Before Night Falls (2000)

Based on the posthumously published memoir by Cuban poet Reinaldo Arenas, Before Night Falls is artist-director Julian Schnabel's second exercise in artist biography, but where Schnabel's earlier film Basquiat was relatively conventional, this film is bolder in both style and execution. Schnabel is perhaps too enamored of his subject as a noble martyr, lending the film a somewhat inflated sense of importance. Still, it's rare to see an artist's life and work so elegantly interwoven, and Before Night Falls uses all of Arenas's life as its canvas, from impoverished youth to lively gay freedom in mid-1950's Cuba; imprisonment during Castro's antigay regime; and to New York City in 1980, followed by Arenas's battle with AIDS and subsequent suicide (depicted here as assisted) in 1990.

Through these extreme rises and falls, Arenas is always writing, his typewriter his most faithful lover and weapon (by way of smuggled manuscripts) against the dark forces that surround him. As Time magazine's Richard Corliss wrote, Arenas is "a serious actor's dream role: to be a gay Jesus in a modern Passion Play," and Javier Bardem--the first Spanish actor to receive an Oscar nomination--inhabits the role with subtle ferocity, charting this emotional odyssey with outer reserve but blazing infernos of internal passion. And while Schnabel suffers from a hyperactive camera, there's poetry here--visual, dramatic, and literal--and vibrant humor to temper the deep tragedy of Arenas's life. Schnabel also uses his actor friends to good advantage: a nearly unrecognizable Sean Penn adds an ironic touch to his brief appearance as a peasant, and Johnny Depp is both funny and fearsome in dual roles as a drag queen and vicious army interrogator. --Jeff Shannon Amazon.com

Fighting for Freedom

Powerful screenplay based on the autobiography of the exiled Cuban author, Reinaldo Arenas.

Arenas was a gay Cuban author and poet who was persecuted by the Castro regime and fled Cuba in 1980 (the Mariel Boat-lift) and ended up in New York City, where he continued to write and rail against the Communists. In 1990, stricken with AIDS and without health insurance, he committed suicide with drugs and alcohol. It's a painful and heart-wrenching story, but the acting is superb and there are moments of true mirth along with those of care and tenderness. Javier Bardem is fabulous playing Arenas in this movie!
Recommended!
June 3, 2008

An excellent film about Cuba under Fidel and his oppression of intellectuals

This film gives the viewer an insight into Castro's take over of Cuba. The acting is superb. It is a look into the life of a gay cuban writer from birth to death and his stuggle as an artist in a society where free thought and speech are forbidden. The film also shows the suffering of a homosexual as an outcast in that society. Gives the viewer an insight into human rights issues in Cuba after the revolution and a "big brother" regime is instituted. The cameo's by Johnny Depp and Sean Penn are amazing. April 5, 2008

Thank you

Thank you for sendin g this movie so fast. It was a great movie and Johnny Depp looks good as a blonde woman. February 18, 2008

revolution eating its own children, best since Gulag Archipelago.

This is a great film, that brings home the horror of totalitarianism - and its very human toll - from a unique perspective: suppressed gays and secondarily writers. I was utterly riveted by this, from the emergence of talent to the spiritual destruction of a human being. This is as good as Solzynitzen.

The acting is simply a marvel, beyond the star, especially Depp: he plays two (at least that I noticed) sexually ambivalent characters in the film, with complete, mesmerizing total concentration. Bardem is an absolutely first-rate talent, and this is the first film I've seen him in.

Warmly recommended. This is a dark side of the 20C that we would be foolish to forget. February 10, 2008

Great film but some pieces missing

I admit I did not know anything about Reynaldo Arenas before seeing this film. I have become a huge Javier Bardem film and wanted to see some of his earlier work. I thought the film was very well done and held my interest very well until the final 30 or so minutes of the film. The final year of Arenas' life in NYC does not follow the same pace as the rest of the film and dragged a bit for me. I also wished that the film would have gone into a little more detail about the writing of "Before Night Falls" and his years in NYC where he was free to write, which I felt was lost in the final scenes.
Javier Bardem's performance is excellent and overall I really enjoyed the film and would recommend it. January 18, 2008

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