Pain And Glory

Nominated for a Best Actor Oscar this year is Antonio Banderas for his role as a director who is constantly in pain in Pedro Almodovar's Pain And Glory, which I caught up with the other day. While Banderas is certainly deserving of the honor, I found the film uneven, with some parts brilliant and others too self-indulgent.

Of course Almodovar has always been a self-indulgent filmmaker, not known for subtlety. His more recent works have been more sedate than his earlier sex farces, and Pain And Glory is downright somber. Banderas plays a stand-in for the director himself, old and grizzled and suffering from a variety of ailments. Over the course of a few weeks he ends up reuniting from people from his past, and all the while thinks of his childhood and his mother (Penelope Cruz).

Things get started when a film society restores one of the director's works and asks him to present it. He gets in touch with the star of that movie (Asier Exteandia), with whom he hasn't spoke to in over thirty years. They feuded over Exteandia's use of heroin while shooting the film. Banderas doesn't hold a grudge and tries heroin himself, and gets immediately hooked, as it eases his pain.

He gives Exteandia a monologue, which the actor mounts as a theatrical production. It's about an old love of Banderas', who also had a heroin addiction. In a coincidence that strains credulity, that man ends up at the performance, and the two reunite.

There's also another whopping coincidence involving a watercolor done by someone from Banderas' childhood. One coincidence in a film is tolerable, but two is overdoing it.

Banderas underplays the role. He has no big speeches, and hobbles around in a kind of fog. But he is completely effective. We can almost feel his pain in our bones. And the scenes recalling his mother, both as a young boy and then later, when his mother was at the end of her life, have a great poignancy, even though Almodovar has done the mother thing before (especially, natch, in All About My Mother).

Banderas (and Cruz) have made several movies with Almodovar, and it's only appropriate that they appear in his most autobiographical work. It's great that Banderas, who has been acting for over three decades, has finally gotten some due. I remember the first film I saw him in, Almodovar's Matador, back in the late '80s, when the actor was so baby-faced. In this film he shows the gray hair of age, and it's kind of remarkable to think of the progression that the two have made together.