Sony Pictures Classics
Banderas’ performance is full of heart and soul.
Having witnessed most of the excellent performances the Academy Award voters have deemed worthy of the Best Actor prize, the one that is seared into my brain and heart is Antonio Banderas in Pedro Almodóvar’s exquisite Pain and Glory. Note: It’s still playing in Madison at Market Square.
The film, also nominated for Best International Feature Film, is a bittersweet ode to cinema, with Banderas playing Salvador Mallo, a Spanish filmmaker no longer in his prime. Salvador is suffering from a number of physical ailments (creatively rendered in animated form) and from the equally debilitating fear that he can no longer create in the medium he adores. He is still grieving his mother’s death, and he is mostly housebound in a bright, beautiful art-filled home in Madrid. But constant headaches mean he’s in the dark, crushing painkillers and vitamins, and only occasionally (and gingerly) stepping in and out of cabs. Mostly he refuses to appear in public, not wanting to be seen in this state. He has a change of heart after receiving an invitation for a screening of a restoration of one of his films. He knocks on the door of Alberto Crespo (the magnificent Asier Etxeandia), the film’s lead actor. They have been estranged for 30 years, but Salvador invites Alberto to join him at the Q&A after the screening. During that visit, Salvador tries heroin for the first time, leading him down another dark path of self-medication and addiction.
Artfully interspersed throughout the movie are sun-drenched flashbacks, with Penélope Cruz playing Salvador’s mother. The family was poor, living in a village of cave dwellings, with a grid over a courtyard providing their only sunlight. Like the real-life Almodóvar, young Salvador is sent to seminary, the only way for poor boys to get a good education. And also like Almodóvar, young Salvador feels a strong attraction to men.
Salvador and Alberto end up collaborating on the theater piece that provides a sense of creative redemption for both men, who are struggling in different ways with career lulls and heroin.
I don’t want to spoil a wonderful scene when Salvador is reunited with a former lover, Federico (Leonardo Sbaraglia), who moved to Argentina decades before. But the tenderness of their reunion sent shivers down my spine.
Banderas’ performance as Salvador is gentle, soulful and quietly powerful. As Salvador struggles in the present, he revisits his past, his mother, and the first man who stirred him. He wrestles with shame, regret, and the desire to return to his work. I’m not the first reviewer to call it a “career-defining” performance — and it’s Banderas’ first Oscar nomination. In casting Banderas, Almodóvar could not have found a better stand-in to play the lead in his semi-autobiographical tour de force. We are seeing the world — in all its sadness and beauty — through his eyes. Banderas brings it all to life.
No matter what the outcome of the Oscars is, Banderas and Almodóvar have won my heart.
