'Lost City': Halcyon Havana
Andy Garcia's Take On
the Revolution Era
By Stephen Hunter, Washington
Post Staff Writer. Friday, May 19, 2006.
Nobody remembers pre-revolutionary Havana
more clearly than those of us who weren't
there. We remember the whores, the gangsters,
the dirty movie palace, the spies, the strippers
and Havana's Shanghai Theater (actual magazine
line: "A Cuban Has Cracked the G-String
Barrier.") After all, we all saw "Godfather
II" or read Graham Greene's "Our
Man in Havana."
But Cubans remember it differently. They
remember an elegant Spanish city of grand
architecture, crashing surf against the
sea wall at the Malecon, the palm trees,
the broad boulevards, the pulsating music
-- and the families, their own and others,
that formed a dense interrelationship of
love and rivalry and angst and fear and
pity.
Those actual memories are at the heart
of Andy Garcia's "The Lost City,"
a tribute to that time and place, an elegy
on what was lost, a little payback for a
regime that drove them out, and, best of
all, a synthesis of the driving Afro-Cuban
rhythms of the extraordinary music.
The big news in the movie will be Garcia's
portrait of the young, ruthless, movie-star
handsome Che Guevara (Jsu Garcia), so beloved
by the American (and world) left. They should
know; after all, they saw "The Motorcycle
Diaries." Andy Garcia -- an emigre
who fled with his parents when he was 5
1/2 -- and the late Cuban novelist-screenwriter
G. Cabrera Infante have a different take.
They see a punk killer who knows how beautiful
he is, how cool, how sexy. He's Mick Jagger
with a .45 automatic and plenty of notches
in the grip.
Good Lord, what will this do to the T-shirt
sales?
But that's only a tiny part of the movie,
which is really the story of a family. And
the truth is, the movie is pretty fair:
It also shows the brutality and corruption
of the Batista regime in full frontal frankness,
and if it laments the direction that history
happens to take, it doesn't question the
idea that a change was necessary.
Again, though, that's not the movie, which
aspires to be more universal. The model
is classic and transcends culture. You can
see it in such diverse works as "Fiddler
on the Roof" and "Legends of the
Fall" and, I suppose, "The Three
Little Pigs." It tracks the fate of
three siblings across a turbulent era and
watches each fate as it transpires, leaving,
ultimately, a melancholy survivor lamenting
what and who have passed.
The film focuses on the Fellove family.
Papa (Tomas Milian) is a college professor
but a man of means. They live in a hacienda
that could easily be confused with paradise,
a vast white house with gardens and servants
and billowing curtains at the windows. But
they know that change will come: It's 1958
and the Batista government is getting more
and more repressive, just as the scruffy
rebels are getting more and more bold. Batista
had lost the middle class and the aristocrats;
he holds only the army. Of course, secret
policemen hunt the bad boys in the shadows
of the city and the game is played as hard
as any revolutionary struggle.
Each brother has a different attitude toward
what is happening around them. Fico (Andy
Garcia) the eldest, is proprietor of El
Tropical, a thinly disguised version of
the still extant Tropicana. He is, like
so many in show biz, apolitical, as the
demands of running the club are so intense
they leave him little time for the larger
picture. (His profession also gives the
movie a platform to offer up almost 40 Cuban
songs.) At the same time, he is a traditional
Spaniard, who believes in the patriarchal
system, and nothing makes him madder than
when his two younger brothers disrespect
the grave, kind idealist who is their father.
Son No. 2 is Luis (Nestor Carbonell), a
pacifist like his father but a man who abhors
the politics of now. He yearns for a democratic
Cuba but comes to conclude that one man
stands between that and reality -- Batista.
Thus, he joins the March 13, 1958, assault
on Batista's palace by an anti-communist
revolutionary group calling itself The Directorio
(the details aren't from the movie, but
from Hugh Thomas's "Cuba or the Pursuit
of Freedom"). Castro had been approached
by the group but refused to pitch in; a
veteran of an earlier shootout at Moncada
Barracks, he sat this one out in the mountains,
a wise decision as the attempt ended in
failure and massacre. (Even an American
tourist got shot by Batista's trigger-happy
guards!) "The Lost City's" re-creation
of this twisted battle is the most dynamic
sequence in the film.
Son No. 3, Ricardo (Enrique Murciano),
at least knows which way the wind is blowing.
Chastened by the results of that engagement,
he joins Castro and soon adds beard and
fatigues to his look. Meanwhile, Fico takes
it on himself to obey his middle brother's
wish and take care of his wife, Aurora (beautiful
Ines Sastre), and soon the older brother
and the widow have more on their minds than
politics.
Some of the tropes of "The Lost City"
are ineffective. Bill Murray plays an unnamed
"writer" who befriends and hangs
out with Fico, offering a comic subtext
to all the revolutionary gloom and doom.
Murray is always funny and when someone
puts him in that forgotten '50s outfit of
the short-pants suit, he looks particularly
hilarious. He says a lot of things, too,
but somehow his character, meant to represent
the offbeat stylings of G. Cabrera Infante
himself, doesn't quite work.
Then there's Dustin Hoffman in the movie
briefly as the famous Meyer Lansky. His
is a different version of the character
played by Lee Strasberg in "Godfather
II," the visionary genius fixer ("Hyman
Roth" was the nom de guerre), but again
the movie's not about the Cuba of Mafia
corruption, sleaze, gangsterism and commercial
sex that was at the center of "Godfather
II" and more than a few novels. Lansky's
appearance, and that plotline, doesn't come
to much.
What does work is the sense of loss. Infante
finds a brilliant device in the love affair
between Fico and Aurora, in that Aurora
in some way becomes Cuba. She is absorbed
by it and the revolution, and though she
loves Fico (who doesn't love a revolution
that imparts its discipline on his entertainment
enterprise), she cannot tear herself away
from a dream of a glorious revolutionary
future.
As a director, Garcia's best skill is in
evoking great work from his cast, particularly
Milian, Murciano, Sastre and Carbonell.
They are the heart of the film, the doomed,
damned Felloves, victims of the classic
wrong time, wrong place tragedy. The movie
makes one thing achingly real: the fact
that it isn't fun to be born in the cross-hairs
of history.
The Lost City (143 minutes, at Landmark's
E Street and Bethesda Row) is rated R for
violence.
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