Focuspuller's Blog

It looks as though, as of July 20th, "Goya's Ghosts" has been released in the U.S. but only in limited areas. Matt sends word that it's in San Francisco, so keep a look out for it in smaller, independent theaters if you want to see it.

The great Czech director Milos Forman has spent 40 years jumping from one historical period to another, leaping entire genres in a single bound-and yet somehow he always winds up making the same movie. Whether we're talking about One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Hair or The People vs. Larry Flynt, when you sit down at a Forman film you know you're going to see the story of marginalized outcasts rising up against the oppressive forces of an unjust society.

Forman's parents were killed at Auschwitz, so it's pretty easy to understand why he's devoted his movie career to battling fascists in every imaginable setting, sometimes even in opposition to his own source material. (His last film Man on the Moon bent over backward warping and distorting the life of Andy Kaufman, trying to turn the prankish, confrontational genius into a cuddly folk hero.)

At first glance Goya's Ghosts, Forman's first picture in seven years, seems tailor-made for the filmmaker's antiestablishment bent. This unwieldy, rocky ride takes on both the Spanish Inquisition and the Napoleonic Wars.

Talk about getting two for the price of one.

A prestigious, handsomely mounted costume piece with a messy, modern sensibility, Goya's Ghosts doesn't have to stretch very far to find present-day parallels. Religious fanaticism and state-sanctioned torture have made great comebacks recently, and if nothing else the screenplay (by Forman and Jean-Claude Carrière) possesses the outsized, commendable fury of some extremely pissed-off aging hippies.

Perched perilously on the edge of camp, Goya's Ghosts is a heedlessly overwrought melodrama boasting some of the most cheerfully insane casting blunders of recent years. Where else can you see Randy Quaid playing the king of Spain?

Stellan Skarsgård stars as Francisco Goya. If you can get over the shock of this great Swedish actor donning a wig of frizzy curls and a bulbous prosthetic nose, it's actually not a half-bad performance. He portrays the legendary painter as an expert politician, sweet talking his way around the whims of royalty and clergy. As has always been the case throughout history, every artist must also be a hustler.

His nemesis arrives in the form of Javier Bardem's Brother Lorenzo, a puffed-up plaster saint of piety who suspects Goya's muse Ines (Natalie Portman, horrible) might secretly be Jewish. Bardem is one of the world's most captivating performers right now, and although there's not much to Brother Lorenzo on the page, the actor brings a wild collection of tics and whimpers to the role, oozing human weakness like an oil slick. Bardem's so damn good, he even sells us on the preposterousness of his character raping and impregnating Ines.

Much harder to swallow is one hoot of a dinner party sequence, during which Ines' parents question Lorenzo about the church's interrogation techniques, and outlandishly have enough props on hand to start staging a little cross-examination of their own. You'll half-expect a Monty Python alum to come wandering into the frame, shouting: "Nobody expects a Spanish Inquisition!"

Fifteen years later it's Napoleon's turn. Bardem's Lorenzo has somehow refashioned himself as an Enlightenment crusader, and the sly actor even strikes poses with his hand inside his unbuttoned shirt, emulating his hero. He and Goya knock heads again, this time trying to locate Ines' illegitimate daughter (played disastrously by Portman again, now with a spray-on tan), currently a prostitute working the war-torn streets of Madrid.

Obviously Forman has a lot of steam he wants to blow off here, and the underlying concerns of Goya's Ghosts couldn't be more admirable. It's all about the interchangeable corruption of hard-line ideologues, and the responsibility of the artist to speak truth to power. Too bad the film also happens to be plotted like a trashy romance novel, and the endless barrage of can-you-top-this twists and some overscaled performances make it unintentionally hilarious.

There are few things funnier than Portman's work as the older, prison-ravaged Ines. Gaunt, bald and dentally challenged, she spends the picture's second hour caterwauling and shrieking to such a point, she should rightfully become a camp icon. (It's amazing how someone can chew so much scenery without any teeth.)

Yet this Razzie-worthy turn somehow suits the film's wildly misjudged, go-for-broke quality that's improbably entertaining, often in spite of itself. Goya's Ghosts has a reckless, angry energy that's somehow riveting-especially when it's terrible.

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No other director has been more successful at the box office. Few other directors have placed more titles on various lists of the greatest films. How many other directors have bridged the gap between popular and critical success? Not many; one thinks of Chaplin and Keaton, Ford and Hitchcock, Huston and de Mille, and although the list could go on, the important thing is to establish the company that Spielberg finds himself in.

Now he owns his own studio, DreamWorks. A few other directors have grown so powerful that they could call their own shots: in the silent days, Griffith, Chaplin, de Mille and Rex Ingram. Since then, not many, and those who have founded studios, like Francis Coppola, have lived to regret their entry into the world of finance. But Spielberg's success has been so consistent for so many years that even the mysteries of money (in some ways, so much more perplexing than the challenge of making a good film) seem open to him.

The genesis of Steven Spielberg's 2001 release, a science-fiction film entitled AI (an acronym for artificial intelligence), lies in a 1969 Brian Aldiss short story, "Supertoys Last All Summer Long." Spielberg inherited the project from the late Stanley Kubrick, who had initially purchased the film rights in the mid-1970s.

The tortuous journey of this short story from Aldiss's typewriter to the big screen is the subject of Aldiss's "Attempting to Please," the delightfully sardonic autobiographical foreword to his new collection of short fiction, Supertoys Last All Summer Long and Other Stories of Future Time. Unfortunately, this 13-page gem is the highlight of the book.

Aldiss is a veteran of science fiction: a professional writer for nearly 50 years now who has gathered a well-deserved plethora of awards and citations. Sadly, most of the fiction collected in this new book fails to showcase his fabled talents.

"Supertoys Last All Summer Long" and its two brand-new sequels, episodes in the life of an android who believes he's a flesh-and-blood little boy, are charming and nostalgic. They are good but not top-notch Aldiss.

In the new and recent stories that fill up the rest of the book, Aldiss tackles worthwhile issues such as Western culture's current subservience to economics and the horrors of the meat industry--but he does so in such a preachy way as to be off-putting to even those readers who, like me, share his views. These message-driven stories are clumsy fiction at best.

The book's closing piece, "A Whiter Mars," at least, is more upfront: it's written in the form of a Platonic dialogue. Perhaps Aldiss should simply give up the pretense of fiction altogether and write more directly about the issues that preoccupy him.

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