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Before Night Falls

Inhalt & Kritik

The Emancipation Proclamations
Swapping the wanton excesses of the 1980s New York art world for the puritanical confines of the Castro regime, Julian Schnabel continues to tread the myth-rich, landmine-ridden terrain of the martyred-artist biopic. It's beside the point to compare the febrile Rabelaisian phantasmagoria of Reinaldo Arenas, the late gay Cuban poet and novelist who is the subject of Schnabel's Before Night Falls, with the snazzy neo-expressionism of Jean-Michel Basquiat (Arenas, for that matter, experienced neither meteoric ascent nor backlash flameout), but the filmmaker's basic attraction to these two all-too-brief lives warrants scrutiny. Both movies cleave to an unabashedly romanticized notion of art as a tool of self-preservation; both bitterly lament the tragedy of a singular talent worn down by an inhospitable environment—first seduced then cruelly betrayed.
As with Basquiat, there's a certain dreamy opacity to Before Night Falls. Schnabel is an empathic, often admiring biographer, but he's uninclined to pause for analysis, as if any lasting residue of insight would irredeemably mire the reverie. By way of compensation, though, the winking insider's perspective of the earlier film has relaxed into the unguarded stance of a newly enraptured observer. Named for Arenas's posthumously published memoir (though drawing equally from his scabrous pentagonía of loosely autobiographical novels), Before Night Falls glides, perhaps a little too serenely, through the writer's life, its anecdotal obviousness leavened by some memorable grace notes. After an impoverished, absent-father rural childhood (given a lush magic-realist gloss), Reinaldo runs away to join the revolution and discovers sexual rather than political fulfillment. (He's played from young adulthood on by the Spanish actor Javier Bardem.) Schnabel dampens Arenas's fabled promiscuity, a misstep given the writer's tireless emphasis on sex-as-emancipation. Still, helped by cinematographers Xavier Perez Grobet and Guillermo Rosas's warmly saturated colors and Carter Burwell's voluptuous score, he has a blast recreating the Caribbean Babylon of '50s Havana (in Mexico), a heady, eroticized idyll of azure sky and sea (and cute boys in Speedos).
Schnabel's refusal to psychoanalyze his subject can be taken as a wary nod to the pitfalls of biopic convention, even if this respectful approach precludes any discussion of Arenas's complex sexuality. A more immediate problem is the filmmaker's failure to convey a substantial sense of Arenas as a writer, save for a couple of key sequences (a montage of newsreel footage of the revolution, a taxicab contemplation that cross-cuts between New York and Havana) in which Bardem recites Arenas's poetry in voice-over (in Spanish; much of the film requires the actors to speak in accented English). The director's weakness for flashy cameos is balanced by his good sense to enlist only professional scene stealers: Sean Penn as a smirking gold-toothed cart driver, and Johnny Depp, who appears as transvestite bombshell Bon Bon, then, disorientingly, a few minutes later as a macho, crotch-grabbing lieutenant. Before Night Falls is really a one-man show, though, anchored by a performance of impressive magnitude and nuance. The film's ephemeral, semi-evasive lyricism ultimately works as a modest frame for Bardem's tender, deft portrait, which is in turn suitably expansive and rooted in the most concrete details—Arenas's pride and anger, his unsentimental wit and defiant vitality.

Dennis Lim, The Village Voice

Death of a Poet
Exiled, impoverished Cuban poet Reinaldo Arenas committed suicide in New York in 1990 after the complications of AIDS became too much for his body and his mind to bear. He left behind a stirring memoir, "Before Night Falls," which speaks eloquently of his poor but gloriously free childhood in rural Cuba and of the repression he suffered, as a sexually active gay man, at the hands of Fidel Castro and the Cuban revolution. It is this moving story that the American painter Julian Schnabel has brought magnificently to the screen in one of the best films I've seen all year.
Schnabel, who survived the stigma of being the reviled poster boy for the gross excesses of the go-go art market of the early 1980s, surprised everyone with his first film, Basquiat, in 1996. That film, about the New York artist Jean Michel Basquiat, who also died of AIDS, was well-made and moderately successful at the box-office but, considering it was the product of one of the most controversial artists then working, rather conventional in execution. With Before Night Falls, Schnabel has moved to an entirely new plane of cinematic achievement.
The biopic is one of the most difficult genres to pull off, simply because the filmmaker has to be more or less true to the historical record, and tell the life story in more or less chronological fashion -- so as not to baffle the audience -- without becoming boringly linear in the process. Schnabel accomplishes this by the felicitous supplementing of Arenas' hallucinatory poetic words by their visual equivalents, which structure the film from beginning to end. We see Arenas as a young boy in Oriente province as he ogles the nude male swimmers and begins to inscribe his poems in the bark of trees. And then in a town, where he learns to drink in bars and sleep with women. Next, in Havana where he begins to establish himself as a writer and gets caught up in the wonderful promise of the revolution. As the Italian poet and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini was also to discover, however, the radical political ideas of the Communist party are seldom matched by the social and sexual ideas of its leaders, which tend to be conventionally bourgeois to the nth degree. For Arenas, as for Pasolini, political freedom was perhaps most intensely expressed through sexual freedom, but this is not the way the authorities usually see it, and the film is at its moral and philosophical best making this point. Arenas was imprisoned, beaten, his writings confiscated, while at the same time his work was being published in France where it won numerous awards. A final glimmer of freedom comes with the Mariel boatlift in 1980, when Castro, anxious to rid his country of homosexuals and criminals, allowed Arenas and 250,000 others to depart to the U.S.
In telling this story, Schnabel has had to weave his way through a political minefield. Some on the left will condemn him for painting Castro and the Cuban revolution as pure manifestations of Satan, forgetting the great strides Cuba, far beyond any other Latin American country, made in literacy and health care for the poor. The anti-Castroites of Miami, most recently seen on TV during the Elian Gonzales crisis, have complained that Schnabel has not been hard enough on Castro, since, for example, he did not quote from the letter that Arenas sent to the New York Times right before his death, in which the poet laid all his difficulties squarely at the feet of the Cuban leader.
If you can bracket its politics, the film is moving, enthralling even, in its own right. The imagery of water that both Arenas and Schnabel are equally obsessed with cascades magnificently from beginning to end. Schnabel's full artistic palette is on display and he has learned to wield his camera like a paintbrush. A couple of his friends -- Johnny Depp and Sean Penn -- show up in small but important roles and give a bit of playfulness to what would otherwise be pretty lugubrious doings.
Perhaps the best reason for seeing this film, though, is to witness the wonderful work of a relatively unknown Spanish actor named Javier Bardem, who plays Arenas. He was in Almodovar's Live Flesh and a couple of other small Spanish films that have made it to our shores (Jamon, Jamon and Boca a Boca), but here he's utterly transformed. He won a prize at the Venice film festival for this performance, which spans the gamut of emotions from pure sensual joy to the utter terror and degradation of solitary confinement in prison. This generally very macho actor has such complete control of his body language that he is able to imitate the slightly mincing manner of Arenas in a completely convincing way yet also convey the utter humiliation of having to "act gay" for a Cuban official to be allowed on the boatlift. This actor's got a very bright future in the movies.

Peter Brunette, Film.com

There are many sequences in the film that are pure art in the way sight and sound have been united on the screen.

Anthony Leong, REEL SITE

Manages to hold its center in a very strong performance by Javier Bardem.

Arthur Lazere, CULTUREVULTURE.NET

Compassionate yet unsentimental.

Charles Taylor, SACRAMENTO BEE

We are invited to let the film wash over us, but its disjointed amateurism prevents that from happening with much success.

Christopher Null, FILMCRITIC.COM

For the Arthouse.

Chuck Schwartz, CRANKY CRITIC

Absolutely one of the best made this year. Don't let it pass you by.

Dave White, IFILM

Julian Schnabel, in a love poem translated into living flesh by Javier Bardem, has complimented an artistic hero by adding to his legacy.

David Elliott, SAN DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNE

[Bardem] gives it his all here, but he is simply unconvincing as either gay or an artist, and is ultimately uninvolving as Arenas.

David Noh, FILM JOURNAL INTERNATIONAL

A beautifully photographed movie.

Eric Lurio, GREENWICH VILLAGE GAZETTE

A prosaically inspirational and passionate work, a celebration of the artistic impulse as a surging force of nature.

Geoff Pevere, TORONTO STAR

You may leave the theater with the impression that quite a few documentaries would profit from deleting the talking heads in favor of an authentic dramatization such as Schnable's.

Harvey S. Karten, COMPUSERVE

A spellbinding treatment of the life of the late Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas that also confirms painter Julian Schnabel as a director of the first rank.

Jan Stuart, NEWSDAY

The picture is ultimately an indulgent bore, admirable yet ineffective.

Joe McGovern, MATINEE MAGAZINE

Beautifully shot and exceptionally well put together, with Schnabel using numerous cinematic techniques, usually to perfection.

Jon Popick, PLANET SICK-BOY

Schnabel gets so caught up in the melodramatic sweep of Arenas' life that he blurs out the specifics which might help us understand his sensibility as an artist.

Kevin Courrier, BOXOFFICE MAGAZINE

Having never read Arenas' work prior to seeing Before Night Falls, this viewer was inspired to rush out and buy all of his available works. That's some movie.

Liz Braun, JAM! MOVIES

All this is well and good, it's just rather boring.

Matt Easterbrook, MATT EASTERBROOK

[Bardem] simply does what the script calls for him to do, which is basically sustain a look of pain for two-hours plus.

Michael Dequina, FILM THREAT

Bardem is so compelling in the central role that Before Night Falls emerges as a testimony to the human spirit.

Robert W. Butler, KANSAS CITY STAR

Paints Arenas as little more than an abstract, idealized vision.

Sean Axmaker, SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER

The main reason to see Before Night Falls is Bardem, one of the few modern actors with real animal appeal and the guts to show it.

Susan Stark, DETROIT NEWS

Bardem, with his bull's head and wondering eyes, gives an immensely sympathetic performance.

Dave Kehr, CITYSEARCH

A truly amazing performance by Javier Bardem.

David Ehrenstein, NEW TIMES LOS ANGELES

A trip to the bookstore to pick up Arenas' memoirs might be a better decision than seeking out this miscalculated character drama.

David Keyes, DAVID KEYES' CINEMA 2000

Before Night Falls is a flawed obituary, but a satisfyingly poetic one nonetheless.

Enrique Fernandez, SOUTH FLORIDA SUN-SENTINEL

Can ... be confidently recommended for its powerful subject, the frequent flashes of visual beauty and horror that Schnabel achieves, and Bardem's impressive lead performance.

Frank Swietek, ONE GUY'S OPINION

A valuable film because it tells a tale of Cuban struggle and hardship of a type that we surprisingly don't see that often in film.

Greg Dean Schmitz, UPCOMINGMOVIES.COM

It's memorably etched in the viewer's mind through Bardem's complex portrait of a besieged but unbowed man.

Jack Garner, ROCHESTER DEMOCRAT AND CHRONICLE

[Bardem's] riveting performance as Arenas helps compensate for the filmmaking and storytelling deficits.

Jeff Vice, DESERET NEWS, SALT LAKE CITY

Always watchable and often engrossing.

John Hartl, SEATTLE TIMES

Bardem's performance is simply shattering.

Ken Fox, TV GUIDE'S MOVIE GUIDE

The film has some great imagery.

Laura Clifford, REELING REVIEWS

A sumptuous, dreamy film that only touches reality in its ravaging final moments.

Lucas Hilderbrand, POPMATTERS

One of the most powerful films of the past year, and should not be missed.

Matt Heffernan, FILMHEAD.COM

What drives this engrossing biography is the potent but subtle, complex, intimate and magnetic portrayal of the author by Javier Bardem.

Rob Blackwelder, SPLICED WIRE

Before Night Falls is successful because of their skill at composing and portraying the film's primary focus. It's just a shame that Schnabel neglects to fill in the rest of the portrait.

Rod Armstrong, REEL.COM

More a collection of half-formed images than any kind of a proper story.

Steve Rhodes, STEVE RHODES' INTERNET REVIEWS

Powerful yet somewhat confusing.

E! ONLINE

The fact that the film has provoked me to go to the nearest bookstore in search of one of [Arenas'] books should say everything about this film.

David Perry, XIIBARO PRODUCTIONS

Before Night Falls is such a vivid experience that it holds you fully in each moment.

Charles Taylor, SALON.COM

It's a horrific and tragic story, but somehow made beautiful through the care and attention of Schnabel's direction and Bardem's tender, unforgettable performance.

Edward Guthmann, SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

Schnabel has fashioned a dense, emotionally satisfying portrait of a man, a time and a place.

HalloweenFan2K@aol.com, VARIETY

An intriguing and sporadically powerful motion picture with a stellar central performance.

James Berardinelli, JAMES BERARDINELLI'S REELVIEWS

It's the emotional and spiritual arc of an exile, in all its terrible isolation, that gives Before Night Falls its power.

Jay Carr, BOSTON GLOBE

Redolent of atmosphere and rapturously cinematic, Before Night Falls has a gift for creating visual mood that's so strong you'd swear it couldn't last -- but you'd be wrong.

Kenneth Turan, LOS ANGELES TIMES

Such a sensory experience; in its best moments, the film washes over you like a fever dream.

Kevin Maynard, MR. SHOWBIZ

Anyone expecting a hard-hitting biography will be disappointed by Julian Schnabel's soft-edged, dreamy and relatively nonpolitical film.

Lou Lumenick, NEW YORK POST

Gives you a sense of Arenas' life, and the time and place in which he lived, that's as vivid as you're likely to experience in a movie biography.

Mark Caro, CHICAGO TRIBUNE

Before Night Falls lays bare not just the cruelty of Cuba's totalitarianism but its spiritual essence.

Owen Gleiberman, ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY

Enjoy Before Night Falls as a great movie, and as a celebration of one man's spiritual and artistic fortitude.

Paul Tatara, CNN SHOWBIZ

One of the best films I've seen all year.

Peter Brunette, FILM.COM

Bardem hasn't the charisma to bring variety to Arenas or his plight.

Richard Corliss, TIME MAGAZINE

Arenas is not presented as a cliche, as the heroic gay artist crushed by totalitarian straightness, but as a man who might have been approximately as unhappy no matter where he was born.

Roger Ebert, CHICAGO SUN-TIMES

If Before Night Falls doesn't give us Arenas's life as he actually experienced it, it offers penetrating glimpses into his life as he may have dreamed it.

Stephen Holden, NEW YORK TIMES

Spain's Javier Bardem gives an undeniably dynamic lead performance that lifts this labor of love over its incessant downer premise.

USA TODAY

Contains many well-mounted and executed individual moments that unfortunately don't seamlessly fit together into one congruous whole.

SCREEN IT!

Auszeichnungen

2001 Nominierung Academy Award (Best Actor) - Javier Bardem
2000 Boston Society of Film Critics Award (Best Actor) - Javier Bardem
2001 Nominierung Chicago Film Critics Association Award (Best Actor) - Javier Bardem
2001 Nominierung GLAAD Media Award Outstanding Film (Limited Release)
2001 Nominierung Golden Globe (Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture - Drama) - Javier Bardem
2001 Nominierung Independent Spirit Award (Best Cinematography) - Xavier Pérez Grobet, Guillermo Rosas
2001 Nominierung Independent Spirit Award (Best Director) - Julian Schnabel
2001 Nominierung Independent Spirit Award (Best Feature) - Jon Kilik
2001 Nominierung Independent Spirit Award (Best Male Lead) - Javier Bardem
2000 National Board of Review Award (Best Actor) - Javier Bardem
2001 National Society of Film Critics (Best Actor) - Javier Bardem
2001 Southeastern Film Critics Association Award (Best Actor) - Javier Bardem
2000 Venice Film Festival Grand Special Jury Prize - Julian Schnabel
2000 Venice Film Festival OCIC Award (Special Mention) - Julian Schnabel
2000 Venice Film Festival Rota Soundtrack Award - Carter Burwell
2000 Venice Film Festival Volpi Cup (Best Actor) - Javier Bardem
2000 Nominierung Venice Film Festival Golden Lion - Julian Schnabel