Forman’s sleep of reason produces wretched excess.
No one makes a bloated, leaden biopic quite like Milos Forman. In Goya’s Ghosts, the director of Amadeus, The People vs. Larry Flynt and Man on the Moon delivers yet another triumph of excess over sincerity and insight.
Set in the Spanish Inquisition of the late Eighteenth Century, the film centers around the legendary painter Francisco Goya (Stellan Skarsgaard). When several of Goya’s uniquely horrific etchings catch the attention of Chief Inquisitor Lorenzo (Javier Bardem), church agents imprison and torture one of Goya’s models, Inés (Natalie Portman). When Lorenzo seduces the terrified young woman, he is disgraced and must flee for his life to France. Fifteen years later, Inés is freed and seeks Goya’s help in tracking down her child Alicia (Portman again) that was taken from her while she wasted away in prison.
It’s difficult to imagine a more self-indulgent picture. The production design is opulent, to say the least, but it’s also indicative of the patent artificiality that encompasses every aspect of the film. The hyper-exaggerated costumes and make-up are downright cartoony: in a ridiculously oversized wig, Skarsgaard bears a remarkable resemblance to Gene Hackman’s Lex Luthor; Portman’s Inés emerges from her fifteen year prison sentence resembling nothing so much an offensive caricature of Southern American women.
Scenes set in affluent surroundings are overflowing with props and set pieces, while more common locales are sparse and bare. Forman could have deliberately chosen to depict this disparity in order to highlight the era’s unequal distribution of wealth. Yet there’s a noticeable lack of weathering throughout the film – even in the prison scenes – that is made all the more conspicuous by a pervasive and glazy soft lighting. It’s as if in his rush to preserve authenticity, Forman shot the movie exclusively in historical landmarks and was terrified of getting anything dirty. The result is an unnatural atmosphere that feels like the world’s most expensive museum tableau, alternately austere and garish but utterly devoid of texture.
So it’s no surprise the stilted and overly affected performances can’t breathe. Forman spaces the actors distantly apart from one another and lingers on pauses between lines. The actors consequently appear to be performing in a vacuum, acting without reacting to each other. This disjointed flow of dialogue is then exacerbated by inconsistent accents and pronunciation, not to mention intrusive bursts of baroque music. Bardem’s performance stands out, if only because his hollow baritone amounts to an unintentional impression of Kermit the Frog.
This all could be mere window dressing if the script (co-written by Forman and Jean-Claude Carriére) was any good. But it’s not. Almost all moments of character revelation are truncated by sweepingly dramatic plot thrusts. The conclusion to Inés’s character arc is particularly contrived, while Alicia’s final fate is both preposterous and insulting to viewer’s intelligence. Indeed, the script is blatantly misogynistic – women are depicted as helpless idiots or (literal) prostitutes, waiting for a big strapping man to come rescue them. Equally frustrating is the total lack of insight into Goya’s psyche. The film begins and ends with some of the artist’s more disturbing images, but provides no explanation for why he felt compelled to create such work before the presumably traumatic events of the story.
Goya’s Ghosts is a perfect example of a film so obsessed with its own pedigree and with its aspirations of being “artistic” that it loses all sense of truth. It’s unfortunate that very few other films have depicted the Inquisition, but it’s perhaps appropriate that Forman’s overwrought and senseless exercise in vanity will be associated with such a senseless and bleak period in human history.
- Steve Kabel
