Before Night Falls

Must be on a Javier Bardem binge, because I finally got around to seeing Before Night Falls, the celebrated indie film about a Cuban writer from some years ago. As best as I could understand it, the points of this movie:

• virtually everyone in Cuba was/is? gay
• the Cuban revolution was mostly about gays and quite joyfully liberating for gays
• the Cuban regime and military was full of gays
• and yet, paradoxically, the Cuban regime persecuted gays something awful, for no apparent reason that the movie cared to explain, delve into, or linger on (except to show the suffering of gays). Some of them were even killed (though tastefully offscreen).

The subject is a Reinaldo something who we are meant to understand was a great writer. We kinda have to take the filmmakers’ word, or perhaps Javier Bardem’s charming (fake) accent/good looks/the poor upbringing of his character, for this. It is also implied that he is a fascinating subject for a character study although the movie eschews much of any characterization or, indeed, plot. There is some music that I supppose would be enjoyed by the same sorts of people who pretend to enjoy that ‘Buena Vista Social Club’ stuff.

Near the end he starts to get AIDS in obligatory movie fashion (the coughing scene, the scene where he feels that his thyroid is swelling up, the scene where he looks at himself in the mirror, the scene where a roommate has to buy him stuff and take care of him, the scene where he can’t keep down food/liquids…). You know, the scenes that make you think: “Ok, I get it. He’s getting AIDS. Now the movie’s going to come to a standstill for the next 20 minutes while we’re sentenced to a whole bunch of scenes about him having AIDS. I think I’ll go get a snack and come back when they’re done.” All very cliche and boilerplate in movies with AIDS in them by now. (Way down but somewhere on the list of the horrors it has wreaked, is the fact that AIDS has not been good to cinema.)

Overall the movie performs the neat doublethink trick of showing Cuban persecution of gays while simultaneously not harshing on the Cuban revolution or regime all that much. This was a tough line to straddle and I was wondering how they were going to do it but they basically did it. So, you’ve got a real-life-based movie (biography is cool) about a persecuted writer (persecuted writers are cool) in Cuba (Cuba is way cool) and gayness (which is also cool) who wants to escape (which is cool, even if it’s not cool to escape from Cuba, but you sort of forget about that. In fact they seem to intentionally confuse things a bit, in one scene he appears to escape by water and by all appearances he’s headed to the U.S. but where does he end up? Back in Cuba!).

Anyway, as you can see, with the Cuba and the gayness, the coolness just permeates throughout this project, which (I assume) is how they got the participation of Johnny Depp (in two smaller roles) and Sean Penn (I don’t know who he was but the credits assured me he was there somewhere). It also is presumably what got it all sorts of awards and of course the knee-jerk obligatory plaudits from critics (“Cuba? Gay? Thumbs-up!”). So, you can understand why they didn’t want to jinx all that coolness by seeming too critical of the actual Cuban regime or its ideas in any sort of explicit overt fashion. Instead, it’s almost as if the great Cuban revolution happened and then was suddenly taken over by aliens, with no explanation.

But that’s no reason for anyone not to keep pretending to think the Cuban revolution was great. Just as one has to pretend – and pretend quite a bit – to give off the appearance of having enjoyed a dreary, meandering, self-important movie such as this.