Pain and Glory

Grade: C

My favorite part of Pedro Almodovar’s film Pain and Glory was the last part of the final shot. There is a delicious, fun, clever twist. I could reveal it here, as it ultimately doesn’t matter whether it was there or not, because it doesn’t change what came before. I’ll just say I’ve literally never seen this narrative tool in a movie before. I almost want to tell you, so you won’t have to sit through the film to see it. It’s a pity it wasn’t in a better one.

Close to the beginning, the protagonist – a film director played by Antonio Banderas – runs us through all the physical and mental ailments he suffers from. As debilitating as they sound, we see little to no evidence of the toll it should be taking on him.

I want to talk about the English subtitles. Many of them were like bad Google Translate jobs. Making a running list of my favorites helped me through the episodic tedium that was this movie.

“I thought we never arrived.”
“In the movies of my childhood always smells like pee.”
“The headache, has it been removed?”
“Hey, is there going to be a conversation?”
“I can help you with something?”
“There is not a single day that does not think about it.”
“Are you not going to drink the milk? You have to do to take it.”

Banderas is fine, but I am surprised by his Best Actor Oscar nomination. He at least shows us he is capable of work like this, and I am looking forward to his receiving more Oscar nods for films better than Pain and Glory. It’s very one-note, and the note is a soft, bland one. There’s a few nice individual moments, but just sat there for me, without really amounting to anything in the end. It is somehow nominated for Best International Feature Film, with the likes of Parasite, which is a bewilderingly brilliant movie – one of my favorites of the past decade. I urge you to see it instead of this. Am I broken? What have I missed here? Hey, is there going to be a conversation?

Grade: C