"Volver"

Almodóvar is at his best when he's writing about, and working with, women. I don't think that gift springs from simply just liking or understanding them (although he clearly does like and understand them). As a writer and filmmaker, Almodóvar never pretends to be one of the girls, insinuating himself wistfully into their world: He's a perpetual outsider, and he's happy to be -- to be around women, to get to talk with them and laugh with them, is better than actually being one, and it affords him an unusually deep level of empathy, one that women don't often have for one another. (He doesn't ignore the ways women can be bitchy -- but it isn't a fixture of his work, either.)

If the performances in "Volver" and in so many other Almodóvar pictures are any indication, actresses must love working with him. (The feeling is clearly mutual.) "Volver" gets its shape and texture from the three lead performances -- those of Maura, Cruz and Dueñas -- and from one given by a fourth actress, Blanca Portillo, who plays Agustina, a neighbor in the women's home village. Agustina is a woman who could never bring herself to leave the village; maybe it would never occur to her to leave. She dresses in dowdy tweed skirts and knee-high nylons, fearful of calling attention to herself, but she also speaks adoringly of her wild-child mother -- "She was the only hippie in the village!" -- who disappeared years ago. Agustina is a symbol of pure kindness who never degrades into being a sap (an indication of the respect Almodóvar has for his characters), and Portillo, with her serious, nunlike face and ultra-cropped hair, plays her with a kind of ironclad sweetness: Her Agustina is the friend you can always go home to.

Dueñas has a serene, open face that verges on being plain, and she's all the more beautiful for it -- her Sole doesn't have Raimunda's flash and fire, but her steadiness gives the movie extra gravity. And Cruz gives a terrific performance here. In the past few years, Cruz has been a tough case. She's seemed self-conscious, stunted and squeaky in so many of her roles, particularly those in American movies. We tend to want our actresses to be cute -- we're afraid of them if they're too beautiful -- and playing cute is the death of Cruz. Almodóvar doesn't ask that of her, and left free to play a knockout overworked mom -- in eyeliner, no less -- she thrives. As dazzling as Cruz is, her beauty never obscures her character's ever-unfolding layers: She shows us that Raimunda's toughness, the thing that has kept her family clothed and fed, has also shut her off, to a degree, from the world.

All of these actresses are essential to "Volver." But it's such a pleasure to watch Carmen Maura in an Almodóvar movie again that she almost eclipses them. Maura appeared in numerous early Almodóvar movies -- including "What Have I Done to Deserve This?" "Matador," "Law of Desire" and "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown" -- but the two haven't worked together for 18 years. Looking at her face here, it's as if we've never been away from her: That face is still lively, strong-willed, just a little nutso. As the story's prodigal mother -- although the picture is structured so that we can't say definitively whether she's returning to her home, or whether her girls, her life, are being restored to her -- she taps wells of feeling filled with tenderness, regret, ridiculous joy. Almodóvar gives Maura a monologue -- a declaration of her protectiveness as a mother, but also a heart-rending admission of her failure to protect -- that brings the picture to an operatic peak. Almodóvar claims that the movie isn't strictly about his own mother or his own childhood, and that's easy enough to believe: "Volver" has a patchwork storybook quality that makes it feel more universal than obviously realistic. But even beyond that, Maura and her fellow actresses make the movie their own. This is a movie about mothers and children that dispatches with the usual goopy sentiment. "Volver" reassures us that you can go home again -- if only in the movies.

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