2019 Muriel Awards: Best Lead Performance - #2

“The young Antonio Banderas who appeared in five Pedro Almodovar films between 1982 and 1989 was all ardor. In that first great wave of movies, Almodovar, his head filled with glamorous Hollywood movies and fantasies about how to push their swooniest romantic conceits into midnight-movie territory, was taken with the idea of the stalker-rapist as romantic hero: the man whose desire burns so bright that it cannot be denied, to whom laws and the word ‘no’ do not apply. This idea always had the potential to just be gross, but in Banderas, Almodovar found the perfect actor to embody his transgressive ideal. In such movies as Matador and Law of Desire, Banderas often looked as if he were crucified on his own boyish handsomeness. He wants his objects of desire to take him and his passion seriously, but he’s a callow pretty boy in a culture that prizes experience and virility. In Matador, the confident young woman he’s obsessed with looks at him with pure contempt not because he’s tried to rape her, but because he’s so terrible at it.

“When Banderas went off to Hollywood to seek his fortune, he couldn’t bring that level of smoldering ardor to most of the movies he was in. If he’d looked at Tom Hanks in Philadelphia the way he’d looked at his co-stars in Almodovar’s movies, the multiplex theaters would have buckled. He compensated by channeling all that passionate emotion into sheer physical exuberance, giving performances that streaked by like lightning and might be summed up by one gesture that was half operatic, half slapstick, like the moment in Four Rooms where he plants a hot kiss on Tamlyn Tomita while kicking the button to close the elevator door. It makes sense that Banderas would return to Almodovar’s orbit to play the director’s surrogate in a story about a once-fashionable filmmaker who thinks his best years are behind him. Pain and Glory is a story about the passage of time, and the ravages of time have a special resonance when they happen to pretty boys and acrobats.

“Banderas’s movie past enriches his character here, but that wouldn’t be enough by itself to match the scale Almodovar is reaching for. (The original movie Zorro, Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., attempted something similar in his last film, The Private Life of Don Juan, and without his customary swashbuckling flamboyance was reduced to an amiable hole in the screen.) As an actor, Banderas has often used his acrobatic dancer’s grace and energy to illuminate, and sometimes satirize, the hearts of his characters. In Pain and Glory, playing a man whose physical and spiritual pain has robbed him of the impulse to move, he channels a remarkable degree of energy and concentration into the blocked hero’s inertia, suggesting so much inner life that you can believe it would be tragic if he really never got out of bed and made another movie.

“Banderas cuts such a striking figure in the first shot of him, sitting nearly naked at the bottom of a swimming pool, that the movie instantly makes a viewer feel its themes---which are the pain of feeling what the middle-aged hero has lost, but also the glory, and beauty, of what he has attained in his maturity, and the possibility of more glories to come if he can move past his personal pity party. The movie, and the performance that anchors it, represent a triumph over sentimental self-pity.” ~ Phil Dyess-Nugent