« Unpleasant truths | Main | It don't mean a thing, if it ain't got that swing »
August 08, 2006
The antidote to Che love
Andy Garcia's The Lost City hit the shelves today, after receiving a limited release in theaters -- and lukewarm praise from the nation's movie critics. But after reading several articles, including Kathryn Jean Lopez' (excerpted below), I'm going to pick up a copy and watch it this weekend.
It seems apropos, given the possibility that Castro may finally join his late, unlamented homicidal friend -- Che Guevara -- in the Hell that awaits those who bring such misery to their countrymen.
The Lost City is an intensely personal project for Garcia. An ode to his homeland, Cuba, it’s full of the passion Hispanic culture is known for—as he portrays family life, the social scene, and, of course, the politics of a troubled island.
The film is set in late-1950s Cuba, right on the eve of la revolución, and Garcia, who directed and stars, crashes straight into the myth of Che Guevara—¡Gracias a Dios! The Lost City has something for everyone: contagious music, a love story, family drama—and familiar faces in Bill Murray, playing to type, and Dustin Hoffman, playing a mobster. But it’s a love story unlike anything Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks or any chick-flick might bring you—here the love between a man and woman can’t escape the brutality of sacrifice and tyranny, and is but one love, where democracy is a deep and abiding one.
[...]
Movie reviewers—a club of which I most definitely am not a member—have taken issue with The Lost City: It is, they point out, too long. But viva The Lost City anyway—it more than makes up for its flaws in its myth-busting cultural contributions.
Here in the U.S., where Che Guevara T-shirts are a staple at most soccer-mom shopping malls and on college campuses, it’s a countercultural revolution of a movie ... It provides a much-needed respite of moral clarity in between Robert Redford’s Oscar-winning Motorcycle Diaries (which portrayed a young Guevara—doctor and freedom fighter—as a secular saint) and the upcoming Steven Soderbergh Che-fest starring Benicio Del Toro (both Soderbergh and Del Toro are Oscar winners).
Che—a Communist responsible for Castro’s gulags—was a monster. But nothing I could tell you about him could do him the kind of justice that Garcia’s film does. You see some of Guevara’s brutality, but Garcia’s most powerful scene may be the one where Fico himself faces Che. When Fico is forced to confront the executioner on prison grounds on behalf of a friend, the viewer feels not only Garcia’s anger and disgust (he himself, as a child, fled this tyrant’s thuggery), but the pain and hatred of an entire people whose lives were irrevocably changed by the Castro-Guevara nightmare. This is Garcia’s moment: You watch a race of overwhelming emotions in the character, and you have the palpable sense it’s not all acting.
There is another haunting scene as you take the heart-wrenching walk with Fico when he embarks on his journey out of Cuba to Lady Liberty’s arms, you might as well be watching home movies from the Garcia family’s own exit; the emotion is that raw.
Garcia’s movie has clearly touched a nerve already: It has been banned in several South American countries. No surprise, given that “Viva Che” is a natural mantra for the likes of Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez. And we can’t forget, of course, about Fidel Castro, in power since 1959, with doctors threatening he could live to be 140—60 more years.
Garcia has said in response to the controversy about his movie: “Some people think Castro is a savior, that he looks out for kids and the poor. It's a bunch of hogwash. In the 45 years since Castro has been in power, Cuba has been in the top three countries for human rights abuses for 43 of those years. People turn a blind eye to his atrocities.” Not Andy Garcia though.
One of the most reliable predictors of a voter's party affiliation is whether or not he belongs to a religious congregation and regularly attends services; it will surprise no one that Republicans overwhelmingly fit that profile.
I suspect that reactions to this movie will closely approximate that correlation; conservatives will find it to be a moving portrayal of the dark night into which Cuba descended almost half a century ago, and leftists will deride it as a revolting piece of right-wing propaganda.
The comments at MetaCritic seem to fit that pattern.
The Chicago Tribune's critic said:
Throbbing with music, seething with anger and romance, "The Lost City" is a film that breaks your heart, bewilders, alienates and ravishes you by turns.
How can you not want to see a movie that does all that?
Posted by Mike Lief at August 8, 2006 10:58 PM
| TrackBack