Beyond the Multiplex

"Goya's Ghosts": News flash: Inquisition bad! Napoleon arrogant! War hell! Movie irrelevant!
Back when so-called art films were essentially a subset of the high-culture world -- when the people who attended them were also the people who went to the symphony, to art museums and to "serious" theater -- the pseudo-Shakespearean historical drama, lavishly costumed and loaded with British-style hambone acting, was a staple of the business. I guess Laurence Olivier's 1944 "Henry the Fifth," not pseudo-Shakespearean but the real thing, was the template to which all such movies refer, but I'm actually talking about later exercises in scenery-gnawing, like Peter O'Toole and Katharine Hepburn in "The Lion in Winter," or Richard Burton and Geneviève Bujold in "Anne of the Thousand Days."

I'm not being snide, I swear. I was reverentially taken to those movies as a small child, since my parents and grandparents were precisely those kinds of high-culture filmgoers, and I'm sure they shaped my sensibilities in ways I can't even see. Pictures like those (and, I don't know, "Becket" and "A Man for All Seasons") still hit me, on a gut level, as being meaty and significant, even though I understand that many younger viewers must see them -- if they ever happen to see them at all -- as baffling curios of the cultural Pleistocene.

People keep making costume dramas, of course, with intermittent success, but it's perfectly true that they can't recapture the cultural heft of bygone days. No contemporary actor (except, maybe, Meryl Streep) has the mixture of theatrical respectability and movie-star cachet that Burton and Hepburn and O'Toole had, and the old high-culture audience has been whittled and niche-marketed down into insignificance. (Not a bad thing, but a double-edged sword.) Maybe all these circumstances go some way toward explaining the incoherent dreariness of "Goya's Ghosts," in which Milos Forman has spent lots of money and employed many people to re-create Spain at the turn of the 18th century. But also maybe not.

Twenty-three years ago, Forman directed "Amadeus," an adapted stage play that might be regarded both as one of the last old-school costume dramas and as one of the first in a new revisionist breed. Historical accuracy aside (because there wasn't much of it), "Amadeus" was an explosive big-screen spectacle, meant to humanize one of the most legendary of high-culture heroes. Presenting Mozart as a vulgar hedonist, a self-indulgent and self-destructive rock star of 18th century Vienna, was an ingenious way to appeal to a mass audience by explicitly rejecting the aristocratic mores of his society.

"Goya's Ghosts," on the other hand, has no clear purpose, no clear message and no clear central character. Like most costume dramas these days, it dwells on the gore, filth and violence of the past (if not as much as Patrice Chéreau's outstanding "Queen Margot" or Tom Tykwer's intriguing failure "Perfume"), but toward what end is never apparent. Here are the historical insights put forward by Forman and co-writer Jean-Claude Carrière: The Spanish Inquisition was cruel, hypocritical and money-grubbing. Napoleon Bonaparte was a grandiose and deluded figure, driven by misguided idealism. Holy Moses! We'd better stop the presses.

Forman gets briefly interested in comparing Napoleon's ill-fated conquest of Spain in 1807 to current events. When French officers tell their troops that the Spanish people will cast flowers in their paths and embrace liberation from an oppressive monarchy and church -- and then, of course, the Spanish don't, and launch a bitter insurgency -- we're supposed to sit there and think, "Aha, plus ça change and all that." But it's a bogus historical parallel that gets dropped pretty fast, and we're left with a movie in which Natalie Portman is constantly being tortured and raped, Javier Bardem plays a simpering villain with silly hair (even sillier than the Ringo Starr do he wears in "No Country for Old Men") and Stellan Skarsgard plays the great Spanish painter Francisco José de Goya, who has almost nothing to do with the story.

OK, he does a little. Not much. In 1792, with the French Revolution going on next door, an ambitious monk named Brother Lorenzo (Bardem) gets permission from the leader of the Spanish church (Michael Lonsdale) to ramp up the Inquisition's hunt for heretics. For no special reason they drag in a girl named Inés (Portman), daughter of a rich merchant named Bilbatúa (José Luis Gómez), on suspicion of being secretly Jewish. Aforementioned torture, screaming and rape ensue. Goya's already on thin ice with the Inquisition for his anti-clerical cartoons, but the sinister Lorenzo likes his paintings, so Goya tries to help. This ends in a completely ludicrous scheme in which Bilbatúa kidnaps and blackmails Lorenzo, who flees across the border and becomes a French revolutionary. That's, like, the first third of the movie.

You may have noticed that the actors mentioned so far include two Spaniards, an American, an Englishman and a Swede. This is one of those movies, all too common on the international scene, where name actors have been packed willy-nilly into various roles and everybody speaks English with a completely different accent. What is that meant to convey? Just a general tone of upper-crust old-timeyness? A universal concession to the global language of business, crime and sex? Or do we just accept the fact that, oh well, this way they could sell the movie almost anywhere without especially pissing anybody off?

So then the story abruptly skips ahead 15 years, to Napoleon and the dimwit brother he installs on the Spanish throne. Goya has become deaf and travels with a sign-language interpreter, which may be the one historically accurate detail in this whole movie but slows down his scenes considerably. There's also a firebrand Madrid prostitute named Alicia, and if we have any trouble figuring out whose bastard jailhouse daughter she might be, there's the fact that she and Inés are both played by Natalie Portman. Got all that? Believe me, you don't. The whole thing is handsomely mounted, with plenty of Goya paintings and supposed observations about the ironies of history and the cyclical nature of life, etc. Forman's always been a huckster, but I never thought I'd see him waste this many good actors on a movie this bad.

"Goya's Ghosts" opens July 20 in New York, Los Angeles and other major cities, with wider release to follow.

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