Before Night Falls

by Cindy Fuchs

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Before Night Falls aspires to a kind of visual poetry, rhapsodic and turbulent. And for the most part, it’s joyous, even breathtaking, to watch. Julian Schnabel’s second arty biopic is, much like his first, 1996’s Basquiat, suffused equally with wonder and polemic, in love with its subject and full of itself. Based on the writings of Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas (Javier Bardem, in a riveting performance), Before Night Falls traces his arduous, fabulous life, from his impoverished childhood in the Oriente province, through his heady days as a promising student at the University of Havana and prize-winning young novelist, to his years of imprisonment — as a homosexual and dissident — at the hands of Castro’s regime. And then, for an inexplicably brief few minutes, the film wraps up by montaging Reinaldo’s final ten years in New York. Here, in 1990, he committed suicide at the age of 47, while suffering from AIDS.

It’s a lot of life to pack into a little over two hours, and the film does it by working across media, layering Arenas’ own poetry in voice-over, using elaborate camera moves and vibrant colors. Night opens with a camera looking up at a canopy of lush trees, taking the point of view of the infant Arenas in his mother’s arms, while an adult Reinaldo narrates her ordeals, abused by his father and unhappily returned to her parents’ home when he was only a few months old, a visible sign of "her failure." Our first view of the boy, maybe 3 or 4 years old, has him naked, digging about in a muddy hole. He looks content, but the restless camera — craning up and out from the hole, then speeding back and away at ground level — seems to intimate the constant sense of displacement and need for motion that will send Reinaldo on his way. Here, as in other sequences, Schnabel and cinematographers Xavier Pérez Grobet and Guillermo Rosas translate Reinaldo’s evolving "natural" passions into rich greens and deep browns, and a camera that cannot stay still.

The film’s dominant image and metaphor is water. Reinaldo and the approximately subjective camera are repeatedly enraptured by rain, waterfalls, rivers, the ocean — all possible versions of thrilling torrents. In a series of scenes, young Reinaldo finds himself separated from his mother by the river where she is washing clothes, gazing happily at a group of men bathing and luxuriating in a sudden summer downpour. It’s about sex, of course, but at some level it’s also about a more broadly conceived sensuality which Reinaldo feels driven to articulate.

It’s not long before he’s imagining himself a writer, but such an ambition is unheard of in a culture where real men do manly work, manual labor and such. The boy (played here by Schnabel’s son Vito) grows up in a house full of women, with his querulous grandfather the only male adult in sight. When Reinaldo’s teacher comes to the house one day to announce that her student has a gift for poetry, the old man — already concerned that the boy is girlish — goes ballistic, chopping down trees on which his grandson has carved poetic musings. Reinaldo and the teacher look on aghast, the camera wildly careening back and forth, taking on the grandfather’s — or maybe even the axe’s — point of view.

On its face, this kind of impressionistic imagery is strange, even unsettling. But if you recall Schnabel’s own painting and sculptures, you realize spectacular, self-important unruliness is his forte, and Before Night Falls integrates it more effectively than did Basquiat. There are certainly jarring moments, as when Reinaldo, running away from home, catches a ride with a cart-driving peasant, played with cartoonish gusto by a heavily made-up, cornily-accented Sean Penn. When the peasant dumps him on the road, Reinaldo is conveniently picked up by a truckload of anti-Batista rebels. At this point, the movie claims a kind of "historical" valence (circa 1958), with footage of the soldiers’ warm welcome by villagers playing under Bardem’s reading, in Spanish, of Arenas’ ode to the moment, "The Parade Begins."

It’s not long before the festivities slam up against a nightmare, in which anyone deemed an enemy of Castro’s state is scrutinized, disciplined and incarcerated. Reinaldo’s passion for freedom extends beyond wanting to avoid prison. While the film does not enumerate his many sexual encounters (the writer claimed to have had some 5,000 by the time he was 25), it does convey, however elliptically, the ferocity of his appetites and his fearlessness in pursuing pleasure, pain, sex — experience of all kinds. Before he’s arrested for the first time, Reinaldo spends his days sunning on the beach and nights at parties. The scenes almost pulse with light and painterly hues; the sky is bright blue, the beach stunning white, the trees verdant green.

Every event during this period of Reinaldo’s life appears as part dream, part hyperreality. Walking along the street, Reinaldo is cruised by one of his first gay lovers, Pepe (Andrea Di Stefano), who’s driving a big white convertible, once owned, he boasts, by Errol Flynn. Reinaldo and the two chatty girls in the backseat are appropriately impressed, enjoying the air and the movement, the feeling of power, but as soon as Pepe places his hand on Reinaldo’s leg, he panics and practically leaps from the car. Only days later, after Pepe buys his new friend a typewriter, the two are locked in an embrace that looks more like a throwdown than anything else. Still, these are hopeful days for him, indicated by the bright palette and the lightly evocative soundtrack.

These days are numbered. Once Reinaldo is literally dragged into the infamous El Morro prison, delirious on drugs supplied by a well-meaning friend, the frames turn predictably dismal and oppressive. Solitary confinement is harrowing; the camera and the metal box he’s in both confine and contort his sweaty, filthy body. As he learns to get along, Reinaldo is aided by resident drag queen Bon Bon (Johnny Depp, looking as lovely as he did playing a harem girl in Don Juan DeMarco), who smuggles his writings out so that they might be published in France. The film makes the metaphorical point that no one is always quite what he seems, I suppose, by also casting Depp as Lieutenant Victor, the prison authority most determined to beat Reinaldo’s defiance and creativity out of him.

Eventually, Reinaldo is released from El Morro, whereupon he attempts to reach the vaunted U.S. shores, by inner tube and by hot air balloon, episodes rendered as part antic comedy and part romantic gesture. Eventually, Arenas and his longtime friend Lázaro Gómez Carriles (the subtle Olivier Martinez) do leave their homeland, part of the chaotic 1980 Mariel Harbor exodus, when Castro evicted Cuba’s "deviants, homosexuals and mentally ill." Once in New York City, they enjoy one ecstatic scene — driving through Greenwich Village streets in a convertible — but too soon are faced with Arenas’ illness and despair. In his suicide note, he blames Castro for all of it.

Though Schnabel has clear ideas about the sanctity of self-expressive freedom — political as well as artistic — he avoids close analysis of his subject or even explanation of events. Instead, he layers his cinematic canvas with textures and tones, outlining the story so that it’s more an effect of the resonant imagery than a cause. But that’s okay. The film is frank about its own obsessions and its passions. It admits from the jump that it is as much about Schnabel’s desires and drives as it is about Arenas’. While such self-consciousness is occasionally annoying, it is also refreshingly honest and mostly fascinating.

See the trailer!