***1/2 (out of ****)
Starring Javier Bardem, Juan Diego Botto, Laura Morante, Elvira Minguez, Alexandra Lencastre, Oliver Cotten, Abel Folk, and Luis Miguel Cintra
Directed by John Malkovich & written by Nicholas Shakespeare, from his novel
2001 (released 2003) R
Combining the police procedural with the character study is a reliable step for an actor-turned-director. Maybe all the actor-director really wants to make is the character study, to give his own actors the freedom to explore their characters completely. The police procedural provides not only a healthy mess of moral problems over which the characters can brood, but it also supplies rules and developments to keep things moving forward.
Not too long ago actor Sean Penn directed “The Pledge,” just such a movie, in which a detective grapples with his own lonely existence while obsessively pursuing a killer who may already be dead. Now Oscar-nominated actor John Malkovich, best known for the very quirky “Being John Malkovich” and his chilling portrayal of an assassin in “In the Line of Fire,” brings us “The Dancer Upstairs,” about a cop in Latin America trying to catch an angry bomber before his corrupt and trigger-happy government does.
Of course the cop (Javier Bardem of “Before Night Falls”) has personal problems. In fact, seeing the word “cop” on the computer screen right now does not seem to fit Bardem’s character at all. Tall, a little heavy-set, and not especially athletic, Bardem neither looks nor moves the way movie cops do. His wife (Elvira Minguez) is an absolute flake, obsessed with beauty products and getting a nose job; she has little interest in what he does because he has little interest in what she does. Most surprisingly, we learn that Bardem was once an affluent lawyer, but has become a police officer (a virtually unpaid one at that) in order to practice the law more honestly. As he investigates a mad bomber known only as Ezequiel, he will slowly sell off his fidelity piece by piece.
It seems Ezequiel is an anarchist crossed with a Marxist. This is already more politics than the average America thriller, and Bardem’s investigation leads him not only to crime scenes but to Immanuel Kant and the Bible. Ezequiel releases no manifesto and takes no specific stance besides angry slogans left near the bodies. Chillingly, this only strengthens his revolution and makes him more popular. As Bardem goes deeper into the jungle of his unnamed Latin American banana republic, the rumors about Ezequiel grow wilder and wilder. In one scene, as Bardem interrogates a philosophy professor who may have known Ezequiel long ago, he asks, what is the advantage of not publishing a manifesto? Jesus and Socrates never wrote a word in their lives, the professor responds, because text takes on a life of its own and cannot debate, cannot answer questions. In a grand, Nietzchean sense, Ezequiel is positing himself only as the action, with no regard for the thought or entity behind it.
As Ezequiel’s victims steadily increase in rank and power—as white-dressed military brass are gunned down outside their compound, as dead animals begin appearing in the presidential palace—trigger-fingers start getting itchy. Bardem’s direct superior (Oliver Cotten) is not so much corrupt as jaded, but it is the head of the palace security (Luis Miguel Cintra) that he dreads most of all. “You don’t want the army back on the streets, do you?” Martial law and kangaroo courts hang in the balance, all working in Ezequiel’s favor by making the people hate their government even more. Suspects are carried off from Bardem’s team by truckloads of soldiers, only to turn up dead a few days later while the army has “no comment.”
“The Dancer Upstairs” is a thriller for liberal arts majors, with more political byways and shortcuts than can be mentioned here. It has few action sequences, but those it has are especially effective, including an eerie, breathtaking sequence near the end in which black-clad, Uzi-toting police methodically block off a street and silently swarm over a house. Like most actors-turned-directors, Malkovich is at times nicely baroque. The movie’s bombings are all the more disturbing because of how calmly he shows them, and it’s creepy the way Ezequiel attaches explosives to live animals and uses children and teenage girls as his assassins.
Shot in Spain, Portugal, and Ecuador, “The Dancer Upstairs” looks great in a dirty, authentic way. It is a tragedy, but not depressing, helped along in no small part by the sense of humor of Bardem’s sergeant (Juan Diego Botto). Bardem himself, in a splendidly restrained performance, has a dry humor of his own. He is neither an overt crusader, nor is he a sycophant, but he has a way of sidestepping awkward situations with his corrupt superiors, a way of looking away from them at key moments. As the film’s core, Bardem keeps his own counsel, thinking much but saying little as he patiently navigates his investigation. Alienated by his wife, he begins to get friendly with his daughter’s ballet instructor (Laura Morante), but is just as secretive with her, and what is left unsaid between them proves tragic by the film’s end.
If I have one complaint about “The Dancer Upstairs,” it is that it is in English, and not in Spanish. I bemoan this not just because I love the sound of Spanish, not just because the cast is comprised entirely of native Spanish-speakers, and not because Spanish would make the movie more authentic. I mind because the names of certain people and places are obscured by heavy accents and left me momentarily disoriented. I’ll be the first to say that some movies actively don’t want us to understand exactly what someone is saying. Don’t forget that great scene in “The Third Man” in which the Austrian landlady whines and whines without a single subtitle, and we know all we need to know. And there’s that bit in “The Thin Red Line” in which a dying Japanese officer makes his final speech to an American soldier, an interlude made more powerful and sad because there’s no one to understand his last words, not even us.
But I don’t think this is the case with “The Dancer Upstairs.” “Shadow of the Vampire” has the same problem, in which characters that ought to be speaking German speak English with German accents that sometimes obscure their dialogue. “Amadeus” solves this quandary by having the Germans who should have been speaking German, and the Italian who should have been speaking German (Salieri), all speak English with English accents. Oh well. Maybe I’ll just turn on the subtitles when I watch “The Dancer Upstairs” on DVD.
Finished May 15th, 2003
Copyright © 2003 Friday & Saturday Night
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