Loving Pablo [Hating Escobar]

In 2009, Virginia Vallejo was a columnist for the Venezuelan opposition newspaper 6to Poder, before Hugo Chavez had it shuttered and threw her boss in prison. It is an important story, but it will have to wait for a different movie. This one focuses solely on her affair with notorious cartel boss Pablo Escobar and his fall from power. Unfortunately, Vallejo is nearly dragged down with him in Fernando León de Aranoa’s Loving Pablo (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York.

This film is adapted from Vallejo’s memoir Loving Pablo, Hating Escobar, so even though the story is credited to documentarians Jeff & Michael Zimbalist (who made The Two Escobars), the film never really asks the obvious question: “what the Hell was Vallejo thinking?” We see her falling for Escobar’s Lord Bountiful act in the Medellin slums and then suddenly she is the drug lord’s mistress and also an advisor to his successful congressional campaign. Seriously, what happened to journalistic distance? Of course, it will not be long before Vallejo rues the day she met Escobar.

According to the film’s account, Vallejo was already a celebrity “journalist” when Escobar paid her (and several others) to lend star power to one of his many lavish parties. Generally, those with high social standing were happy to accept his hospitality, but they never mingled with their “nouveau riche” hosts. That was a euphemism for drug dealers. Vallejo would be an exception. Escobar started his charm offensive at the party, but he sealed the deal when Vallejo produced a story about his supposed philanthropic projects.

Despite the double-speak, Vallejo knew well enough just exactly what Escobar was. In fact, she was present as arm candy at several milestone meetings of the allied cartels (Medellin, Cali, etc.). For a while, she manages to keep kidding herself, but when Escobar’s political opponents are gunned down in broad daylight, she finally snaps out of her denial. As the heat turns up on Escobar, she also starts receiving threatening phone calls from the friends and family of his victims.

Granted, Loving Pablo can get a little cheesy at times. Vallejo does not actually accuse Escobar of stealing her youth, but a line like that would not sound out of place in this film. Nevertheless, it offers a somewhat unusual vantage point on the gangster-rise-and-fall narrative, from the perspective of the disillusioned mistress and media consultant.

You also have to give Javier Bardem credit for all the De Niro pounds he packed on to play Escobar. He looks so bad, viewers will fear for his health. In contrast, Penélope Cruz looks fabulous as Vallejo. When you see them together in Loving Pablo, it is dashed hard to believe they are still married in real life. In terms of actual acting, Bardem growls and chews the scenery with abandon, but his portrayal pales compared to heavy, career defining work in Biutiful and To the Wonder. Arguably, Cruz fares better doubling-down on glamour and old school oh-if-I-had-but-known melodramatic chops as Vallejo. Peter Sarsgaard also helps keep things lively as the corner-cutting but still somewhat principled DEA agent, Shepard.

Loving Pablo has epic ambitions León de Aranoa is not able to fulfill, but he delivers a super-slick two-hour nostalgia trip for eighties-centric fans of Miami Vice and Scarface. That’s definitely something. Recommended accordingly as a grandly shallow indulgence, Loving Pablo opens this Friday (10/5) in New York, at the Village East.

The Gunman: Sean Penn’s Congo Temp Gig

Seriously, why bother assassinating a government official of a failed state? A small team of mercs will do so anyway, because a job is a job. Unfortunately, the shadowy outfit managing the contract has started tying up loose ends. Those would be Jim Terrier and his former comrades-in-arms. He just might be the only left who isn’t part of the conspiracy, but he should be enough to bring them all down in Pierre Morel’s The Gunman (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York.

For a while, Terrier was really enjoying the Congo assignment. While secretly working for Lawrence Cox’s death squad, he volunteered as a relief coordinator by day to maintain his cover. That is how he met and fell hard for Annie, the professional do-gooder. Unfortunately, just when both their romance and the country’s civil war are heating up, Terrier is assigned to the team taking out an uncooperative natural resources minister looking to renegotiate terms (in real life, the mining companies would just say fine, call us when you have a working legal system). Since he will be the trigger man, Terrier will have to vanish afterwards, leaving Annie to the creepy advances of Felix, his smarmy corporate contact.

Haunted by his collective guilt, Terrier returns to Congo, hoping to do penance, like Jack Bauer in the two-hour special 24: Redemption. However, when an unusually well-equipped hit squad shows up gunning for Terrier, he realizes someone is out to get the old gang, but they all seem to be dead, except for him and the suspiciously chipper Cox. Felix also seems to be acting excessively obnoxious, but that is just sort of how he is. For understandable reasons, his wife Annie has mixed emotions seeing Terrier again, but the sparks are still there. She tries to guilt trip him, pointedly asking: “what did you expect showing up after all this time,” but since they just slept together, things are probably exceeding his expectations (but not necessarily ours).

Frankly, the early scenes of the hard-bitten assassins doubling as relief logistical specialists are rather intriguing and hint at dramatic possibilities the film opts not to take. Of course, we have to deal with the film as it is and not what it might have been. Granted, the narrative drive and internal logic start to sag in the second act, with the former rebounding and the latter utterly imploding down the stretch, but nobody can blame Sean Penn. Gunman is really his coming out party as a middle aged action figure, where he indeed shows he has the chops and the presence. He also clearly put in the time at the gym.

However, Idris Elba is even more impressive, getting second billing over Javier Bardem for maybe two days of work, tops. Appearing as DuPont, the Interpol agent, he just drops in, makes an extended treehouse analogy and then disappears until it’s time for the mopping up. Yet, he is still totally badass. Ray Winstone does his old hardnosed thing as Terrier’s trustworthy associate Stanley and Mark Rylance’s Cox chews on a fair amount of scenery. Frankly, it is hard to know what to make of former Bond villain Bardem, but at least he isn’t playing it safe as the whiny, petulant Felix. On the other hand, it is safe to say Jasmine Trinca (so subtle and earthy in Valeria Golino’s Honey) is woefully wasted as the problematically passive Annie.

There are some nicely executed old school actions scenes in Gunman, but some sequences are undermined by questionable editing. On several occasions it looks like Terrier is in the immediate path of assorted perils, only to find him safely outside the line of fire an abrupt cut or two later. Taken helmer Morel gets the attitude right, but he largely keeps the film on a medium tempo rather than a break neck speed. You just leave the theater suspecting in most alternate universes, this movie is totally awesome, but the one we get is just okay. It will satisfy hardcore Penn fans, but the rest of us should feel no urgent need to rush out to see it when it opens this Friday (3/20) in New York, at the AMC Empire.

Malick’s To the Wonder

It seems eerily fitting that Terrence Malick’s To the Wonder would be the final film reviewed by the auteur’s longtime champion, Roger Ebert.  It is rather more surreal to think Olga Kurylenko commenced production on Malick’s latest in 2010, the same year she worked on the forthcoming but already infamous mermaid potboiler Empires of the Deep.  Yet, any new film from Malick is a cinematic event in its own right.  The director’s admirers will find it is very much a Malickian statement, except perhaps more so, when To the Wonder (trailer here) opens tomorrow in New York.

Neil and Marina meet in France and fall deeply in love.  He is a visiting American.  She is a Ukrainian single mother.  Intending to start a new life together, she and her daughter Tatiana move into his Oklahoma home, where the wind comes sweeping down the plain.  Their dreamy ardor persists for a while, but soon fissures develop in their relationship.  Eventually, Marina and Tatiana return to Europe.  She and Neil eventually feel compelled to make another try, but this time her daughter stays with her (unseen) father.  Despite the support of the equally alienated Father Quintana, the couple’s issues persist.

Just under two hours, Wonder is practically a short subject by Malick’s standards.  However, he makes absolutely no stylistic concessions.  Frankly, it is more like a series of tableaux than a movie, even of the art house variety.  Framing lovely images is a hallmark of Malick’s work, so his striking vistas should come as no surprise.  Yet, at some point, moving pictures really ought to, you know, move.

Throughout Wonder, Malick’s favored perspective on Ben Affleck’s Neil is the back of his head, which is obviously deliberately distancing.  Yet, in a way it suits the reserved and reticent Oklahoman.  Even as Malick and his characters seemingly strain to shut viewers out, cracks of profundity occasionally open up in the film.  In one particularly heavy moment, Father Quintana counsels Neil it is always difficult to be the one who loves less than their partner.  Indeed, Neil has plenty of guilt to process without the consolation of Marina’s emotional reveries.  There’s something for the daytime talk shows to chew on.

Naturally, Father Quintana has lost (or at least misplaced) his faith.  Nonetheless, it is a deeply sympathetic portrait of a man of the cloth.  Malick unflinchingly captures his loneliness and the imperfect solace he finds in service to others.  Javier Bardem might not dig into such deep and dark places as he did for Biutiful, but he still conveys a sense of a man with a long, complicated history. 

Since nobody is really granted a substantial backstory, it is incumbent on the cast to evoke the sense their pains and regrets are rooted in something real and universal.  That is a real strength for Bardem.  Whereas Affleck is supposed to be cold and aloof, Olga Kurylenko is also surprisingly effective and affecting as the passionately needy Marina.

Viewers who lose patience with Wonder are not shallow philistines.  Malick de-emphasizes plot and character development in favor of imagery and in-the-moment impressionism.  It is slow and at time pretentious.  Yet, at the fleeting junctures where it all comes together, it is like the epiphany produced by an audacious free jazz performance.  Dashed demanding, To the Wonder is mostly recommended for hardy Malick followers when it opens tomorrow (4/12) in New York at the Walter Reade Theater uptown and the Landmark Sunshine downtown.

Submitted by Mexico: Inarritu’s Biutiful

He is a Spanish ghost whisperer. It is not a scam, Uxbal really believes he can sometimes reach the very recently deceased. Unfortunately, he knows he will soon be joining their ranks, but he is not ready to go in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Biutiful (trailer here), Mexico’s official submission for best foreign language Academy Award consideration, which opens tomorrow in New York.

Ironically, Uxbal’s second sight is his only business on the up-and-up. His main employment involves smuggling and concealing illegal laborers from China. He kids himself into thinking they are working to build a better life for themselves in Spain, even trusting Li, a nurturing Chinese worker, to sit for his daughter Ana and son Mateo. As it happens, he has other things to distract him from their slave-like conditions, like the cancer eating away at him.

Uxbal might not be perfect, but he is a far better parent than his estranged floozy wife, Marambra. Understandably, securing his children’s future preoccupies him, until tragedy inevitably strikes, leaving him profoundly shaken.

Biutiful is not exactly what one might call a happy film. Visually though, it is often quite striking, with Iñárritu (previously on Oscar’s radar with Babel) adroitly mixing modest doses of subtle magical realism into a grittily naturalistic world. In its own way, Biutiful is actually a deeply moral film as well, clearly suggesting karma can be a real infernal boomerang. It is also somewhat ironic to see such a bitterly tragic story about “undocumented workers” set in Spain, which has not exactly carried the EU economy in recenmt years. Indeed, Iñárritu paints a harsh portrait of Spanish society, suggesting it is corrupt and exploitative in no uncertain terms.

However, though logic may not be an unfailingly human trait, there are times when Biutiful’s characters make decisions that truly exasperate all remnants of patience. Granted, they have a host of issues, but there is a lot of self-destruction and self-contempt on display. Such behavior combined with the abject meanness of the environment and the constant presence of death makes the film quite a draining experience.

Javier Bardem’s Oscar buzz is certainly justifiable, following his best actor honors at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. As Uxbal, he truly looks like remorse personified right from the start and he only deteriorates from there. Yet, his on-screen work is thoroughly credible each step of the way, rather than an indulgence in showy, clip-reel acting. Likewise, young Hanaa Bouchaib also modulates her performance as Ana quite well, while in a small-ish supporting role, Lang Sofia Lin is truly haunting as poor (even by Spanish or Mexican standards) Li.

Biutiful is certainly technically accomplished film, featuring a very fine turn from Bardem. Yet, aside from its rather grim sow-what-you-reap implications and a legitimately touching framing device, the film does not leave viewers with much, after demanding plenty. Still, that is not nothing. Given the extent Iñárritu’s colleagues have championed Biutiful, it is probably a favorite for the best foreign language Oscar, but it is not likely to duplicate the audience reach attained by recent winners, like The Secret in Their Eyes and The Lives of Others. Recommended for hardy cineastes, Biutiful opens tomorrow (12/29) in New York at the Landmark Sunshine.