Mark Reviews Movies: PAIN AND GLORY

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 10, 2019

Pedro Almodóvar, the now-70-year-old Spanish filmmaker, barely hides himself in Pain and Glory. The writer/director's newest, about an aging filmmaker dealing with health issues and grief and addiction and the ghosts of his past, isn't directly an autobiography. The main character has a different name, after all. That character also hesitant to call his own work autobiographical, although everything that happens here points to notion that Salvador Mallo (Antonio Banderas), an aging Spanish filmmaker whose hair and clothing look more than suspiciously like Almodóvar's, is just using the guise of fiction to reveal himself by way of his art.

If that's not Almodóvar admitting the same is true of his own work (and especially this particular film), then no work of fiction with autobiographical influence could be considered a form of personal revelation. Watching this film is like witnessing a confession. It's raw, in the moment, uncertain of what and how much should be said, and entirely self-reflective. Here, a man ponders the key events of his life—from his childhood, to his career, to his most impactful romance—because there doesn't seem to be much life left in him. The film is, as its title suggests, filled with pain—of grief, of regret, of the body, of feeling unmoored from one's own purpose.

The glory of the title seems almost impossible to find amidst Salvador's life, but it's there, nonetheless. One of the earliest scenes in Almodóvar's film sees a young Salvador (played by Asier Flores), watching his mother Jacinta (Penélope Cruz) and other women of the village where he was born and raised doing laundry, smiling with joy while the women sing and gently place sheets across the tall grass by the riverbank. It's not the last time that we see Salvador, as either a child or an adult, smile, but in this moment—free of what's to come in the boy and, later, the man's life—there's a purity to that happiness that, in retrospect, we know may never return.

Almodóvar's screenplay jumps back and forth in time. It moves between an older Salvador, experiencing tremendous pain from a recent spinal surgery and his lifelong troubles with headaches (An animated interlude shows us the causes and symptoms), and the younger one, moving to a new village—where his father Venancio (Raúl Arévalo) can only afford for his family to live in a cave (The boy, as any kid would, loves it, but his mother barely tolerates the new living conditions, if only because her son is so enamored with them).

In the past, Salvador hones his learning and creativity, reading almost constantly and even teaching a local handyman and amateur painter named Eduardo (César Vicente) to read and write. In the present, because of his health issues, Salvador's lifelong love of creativity is at an unendurable standstill. Directing a movie is difficult work, and Salvador is convinced that his body isn't up to such a task.

The story revolves around relationships—as they were and, now, as they have since faded. In the first section of the present-day story, the focus is on the Salvador's estranged connection to the star of one of this earlier films, which recently has received a restoration and has gained in importance. The actor is Alberto Crespo (Asier Etxeandia), to whom Salvador hasn't spoken in almost 30 years. He resented the actor's performance at the time, but now, he has reconsidered it.

On the screen, that re-ignited bond, as Salvador tries to convince Alberto to present their film at an upcoming screening, possesses considerable tension. There's the fact that Salvador might only be trying to get what he wants—at first, the appearance and, later, heroin, which the filmmaker tries for the first time with Alberto and discovers that it alleviates his pain.

In the back of our minds, we might also be thinking how Alberto might be, in that not-quite-autobiographical way, a stand-in for the actor playing the stand-in for Almodóvar. After all, the filmmaker and Banderas, who made multiple films together before the latter became an international star, went over two decades without making a film together. There's something surreal in watching this fictional reunion play out within the narrative, even as we see the real-life reunion between a director and an actor play out as the film itself—not to mention how sympathetic yet critical Banderas' performance is.

Another relationship comes from a short, semi-autobiographical piece, about a lover of Salvador's who was addicted to heroin, that Alberto wants to turn into a one-man show. We watch that show unfold, with Salvador refusing to put his name to it, and Almodóvar also remains focused on a stranger in the audience, who seems to have an intense emotional reaction to hearing the story. The man is Frederico (Leonardo Sbaraglia), who has moved on from the past in considerable ways. The resulting scene, which is yet another reunion for Salvador, is tender and melancholy—decades' worth of regret and longing being held back out of fear, resentment, and/or simple pragmatism.

The final significant relationship is between the young Salvador and his mother, which, in the film's final act, becomes that between the adult Salvador and his ailing mother (played by Julieta Serrano). By this point, we have come to understand that Almodóvar's story, with its reliance on potentially unreliable and shifting memories (The way Salvador's opinion of Alberto's performance changes, and the long absence between the lovers, even when they were together), isn't about telling a straightforward, cohesive story. It's about getting to the emotional core of memory through this series of flashbacks and reunions.

In the film's final stretch, with Salvador's health becoming worse and some uncomfortably honest talk from his mother, we realize just how much of an emotional impact this approach achieves (The reappearance of a long-forgotten drawing, seemingly—like so many of the reunions here—by chance, is particularly affecting, even though Almodóvar has to insert a lengthy flashback to explain its significance). However authentic Pain and Glory may be to Almodóvar's life, the film itself is bracingly, nakedly authentic in its emotional truth.

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