Goya's Ghosts
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Movie Reviews of Goya's Ghosts
Movie Review: Memorable Portrait of Goya and the Spanish Inquisition
Summary: 4 Stars
Despite its unfavorable reviews, this is a film I'm glad I saw! A dark film, indeed, and fictionalized, but a good period piece of the terrors of the Spanish Inquisition and the "ghosts" behind Goya's paintings. Memorable. Rated R for scenes of Inquisition violence.Movie Review: Goya's Ghost
Summary: 4 Stars
I really liked Goya's Ghost as I learned some insight of the Artist's life. It was a good period piece with suspense and drama in the storyline. I consider it a good film but not a great one. It was worth the price of the DVD.Movie Review: Pot pourri or main meal?
Summary: 3 Stars
This is no Valmont or Amadeus,both based on beautiful works of fiction,this is a magnificent folly with a hollow core and at it's heart a hero(Goya) who is a ghost.Coming as it does at the tale end of the Inquisition in Spain and with the rise of the French Revolution,the Napoleonic invasion that is supposed to overthrow all feudalism.The Church must shore itself up against the profanities and absurdities depicted in Goya's Los Capricchos Lorenzo (Bardem) is friendly with Goya(Skarsgard) and is getting his portrait painted.Goya's muse is Inez (Portman), whose portrait he is painting and using her image to depict angels on church ceilings.Lorenzo, ambitious for power, suggests to the committee of the Inquisition going back`to old methods',using techniques like torture("putting someone to the Question") to increase Catholicism's hold on disobedience and heresy.Inez is spied on in an inn turning her nose up at pork.She is taken into the Inquisition's Offices and asked if she did this.She does not deny it.She is put to the question and confesses to practising as a Jew.She is thrown into a dungeon and later visited by Lorenzo.He offers her prayer but also rapes her.Goya is asked by Tomas (Gomez),the father of Inez,if he can help get her out of prison.Goya arranges for Lorenzo to come to Tomas's house for a meal.Tomas has already offered substantial offerings to a chapel and asks if Inez can be released but Lorenzo just reiterates she's been put to the question,confessed and will go to trial.Tomas says that you can get a tortured person to confess to anything,demonstrating this,by torturing Lorenzo to sign the confession he is the bastard child of chimpanzees and joined the church to destroy it.Tomas tells him he'll keep this confession until his daughter is released,showing it later to the king,CarlosIV(Randy Quaid).The king has been shown out with a hunting party,shooting vultures and rabbits.He is shown in scenes at court with Queen Maria and she has had her painting done by Goya on horseback.He hears of King Louis's execution in France.He himself is a Bourbon and dreads the news.He plays violin to Goya.
The 2nd part shows events 15 years later the French think they'll be welcomed as liberators by the Spanish.Goya's liberalism welcomes the revolutionary French but we soon flip to his prints of The Calamities of War after the rape and pillage followed by Napolean enthroning his brother Joseph as king.The French declare the Inquisition a void and free the prisoners,sending toFrance many Spanish art works.Inez knocks on Goya's door having found her family all dead.She asks him to find her daughter. Lorenzo is now a Buornopartist and sends Inez to an asylum and searches through orphanages for his daughter Alice.He condemns the Inquisitor General to death.Goya discovers Alice working as a prostitute in a park and informs Lorenzo,who later gets prostitutes rounded up to be sent to America.Goya purchases Inez's freedom to reintroduce her to her daughter.Then English soldiers invade and drive out the French reinstituting the church.Lorenzo is captured,sentenced to death unless he repents.The 2nd part is bombastic and melodramatic,historical soap-opera,with the gap of 15 years. There are too many implausibilities: Lorenzo's rape of Inez in the dungeon,his conversion from Inquisitor priest to Republican revolutionary.All this is served up with a pot-pourri of English accents,with Spaniard Bardem's the most mannered.I did think it attempted a sweep of historical epic proportions,but lost its focus on character and narrative direction with too many changes and events.The cinematography is excellent,the rich painterly colouring and sumptuous set design. Skarsgard's Goya is a Candide-like observer,but is not given enough personality.His deafness is conveyed.Instead his satirical prints are used to tie things together.Bardem's Lorenzo is the central character,displaying charisma and intensity,without explaining his motivation.Portman was good in 3 roles as herself at different ages or as her daughter.The script by Carriere is patchy,bizarre and fails.This from a man who'd worked with Bunuel,whoidentified with Goya's sense of the absurd and worked with Forman before,makes the failure greater.The goal to depict an age never before filmed,showing it's evil,cruelty,irrationality and hysteria was in itself admirable.But let's get a proper film of Goya and his works.Clarke left Spanish art out of his 'Civilization' series.
Movie Review: Hints of greatness, which ultimately disappoint
Summary: 3 Stars
SPOILER WARNING (Do not read the last paragraph if you have not seen this movie or do not want to know what happens)
Goya's Ghosts came highly recommended to me, and given Javier's fabulous performance in No Country For Old Men, I was sold. I bought it and eagerly popped it in. Unfortunately, I just couldn't buy the hype. Bardem is great, of course. This is just the type of devious role that he really breathes life into. Nearly every other actor, however, brings the film down. Natalie Portman, to start, is kind of a mixed bag. She plays a rather unremarkable young woman, who of course is Goya's heaven-sent muse. After being locked in a dungeon for years, she goes a little crazy and pasty, and this brings her overall performance in the film to a solid B as she imitates a broken jaw and a handful of psychoses. Then, she plays the DAUGHTER of her character, while they both are still alive, and goes back to plain old bland. I do wonder, however, if she has some kind of fetish for playing weird roles where they deform her (queen Amidala, V for Vendetta, perhaps others I can't remember...)
Also Randy Quaid plays the King of Spain. He has a wonderful air of regality. No, not really. This is the guy who played the dad in Independence Day and Cousin Ed in the National Lampoon Vacation movies. He hasn't got a regal bone in his body, and he's nearly the WORST actor I could think of for a dramatic role (except for maybe... Natalie Portman?)
Aside from this, the movie is just a little too wide in scope to be seen as an insular, complete story. It covers about 30 years and three generations in two hours, and kind of leaves each epoch a mess, with little or no sense of resolution. At the end of the film, Bardem's character is killed by the church for his rebellion and carted off through the streets of Spain while kids chase it, and a song that means roughly "oh, what a bad world, where a man hurts so bad he wants to kill himself" in Spanish plays. At that point, you realize that all the other stuff was just window-dressing and pretension of drama, while it was really an Inquisition-era No Country For Old Men, a film to give Javier Bardem a role that steals the show with little other reason for watching. The only other plus of this movie, beyond his acting, is the beautiful Spanish scenery and location design which simply cannot be beaten. Too bad, then, that most of the cast is less interesting than the backdrop.
Movie Review: awkward plot devices ruin what could have been truly fine
Summary: 3 Stars
I was hoping for a historical snapshot like the one in Amadeus, which is unquestionably one of the best in spite of all its inaccuracies. Alas, while there are very strong moments, this film founders on its many TV-like simplifications of very complex events. That being said, the acting is excellent, in particular the sublimely beautiful Portman as Inez.
The story is extremely novelesque: you have the artist and his muse as well as an outside authority that interferes. Inez is taken in by a revived Spanish Inquisition, which operates with frighteningly bizarre reasoning (if you are innocent, God will give you the strength to resist torture). Of course, this proves untrue, and Inez is consigned to heretics prison, while a monk ally must flee for his own forced confession. Goya is the recording eye for all of this, and the emotional center of the film. Upon the invasion of Napoleon's forces, we see the return of the characters after 15 years. Portman is magnificent as the ruined Inez, who has lost everything. The monk-turned revolutionary (Bardem) is also entirely believable as a chameleon-like survivor who remains much the same person in spite of his profound ideological transformation. It is very moving and full of very complex themes.
Unfortunately, Forman tries to pack too much history into the story. For example, when Goya is attempting to convince a key character to come with him, it is at that precise moment that the French troops choose to intervene. There are many other preposterous scenes like this, which badly damage the believability of the film and also feel stupidly rushed. For me, it was this that ruined the film = you can't sum up the French Revolution and the Inquisition in a single apocryphal speech.
Recommended tepidly. Portman is the one who really performs best.