Now that the Emilia Pérez Oscar campaign has turned into a tire fire, the foreign film to watch in the Oscar race is probably I’m Still Here, the Brazilian entry that got nominated for Best Picture, Best Actress, and Best International Feature just like Emilia did. It opened this past weekend in some of our multiplexes, it has a director with an Oscar history (Walter Salles previously made Central Station), and it’s politically conscious in ways that resonate with both history and today’s climate. Unfortunately, with all that, I’m afraid it’s not that exciting.
The story begins in December 1970, when Brazil’s U.S.-backed military dictatorship starts cracking down on any forms of dissent. In Rio de Janeiro, Rubens Paiva (Selton Mello) is a former congressman who has left politics behind to take a job as a civil engineer. He spends most of his free time designing a bigger house for his family, but he’s never too occupied to go to the beach or play a game of foosball with one of his five kids. However, shortly after Christmas, some armed guys in civilian clothes enter his home and take him away to give a deposition. No one ever sees him again.
This movie is based on a biography by Marcelo Rubens Paiva, the only son of Rubens Paiva who grew up to become one of Brazil’s most celebrated writers. Rather than pulling back for a panoramic view of Brazil’s history, the film focuses on how the father’s disappearance affects this one family. The Paivas discreetly send their oldest daughter (Valentina Herszage) away to college in London because her political activities might land her in trouble, but they brush off the warnings of their friends who have fled the country. When the movie starts, middle kid Marcelo (Guilherme Silveira) finds a stray dog on the beach, and his biggest concern is convincing his parents to let him keep it. Later, when the dog barks repeatedly at the undercover cops who are staking out the Paiva home, the police kill the dog in front of the house.
That last bit demonstrates the movie’s effectiveness at using its little-picture viewpoint to draw a portrait of life under a dictatorship. Having said that, a dose of big-picture detail might have been good for the film. We aren’t informed that Brazil’s military junta was wildly popular with its people because it presided over great economic growth, or that it lost favor only when the economy collapsed.
As Rubens’ wife Eunice, Fernanda Torres does much to hold the movie together. Eunice is thrown in jail for 12 days, deprived of food and communication with her family and her lawyer, and questioned endlessly about Rubens’ connections with communists. Torres’ quiet performance nevertheless shows you how this docile, well-to-do housewife is radicalized by the experience. Of course, her daughters have something to do with her evolution as well, as the older ones yell at her for hiding information from them and not standing up for herself. She emerges as the hero who learns how to manage the family finances and goes back to school at age 48 to become an advocate for the country’s indigenous populations. More than that, she simply refuses to let her husband’s murder rest, filing motions and giving interviews until a new government finally capitulates 25 years later.
I’m sad to say Salles botches the ending. He spends most of the movie steadying the ship, but his social conscience consistently shackles his imagination in Central Station, The Motorcycle Diaries, and On the Road. (Only in his 2005 Hollywood remake of Dark Water did he let himself get weird.) Here we lack any sense of trauma echoing down the generations and shaping the Paiva children into the adults they become. All we get is a bland press statement delivered by the grown-up Marcelo (Antonio Saboia). The film’s fellow Oscar nominee The Seed of the Sacred Fig covers this ground more urgently and passionately. For that matter, so does The Official Story, the Argentinian film about forced disappearances that won the Oscar 39 years ago. I’m Still Here has some helpful stuff to say about living under a government that employs anonymous thugs and gives them immunity for whatever they do. On an intellectual level, it connects. It just feels too much like a history lesson.
I’m Still Here
Starring Fernanda Torres. Directed by Walter Salles. Written by Murilo Hauser and Heitor Lorega, based on Marcelo Rubens Paiva’s biography. Rated PG-13.
