{"id":8221,"date":"2020-01-31T09:23:39","date_gmt":"2020-01-31T14:23:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=8221"},"modified":"2020-01-31T09:23:40","modified_gmt":"2020-01-31T14:23:40","slug":"pain-and-glory","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2020\/01\/31\/pain-and-glory\/","title":{"rendered":"Pain and Glory."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Antonio Banderas landed one of the five nominations for Best Actor this year for his role as Salvador in Pain and Glory (Dolor y Gloria)<\/em>, the latest film from Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almod\u00f3var (All About My Mother<\/em>). It’s a command performance from Banderas, who gets his first Oscar nomination at age 59, one that would get my vote (if I had one) in his category for the range and depth he shows in bringing this complex, sad character to life in a story that meanders like the memories it’s trying to depict. (You can rent it on amazon<\/a> and iTunes<\/a>.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Salvador Mallo is a once-famous Spanish director who is now\nin professional and physical decline, wracked by joint and back pain and\nhobbled by various other ailments (some of which may not be real), all of which\nleaves him feeling like he’s unable to work, and if he can’t make movies, he\ndoesn’t see any point to living. He’s thrust into the past when a local cinema\nrestores and airs his film of 30 years earlier, Sabor<\/em> (Flavor<\/em>), whose\nstar, Alberto, played the lead character so differently than Salvador intended\nthat the two haven’t spoken since. The two meet again, tentatively, and Alberto\nshares some heroin with Salvador, who tries it on a whim but becomes hooked,\nand while he gets high we see more flashbacks to his childhood with his mother\n(Pen\u00e9lope Cruz, who doesn’t seem to age) in a cave house in rural Spain. While\nthere, Salvador meets Eduardo, an illiterate but kind local laborer, whom he\nteaches to read, write, and do basic math; and fights with his mother, who\nwants to send him to a seminary to continue his education so he doesn’t end up\n‘like his father.’<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The two tracks, in the present day and in the world of Salvador’s\nmemories, both move forward in linear fashion, but the latter jumps around\nenough to resemble the way our memories actually work. Almod\u00f3var then combines\nthe two timelines when Alberto discovers an unpublished treatment Salvador\nwrote called “Addiction,” that tells the true story of Salvador’s affair\nwith a man who was also addicted to heroin, an affair that ended because he\ncouldn’t kick the habit; Salvador confesses he doesn’t even know if his former\nlover is still alive. When Alberto convinces Salvador to let him stage the\nplay, you can probably guess what happens, and how that kind of closure helps Salvador\nfinally take some small steps to help himself, and to let his incredibly\ndevoted friend and assistant Zulema help him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Most of the summaries I’ve seen of Pain and Glory<\/em>\nhave focused on Salvador’s infirmities, describing it as a meditation on aging\nand mortality. While those themes are clearly present, the movie, and Banderas’\nperformance, are both far more hopeful than you’d expect from such a\ndescription, while also trying to explore how our past experiences and our memories\nof them can shape our lives for years or decades afterwards. Salvador flashes\nback to various scenes because of how much they’ve influenced his later life, especially\nin how his relationship with his mother, right up to her death, has affected\nand haunted him well into adulthood. Confronting those memories is a crucial step\nin his recovery not just from his temporary addiction but from the depression\nthat has taken over his entire life, threatening his career and possibly more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Salvador is not exactly Almod\u00f3var, but there is a lot of the\ndirector in the character, and Banderas does a marvelous job bringing that\ncharacter to life with the kind of depth and rounded edges that he needs to\nhave to engender enough empathy and interest from the audience. Some of the key\npoints about Salvador, including his\nphysical pain<\/a>, come across in ways that feel organic without overwhelming\nthe character or the story \u2013 he’s in pain, and that often leads to him choosing\nnot to do things, but he is not inert on the screen because Banderas renders\nhim in three dimensions, especially finding small ways to show that there’s\nsome energy left in the old man even if his back or his legs aren’t willing. It\ncould have been a monument to self-pity, but Banderas avoids that trap and\ninstead gives one of the best performances of the year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Almod\u00f3var still makes some quirky choices that don’t entirely work; the sequence near the start of the film where Salvador runs through all of his maladies with the help of some animation feels incongruous and took me right out of the movie just as we were getting started. There was no way this was going to beat out Parasite<\/a> <\/em>for Best International Feature Film (for which both are nominated), but some of those small decisions are enough to keep it from coming close to the South Korean hit in my own estimation. Cruz is excellent in small doses as Salvador’s mother while he was still a child, but she could have used some more screen time to further develop both her character and her relationship with Salvador, and those scenes suffer a bit because Banderas isn’t there. His performance is so strong \u2013 he’s not going to win, as his character obviously isn’t crazy enough to beat out Joaquin Phoenix \u2013 that it elevates Pain and Glory <\/em>from something maudlin into an elegiac lament that still gives its main character reasons to hope and to live, right up to the film’s glorious final shot.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Antonio Banderas landed one of the five nominations for Best Actor this year for his role as Salvador in Pain and Glory (Dolor y Gloria), the latest film from Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almod\u00f3var (All About My Mother). It’s a command performance from Banderas, who gets his first Oscar nomination at age 59, one that would […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1146,1147,1077,161,215,1152,932],"class_list":["post-8221","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-2019-best-actor-nominees","tag-2019-best-international-film-nominees","tag-2019-movies","tag-highly-recommended","tag-movies","tag-spanish-films","tag-spanish-language-films","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8221","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8221"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8221\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8223,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8221\/revisions\/8223"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8221"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8221"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8221"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}