Goya's Ghosts

Let’s be honest here, Natalie Portman is a lovely and intelligent young woman, but she is not much of an actress. In Milos Forman’s film she is asked to hold a ramshackle story together with a three-part role, and sadly fails. A classic case of less than the sum of its parts, this film offers some sense of period and practice, but none of character or significance. It would love to be another Amadeus but does not come close. Stellan Skarsgard seems an odd choice for Goya, but maybe there’s a physical similarity, and his role is confined to observing anyway, as he watches the melodrama unfold but does not participate much. The central character is Javier Bardem as Inquisitor turned Napoleonic proconsul, who is fun to watch if not so much to think about. Poor Natalie is the woman he ruins, and the courtesan daughter that results. But the film does put a lot of Goya’s work on display, and paints a picture of the time and place from which it emerged, with a strained effort to draw contemporary parallels. A visual feast, if an emotive famine. (2007, dvd, n.) *5+* (MC-52.)

Out of the vein of recent disappointing re-viewings spurts The Grifters (1990), which may appeal to those who felt No Country for Old Men was the best picture of 2007, but leaves me rather cold, despite engaging performances from Anjelica Huston, John Cusack, and Annette Bening. Stephen Frears’ first American film is a stylish noir revival of Jim Thompson’s hardboiled “Sophoclean” worldview, in an incestuous triangle of con artists who dance and mate and kill like scorpions in a bottle. It’s funny and clever, but only to set up grisly scenes of horror, both physical and psychological. If that’s your idea of entertainment, then don’t let my lack of enthusiasm steer you away from a film that many rave about.