PAIN AND GLORY – Review

Making a film about a movie maker is a tricky thing but thankfully, Pedro Almodovar gets it right in the Spanish-language drama PAIN AND GLORY. Get it wrong and you have a self-absorbed mess right but get it right and you have something luminous like 8 1/2. In PAIN AND GLORY, an aging Spanish film director, with a long, storied career, reflects on his past life, particularly a childhood in poverty, as he copes with the pain and physical ailments that keep him from continuing to do what he loves – make movies.

The Oscar-winning Spanish director/writer/producer Pedro Almodovar has had his own storied career, with films ranging across genres with dramas like Oscar winner ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER, thrillers like THE SKIN I LIVE IN, and comedies like his breakout WOMEN ON THE VERGE OF A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN. Many Almodovar films have an element of drawing on the director’s own life but it is much more pronounced in this film about a director, of course.

Almodovar has made a number of great films, and can add one more with PAIN AND GLORY. For any great director, some films turn out better than others but PAIN AND GLORY is one of Almodovar’s successes. Almodovar frequently casts the same actors in lead roles in his films, particularly so with Javier Bardem, Antonio Banderas and Penelope Cruz, and favorites Banderas and Cruz return in this one.

Salvador Mallo (Antonio Banderas) is a Spanish film director who has had a lot of cinema glory in his career but now he lives in a world of pain. Unable to continue making films due to a host of physical ailments coupled with depression, the aging director lives a nearly reclusive life, spending time remembering his past life, particularly his childhood and his beloved mother. Penelope Cruz plays his mother Jacinta, who takes her son from her their rural village to a small town hoping for a better life, a village where Salvador’s father has gone seeking work. Rather than wait for him to send for them, his wife and small son arrive unannounced, and she is dismayed to find the appalling conditions in which her husband as living. Undeterred, she struggles to make life better and give her bright son a future.

In the present, the director’s manager Mercedes (Nora Navas) tries to draw him out of his hermit-like life, and finally persuades him to appear at a retrospective featuring one his old films. A chance meeting with an actress he had not seen in years sparks him to reconnect with the star of that now-classic film. The director and actor had parted ways over the actor’s portrayal of the main character but the director has reconsidered his reaction to the film on re-watching it these many years later. Meanwhile, the actor, Alberto (Asier Etxeandia), has fallen on hard times, in part due to his heroin addiction, and the high-profile retrospective offers a chance to revive his sagging career.

Like all Almodovar films, there are a lot of complicated, often edgy things going on around this plot and with these equally complicated, flawed people. As in most Almodovar films, the strong characters, the ones with will and focus, are the women. In this case, it is both the director’s mother, in his memories of her from his childhood and in her later years (where she is played by Julieta Serrano ), and his manager Mercedes who help Salvador find his way.

The script is more introspective and universal than one might expect. Although this particular character is a film director, his experiences and situation could be any person of a certain age, remembering the childhood that shaped them, remembering first loves, first heartbreaks, and re-evaluating one’s work with the perspective of time, and contemplating the later part of life, as Salvador.

But this film is not all seriousness, by any means. There are elements of humor, particularly in the scenes with the actor Alberto, played winningly by Asier Etxeandia. When Salvador waffles about inviting Alberto to speak along at the film retrospective, Alberto tries to persuade him, as if he is auditioning, and Salvador unconsciously slips into directing, telling him not to cry at the event, and commenting the “actors always want to cry,” with exasperation. The film also has moments of romance, sweetness and poignancy, as well as struggle, indecision and bad decisions, making it a warm and emotionally engaging experience.

The acting is superb, as it always is in Almodovar’s films. Antonio Banderas turns in one of his best performances, as a man in emotional and physical pain, trying to find his way in late life and reconciling the past while contemplating the future. Penelope Cruz glows as young Salvador’s mother, displaying iron determination, showering him with love while working tirelessly to build his future. Other supporting actors strengthen and deepen the narrative too. Leonardo Sbaraglia is warm as Frederico, a long-lost lover who reconnects with Salvador, and César Vicente is touching as Eduardo, an artistically-talented and handsome young man, who sparks the early stirrings of sexual attraction in young Salvador (Asier Flores).

The film is visually vibrant, filled with bright colors, sunlight, and bold graphic shapes, giving the images on screen energy. The attention to the beautiful composition and color in nearly every scene gives the feeling of being inside a painting, and in fact, paintings and artists are a motif running throughout the film. But everything is masterfully integrated in this film, the story, the imagery and performances, so that it draws into its world fully and involves us deeply in Salvador’s dilemma grappling with the aches and regrets of late life but resolving them to find a path to keep living.

PAIN AND GLORY is a impressive but of cinema but it is, more importantly, a rich film experience for thoughtful audiences, both warm, bittersweet and satisfying.

PAIN AND GLORY, in Spanish with English subtitles, opens Friday, Oct. 25, at the Plaza Frontenac and Tivoli theaters.

RATING: 4 out of 4 stars