The Screen Is a Lush Canvas in ‘Before Night Falls’

Redolent of atmosphere and rapturously cinematic, “Before Night Falls” has a gift for creating visual mood that’s so strong you’d swear it couldn’t last--but you’d be wrong. Anchored by a charismatic and accessible performance by Javier Bardem as star-crossed Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas, this florid examination of an artist’s coming of age, of cultures in collusion and conflict, is difficult to resist.

Stronger on images than on dialogue and with a tendency to embrace excess for its own sake, “Before Night Falls” is not without its shortcomings. But ultimately this powerful, beguiling film about a poet whose homosexuality put him at odds with the state seduces us just as it seduced Bardem (who resisted the part but ended up winning best actor at the Venice Film Festival) and director Julian Schnabel, who has made a much better film than anyone might have expected.

Hardly the modest artisan, Schnabel is a famously successful artist whose feature debut, “Basquiat,” was more on the order of a self-indulgent dabble in another form. There are similar indulgent elements here, like the stunt casting of his friends Sean Penn and Johnny Depp in cameo roles and putting his wife, his five children and his parents in the picture, but what’s remarkable about “Before Night Falls” is how much Schnabel has surmounted this gimmickry and turned out a deservedly confident and artistic piece of work.

It all starts with that intoxicating look. Collaborating with cinematographers Xavier Perez Grobet and Guillermo Rosas and production designer Salvador Parra, and with Mexico standing in for Cuba, Schnabel has turned out an exceptional re-creation of several exotic worlds. The Edenic rural Cuba of Arenas’ childhood, the hothouse sensuality of Havana just after the old regime’s fall and the nightmarish prisons that are the revolution’s darker side combine to create visual poetry of a high order.

Ironically for a film about a poet, it’s the scenes without words, or rather the scenes where excerpts from Arenas’ wonderful poetry and prose are read by Bardem in the original Spanish over magical images and Carter Burwell’s hypnotic music that are the most successful. The script by Cunningham O’Keefe, Arenas confidant Lazaro Gomez Carriles and the director is at its weakest when it resorts to dialogue, both because its take on emotions is more operatic than realistic and because Bardem’s uncertain command of English frequently makes him hard to understand.

On the other hand, that heavy accent is a price easily worth paying for the actor’s exceptional performance. A major star in his native Spain but little-known here, Bardem brings grace, empathy and sensitivity to his portrait of the poet who makes the journey from innocence to experience without losing his freshness and his receptivity to new sensation. Though Bardem is on the screen in almost every scene, his is a presence that never wears out its welcome.

It’s Arenas’ childhood we experience first, growing up in rural Oriente “a child of absolute poverty, absolute freedom.” Raised by his mother (Olatz Lopez Garmendia, Schnabel’s wife) and a supportive matriarchy, young Reinaldo experiences the first stirrings of what will be the twin passions of his life, poetry and men.

Captivated by Fidel Castro and his revolution, Arenas ends up in Havana in 1964, a shy, modest, would-be poet and novelist. His early work catches the eye of some well-known writers, and his physical gifts attract the notice of Pepe Malas (Andrea Di Stefano), who guides the young author (and us) through the city’s quasi-clandestine gay subculture.

Those early days of the revolution are portrayed as a pansexual fever dream when everything was tolerated. Gradually, however, the Castro regime gets increasingly rigid and views Arenas, both as a gay man and as a writer, as the kind of threat it doesn’t want to tolerate. “Artists are escapists, counterrevolutionaries,” someone tells the poet. “People who make art are dangerous to any revolution.”

“Before Night Falls” presents an especially damning look at the Cuban revolution’s attitudes toward homosexuals, and, in a wider sense, at the way increasingly repressive regimes try to marginalize anyone who bucks the imperative to conform. Though the last parts of Schnabel’s film are not up to its best segments, its wholehearted embracing of what the poet believed in and its ability to unfold like a veritable dreamscape, to use the camera to expand our world, are virtues in short supply. “Before Night Falls” commands our involvement and our respect.

* MPAA rating: R, for strong sexual content, some language and brief violence. Times guidelines: fairly graphic sexual encounters, brutal scenes of torture and prison life.

‘Before Night Falls’

Javier Bardem: Reinaldo Arenas

Olivier Martinez: Lazaro Gomez Carriles

Andrea Di Stefano: Pepe Malas

Johnny Depp: Lieutenant Victor/Bon Bon

Sean Penn: Cuco Sanchez

Michael Wincott: Heberto Zorilla Ochoa

Olatz Lopez Garmendia: Reinaldo’s Mother

A Grandview Pictures production, released by Fine Line Features. Director Julian Schnabel. Producer Jon Kilik. Screenplay Cunningham O’Keefe, Lazaro Gomez Carriles, Julian Schnabel. Cinematographers Xavier Perez Grobet, Guillermo Rosas. Editor Michael Berenbaum. Costumes Mariestela Fernandez. Music Carter Burwell. Production design Salvador Parra. Running time: 2 hours, 5 minutes.

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