Cuba libre

Art shines in Before Night Falls

by Peter Keough

BEFORE NIGHT FALLS. Directed by Julian Schnabel. Written by Cunningham O'Keefe, Lázaro Gómez Carriles, and Julian Schnabel. With Javier Bardem, Olivier Martinez, Andrea Di Stefano, Johnny Depp, Sean Penn, Michael Wincott, Najwa Nimri, Hector Babenco, Olatz López Garmendía, and Vito Maria Schnabel. A Fine Line Features release. At the Avon.

Not that I'm complaining, being a member of the profession myself, but a number of recent high-profile movies have focused on writers. Wonder Boys, Almost Famous, Quills -- each endeavors to capture this quintessentially subjective process in the two-dimensional medium of film. Despite their other virtues, none of them really succeeds. Perhaps because it's made by an artist, broken-crockery expert Julian Schnabel, whose overlooked first film, Basquiat, roughly captured the torment and vision of the tragic '80s painter of the title, Before Night Falls comes closest to depicting not only the creative process but the entire life of an artist -- and, more important, the will of an individual to prevail over the tyranny that would oppress him.

It's the true story of Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas, who's played with utter conviction and disarming playfulness by Spanish actor Javier Bardem. Arenas had the triple misfortune to be a lover of beauty, a lover of freedom, and a lover of men in Castro's Cuba. Born into abject rural poverty and recognized early on as one of the country's best writers, he was passed over nonetheless by the powers that be and through the '60s and '70s got deeper into trouble with the authorities for his uncompromising prose, lifestyle, and attitude. He smuggled manuscripts out and won awards in other countries, but in Cuba he was hounded and imprisoned. He escaped to the US in the 1980 Mariel boatlift; 10 years later he died in poverty and obscurity, a victim of AIDS.

A sad story? Hardly. Schnabel and Bardem capture their hero's indomitable spirit and imagination through Arenas's own words, startling images, and a layered free-associative narrative that imitates the workings of memory and experience. Night re-creates and vindicates not just this tragic Cuban writer's soul but everyone's.

Arenas is an unlikely Everyman, and he earns that distinction through persevering in his own uniqueness. This is the film's chief virtue and weakness, for the hero's polymorphous, narcissistic, even solipsistic universe subsumes everything else -- lovers, family, friends, history itself. And the narrative continuity and coherence is a victim to his exuberant self-indulgence. From the fecund early image of the infant Arenas peering over the lip of the grave-like ditch that served as his cradle to the macabre use of an "I LOVE NY" plastic shopping bag in the end, his experience defines all, the flux around him serving merely as inspiration or restraint.

It helps, then, that Bardem puts in the best acting performance of 2000. Chimerical, canny, joyous even in suffering, his Arenas is tough enough to endure years of neglect and brutish persecution with his joy and integrity intact, yet he remains to the end an infantile egoist who eats baby food. Schnabel also has a gift for rendering epiphanies: the stand of trees on which the teenage Arenas (played by Vito Maria Schnabel, the director's son) carved his first poems; the triumph of Castro's rebellion, here a collage of bright banners, soaring prose, and handsome men in cars; the terror of a nocturnal raid by soldiers that ends in an orgiastic romp; the Oz-like inappropriateness of a giant balloon in the roofless nave of a church full of fugitives.

On the other hand, it would be nice if we could keep track of certain details, like which dark-haired, moustached young man is Arenas involved with this time? (There are at least three; the third, Lázaro Gómez Carriles, is played by Olivier Martinez, who was Arenas's last companion and Schnabel's collaborator on the screenplay.) And the namedropping cameos don't help: the sudden appearance of Sean Penn with a gold tooth and a Señor Wences accent or Johnny Depp in drag distracts from the subject. These stars stick in the mind as more germane characters, like Arenas's mother (Olatz López Garmendía, Schnabel's wife), come and go without much explanation, or key events take place, such as Arenas's attempt to escape to Miami by inner tube, which leaves the film likewise lost at sea.

Not quite, though -- Night is always centered, to exhilarating or suffocating effect, in the consciousness of its hero. It's a reminder that politics is always and ultimately personal, and that art not only must confront politics but can define it.

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Signs and wonders

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