GOYA'S GHOSTS (2007) ¢ ¢ ¢
D: Milos Forman
Stellan Skarsgård, Javier Bardem, Natalie Portman,
Randy Quaid, Michael Lonsdale, Blanca Portillo
It's clear from the opening frames of this that Milos Forman has spent a lot of time looking at the work of Francisco Goya. Enough to wonder what stories might be behind the artist's startling images. Enough to write a script and make a movie about them. Stellan Skarsgård plays Goya, working incessantly, turning out paintings, sketches and prints, and eluding the Inquisition at least partly because he's the official portrait painter to the Spanish king. Not so lucky is his model and muse (Natalie Portman), the daughter of a wealthy merchant, who's arrested, imprisoned, tortured and forced to confess to an offense she knows nothing about. Also unlucky in the long run is her inquisitor (Javier Bardem), whose intelligence and ruthlessness can't save him from the shifting currents of history. It plays like one of those 19th-century novels where characters keep turning up and finding each other again and again over years and years, no matter the odds against them. Portman, who you'd think would've suffered enough in "V For Vendetta", emerges from 15 years of captivity in ruins, her beauty gone, her spirit, her mind and apparently her jaw shattered beyond repair. A ghost, for sure. It's not a great movie, but it's a good one, and its best moments are the ones that show Goya at work, scratching with charcoal or dabbing with paint, an eyewitness to a terrible time, who had the skill and the luck and the passion to record what he saw for the rest of us.
