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Film Review By John Demetry
During an initial viewing, anyway, Before Night Falls feels esoteric and shapeless, yet undoubtedly erotic and sinuous. It's boring, I suppose, because it is repetitive. Your mind wanders, but not away from what's on-screen. Schnabel very early introduces the themes of economic and sexual oppression -- and the resulting drive of desire. According to Schnabel, those desires fueled the art of gay Cuban author and poet Reynaldo Arenas, on whose same-titled memoirs Before Night Falls is based. The dramatic pitfalls of the bio pic -- especially about an artist -- in feature-length are common ones into which Schnabel often falls. Uneasily bridged gaps in years can lead to confusion. The problems of presenting intimate details and larger political events lead to both being inadequately developed. Dramatizing the process of creating art -- the workings of imagination -- itself requires rare imagination. Has it been done? Check out Robert Altman's 1990 Vincent & Theo. It used the relationship and parallel experiences of Vincent van Gogh and his brother as the dramatic crux to explore political and artistic themes. Altman coalesced those themes through his own commerce-art struggles. That imaginative leap made Vincent & Theo insistently invigorating and immediate.
Bardem captures Arenas' nervous, yet giddy plunge into writing and into gay life. In his tentative reading of a section of his first novel before a panel of judges, Bardem conveys Arenas' uncontainable joy. Shortly after this reading leads to his job placement at a library, Arenas has sex with a man for the first time. At first uncomfortable with the advances, he darts his head away from a kiss. "You don't like to kiss?" the man asks. "Only when I'm in love," Arenas answers and then pulls the man's lips against his. In the voluptuous degree of Arenas' lust, Bardem exposes the poet's heightened emotions. Both of these arenas seem to fulfill the false promise of freedom and economic security of Fidel Castro's Communist regime in Cuba. The way the people's yearning for a better life enables an ideological dictatorship is merely touched upon by Before Night Falls. We see it in the young Arenas' journey away from the squalor of his childhood to join Castro's rebels. However, we don't get a sense of his realization of how and why his hopes have been betrayed and, consequently, how that revelation made his art so powerful and dangerous. We are just told that it was. The resulting struggles to get his self and his writing out of Cuba become the obvious focus of the film. And it's here that it gets most tiresome in terms of the story. This section even features not one, but two cameos by Johnny Depp. First as a transvestite and then as an all-but mustache-twirling commandant, the performance is all mugging. Even Depp's ass mugs for the camera! Maybe he's most embarrassing because Bardem is so good. He continues the layers of emotion borne from desire that began in his performance in Pedro Almodovar's nineties masterpiece, Live Flesh -- itself an edgier, sexier inquiry into the political laws of desire. In the supporting cast, Olivier Martinez stands out. The matinee-idol beauty of his role in The Horseman On the Roof gets played down, yet deepened, as Arenas' straight friend and, later, his platonic companion during the devastating struggle with AIDS in New York City.
Schnabel's cinematic artistry breaks down that boundary as well. His camera takes Arena's point-of-view of men bathing nude in a river, of a new lover's puckered lips fading into memory, or of a humorously exposed penis underwater. Low-angle shots of his mother visualize how Arenas' poetry explored a changing perspective on his upbringing in poverty. Even when the point-of-view is that of a former lover stealing away from Cuba in a hot-air balloon looking down on Cuba from an aerial view, it's a flight of poetic fancy evoking shared dreams of escape. This sets up Schnabel's most powerful sequence. Returning to his New York City apartment after an all-too-short hospital stay (he doesn't have insurance), Arenas looks out the cab window at the Reagan/Bush-era urban wasteland. Extended tracking shots of the city's abandoned buildings join a poem by Arenas mourning the human waste bred by the neglect of tyrants (Reagan, Bush, and Castro). It makes politically poignant the desperation of that time when desire bathes in the sun just before night falls.
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Javier Bardem and Olivier Martinez
star in Before Night Falls
© 1997-2002 BEI