some of those scenes were done very well and I did enjoy them.

But I didn't enjoy the way the movie would sometimes pick up and/or lose seemingly major characters without explanation. Sometimes a character would have worked his or her way into major elements of the story ... and I'd still not be sure who he or she was supposed to be. And I was especially perplexed by Schnabel's decision to cast Johnny Depp and Sean Penn in roles that amounted to nothing more than glorified cameos. The presence of these two Caucasians, putting on bad fake Spanish accents and chewing on the scenery, totally brought me "out of the movie," so to speak. Depp was especially distracting; he played not one but two minor roles here, and one of them was in a scene that should have been a major showcase for Bardem. Honestly, I couldn't have been more distracted and puzzled if Bugs Bunny had been put on the screen.

SPOILERS FOLLOW: The movie drags on, too, with an oddly violent ending that seemed tacked on as an afterthought. I found that especially irritating, given that shortly before that strange coda there had been a beautiful monologue by Bardem about the joy and wonder of writing. That passage, that dialogue, seemed very final. Closing credits should have appeared with Bardem's last words in that passage. Instead the movie lumbers into a long sequence that suggests that the very ill Arenas's death was at the hands of a friend. That isn't true, the real Arenas died of suicide by overdose. In his suicide letter, Arenas went out of his way to make sure that no other person was blamed for his death. Knowing that makes the end of Before Night Falls seem very strange.

I can sorta recommend Before Night Falls, but with a number of qualifiers: It's strictly for fans of Javier Bardem, that's one qualifier. For another, I'd suggest it as a good movie for film students who want a film to pick apart, discuss, dissect and debate. I won't recommend it, though, for anyone simply looking for two enjoyable hours of cinema. Before Night Falls is a mixed bag ... a few diamonds and a big helping of junk.

Trailer:

Labels: Movie Reviews, Movies