Before Night Falls

(2000, USA) 
Director: Schnabel, Julian 
Producer: Kilik, John
Starring: Javier Bardem ; Andrea Di Stefano ; Johnny Depp

Julian Schnabel's second film, Before Night Falls, about Cuban writer and gay activist Reinaldo Arenas, breathes hot-blooded, lyrical life into the biopic genre. The result is one of the best movies ever made about the heart and soul of an artist. 

The film opens with a languid depiction of Arenas as a boy born into poverty in rural Cuba in 1943, persecuted early on by his father for writing poetry. As a teenager, Arenas joins the political opposition to Castro's regime. At age 20, his first novel, Singing From the Well, took Cuba by storm and won Arenas a National Book Award. But by this time, he was branded a political dissident, an artist, and persecuted for being openly homosexual. Subsequent novels, poems, and short stories all were published and acclaimed outside Cuba. In Schnabel's powerful film, Arenas's sexuality, political activism, and his prolific writing are inseparable aspects of his life. They are the essence of his quest for freedom and as such they are subversive to a totalitarian regime. 

The final quarter of the film depicts Arenas's flight from Cuba (he was part of the 1980 Mariel Harbor boatlift that allowed anyone who was gay, mentally ill, or had a criminal record to leave Cuba). His years in New York City are not given much time in the film; he died there of AIDS complications in 1990, with close friend Lazaro Gomez Carilles (Olivier Martinez), who cooperated with the making of Before Night Falls, by his side. 

Brilliantly played by Spanish actor Javier Bardem, Reinaldo Arenas emerges as a strong-willed but sensitive, sensual being. The scenes of him being tortured in Cuba's notorious El Morro prison, on a trumped-up charge of molestation, are harrowing. It is an astoundingly moving portrait of the artist as a man too free, too passionate, for the repressive society he was born into. 

Schnabel uses bold, expressionistic ways of conveying the world through Arenas' eyes and though his poet's soul. He effectively uses some of Arenas's own words, such as the poem "The Parade Begins," recited by Bardem in voice-over. The film is also aided by fine supporting performances, most notably Johnny Depp's turn as a street transvestite who helps his friend Arenas smuggle a manuscript out of prison. Depp also appears as a sinister, homophobic prison guard. 

Anchored by a luminous lead in Bardem, who should get an Oscar nomination, Before Night Falls is a triumph for Schnabel. With extraordinary visuals and an uncompromising political punch, the film is an unsentimental and uncompromising portrait of art as both freeing and dangerous. It shows how a born artist like Arenas is a threat to a dictatorship bent on suffocating such individual expression. 

--Loren King

Source : Obtained from planetout.com