Courtesy Of Sony Pictures Classics
Pain And Glory (2019)
The director and star of the 1980s art-house classic featured at a film festival are no-shows at the post-screening Q&A. The panicky organizers finally reach them by phone and put them on speaker. But instead of transmitting anodyne answers to questions from the audience, the speaker phone picks up the distinct snort of the director doing dope along with an erupting argument over unreconciled artistic differences.
In the ’80s, a comparable scene in a Pedro Almodóvar film would have played as hilarious comedy, but in recent years the Oscar-winning Spanish director’s mood has grown more somber. His latest effort, Pain and Glory, puts a once brash, young filmmaker from the ’80s, Salvador (Antonio Banderas), on a painful downward spiral into old age. Plagued by depression as well as worn bones, he’s creatively blocked and feels physically unable for the task of directing another film.
The impending film festival prompts Salvador to visit the star of his long-ago cinematic triumph, Alberto (Asier Etxeandia), their first encounter in decades. The reconciliation begins as a patchy affair at best and leads to another downturn in Salvador’s life when he casually smokes some of Alberto’s heroin. Inevitably, Salvador is hooked more and more, even as Alberto tries to decrease his own dependence. “It’s slavery,” Alberto says, taking no delight in his former foe’s addiction but having done nothing to dissuade him from trying a substance whose sinister hold is hard to reverse.
Pain and Glory references how pieces of a life find their way into an artist’s work. In many scenes, Salvador flashes back to childhood where his mother (Penelope Cruz) raises him with love and encouragement in the poverty of 1950s small-town Spain. What comes across—autobiographically—is the imaginative inspiration Salvador (and Almodóvar) derived from Hollywood cinema fandom. Pain and Glory even sounds like the title of a movie Tyrone Power and Bette Davis never got around to making.
Alas, as with many of Almodóvar’s films from the past three decades, the many interesting bits and touching moments amount to a sum less than the whole despite excellent casting. As usual, the cinematography is distinctly Almodóvar, offering a palette of wild colors whose prevailing hue is red. Pain and Glory is seldom funny (some humor requires intimate knowledge of life in Franco’s Spain) or compellingly dramatic for long stretches—except for the performance within the film of Salvador’s play, Addiction. And yet, Pain and Glory can be appreciated as the heartfelt reflections of an artist looking back while struggling to find his future.
