Puenzo Visits Hollywood--He’s Not Applying for Citizenship

When director Luis Puenzo made his Oscar-winning film “The Official Story” in 1984, he shot scenes in his own bedroom in a pleasant upper-middle-class Buenos Aires suburb. At night, he slept below his own klieg lights.

He spent just $465,000 to make the film, an intimate and searing study of a woman who discovers that her adopted daughter was stolen from a prisoner murdered by military officers during the last Argentine dictatorship.

Still wide-eyed, Puenzo muses that he suddenly found himself in command of a $25 million Hollywood extravaganza, organized by co-star Jane Fonda and made for Columbia Pictures. The 150 drivers employed for his latest film, “Old Gringo,” outnumbered by six to one the entire technical staff for his previous film.

The cultural journey of an Argentine art-film director into the realm of Hollywood spectacle is a fairly close analogy for the movie itself, and its central theme: how people, and peoples, reconcile the conflicts inside them and the differences that separate them.

Puenzo, silver-haired at 43, had made just two full-length movies before Fonda asked him in 1986 to write and direct a film version of Mexican author Carlos Fuentes’ novel, “The Old Gringo.”

His career until then had been largely in commercials; his dream of directing movies collapsed with the Argentine military coup of 1976 and the subsequent repression. “The Official Story,” awarded the Oscar for best foreign film in 1986, was one of a series of prize-winning Argentine films that spilled forth after democracy was restored in 1983.

“The Old Gringo” imagines the final days of Ambrose Bierce, the 71-year-old muckraking American journalist who set off in search of Mexican revolutionary leader Pancho Villa in 1913 and disappeared. Fonda bought the rights in 1980, and mentioned the book to Puenzo at their first meeting six years later. He fought through the English version on his flight back to Buenos Aires, then reread it in Spanish and, unasked, produced an outline for the film. As soon as she read his plan and spoke with him again, Fonda named him director and co-writer, along with his long-time partner, Aida Bortnik.

“Old Gringo” had its world premiere in Puenzo’s own Buenos Aires on Aug. 29, six weeks before its scheduled U.S. opening on Friday. (The prints here are subtitled for the English dialogue.) The overseas opening is just one of several departures from Hollywood convention in this bicultural epic.

A more fundamental challenge to the norms, Puenzo said in the upstairs study of his home on the day the film opened, is the mixing of genres. This is a close-up triangular love story and at the same time a big-screen action picture, with vast battle scenes.

To a few Argentine critics, that has meant a lack of cohesion--squeezing the director between the artistry of Fuentes’ dense dialogue and the Hollywood moguls’ determination to make this a vast melodrama. Most critics, however, were satisfied that Puenzo succeeded in an ambitious attempt to create a combination that has often eluded more seasoned directors: an extravaganza that manages to be provocative and thoughtful.

One of the critics’ few doubts about the film was the treatment of the Mexican Revolution itself, a complex event that has often defied American attempts to portray it. Indeed, the critic for the Mexico City newspaper Excelsior, who had seen a preview, was caustic: “The most generous thing you can say about the film is that it is pure gringo: That is, it is an extremely superficial production on the Mexican Revolution for average, U.S. consumption, for Americans who buy those red velvet sombreros decorated with sequins and things of that sort.”

The critic for the newspaper La Jornada was kinder. He said the film “managed to recreate the revolutionary epoch, the mood of the era and the spirit of Fuentes’ book. Beyond that it offers a respectable version of Mexico and Mexicans in general.”

He summed up: “Succinctly put, ‘Old Gringo’ is a respectable but complacent film.”

Just as Fuentes conjured up Bierce’s fate among the rebel Mexicans, so Puenzo imagined Fuentes’ “unwritten scenes”--aspects of Bierce’s fate that the book suggests without conveying explicitly. The movie takes as many liberties with Fuentes’ story as the author Fuentes did in imagining Bierce’s final days.

Gregory Peck, still an able horseman at 73, gives what one Argentine critic called an “unimprovable” performance as the crotchety, cynical Bierce. Rediscovering his ability to feel, he falls in love with spinster Harriet Winslow (Fonda), who came to Mexico to escape her repressed, American Victorian-era life. They are both swept into the life of young rebel Gen. Tomas Arroyo (a sensual, seething Jimmy Smits of “L.A. Law”). Arroyo, having seized the hacienda where he grew up as the bastard son of the wealthy ranch owner, cannot bring himself to leave the place and take his troops to join Villa at the front. Bierce becomes the unwilling father figure for both in a tormented, fatal conflict between selves, generations, ideals and cultures.

Around this inner drama swirls the extravaganza of battle, of an explosive New Year’s celebration in Chihuahua, and the decadent elegance of the guerrilla-occupied estate.

Puenzo said he decided consciously to employ competing styles to underline the tensions at play in the story itself. His years as a director of commercials, he said, had taught him every possible style, so he was as comfortable with the spectacle as he was with the close-up scenes.

“American films normally stick to one genre, American directors are very respectful of genre. We intentionally decided to mix them,” he said.

Throughout, the focus is on the differences between the Mexicans and the Americans thrown among them, and their halting attempts to understand each other.

“U.S. films, with few exceptions, teach us that ‘different’ is at very least worse, and usually an enemy,” Puenzo said. “The logical extension of this is that the enemy must be destroyed. This is especially true, and especially dangerous, in children’s films.

“That kind of cinema is extremely political, even though few people would use that word to describe it,” he added. “The core of ‘Old Gringo’ lies in the encounter between two cultures, and their ability to understand each other; the possibility to learn to live with and respect differences--that they are not ‘worse.’ ”

Puenzo recalled that he was asked at a news conference with Fonda whether a scene in which Arroyo admonishes a child not to accept the clothes or toys or ideas of the enemy might not be a metaphor for his own entry into Hollywood--in short, whether he was being corrupted.

“If I have played with the toys of Hollywood, I have done so with great caution,” he replied. “I have no doubt that I am an outsider for Hollywood. I can be a good director to the extent that I don’t disengage myself from my roots.”

Yet he also acknowledged that there was an element of “fortunate misunderstanding” in choosing him as director. While Fonda has said that only a Latin American could have handled the theme with the right sensitivity, Puenzo noted: “Los Angeles is much more Mexican than Buenos Aires. As Argentines, it has always been difficult for us to feel part of Latin America.”

Buenos Aires, built largely by immigrants from Italy and Spain, is more European than any American city, and Argentines have a mutual love-hate relationship with their brethren on their continent. Puenzo said he had to plunge into extensive study of Mexico to appreciate its culture and history, probably not unlike Bierce himself. Puenzo himself was thus thrust between American and Mexican culture, rather than on one side or the other.

There have been rumors in Hollywood that the film was troubled by disputes between Columbia and the director that delayed its opening, initially announced for last Christmas. Puenzo said that over-eager publicity agents had prematurely announced that date even though editing and final sound mixing were incomplete. Columbia Pictures executives, he said, agreed to devote the needed time rather than rush the movie to meet that date, despite the risks of inevitable rumors.

Furthermore, Puenzo said, Columbia showed its commitment to the film by deciding to hold it for the U.S. autumn, rather than dump it onto the summer market. That delay meant absorbing substantial interest payments on the film’s $25 million cost, he noted.

Back in Argentina, Puenzo is worried now about the newly elected government’s decision to impose an amnesty for military officers convicted of human rights abuses during the dictatorship. He said he is toying with ideas for a next project on that issue, which would bring him back to the issues he addressed in “The Official Story.”

On opening day of “Old Gringo,” it was clear he had not broken the habits bred from years of work on a lesser scale. He was heading out to the theaters, to watch the crowds’ reactions and tinker in the projection booths, making sure the sound levels and picture were just right.