Peasant, fighter, prisoner, exile... the extraordinary biopic of a gay
Cuban writer comes close to perfection
Peter Preston. The
Observer. Sunday June 17, 2001. UK.
Before Night Falls (135 mins, 15) Directed by Julian Schnabel; starring
Javier Bardem, Johnny Depp, Andrea Di Stefano
Everything about Before Night Falls is extraordinary. It tells the
extraordinary story of the life and death of the Cuban novelist Reinaldo Arenas.
It is filmed with extraordinary intensity by the painter Julian Schnabel (whose
only other film, Basquiat, didn't hint at this talent). Javier Bardem gives an
extraordinary performance as Arenas, one that brought him an Oscar nomination
and should have brought more. And when Bardem says, in subsequent interviews,
that being there at the making was an extraordinary, life-changing experience,
you need only see this film to understand why. There's a memorable passion to
it.
The script - part-written by Schnabel - draws heavily on Arenas's eponymous
(and posthumous) memoir. He's a dirt-poor kid from a dirt-poor peasant farming
family in the Oriente province of the Forties. His beautiful single mother
(played by Schnabel's wife) is trapped in the loneliness of desertion. When the
village schoolteacher tells his grandfather - the head of the family - that
young Reinaldo has a gift for poetry, furious grandpa takes an axe to a tree
trunk. They move to the nearest city: 200,000 inhabitants, one garbage truck.
But the Batista regime is crumbling. Arenas, barely in his teens, goes off to
fight with Castro.
As a student in Havana, writing his first book, given a state job in the
library, life feels good. He's making his way and revelling in his
homosexuality, for this was a sexual revolution, too. He runs and ruts with a
gang of wild mates led by Andrea Di Stefano. Then the disillusion and the
persecution begin. The new government clamps down on gays - and writers who
don't toe the line. Arenas, smuggling out manuscripts for publication abroad, is
a hunted animal, finally trapped and incarcerated for eight years, surviving by
writing letters for other prisoners, enduring long, delirium-filled weeks in
solitary confinement. He is nearing 40 by the time he's free again, shoved on a
boat to Florida with the great unwanted, the sick, the criminals, the gays.
Welcome to the land of the free. He can live in a New York garret and write what
he likes. But he has Aids, and no health insurance. In 1990, there is only
suicide.
True tragedy. Not many laughs. It could all be unremittingly bleak (and
over-didactic as it charts Arenas's driving contempt for the revolutionaries who
betrayed him). But Schnabel skilfully skirts the traps. Bardem may be the hero,
but he is not always portrayed heroically - sweating and trimming and panicking
under pressure, a man of words but not always a man of action. Cuba may be
filled with cruelty, but there is no glow to Arenas's miserable death in the
Shining City on Manhattan Island. We are asked to identify, not to take sides
simplistically. There is depth and subtlety here. There is also pervasive
authenticity.
One minor miracle is the casting. Bardem is Spanish, Di Stefano is Italian;
Johnny Depp has two cameos as a transvestite and an army lieutenant, Sean Penn
jogs by as a gold-toothed cart driver; most of the rest are Mexicans. This could
have been Captain Corelli' s inanely polyglot Mandolin all over again. But there
are no dissonances. Everyone feels Cuban, looks Cuban. The flyblown Havana they
reconstructed in Vera Cruz has nothing of the stage-set to it.
This, though, is Bardem's film. The macho man of Jamon, Jamon may still flex
a craggy jaw, but he seems frailer, more vulnerable. He never lets conventional
camping hide his essential humanity. He doesn't so much ape the old Arenas of
flickering TV interviews as create a new, totally convincing Arenas. He's not
just immersed in his character; he has become his character. And though Schnabel
sticks close to the facts - as Arenas perceived them - he allows himself one
literal flight of poetry which turns biography into art. The hunted, seeking
escape, have built a balloon in the shell of a church. They are poised to fly to
freedom. But Di Stefano hijacks the balloon for himself and we see it drifting
over a tiny town before plunging to earth.
There was no balloon. That single scene is pure invention. Nevertheless,
it's a total fit, the fragile, taunting lyricism of escape. It helps make Before
Night Falls much, much more than a conventional biopic. It allows it to match
the poetry in Bardem's sweetly guttural narration of Arenas's texts.
Perfection? You can always carp, and some of the storytelling grows ragged
on time and place. Schnabel has fitted the familiar struggle to carve a true
life into the confines of drama. But these are quibbles. They don't diminish the
power of the tale or the resonance of Bardem. They don't drain away the sorrow
or the pity - or the anger. Now, 11 years after his death, Arenas's books are
back in US print and selling by the tens of thousand. You can see why. This is a
film which makes you want to know everything about its subject, to hear his
voice again from a printed page. Extraordinary.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2001 |
