FFWD Weekly
Copyright © 1997. All Rights Reserved.
Cry for me, film reviewer
Evita: beautiful film, lousy movie
by Robert TarryEvita
directed by Alan Parker
starring Madonna, Antonio Banderas and Jonathan Pryce
Now playing, check listingsFirst things first: Madonna makes a decent Evita - a strange combination of breathy vocals and a wooden expression perhaps, but not bad. She's come this close to finding a character that eclipses her own overblown wattage.
As Che, Antonio Banderas delivers his best performance to date. For the first time he seems part of the film he's in, not just some good-looking guy visiting the set. (Ironic how it took a character who exists outside the narrative, speaking directly to the audience, to finally break the Banderas mold.) And as an exercise in costuming, lighting, choreography and atmosphere, Evita is simply stunning.
But as a movie, it's horrible. I mean really, really bad. And not just bad, but high bad. Bad like when a whole town erects a statue of the world's biggest perogie bad.
Evita is tacky - a jockey on the lawn of music - full of dippy rhymes ("Love me, adore me, Christian Dior me!"), cheeseball puns ("Buy me, sell me, Machiavel me!") and exactly two and a half memorable tunes. Even those Michael Crawford commemorative-plate collecting types should grudgingly admit Evita is a lousy musical.
And now, $60 million, six years, mountains of hype and casts of thousands later, Evita is still a lousy musical, painfully demonstrating the limitations of telling a complex story through dorky '70s show tunes. It's all sweep and no substance, making up for lack of self-sustained interest with trainloads of bombast and endless shots of people swooning and chanting.
But could it have been helped?
Has there been a decent musical filmed in decades? Here's a theory: we can't stomach the broad-gestured, scenery-chewing acting necessary to make outbursts of song seem like the most natural thing in the world. (We let Jack Nicholson overact, and occasionally Daniel Day Lewis, but they can't sing.) Cartoons can sing. That's fine. Cartoons are supposed to be over-the-top (though really, all things considered, we'd prefer it if they were singing lions or candlesticks - even cartoon singing humans, like Pocahontas or the Hunchback of Notre Dame, are a bit much).
And if a cartoon human being like Madonna can't pull off a movie musical, then maybe it's time to retire this puppy to Broadway for good.
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