Rating: 16/20
Plot: Sometime in the 1930's, an English ex-consul in Mexico lives in an alcoholic stupor after his wife, a woman who slept with his half-brother currently living with him, left him. She returns, and the trio run off to have an adventure.
I don't want to take anything away from Jacqueline Bissett or Anthony Andrews because their performances are fine. But this is Albert Finney's show. I haven't seen Amadeus in a really long time, so I can't compare Finney's performance to the Best Actor winner F. Murray Abraham, but he's amazing here. The character's inebriated for the duration of the movie, and that sort of thing's been played--a lot of times comically--since the earliest days of cinema. And it's hard to play something like that delicately enough and in a way where the character's humanity is still intact, a way that doesn't slide into gross caricature, a way that you can take seriously. This is a drama, but it's hard not to be amused by Geoffrey Firmin's act. He falls asleep in the middle of a street, he stumbles around his house looking for a drop of alcohol, he interrupts a neighbor's cat-related complaints with a rambling version of the story of some guy who wandered into the wilderness. But Finney is not playing this character for laughs, and the humor is all just a shell of this almost completely-defeated human being anyway. I've read some people say that Finney's performance is the best or most accurate drunk guy performance in cinematic history. It might be--I wouldn't know because I've never been drunk and haven't had much experience around drunk people either--but the beauty in this performance has more to do with the depth. I don't know how he does it exactly, but Finney somehow brings all this sadness and fatigue and despair and anger and passion to the surface, and it almost emanates from the screen. Finney also gets some great writing to work with. Like, "How, unless you drink as I do, can you hope to understand the beauty of an old Indian woman playing dominoes with a chicken?" or the more-famous "Hell is my natural habitat." It's really a powerhouse performance. You might not remember anything else about this movie months after you've seen it, but you're going to remember how good Albert Finney was.
Check out that poster up there and compare it to this one:
Or this one!
Ok, in my head that worked a lot better. I'm leaving it though because I spent a lot of time putting that together.
There's a great little person performance in this. The "dwarf" is played by Jose Rene Ruiz, also apparently known as "Tun Tun." He's an energetic little fellow, but it's a shot where he's making an obscene gesture with this giant fantastic grin that really made his performance magical. I wish I could find a Youtube link or a gif, but I can't. Here's a screenshot of the little guy in action:
This is either one of cinema's greatest moments or I'm easily amused. Or both.
I loved the opening of this movie, too, great playful opening music over shots of skeleton marionettes and figurines. You know, because this takes place on the Day of the Dead. It puts you in the mood to follow a guy around in his own personal hell for a couple hours, a story steeped in symbolism like you'd expect from John Huston. I'm not really sure what to think about the way things end, but things like storytelling don't even matter when you've got a little person making obscene gestures and such a terrific lead performance.
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