At the Movies: 'Before Night Falls'

An established artist reveals fresh colors as a filmmaker in ``Before Night Falls,'' Julian Schnabel's beautiful and ultimately wounding biography of Reinaldo Arenas, the Cuban novelist and

Friday, December 22nd 2000, 12:00 am

By: News On 6

An established artist reveals fresh colors as a filmmaker in ``Before Night Falls,'' Julian Schnabel's beautiful and ultimately wounding biography of Reinaldo Arenas, the Cuban novelist and poet.

Schnabel is far better recognized as a painter, so it comes as something of a surprise that his movie is such a fully cinematic view of a period â€” and person. Whereas some visual artists (think Peter Greenaway) have trouble creating movies that actually move, ``Before Night Falls'' chronicles the life of a poet with a deeply empathic poetry.

``Trees have a secret life,'' we hear at the beginning, but so does this movie, which honors its source without ever sanctifying him.

Its point of origin is Arenas, the writer who, though vilified in Fidel Castro's Cuba, found international renown before dying of AIDS at 47 in New York in 1990.

``Before Night Falls'' is never merely a deathbed chronicle. As portrayed by Spanish actor Javier Bardem with supreme but unshowy power, Arenas emerges as a complex iconoclast â€” a sensualist with guts of steel who survives poverty, fascist politics, and even solitary confinement to make the typewriter his ``piano.''

When first seen, he's a young boy (played as a child by the director's son, Vito Maria Schnabel) whose imaginative talents have already been singled out by his teacher.

That normally cheering news doesn't sit well with Arenas' grandfather, a none-too-literary brute whose antipathy firms up Arenas' desire to leave an impoverished community of 200,000 people â€” and, we are told, one garbage truck â€” in Cuba's Oriente Province.

In the big city of Havana, a library job enables Arenas to discover a world of books even as, sexually, he is discovering men.

Schnabel, who made his directing debut with 1996's ``Basquiat,'' gets a lot of wry comic mileage â€” alongside stirrings of tragedy â€” out of the prevailing sexual hypocrisy, with soldiers engaging freely in homosexual encounters even as, officially, they must be seen to stamp them out.

Before long, poetry readings have been disallowed on the grounds of sedition. So has gay sex, pushing Arenas and his friends further underground.

Jailed on false charges of molestation, Arenas wins over his fellow inmates by writing letters home for them, until he lands in solitary, smeared in his own excrement. (Those scenes recall Denzel Washington's imprisonment last year in ``The Hurricane.'')

An amnesty granted in 1980 to homosexuals, criminals and the mentally ill eventually allows Arenas to leave his homeland for the United States.

He ends up in New York, the city of promise and hope and yet one for him of illness and death. The cruelly ironic prop in the film's closing images is a shopping bag which proclaims, ``I Love New York.''

Throughout, Schnabel weaves passages from Arenas' writing into a portrait of his life, drawing on ``The Parade Ends,'' ``The Hallucinations,'' and his memoir, ``Before Night Falls.''

Several sequences repeat themselves in varying ways, setting Arenas' imagined or wished-for version of events against what really happened. (One of these involves Johnny Depp, double cast as both a fearsome lieutenant and a fleshy drag queen named Bon Bon.)

A gold-toothed Sean Penn shows up early on, scarcely recognizable, and other notable collaborators on the film include Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson, who added to Carter Burwell's evocative, properly Latin-drenched score.

``Before Night Falls'' remains the twin triumph of a director and his star, with Bardem's pugilist face at odds with an ineffable delicacy of movement that never turns camp.

Together, the two men honor a life scarred by ugliness, and yet given over to meditations on beauty.

``Before Night Falls'' is a Fine Line Feature, produced by Jon Kilik. Rated R for sexual candor and some violence, the movie runs a wholly riveting 132 minutes. Several sequences are subtitled in Spanish.

â€”â€”â€” Motion Picture Association of America rating definitions:

G â€” General audiences. All ages admitted.

PG â€” Parental guidance suggested. Some material may not be suitable for children.

PG-13 â€” Special parental guidance strongly suggested for children under 13. Some material may be inappropriate for young children.

R â€” Restricted. Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian.

NC-17 â€” No one under 17 admitted.