MOVIE REVIEW : The Loony Politics of ‘Moon Over Parador’

In Paul Mazursky’s “Moon Over Parador” (citywide), you feel the director and actors have gotten hold of something really wonderful and then let part of it slip away: swoop off parrot-like down the marble hallways of the dictator’s palace in their mythical Parador.

Not that “Moon” doesn’t have lots of incidental pleasures and ripe, loony laughs. The movie is a comedy about actors and politics, a satire in which power and illusion trip prettily over each other’s feet. In it, Mazursky and co-writer Leon Capetanos imagine a struggling American actor suddenly thrust into South American dictatorship: journeyman Jack Noah (Richard Dreyfuss), a double for Parador’s tyrant, Alphonse Simms (also Dreyfuss, in lifts.)

Simms, a be-medaled macho libertine, dies of his own excesses in a limousine, in the arms of secret police chief Roberto Straussman (Raul Julia). While the real tyrant hangs on a meat hook in the frozen beef locker, the imprisoned Noah--forcibly recruited by Straussman during Parador’s carnival--is made to assume his ceremonial duties, speeches, even his bedroom frolics with Simms’ fiery peasant-born mistress, Madonna (Sonia Braga).

Was power ever so meaningless? In Parador, the shots are called by Straussman, his shadowy cabal and a grumpy CIA chief in Bermuda shorts (Jonathan Winters--a truly inspired casting choice.) Mazursky has a devastating premise here. He’s commenting not so much on Latin American politics--reduced in Pato Guzman’s sumptuous comic opera design to a kind of banana daiquiri republic--as on the cult of political personality. And, tellingly, on the wholesale corruption of modern politics by TV, public relations and media experts.

Mazursky’s actor-dictator is all image. He exists only for TV spots and ceremonial duties. When Noah-Simms appears on the tube, beaming in paternalistic delight to lead his people in mass aerobics, he’s the ultimate modern politico--a mixture of Castro, Peron, Reagan, Jane Fonda and Richard Simmons. Noah-Simms’ control is calibrated, like most politicians, on his mastery of the perfectly timed, authoritative cliche. He interpolates the lyrics of “The Impossible Dream” into a political speech and brings down the Parador plaza.

The basic plot of “Moon” comes from a 1939 Robert Florey B-movie, “The Magnificent Fraud,” in which Akim Tamiroff played the actor-turned-dictator. That’s part of the problem: It’s a B-movie idea that has to remain in a relatively fantastic world; otherwise, we can’t accept anachronisms like the apparent Paradorian language of Latin-accented English. Mazursky may sense this: He frames the movie in Jack’s recollection to two fellow actors at the Public theater, plants the idea that he’s making it all up.

It’s a typical Mazursky plot: an innocent traveling through a corrupt, glamorous, goofy world. But the basic comic-paranoid thread--the hapless actor surrounded by maniacs, trapped in a palace in a role that’s unraveling--gets snagged. The contemporary topical-political parallels get too obvious, characters get lost in the shuffle. Sometimes obvious political nudges--even as deftly executed as Dreyfuss’ “I can’t hear you” Reagan parody--muddy up the narrative line, pull us outside. The movie might have been better without those revolutions and massacres.

But Mazursky is a film maker with such a charming, humane personality--and such sensuous comic skills--that he can keep you entertained even when his movie isn’t quite working. Certainly his cast could hardly be better: Winters, Polly Holliday, Fernando Rey, Sammy Davis Jr. (a wry self-parody), Braga--in her sexiest American movie performance--and Julia, who has the icy, dead eyes of a true fascist and the best psychotic laugh since Peter Lorre.

And it’s doubtful that anyone, even Dustin Hoffman in “Tootsie,” has better conveyed the existential dilemma of the journeyman actor than Dreyfuss in the first half of this picture. He’s a vessel waiting desperately to be filled: a harried face yearning for greasepaint, constantly comparing himself to other actors, dreaming of parts he’ll never get, living on a shifting sand of fantastic opportunities and bedraggled realities.

Dreyfuss is one of the quickest wits in American movies, and he juggles the two halves of the part delightfully. Watching “Moon Over Parador” (MPAA rated: PG-13, for some sex and violence), we can instantly grasp the hollowness and danger of media theatricality dominating politics. Underneath the electronic charisma--the ready smile, the flow of platitudes--there may be, as here, nothing but another desperate actor, waiting for his lines, surrounded by bullies in the palace halls.