‘Picasso’ by the Numbers

“Surviving Picasso” is mistitled. “Surviving Arianna” is more like it.

Arianna is Arianna Huffington, queen of the so-called Republican politics of compassion, whose 1988 trash-biography of Pablo Picasso is the basis for the new movie, opening today. Why a prestige trio like James Ivory, Ismail Merchant and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala would seek to film the worst biography of an artist published in years is a question best left to those who have at least a tentative grasp on the arcane workings of the Hollywood mind. Surely the lure of the cash register has something to do with it: Huffington’s potboiler, “Picasso: Creator and Destroyer,” may have been crappy, but it was also a bestseller.

What made the book a chart-buster was its breathless devotion to chronicling Picasso’s awful misogyny. For the 1980s, the author’s merger of big-money art, tabloid-style celebrity sensationalism and a newly popular American awareness of the socially repressed evils of domestic abuse was tailor-made. The book took off.

It also left art-watchers rolling in the aisles--at least they guffawed when they weren’t rushing to the porcelain throne to divest themselves of lunch. This is a book that sincerely proposes that the faceted planes of Cubist painting--the great artistic watershed of the early 20th century--actually represented Picasso’s barely contained desire to cut up women.

Right. And today’s Arianna Huffington has no more political ambitious for herself than does Pat Buchanan’s modest and unassuming wife.

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The oft-told tale of the Spaniard’s misogyny, and not the loony ravings that pose as sober art historical analysis, is what has survived on-screen in “Surviving Picasso.” The artist’s emotional torture of his wife and assorted mistresses--not to mention his shabby treatment of his long-suffering secretary, Sabartes; his long-suffering Parisian dealer, Henry Kahnweiler; his newly suffering American one, Sam Kootz; and his hapless son, Paulo--is the subject of the movie, which is shapeless and only intermittently interesting.

Not much time at all is spent on questions about the life of art. That’s no surprise. Movies are a personality-driven medium, not an agent for ideas, and Picasso certainly had a personality as big as CinemaScope.

Anthony Hopkins, who plays the titanic artist, is a marvelous actor, and he has his moments in the film. (Given the Huffington book’s assertions about Cubist cut-up women, though, I half feared a bohemian riff on “The Silence of the Lambs.”) But never does Hopkins convey the sense of a dynamic, uncontainable, all-consuming urge for intimacy, which is in fact the main link between Picasso’s ugly psychological profile and his extraordinarily inventive art. The faceted planes of Cubist painting and its extreme bodily distortions--two-sided noses, smashed-together fingers, doubled eyes, twisted lips--are stylized representations of what the human eye actually sees, when it moves in close for an intimate scan of the voluptuous surface of a face, a hand, a body.

Try it and you’ll see.

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Whenever a two-hour movie starts to feel like four, you sink ever deeper into your seat and, for your own survival, marvel at the nuttiness: Watch the famous guy shriek with glee as a predatory owl swoops down and snaps up a passing stray cat, while the guy’s once-feisty girlfriend looks on in premonitory horror. She’s next!

Yikes. I suppose we should be grateful after all that the life of art is only marginally considered in this script.

If the art audience is blessedly spared Huffington’s aesthetic ignorance about Picasso, we are nonetheless treated to her book’s deification of Francoise Gilot, mother of Claude and Paloma Picasso and the young art student/mistress around whom the screenplay is built. (Flashbacks, chance encounters and arranged meetings bring us his other wives and lovers, including Olga Koklova, Dora Maar, Marie-Therese Walter and Jacqueline Roque--all played by actresses whose resemblance to Picasso’s portraits of them can frankly cause your jaw to drop.) In 1964 Gilot wrote her own scathing memoir (with Carlton Lake) of an abusive 10-year “Life With Picasso,” and she was a principal interview source for Huffington’s book.

Now, both book and movie pay her back in spades, charting a descent from radiant innocence to emotional distress and crafting a heroic return to virtue. Why, Gilot ought to be an NBC Olympic all-star, what with all that triumphing over adversity.

My favorite line in the movie comes when Gilot, a mediocre painter of no particular originality or significance, is shown flailing away at a canvas on her easel and stoutly declares, “Picasso didn’t directly influence my work.” Well, turns out we didn’t survive Arianna after all.