I happened to see only two movies in the month of August, and both starred Penelope Cruz. The first is Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona features Cruz as Maria Elena, the hothead, unstable ex-wife of Juan Antonio (Javier Bardem), the “enlightened” Spanish painter at the center of everyone’s sexual fantasies and realities as he gets between the titular two American friends, played by Rebecca Hall and Scarlett Johannson, on their summer trip to Barcelona. The second is Elegy, which features Cruz as Consuela, a grad student who falls for her much older professor, played by Ben Kingsley, and explores age and perceptions in sex and love.
The week I saw Vicky Cristina, I also caught Cruz on The Late Show With David Letterman. Cruz mentioned she’d just wrapped a Pedro Almodovar movie in Madrid and was exhausted touring the states doing promotions for her two movies. In fact at the time, I hadn’t even heard about Elegy, and now, a month into its release, I doubt I would’ve heard of it at all except for a rave review by Owen Gleiberman that sent me scrambling to the Seven Gables on 50th. I figured Vicky Cristina and whatever the Almodovar movie she’s completed were the movies she was promoting.
Vicky Cristina Barcelona has sort of gotten good reviews – you can tell because of the Woody Allen movies the reviews compare it to. It’s like Match Point says Variety, like Small Time Crooks (meaning, a screwball mixed bag) says The Village Voice, like Bullets Over Broadway and Sweet and Lowdown (meaning “funny!”) says The Baltimore Sun, and totally unlike Annie Hall and Crimes and Misdemeanors says Salon. Some dismiss it, some find things to enjoy – probably none love it all that much, which makes some sense.
It’s Allen’s biggest diss to American sensibilities of all of his recent European movies – in the movie, Cristina (Johannsson) finds herself wandering into a happy, Spanish hippie polyamorous relationship with Cruz and Bardem while Hall finds herself stuck with a successful Upper East Side real-estate yuppie who plays bridge and lunches with boring colleagues.
But something does work about Vicky Cristina – and that something is Cruz. Bardem has gotten some deserving good reviews for the movie, and so has Hall, but every time the movie zips, it’s because of what Cruz brings to it – the movie is ostensibly about Hall’s sensible Hall and her friendship with wild Cristina, but the wild one you truly believe in is Maria Elena – played by Cruz with total abandon, from her hair that looks like it’s never seen a brush to her Amazonian stalking of a painting canvas. Vicky Cristina should be Allen’s most thinly veiled free-love manifesto, but with Cruz at the helm of its “European” retro-sixties sensibilities, it feels alive and unpredictable.
That’s because Vicky Cristina Barcelona, like Elegy, is a better movie because Penelope Cruz is in it. The truth is, most movies with Penelope Cruz are better movies because Penelope Cruz is in them. How did this happen? Cruz became popular in America, if you can recall, not because of a film role necessarily, but because of a very pretty blue, Oscar De La Renta dress at the 2000 Academy Awards. She had starred (beautifully) as a pregnant, HIV-positive nun in Almodovar’s All About My Mother, and presented Almodovar with the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film that year. She wore a tight, periwinkle dress and suddenly seemed to be dating Tom Cruise. Cameron Crowe immediately tapped her to play an American version of a Spanish role she’d created in his Open Your Eyes remake Vanilla Sky, which would eventually be seen as mostly unsuccessful.
Looking at her film credits since ostensibly becoming well-known 8 years ago, before her Oscar-nominated turn in 2006 with Almodovar’s Volver, her movies fall into two categories – forgettable flops like Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, Waking Up In Reno, Head in the Clouds, or Gothika; and flops that are memorable only because of the notoriety of how massive their failures were like Sahara, All The Pretty Horses, or Masked and Anonymous. One credit I’m skipping is perhaps her most famous American role – as Johnny Depp’s shrill cokehead wife in Blow, a widely derided movie at the time that earned her a Razzie Nomination for Worst Actress.
Blow has been resurrected by college-aged male movie lovers that enjoy seeing coke consumption and hot women on screen, but it still is, in all honesty, not a particularly memorable movie either. However, it too is a better movie because of Cruz. I remember at the time people discussing how obnoxious she was in her role, but I think that is Cruz’s success in the movie – with total abandon, she inhabits a shrill and obnoxious character. Her hair too flies around wildly until it’s chopped off in a masculine ‘do at the end of the movie (much like it is in Elegy, when she’s tamed a bit, too).
I’d like to say I called it then, and apparently it worked – amongst all those flops, Cruz became a major star. Maybe, movie dorks like myself that caught her, briefly, as a trash-talking woman giving birth on a bus to Javier Bardem's rival in Almodovar’s Live Flesh in 1996 knew she’d be this famous, but I doubt it – I truly think as good as she was in Flesh and All About My Mother, it was that fearless turn in Blow that did it, and since then, she’s made one bad casting choice after another, only to have them not matter that much.
Elegy is even less successful right now than Vicky Cristina Barcelona, but it proves how incredible Cruz can be. Ostensibly, her Consuela is the opposite of Maria Elena – proper, reserved, hair in a geometrically precise shoulder-length cut with uniform bangs, wandering around in a school-girl outfit. Her character is supposed to be somewhat “invisible” to Kingsley’s David Kepesh, as he is so consumed by the idea that a beautiful woman could love anyone his age. Indeed she is a mystery to him, and to us, but as played with the sincere, piercing dark eyes of Cruz, she is a full bodied idea of gorgeous curiosity and life, a woman mostly unaware of how beautiful she is internally and externally, but rather competent and wonderful anyway.
Kingsley is excellent too, but without Cruz in this role, I don’t believe Elegy would have the outstanding power that it has. I won’t ruin where it takes Cruz’s Consuela, but I will say that she is given, towards the end of the movie, a deeply wounding scene involving an unguarded, naked photo session (Cruz has the rare distinction of being an object of obsession in dark rooms in both movies – she certainly does photograph well). The scene shows the extremes of Cruz’s talent – an unabashedly carnal performer with the ability to catch a viewer off guard through vulnerability and honesty, her sexuality emerging simultaneously with emotions and needs that crave and overwhelm.
Cruz made so many bad casting choices over the years it makes sense that she was due to make a few great choices to show off just what she can do, but it may have also been that movies were looking for any “Hot, wild, mysterious Spanish woman” roles that could possibly reign in the vivacity she was displaying anyway. What makes Cruz continue to be so exciting as a celebrity is wondering just when we’ll get to see that side of her personality reigned into a movie worth watching – I was lucky to find out that that’s happening twice, right now.
The week I saw Vicky Cristina, I also caught Cruz on The Late Show With David Letterman. Cruz mentioned she’d just wrapped a Pedro Almodovar movie in Madrid and was exhausted touring the states doing promotions for her two movies. In fact at the time, I hadn’t even heard about Elegy, and now, a month into its release, I doubt I would’ve heard of it at all except for a rave review by Owen Gleiberman that sent me scrambling to the Seven Gables on 50th. I figured Vicky Cristina and whatever the Almodovar movie she’s completed were the movies she was promoting.
Vicky Cristina Barcelona has sort of gotten good reviews – you can tell because of the Woody Allen movies the reviews compare it to. It’s like Match Point says Variety, like Small Time Crooks (meaning, a screwball mixed bag) says The Village Voice, like Bullets Over Broadway and Sweet and Lowdown (meaning “funny!”) says The Baltimore Sun, and totally unlike Annie Hall and Crimes and Misdemeanors says Salon. Some dismiss it, some find things to enjoy – probably none love it all that much, which makes some sense.
It’s Allen’s biggest diss to American sensibilities of all of his recent European movies – in the movie, Cristina (Johannsson) finds herself wandering into a happy, Spanish hippie polyamorous relationship with Cruz and Bardem while Hall finds herself stuck with a successful Upper East Side real-estate yuppie who plays bridge and lunches with boring colleagues.
But something does work about Vicky Cristina – and that something is Cruz. Bardem has gotten some deserving good reviews for the movie, and so has Hall, but every time the movie zips, it’s because of what Cruz brings to it – the movie is ostensibly about Hall’s sensible Hall and her friendship with wild Cristina, but the wild one you truly believe in is Maria Elena – played by Cruz with total abandon, from her hair that looks like it’s never seen a brush to her Amazonian stalking of a painting canvas. Vicky Cristina should be Allen’s most thinly veiled free-love manifesto, but with Cruz at the helm of its “European” retro-sixties sensibilities, it feels alive and unpredictable.
That’s because Vicky Cristina Barcelona, like Elegy, is a better movie because Penelope Cruz is in it. The truth is, most movies with Penelope Cruz are better movies because Penelope Cruz is in them. How did this happen? Cruz became popular in America, if you can recall, not because of a film role necessarily, but because of a very pretty blue, Oscar De La Renta dress at the 2000 Academy Awards. She had starred (beautifully) as a pregnant, HIV-positive nun in Almodovar’s All About My Mother, and presented Almodovar with the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film that year. She wore a tight, periwinkle dress and suddenly seemed to be dating Tom Cruise. Cameron Crowe immediately tapped her to play an American version of a Spanish role she’d created in his Open Your Eyes remake Vanilla Sky, which would eventually be seen as mostly unsuccessful.
Looking at her film credits since ostensibly becoming well-known 8 years ago, before her Oscar-nominated turn in 2006 with Almodovar’s Volver, her movies fall into two categories – forgettable flops like Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, Waking Up In Reno, Head in the Clouds, or Gothika; and flops that are memorable only because of the notoriety of how massive their failures were like Sahara, All The Pretty Horses, or Masked and Anonymous. One credit I’m skipping is perhaps her most famous American role – as Johnny Depp’s shrill cokehead wife in Blow, a widely derided movie at the time that earned her a Razzie Nomination for Worst Actress.
Blow has been resurrected by college-aged male movie lovers that enjoy seeing coke consumption and hot women on screen, but it still is, in all honesty, not a particularly memorable movie either. However, it too is a better movie because of Cruz. I remember at the time people discussing how obnoxious she was in her role, but I think that is Cruz’s success in the movie – with total abandon, she inhabits a shrill and obnoxious character. Her hair too flies around wildly until it’s chopped off in a masculine ‘do at the end of the movie (much like it is in Elegy, when she’s tamed a bit, too).
I’d like to say I called it then, and apparently it worked – amongst all those flops, Cruz became a major star. Maybe, movie dorks like myself that caught her, briefly, as a trash-talking woman giving birth on a bus to Javier Bardem's rival in Almodovar’s Live Flesh in 1996 knew she’d be this famous, but I doubt it – I truly think as good as she was in Flesh and All About My Mother, it was that fearless turn in Blow that did it, and since then, she’s made one bad casting choice after another, only to have them not matter that much.
Elegy is even less successful right now than Vicky Cristina Barcelona, but it proves how incredible Cruz can be. Ostensibly, her Consuela is the opposite of Maria Elena – proper, reserved, hair in a geometrically precise shoulder-length cut with uniform bangs, wandering around in a school-girl outfit. Her character is supposed to be somewhat “invisible” to Kingsley’s David Kepesh, as he is so consumed by the idea that a beautiful woman could love anyone his age. Indeed she is a mystery to him, and to us, but as played with the sincere, piercing dark eyes of Cruz, she is a full bodied idea of gorgeous curiosity and life, a woman mostly unaware of how beautiful she is internally and externally, but rather competent and wonderful anyway.
Kingsley is excellent too, but without Cruz in this role, I don’t believe Elegy would have the outstanding power that it has. I won’t ruin where it takes Cruz’s Consuela, but I will say that she is given, towards the end of the movie, a deeply wounding scene involving an unguarded, naked photo session (Cruz has the rare distinction of being an object of obsession in dark rooms in both movies – she certainly does photograph well). The scene shows the extremes of Cruz’s talent – an unabashedly carnal performer with the ability to catch a viewer off guard through vulnerability and honesty, her sexuality emerging simultaneously with emotions and needs that crave and overwhelm.
Cruz made so many bad casting choices over the years it makes sense that she was due to make a few great choices to show off just what she can do, but it may have also been that movies were looking for any “Hot, wild, mysterious Spanish woman” roles that could possibly reign in the vivacity she was displaying anyway. What makes Cruz continue to be so exciting as a celebrity is wondering just when we’ll get to see that side of her personality reigned into a movie worth watching – I was lucky to find out that that’s happening twice, right now.
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