Published on District.
I am glad to see that Pedro Almodóvar remains obsessed with his mother. Or in artsy terms, the archetype of the mother: provider, Gaia, Mother Earth. But beyond themes, at its heart, Pain and Glory is a straight dramatic film about the weirdness of growing up as an artist.
At the beginning of the film, we see Salvador as a 10-year-old: quick, introverted, and full of potential. Cut to Salva at 50: lonely, successful, and creatively blocked. But also, done with the world. Here, Almodóvar offers a story that is fittingly unpredictable. One minute it’s a beautiful white village, the next urban Madrid, scenes adding up to a chaotic life.
If Bond has a title sequence with ladies dancing to the plumes of gunfire, then Salva has a visual festival of medical diagrams, detailing the painful illnesses that affect him including asthma, migraines, insomnia, etc. This raises questions about the relationship of the artist to their pain, whether it can fuel creativity, but just look at all those pretty colors.
Despite the scope of these topics, the story is told in small spaces from the perspectives of deeply flawed characters (i.e. most are divorced, drug-addicted). Flipping between the man's childhood and his rough years after the glory, Almodóvar seems more interested in quiet moments than award shows or extravagant parties. Instead, Salvador meets with an actor he fought with years earlier, only to establish a new, fraught friendship. This opens the gates to acquaintances from his past showing up, sometimes by coincidence.
And yet, these moments didn’t strike me as forced, but rather as conversations that had to happen at some point in Salva’s life, so why not now? With this, it’s hard to imagine an actor other than Antonio Banderas can handle such loaded material. Like Birdman portrayed an actor that has been boxed in by his past success playing a superhero, Pain and Glory casts Banderas as the director that has run out of juice, and by the sheer passage of time, grew shy to create, and even ashamed of who he is.
Here and there are nudges, as if Almodóvar was putting his hand around my shoulder and pointing at something that seems unimportant: references to autobiography, to art, to his mother. The best part of this approach is he made me care about an old, washed-up, rich, drug addled, sad, lonely, funny, film director who may just be Almodóvar himself. We all have our problems, we all have our past, and what we do continues to define us.
“Don’t take away my paintings,” says Salvador to his agent, “They’re the only things that keep me company.”
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