Before Night Falls - 2000

Before Night Falls (2000)

Before Night Falls continues artist-turned-director Julian Schnabel's fascination with creative visionaries who reside outside society's normal parameters. While the woefully underdeveloped subsidiary characters make it less successful than his earlier film Basquiat, Schnabel's new work does succeed in creating a compelling portrait of the film's central figure, homosexual Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas.
The author (played by Jamon Jamon's Javier Bardem) is born in 1943, and spends much of his younger days in an impoverished rural province of Cuba with his mother and her parents. After his grandfather chops down a tree on which Reinaldo has carved a poem, the boy runs away from home to (as he puts it) "join the rebels." A brief newsreel segment about the Cuban Revolution of 1959 is the bridge to Havana 1964, when we see Arenas as an adult, attending university classes and discovering his sexuality. Though Bardem is in his 30s, he conveys the exuberance and slight awkwardness of a revolution-minded 21-year-old with an artistic bent, and this sequence is one of the finest in the film.

Arenas' social life revolves around a group of other gay men, one of whom is his off-again, on-again boyfriend Pepe (Andrea Di Stefano, in one of many underwritten roles), and though the friends are circumspect about their behavior, they are also fairly uncloseted. This relative openness causes problems for them when Castro makes a pronouncement in the late-'60s that homosexuals are counter-revolutionary, and it's not long before Arenas is arrested and his books are banned. He supports himself in prison (and saves himself from physical assault) by writing letters for the mostly illiterate prisoners. The scribe then uses the payment from these endeavors to get a drag queen inmate named Bon Bon (Johnny Depp, in the first of two very distinct roles) to smuggle out the manuscripts he writes in jail.

After Arenas is released from jail, the film takes a Fellini-esque turn as he goes to live with a group of prostitutes and other outcasts in an abandoned hotel. Escape from Cuba is on everyone's mind and the discovery of a bunch of parachute material leads to the construction of a hot-air balloon in the film's most surreal sequence.

Although this mode of escape fails, Arenas eventually gets to New York by virtue of a 1980 Castro edict which allowed people who were homosexual, mentally ill, or had a criminal record to leave Cuba. A decade later, categorized by the U.S. government as "stateless," the writer dies of AIDS.

With a life this full and complex, Schnabel has a lot of material to get through, and Before Night Falls should really have been longer. At its current length, the movie is dramatically unsatisfying, more a "Greatest Hits" collection from Arenas' life than a presentation of his full catalogue. The director has a terrific visual sense, and an aptitude for erotically representing his central character without a prurient leer, but he should have been more confident that the audience wanted to see his subject in greater detail.

Bardem is astonishingly good in the best role of his career. His early parts typecast him as the macho heterosexual stud, but he's recently been veering away from this (he also played a gay man in 1999's Segunda piel, which has not yet been released in the U.S.), and Before Night Falls takes him to another level entirely. Like Tom Cruise in Born on the Fourth of July, the actor is given the opportunity to create a character who goes through numerous iterations, and is utterly believable at every stage.

Other actors don't fare so well. They either suffer from under-representation in the script or from Schnabel's penchant for stunt casting (Sean Penn comes off the worst as a campesino who gives young Reinaldo a ride after the lad leaves home). Di Stefano exudes scads of charisma as Pepe, but this clearly significant relationship in Arenas' life is given short shrift. A similar fate befalls Olivier Martinez as Lázaro Carriles, who befriends the writer after his prison release and sees him through his illness in New York.

Portraying the life of an artist whose method is the written word is very difficult. Other modes of expression are far easier to represent visually and can allow the filmmaker to more successfully connect the audience with the main character's internal life. Bardem and the director work very well together to overcome this substantial obstacle, and Before Night Falls is successful because of their skill at composing and portraying the film's primary focus. It's just a shame that Schnabel neglects to fill in the rest of the portrait.