Banderas and Me

I have watched the day slowly expire, the sunlight flickering off the "Big Fish, Little Fish" pet shop and Celtic bookstore across the street, pinks and reds from out of the bottom corner of my window.  

For the last 24 hours since I got back from New York, I have become a hermit.  Not that I'm short on adventure.  Going to the basement for laundry was like journeying through the roots of an enchanted tree to a dungeon of discarded mattresses and arachnid kingdoms.  I am surrounded by maps, left by the previous occupant, so I do still know the world exists.  And also that it is flat.  (Thank you Thomas Friedman, you sly bastard). 

Just perched for hours this evening whittling away my time, procrastinating and turning my brain into jelly, looking at a screen, remembering my day--how I wandered over to Emerson this morning, just to catch that old-time undergraduate buzz.  

You know what I mean: Giganto boxes of nametags!  Folders with superfluous information!  Parents, in full pre-empty-nest frenzy, hovering and shoveling out wads of cash with wild abandon!  Purple smocked teenagers with headsets and dopey grins dancing to Kelly Clarkston outside the bookstore!   How old I felt.

Which has brought me to my main point: which is my anger at offensive Anglo adaptations of brilliant Latin American books.  

Random?  Nay.  You knew where you were going with this.  That's cause I'm writing in a pyramid: intro, thesis--I was no fool in 11th grade English.  

Actually, I'm a hypocrite.  Confined to English translations.  But that won't stop me!  (And don't let it stop you, there's candy at the end of this page).

You see, I just finished Isabel Allende's "The House of the Spirits."

Isabel was Salvador Allende's niece, so she has a unique stake in 20th Century Chile.  More than that, she's an amazing writer.  Her book spans more than four generations and encompasses a country's history with clarity and compassion.

And complexity.  The tragic characters are redeemable.  There are no clear villains--not even the sociopathic Esteban Garcia, himself a product of injustice and violence.  You read and read and read and then suddenly realize with amazement how deep and intricate the story is.

So when I found out that they made a movie in 1993 with, whoopee, an "all-star cast," I was intrigued.  It turns out, with a little patience, you can watch the whole thing on youtube.  

And that's when I noticed something... amiss.  That is, the watching part.

You see, for whatever reason (perhaps because she is called "Blanca," and her skin is so WHITE), they cast WINONA RYDER as a bizarre combination of the daughter and the granddaughter characters from the book, when one would be a stretch...

Then you have Jeremy Irons Senator Trueba, the patriarch of the family whose fatal flaw is his uncontrollable rage and inability to see the truth.  Now I love "Jeremy's Iron" as much as the next gal, but for once his pensive physique and rich, polished mahogany accent just felt... out of place?  Not to mention that the scenery resembled sweeping epics set in Italy.

Throughout the book, Trueba grows smaller, as part of his sister's curse.  I wondered how details like this would translate visually... After all, we don't know whether Trueba is REALLY going from grape to raisin, or if it's just the result of the knowledge he holds inside of how tyrannical he's been to his family.  

But none of this turns out to matter.

As Irons ages 50 years, you pretty much get the standard white wig, exaggerated wrinkle-paint and crotchety gum-flapping stereotype.  Which I think basically sums up the level of creative vision throughout.

Speaking of stereotypes, the most bizarre offense is how they cast all American/British actors--Meryl Streep, Glenn Close, etc--for the main family, but characters like the whore or the bad guy go to people with these weird exaggerated foreign ("Spanglish" anyone?) accents.  

Which brings me to the sultry forbidden lover.  Who else could be up for the task than, how do you say it, ah yes!, Antonio Banderas (guitar solo).  Who in the 90s was basically the entirety of Hollywood's "Latino" casting pool.

Oh, and they cut out the two brothers, Jaime and Nicolas, who are key in the book's plot.  But blah blah, we'll be here all night.

Each scene seems to be missing something, and that something is understanding.  It's true that probably no movie adaptation would ever meet my standards, but a director with real vision could have cut through such a giant hunk of work to at least extract the most essential pieces... 

And what's my point, other than that I just spent an hour of my life scanning through youtube clips to make myself angry?  Well, that will have to wait for another night.  There is far too much speghetti to be boiled, far too many suitcases to collect dust on my floor.

Goodnight.