Goya's Ghosts

BEWARE THE EUROPEAN CO-PRODUCTION!

This isn't the first time financiers from several EU countries got together an international cast and an A-list director to film a historical epic -- in English, of course (ever mindful of the international box office)-- in order to make a fast Euro. The fact that the end product is an embarrassing, unhistorical mess, wildly uneven in tone and execution, is irrelevant.

Irrelevant to all but us poor souls who expected some art or insight from the great director Milos Forman's take on the complex, larger-than-life Spanish painter Francisco Goya. Sadly, Forman is there solely to pick up a paycheck, casting his actors adrift in an unsubtle morass of a screenplay that swings from comedy to drama so many times they should hand-out Dramamine at the door. At its BEST, the movie's historical re-creations look no more authentic than a History Channel documentary (without the Di-Tech commericals). I cannot conceive of damning it with any fainter praise than that.

Forman tries to draw paralells between the torture policies of the Spanish Inquisition and France's precipitous invasion of Spain with the Bush administration's torture policies and Iraq fiasco, but his digs are obvious and lame (and soon passed over). Because the ridiculous plot does moves at a fast clip: fifteen years pass before the make-up artist can finish Natalie Portman's ageing make-up (it looks like it was smeared-on with a putty knife).

Poor Natalie Portman suffers the most by this general incompetence of this production (both in the story and in her performance): seeing her being stripped and tortured by the Spanish Inquisition, after her ordeal in "V for Vendetta," and I can only hope she is interviewing new agents. Stellan Skaarsgaard is a cipher as Goya -- but the weak-willed title character is merely a spectator in his own film. If you want an artistic treatment of Goya's life and art, rent Carlos Saura's moody and surreal "Goya in Bordeaux" (2000). And Randy Quaid as the King of Spain? Randy Quaid??

I make a distinction for the professional actors because apparently the movie is stuffed with cameos by European aristocrats (to please those demanding investors, no doubt). That explains the several unnecessary close-ups of non-speaking characters, serving only to lengthen an already interminable film. Not that this unsophisticated eye would recognize any of them, but it does give this ill-conceived production one notable, if dubious, distinction: it has to be the first 'Euro-Trash Vanity Pic'!