Susan Granger’s review of “BEFORE NIGHT FALLS”
Spain’s most acclaimed young actor, Javier Bardem, makes his American debut in this cinematic parable and portrait of Reinaldo Arenas, who was persecuted for literary and sexual transgressions in Cuba. A writer and homosexual, Arenas was perceived as a threat to Fidel Castro on both counts. After escaping from the haunting Kafkaesque nightmare of the notorious El Morro prison, he tried unsuccessfully to flee Cuba by inner tube before emigrating to the United States in the 1980 Mariel boatlift of “undesirables.” Arenas settled in New York’s Greenwich Village where, suffering from AIDS, he committed suicide at the age of 47. Julian Schnabel (“Basquiat”) writes and directs this righteously honest, impressionistic biography with intelligence, delicacy and craftsmanship, beginning with Arenas’s rural childhood that was marked by an idyllic communion with nature. With cinematographers Xavier Perez Grobet and Guillermo Rosas, Schnabel utilizes various film stocks and colorations but without the flashiness of Steven Soderberg’s “Traffic.” While exploring Arenas’s obsession with indiscriminate sex (he claimed to have had 5,000 lovers by age 25), the screenplay, however, offers little analysis or explanation for Arenas’s quirks of character. Although Schnabel originally envisioned Benicio Del Toro as Arenas, it’s Bardem’s dynamic, astonishing performance that elevates the dreariness and depression of the fragmented tale, along with Sean Penn and Johnny Depp’s cameos. On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “Before Night Falls” is a strong, poetic, imaginative 8, representing freedom of expression in form and content. His cry, “I’m a citizen of nowhere…the State Department declared me a citizen of nowhere, so legally I don’t exist,” resonates.
