# Before Night Falls (2000)

### reviewed by
JONATHAN RICHARDS

    BEFORE NIGHT FALLS

    Directed by Julian Schnabel

    De Vargas    R     134 min

This is the second feature by the successful painter Julian Schnabel (Basquiat). Both have been biographies of minority artists who suffered grievously and died young, both have been visually and stylistically bold, both have been self-indulgent, chaotic, and often tedious.

Before Night Falls is based on the autobiography of Reinaldo Arenas, the Cuban poet and novelist who was hounded by the Castro government for his homosexuality and his writing. He was surprisingly prolific at both. He boasted of having bedded 5,000 men by the age of 25 (and after that he was in prison where the opportunities can't have slackened much), and despite his years behind bars and the relentless censorship he turned out over 20 books before his premature death of AIDS in New York at 48.

Central to the critical success this picture has enjoyed is the Oscar-nominated performance of Spaniard Javier Bardem (Jamon, Jamon) as Arenas. Bardem does a remarkable job of taking the character from exuberant youth to sickly middle age, and he animates him with a cocky, jaded innocence. But as Best Actor material his credentials have as much to do with screen time as with interpretation. The shortfall is to a large extent the fault of the movie's structure, which dulls the telling with repetitiveness and confusion.

Some of the confusion comes from the accents. The movie is spoken primarily in a thickly-accented English which is supposed to be Spanish, and which is sometimes incomprehensible to the American ear. Confusing matters further are occasional passages spoken in Spanish, the same Spanish they're speaking when they're speaking English, if you follow my drift. At least the Spanish Spanish is subtitled, which makes it easier to understand.

Schnabel begins his tale with the baby Reinaldo, playing bare-fannied in the dirt in his little village, as the adult Reinaldo fondly recalls in voice-over "a childhood of absolute poverty and absolute freedom." He grows up, discovers his writer's gift and his homosexuality, and proceeds to write and fornicate until he's thrown in jail on trumped-up charges by the revolutionary regime, whereupon he continues to do both anyway. Eventually he gets out of Cuba when Castro empties the country of "undesirables" and ships them to Miami.

There is an extraordinary cameo by Johnny Depp as a manuscript-smuggling transvestite, muddied by another cameo by Johnny Depp as a military officer, also well played but confusing -- you wonder if it's supposed to be the same guy leading a double life. Sean Penn also contributes a barely recognizable cameo as a gold-toothed wagon driver.

Schnabel and cinematographers Xavier Perez Grobet and Guillermo Rosas come up with some stunning visuals, and the film's condemnation of the repressiveness of the Castro revolution is damning and disturbing, but the movie churns and spins its wheels in an orgy of stylistic muck, and never gets up to the speed the story requires.

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