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I'm struggling to find something positive to say about this turkey and it's not easy. It's always sad when artistes attempt to persevere when they've passed their sell-by date and this is nothing if not Forman's Buddy, Buddy - always assuming, of course, you're prepared to put him in the same league as Billy Wilder. There seems to be something of an international movement afoot to persist in shooting 'period' movies in semi-darkness and I can appreciate that in this case the interiors were attempting to replicate the sombre quality of the Old Masters - Rembrandt in particular - but daylight? In Madrid, yet? Did the sun never shine there in the 18th century. If you got it up at the Box Office in anticipation of learning something of Goya the Man or even Goya the painter you'd extract more hard knowledge from one short paragraph in a Gallery brochure; this time around Goya is merely a link between a corrupt priest, Brother Lorenzo (Javier Bardem) and the daughter of an affluent family, Ines (Natalie Portman) over a fifteen year period during which the girl is a victim of the Spanish Inquisition, impregnated by the priest and loses both her child and her mind whilst the priest flees to France and returns years later with Napoleon's army, a married man with a family. For reasons best known to Forman and the Producers the leading roles go to actors unknown outside their native countries; Bardem has more than a passing resemblance to Oliver Reed but plays from beginning to end like a Reed heavily sedated permitting not even a flicker of anger, passion, fire. The whole thing resembles nothing so much as one of the spaghetti westerns shot in Spain in the late sixties and like spaghetti the separate strands are all over the place. One to miss.
score 5/10
writers_reign 4 May 2007
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw1649040/ |
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9-8-2020 11:22:11