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Before Night Falls by Michael Atkinson An impressionistic, lyrical biography of the beleaguered Cuban poet/novelist Reinaldo Arenas, Julian Schnabel's Before Night Falls avoids many of the tragic biopic pitfalls--relentless doom, formlessness, artistic endeavor that's nearly impossible to film--simply by having a theme: Arenas' proto-cosmic relationship with earthly matter, which for the most part entails a beatific acceptance of sexual need and pleasure that would be unpopular in any social context. In revolutionary Cuba, of course, Arenas's homosexuality is his primary crucifix. Fascinating because of his circumstances, Arenas was an amazingly prolific person--he wrote many books published to great acclaim outside of Cuba (while he lived in poverty or prison), and he had by his own count thousands of sexual partners before dying of AIDS in New York in 1990. Schnabel has a penchant for fated artists--his underrated Basquiat is one of the best American movies ever made about a painter--but Before Night Falls is never pessimistic. Like Arenas, it has a bounce in its step. PAGE 1 | 2 |
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What's more, it's a neat history lesson on Cuba through the '60s and '70s, utilizing ample news footage and putting Arenas' spontaneous decadence in perspective: before and immediately after the revolution, Cuba was a party-hearty-Marty country, with the very foreign money that Castro battled against creating an atmosphere of sensual free-for-all. At the center of Schnabel's movie is Spanish star Javier Bardem, whose shy physical confidence and quick intelligence (he looks like Robert Downey Jr. if Robert Downey Jr. was a boxer) holds the movie together like glue. Schnabel doesn't preach one way or the other about the man's life; the movie has a fugue quality, dallying with poetic asides, visions and tangents almost to the exclusion of a coherent narrative. But it's not difficult; Arenas' odyssey is crystal clear. If Before Night Falls isn't an outright homerun, it's because of the biopic form: it's a life, not a story, and even if it's not as repetitive as, say, Pollock, it's still going nowhere. Of course he dies in the end--would there be a movie otherwise? PAGE 1 | 2 |
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