Goya’s Ghosts
Directed by Milos Forman
It’s no great surprise that Milos Forman has retained his ability to make a good movie, an evident skill even when the resulting production—in this case, the discordant period piece, Goya’s Ghosts—ultimately fails to match the competence of its director. The Czech-born filmmaker proved his durability with the astounding success of Amadeus in 1984, nine years after One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest indicted mental asylums for condescending to insanity. In a sense, craziness takes center stage in several Forman movies, demonstrating a remarkable consistency of subject matter: Disturbed minds intent on expressing a singular approach to reality, whether it’s Mozart in Amadeus or Andy Kaufman in Man on the Moon, earn the right to their creative nooks. Now we can add master painter Francisco Goya to that list.
Set in the waning days of the Spanish Inquisition, Goya’s Ghosts spins a compelling narrative with an excitingly subversive hook. Inner circle member Brother Lorenzo (Javier Bardem) befriends the modernist painter’s demonic sketches in front of his colleagues in order to ensure that Goya (Stellan Skarsgård) completes his portrait. Lorenzo’s kindness gets him in a rut, as he finds himself being begged for favors from Goya’s family friend, whose daughter Ines (Natalie Portman), lands in prison on false accusations that she’s secretly a Jew. The suspicion apparently stems from her disdain for pork, but the sentencing results from her admission of guilt in the face of unending torture—or, as the Church haughtily refers to it, she’s “put to the Question.” Deterring common sense, the zealous leaders insist that torture elicits the absolute truth by way of godly guidance. Lorenzo confidently backs the belief, until Ines’ father puts him to a rogue form of the Question and forces the poor priestly fellow to confess that he’s a monkey.
And so the scandals begin. Banishment leads to rebellion: Ines becomes the cause of Lorenzo’s affliction and his clandestine affection, while Goya keeps sketching away, making the case for emotionally intense caricatures as a form of documentation akin to Werner Herzog’s concept of ecstatic truth. Delivering on the movie’s titular promise, Forman places Goya as a background figure, which is effective in the sense that viewers can relate to his perspective and experience the story through his through his vision of wholly-formed cataclysms.
But no single exhilarating plot twist (Lorenzo’s return to public view as a radically secular revolutionary, among them) can change the status of Goya’s Ghosts as a mannered drama, particularly because the story contains enough inconsistencies that pull you out of the experience to prevent any substantially moving developments. As years fly by, Portman’s character grows ancient and grimy, while Bardem maintains his youthful facade as though imbuing the godly power that he ultimately chooses to reject. The script is riddled with linguistic confusion (why does Lorenzo speak in English with a Spanish accent, but Goya sounds like a Westerner?) and the gradually accumulated drama never amounts to a substantial conclusion. The final execution scene doesn’t come close to matching the virtuosity expressed in the movie’s first act.
Yet Goya’s Ghosts still showcases Forman’s refined storytelling techniques and deploys them on a strong cast. Goya’s loss of hearing during his senior years highlights the painter’s memory of resonant noises by way of fascinating sound design schemes. Skarsgård plays a fine Goya, although the role feels oddly underwritten in order to enforce his outsider ranking. And Portman displays her consistently impressive intensity, but the show really belongs to Bardem, throwing the full dramatic resonance of his long, contemplative mug into the heart of every scene. Look for another magnificent Bardem performance later this year in the Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men, where the actor plays a murderer whose choice of victims seems to pinpoint the end of an era. In both movies, he’s a killer of the old world—and, furthermore, a canvas for the deeply anti-humanist visions that Forman and the Coens understand too well.
