When second thoughts nag

   

   I've been having an argument with myself, and I'm inviting you to listen in. I don't second-guess a lot of things, but I make an exception when it comes to my work.

  Let me clarify: I've been thinking about director Pedro Almodovar -- not the person whom I've never met and have only seen once in person when both he and I were much younger and Almodovar was making his first big wave on the festival circuit with 1988's Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.

   In the early 1980s, Almodovar, now 75, gained bad-boy notoriety for the gay tilt of his movies, which could seem shocking even as his native Spain shed the oppressive strictures of Franco rigidity. But Almodovar always has been too talented to be pushed into one more genre ghetto.

    Visually robust and thematically provocative, Almodovar has established himself as a significant  presence in the “art film” world. The auteur theory isn't talked about much anymore, but Almodovar qualifies as a bona fide auteur.

  I mention this because I just finished writing a negative review of Almodovar’s The Room Next Door, an adaptation of a 2020 novel by Ingrid Nunez. I’ve read Nunez, but not What Are You Going Through, the novel on which The Room Next Door is based and which I’ve learned is more discursive than Almodovar’s film. 

   Sadly, I found The Room Next Door surprisingly uninvolving. I seldom felt as if I were encountering a film in which style and story merged in vivifying ways. Offering only trace elements of the director's capacious talent, The Room Next Door isn't a typical Almodovar film. 

     The Room Next Door is also Almodovar's first English-language feature, but I didn’t dwell on the impact that might have had on the movie. Lingual landscape is also cultural landscape, but thoughts about something else have been nagging at me: how to think about potential shifts in an artist's approach.

     Almodovar tells the story of a terminally ill war correspondent (Tilda Swinton) who asks an old friend (Julianne Moore) to share a rented house in upstate New York. There, she plans to end her life by taking a pill she obtained on the dark web. 

     Why didn't a foray into such emotionally charged territory seem more grounded in the messy business of dying? 

     I’ve seen too many people die of cancer. None of them looked as well-kempt as Swinton for their date with the reaper. They may have been brave and composed on their deathbeds, but their bodies were being destroyed. It's difficult fully to understand the word “ravaged” until you’ve seen a body under malignant siege.

       So, there was that. At the same time, I wondered if I weren't being too rigid. Why must every Almodovar movie conform to my idea of what an Almodovar movie should be? At the same time, I saw no reason Almodovar couldn’t deal squarely with death while keeping his voice at full throttle. (For examples, see Almodovar's Volver (2006) and Pain and Glory (2019), movies in which death plays a role.)

        Questions and more questions kept tugging at my sleeve. Could Almodovar's decision to make a film in English have signaled his need to take a break from being the Almodovar of expectation? Should an artist be admired for trying to expand his or her range? Is it possible for a filmmaker to exhaust a particular style or, at minimum, need a refresh? Shouldn't such transformative efforts be supported? Or perhaps, I wondered, was the style of The Room Next Door not transformative enough?

       I haven't resolved these questions, nor do I want to recant my review. To check myself, I watched The Room Next Door twice and concluded that it might represent a mismatch between Almodovar and the movie's source material. Still, when serious filmmakers don't seem to be working at peak levels, they deserve more consideration than might be given to less ambitious efforts.

     To take another recent example, director Robert Eggers (The Witch, The Northman, and The Lighthouse) brings distinctive atmospheric artistry to horror. I don’t think Nosferatu, Eggers' latest, totally succeeded, but as a work of undeniable aspiration, it shouldn't be casually dismissed.

      Francis Ford Coppola couldn't have wanted to spend his life making Godfather movies. He’s always insisted on going his own way. But Megalopolis? In Coppola's case and in the case of some other filmmakers, one isn't just reviewing a single film but trying to understand where that film fits (or doesn't) into a career based on vision, acuity, and the ability to get under the skin and stay there.

      In his way, Almodovar may have been advocating for everyone being able to choose death if faced with an incurable illness that promises nothing but pain. I’ve known people, who, facing such illnesses, proceeded bravely and with resolve. Enough, as the saying goes, is enough.

        And, so, too, with this essay. Enough.

       Maybe I've misread Almodovar's movie, or perhaps the director has landed in the midst of a transition period, the kind of artistic purgatory where one keeps working while waiting for the heavenly call of renewal to sound. That’s what artists do. They work.

      As I said at the outset, I'm arguing with myself, turning my thoughts this way and that while living with the unavoidable prospect of never sticking a perfect landing. 

      

A woman opens death's door

     The Room Next Door, Pedro Almodovar's adaptation of author Sigrid Nunez’s 2020 novel, What Are You Going Through, marks the Spanish director’s first English-language feature. Almodovar,  best known for his long career in Spanish film,  previously made two short films in English. 

      Language aside, I’ve generally counted on Almodovar to refresh my eye. I don't consider this a small matter in the age of Marvel, CGI, and mega-make-up. Almodovar’s bold use of colors, his ability to build stories around distinctive faces, and his skill at spicing his movies with tension, eroticism, and melodrama have made him an internationally known auteur.

     Serious and emotionally measured, The Room Next Door comes across as an anemic helping of  Almodovar, a modest drama about death that flirts with a major idea about climate disaster as it searches for a human approach to the doom that awaits every individual.

  Tilda Swinton, who has worked with Almodovar before, plays Martha, a well-known war correspondent who has witnessed her share of battlefield death. Julianne Moore portrays Ingrid, a prominent author who early on learns that Martha has been hospitalized with terminal cancer. Once close, the two haven't seen each other in years.

    Ingrid visits Martha in the hospital, and their friendship renews -- albeit under extreme circumstances. Whatever relationship the two develop must end with grief.

    Whispers of plot emerge when an experimental treatment fails to halt the advance of Martha’s stage three cervical cancer. After exploring the dark web, Martha obtains a pill that will end her life. She's done with suffering.

     Martha asks Ingrid to join her in a sleek modern home in upstate New York where she’ll spend her remaining days. She doesn’t want Ingrid by her side when she dies, but she wants someone nearby, a person who’ll know that she's gone. 

      The screenplay leans on exposition to explain how Ingrid will escape criminal liability for Martha’s death. She faces exposure because New York has not yet legalized assisted death. Ingrid will also bring news of Martha's death to the daughter from whom the dying journalist has become estranged.

       The Room Next Door may be less stylish than other Almodovar films, but don't get the impression that Almodovar drains it of all color. The characters wear vividly colored clothes, and Almodovar doesn't neglect the film's interiors. Martha's design-oriented hospital room looks impervious to the smell of antiseptic, and Almodovar seldom meets a wall from which a painting can't be hung.

     But these touches don’t feel nearly as pleasurable as they have in previous Almodovar work; they're like footprints, reminders of the director’s presence rather than a fully realized expression of it.

       Mostly, The Room Next Door involves conversations between Martha and Ingrid, although at one point, a flashback reveals a memorable experience Martha had while covering the war in Iraq. Another scene, possibly the movie's most vivid, explains what happened to the father of Martha’s daughter, a Vietnam veteran who suffered from PTSD. 

       And, then, there's the film's thematic reach — or possibly its overreach. While looking after Martha, Ingrid meets with a writer (John Turturro) who lectures on the inevitability of climate-related catastrophe. Both Martha and Ingrid once had affairs with Turturro's character, who has become annoyingly stern. 

       Turturro’s appearance may be meant to highlight the gap between the prospect of global doom and the solitary death of one woman, but the horrors of climate change seem tacked on to an intimately told story about two women who share a profound experience.

      Appearing gaunt and pallid, Swinton makes Martha's death feel a bit abstract. Not her fault. Almodovar focuses on a woman who’s managing the messiness out of her death -- and perhaps out of the movie, as well. Moore makes Ingrid's openness apparent; she's uncertain about Martha's decision to end her life, but she's devoted to her friend.

     A thriller-like score by Alberto Iglesias vibrates beneath the movie's surface, but the music feels misplaced. I took that as a clue. Maybe this is a case of a mismatch between director and material. The Room Next Door didn't seem to give Almodovar or the story he tells enough room to breathe.

Pedro Almodovar visits the Old West

 It's hardly a surprise that director Pedro Almodovar, once regarded as the gifted and undisputed bad boy of Spanish cinema, has decided to make a film about gay gunslingers in the Old American West. Surprisingly, though, Strange Way of Life, a  31-minute, English-language short doesn't  go much of anywhere. Those familiar with Almodovar's work know him as a visual master whose films brilliantly  meld design and meaning. He’s an ardent proponent of entertaining the eye in ways that serve both the worlds and the characters he creates. You'll see some of that in Strange Way of Life, but there's not much more to consider about the movie. Ethan Hawke stars as a bitter, tormented sheriff who reunites with a former lover (Pedro Pascal) after 25 years. Jake (Hawke) has a sexual reunion with Pascal's Silva, but resists taking things further. A strained subplot revolves around Jake's duty to track his sister-in-law's killer (George Steane). The killer happens to be Silva's son. Silva argues that Jake should allow the young man to flee to Mexico. Almodovar includes a flashback to the Wild Bunch days Jake and Silva once shared. Viewers may have seen the subject of gay men in macho worlds better developed in Brokeback Mountain and more recently in The Power of the Dog.  Hawke, however, brings the force of severity to the lawman role Jack feels compelled to play. Strange Way of Life tries for the poignance that stems from recognizing roads not taken. But the movie might be confused with the sizzle reel for a feature-length movie that never materialized.

Strange Way of Life is being released theatrically on a double bill with The Human Voice, another short film by Almodovar. First released in 2020, The Human Voice stars Tilda Swinton in an adaptation of a play by Jean Cocteau. I haven’t seen it.

Almodovar's look at mothers and history

 

   For much of his career, director Pedro Almodovar has devoted himself to a pleasure-filled aesthetic. Almodovar's Parallel Mothers doesn’t entirely abandon the director's love of splash colors. Almodovar's characters typically arrive on screen drenched in decor and design. The women in his movies seldom appear ordinary.

  Of course, there’s another side to this coin. Does the emphasis on exteriors cloak what’s on the inside of all those characters? Is Almodovar playing a sly game with us?

  Living in Spain, Almodovar must know that his country’s leap into post-Franco modernism carried risks, even as it brought gender fluidity, sexual expression, and bold artistic expression.

  The joys of liberation threaten to obscure a brutal past in which dissent and dissenters were not tolerated.

  That's the troubling foundation on which Almodovar allows Parallel Mothers to unfold, focusing his story on a successful photographer (Penelope Cruz) who's trying to settle a debt with the past.

   In her work. Cruz's Janis meets Arturo (Israel Elejalde), a forensic archaeologist. She wants Arturo to help excavate a site which the folks in her hometown have identified as the location of a mass murder. Janis's great grandfather was among those slain by fascist soldiers.

   As the story evolves, the personal and the political prove inseparable. Janis sleeps with Arturo, becomes pregnant, and opts to keep the baby. The married Arturo isn’t ready to leave his ailing wife. Janis seems intent on being a single mother.

   Almodovar sketches all this quickly before settling into the main part of the movie, which deals with Janis’ relationship with another young mother (Milena Smit), this one still a teenager.

    The two women meet when both are in labor and sharing a room at a Madrid hospital. 

     Almodovar opts for a contrivance (I won’t reveal it here) that easily could have sunk his movie, pushing it toward cliche. Instead, he shows us how the two women are drawn together as they face troubling questions, some  hinging on generational differences.

     Still a young woman, Smit’s Ana is less attuned to recent Spanish history than Janis. She’s a kid and she’s given a nearly impish look that’s reinforced by Smit’s performance.

     Additional characters appear. Almodovar veteran Rossy de Palma portrays Janis’s editor, a woman who hires Janis for glossy photoshoots. Ana’s mother (Aitana Sanchez-Gijon), an actress, seems too preoccupied with her career to fully acknowledge her daughter.

    Cruz’s performance holds the movie together. Cruz has talked about the intuitive connection she has with Almodovar.  Since 1977, she has made seven films with Almodovar, including Volver (2006) and All About My Mother (1999).

   I don’t know if Cruz is romanticizing her relationship with Almodovar but her work here is first-rate. She’s playing a character burdened with her own issues while fulfilling a cultural responsibility, an obligation to the past.

    At a key point in the movie, Janis also must make a crucial decision about her own relationship to the truth.

    By the movie's end, Almodovar has reminded us of a lesson that goes beyond Spain, the Spanish Civil War, and totalitarianism. We must dig up the past before we can put it to rest. We owe it to the dead and to ourselves.

A director slips into depression

Antonio Banderas leads the way in director Pedro Almodovar's Pain & Glory.

In Pain & Glory, director Pedro Almodovar tells the story of an aging director who's creaking has ways toward the last good night. As Salvador Mallo, Antonio Banderas makes us feel his character's pain even when he's doing something ordinary, getting out of a taxi, for example. A master of eye-popping color, Almodovar almost makes it seem as the blood has been drained from Banderas's face. But more about Banderas later.

Working in a reflective mode, Almodovar has made a movie that begs to be taken autobiographically.

Scenes in Mallo's home were shot in Almodovar's Madrid apartment. Banderas wore Almodovar's clothes during the filming and styled his hair in the swept-back fashion Almodovar favors. Of course, Banderas has a long history with Almodovar, having starred in Almodovar's Labyrinth of Passion (1982) and later in movies such as Law of Desire, Matador, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown and even later in films such as Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! and The Skin I live In.

So, Pain & Glory arrives on-screen weighted with a history that's reflected in the screenplay when Mallo reconnects, after 32 years, with the actor (Asier Etxeandia) who starred in what apparently was the director's best film.

Mallo's connection with his past comes at a time when depression keeps him from work. He reads. He sometimes writes. But mostly he's holed up in his apartment, where he remembers his life as a child.

Flashbacks to childhood, some induced when Mallo decides to try heroin, show us the relationship between young Mallo (Asier Flores) and his mother (Penelope Cruz).

An early-picture close-up of Cruz washing clothes in a river near the village where Mallo was born so intensely captures Cruz’s beauty that it feels as if the image should be lifted from the screen and framed. It's practically a love letter.

In another flashback, we glimpse the future. Young Mallo auditions for a church choir. The other boys can't carry a tune but Mallo can sing. He has a voice.

Mallo recalls the birth of his sexual desire in a scene in which the young Mallo watches Eduardo (Cesar Vicente), a workman who's putting up tiles on the wall of the family's home. When a nude Eduardo washes away the dirt of work, Mallo is overwhelmed. His mother arrives home and we sense that she's confirming what she already knows about her son.

Almodovar, as always, is in fine form, but Banderas's performance makes the movie. It almost feels as if his bearded face is being pulled down by the drag of Mallo's depression. Banderas doesn't so much portray depression as embody it. With graying hair and beard, the handsome Banderas has made his face drab.

If the movie is meant to be autobiographical, Almodovar isn't always kind to himself. Mallo cruelly sabotages his renewed friendship with Etxeandia's character. He indulges in heroin and seems to treat the devoted woman who assists him (Nora Navas) as nothing more than a sounding board for his laments.

At one point, Mallo -- perhaps as an act of contrition -- gives his estranged actor friend the rights to a story he has written. The story becomes a one-man showcase for the actor, a stage production that's highlighted by a confessional recounting of the days when the narrator was unable to save a youthful lover from the ravages of heroin.

But even that story becomes suspect when, after many years, the lover (Leonardo Sbaraglia) returns to Madrid from Argentina. After accidentally stumbling across the play, he meets with Mallo. Turns out that the former lover is content, stable and living a life that seems altogether more fulfilling than Mallo's.

There also are scenes that seem lifted from life, as when Mallo listens to his now-aging mother instruct him in how she wishes to be displayed in her coffin. This rosary, not that one. And please, no bound feet. That might constrict her freedom in the afterlife.

Although there's a play within the movie and other references to art -- both visual and verbal -- Pain and Glory isn't nearly as playful as much of Almodovar's work. Winds of sadness and defeat blow through much of the movie. Even when we learn that Mallo will resume his career, it doesn't feel like a triumph. We've already seen that he has nothing in his life but filmmaking. Is that enough? Shouldn’t life have more?

Almodovar, who’s 70, paints a portrait of a cinematic bad boy in his twilight years. In a way, that makes Pain and Glory a story about the kind of loneliness for which no antidote has yet been discovered.

An isolated woman deals with loss

Director Pedro Almodovar blends stories by author Alice Munro and makes them his own.

Pedro Almodvar, the fine and often cheeky Spanish director of movies such as Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, The Skin I Live In and Talk to Her, always has been as much interior designer as movie director. In an Almodovar movie, everything from hair styles to wall paper take on evocative meaning.

Of course, all filmmakers pay attention to such details, but with Almodovar the icing and the cake often carry equal weight.

Beyond that, Almodovar's fluid camera creates a cinematic richness that's difficult to resist -- even when the director isn't working at peak form, as probably is the case in Almodovar's latest, Julieta.

Loosely basing his movie on several stories by Canadian author Alice Munro, Almodovar focuses on the title character at two distinct stages of her life: as a young teacher (Adriana Ugarte) and as a middle-aged woman (Emma Suarez).

We meet the older version of Julieta as she's about to leave Spain for Portugal with a grateful and admiring lover (Dario Grandinetti). But Suarez's Julieta backs out at the last minute, deciding to remain in Madrid. She leaves her upscale apartment, and moves into an building she occupied when her now-grown daughter was a teen-ager.

The story then introduces us to the younger Julieta, a woman whose life changes when she meets a young fisherman named Xoan (Daniel Grao) on a train. Julieta and Xoan have an affair; she becomes pregnant. Julieta moves to a small seaside town to be with Xoan.

Xoan's housekeeper (Rossy de Palma) doesn't take to Julieta, but she's totally attached to Xoan and, then, to Julieta's child, Antia. We also meet Ava (Inma Cuesta), a sculptress who was one of Xoan's lovers -- and, on occasion, still may be.

Julieta's daughter becomes the source of the middle-aged Julieta's torment as Almodovar creates a massive generational gulf. Neither mother nor daughter can deal with tragedy, and both are mired in recrimination.

Young Antia vanishes, after participating in a mountain retreat. She hasn't been in touch with her mother in more than a decade. When Julieta settles into her depressing new digs, she begins to write letters to the daughter with whom she's lost touch. These letters serve to explain why Julieta now lives in isolation.

As much as any director, Almodovar loves the movie image, and that love often redeems his movies. In the case of Julieta, the director has found material that takes him to a familiar place: the trials of a woman who responds to a chance meeting that turns into ... well ... a life.

Almodovar's flight remains grounded

When a gifted filmmaker misses the mark, it's best to simply note the failure and move on. That's pretty much how I felt about Spanish director Pedro Almodovar's I'm So Excited!. Although its set almost entirely on a jetliner, Almodovar's new movie barely gets off the ground. After cameo appearances by Almodovar veterans Penelope Cruz and Antonio Banderas, the movie finds its true focus, introducing us to the pilots, crew and first-class passengers of a Spain-to-Mexico flight that will be forced to make an unexpected landing. Almodovar builds the movie around three gleefully gay flight attendants (Javier Camara, Raul Arevalo and Carlos Areces), the trio that lip-synchs the Pointer Sisters' song that provides the movie with its disco-dizzy title. If you know Almodovar's filmography -- from early works such as Matador to later movies such as The Skin I Live In -- you won't be surprised to discover that the director hasn't lost his touch when it comes to a splashy color palette or vividly realized imagery. But I'm So Excited! proves distressingly short on amusement, despite the efforts of a game cast that includes Cecilia Roth, as a dominatrix, and Lola Duenas, as a woman who's both a psychic and a virgin. Almodovar doesn't skimp on outre sexual high jinx, but this time, his usually buoyant sense of outrageousness feels muted, flat and generally uninspired.