Recencies van critici

Ultimately, Larraín's approach feels far too redundant. The director stacks the deck against Oscar just so he can watch the young man go from one kind of zealot to another, and provide his gluttonous hero with even more worship.

Proof, as if any was needed, that art needn't lose an ounce of its power to its steadfast political conviction. That the two may enrich and empower each other and create something unforgettably human and poetic. Overshadowed by now by its more famous cousin, this is the Larraín film all others should be judged against, though he hasn't yet made a bad or dishonest film. It is as hopeful and tastily byzantine as Tony Manero was bleak and uncomplicated.

As the left-wing son of right-wing parents, Larrain is no stranger to irony or complexity. Neruda doesn't merely unpacks the idea of the hero as saint; it dismisses the whole notion of an integrated personality. Yet if Larrain never saw a facile myth he didn't love to dismantle, he's no cynic either in this tough, tender portrait of a man, at once an opportunist and an idealist, with Chile's best and worst selves duking it out inside and around him.

Likely, Neruda is supposed to be more myth than man at this point, but the abject terror on García Bernal's face is nothing short of ridiculous—I burst out laughing. The real trouble is that Neruda is never regarded as anything but a figure of mythic status by his allies.

The point of it all being that history and poetry are not possible without personified antimonies, real or imagined. "Neruda" does not make this point in any particularly convincing way, despite excellent performances by Luis Gnecco as the title character, a stolid Gael Garcia Bernal as his pursuer, and Mercedes Morán as Delia. "Neruda" is, like all the Larrain films I've seen, laudable in its ambitions and ultimately unsatisfying in its execution.

In the tradition of Haynes and Whitman, Larraín finds the best view of the poet isn't head-on, but refracted. He shows us the politician directly but the poet in a mirror. That mirror image is the other half of the chase, the made-up detective who's the heart and soul of the film.

As a thriller of politics and poetry, and as a study of an unlikely symbiotic relationship, Neruda certainly has its felicities, but throughout Larraín and Calderón prove all too eager to point out the sheer artifice of their endeavor... After a while, it's hard to shake the impression that Neruda might've been better served as the very type of movie that Larraín seems so strenuously opposed to making: a conventional historical narrative.

While its tricksiness may set some viewers' teeth on edge, it's a film that's very congruent with a tradition of self-reflexiveness in Latin American literary fiction. Think of it not as a movie about Pablo Neruda, but as an experimental novel masquerading as a movie about Neruda, and this film begins to make a bold, perverse kind of sense.

It's more than a cool idea for a biopic. It exercises the notion of using art not to flatter but to investigate... The film is meta-sorta-fiction, always calling attention to its own artificiality. But its sincere about wanting to do the impossible: understand, perhaps even forgive, someone who stands for everything you stand against.

Neruda is ultimately a very different film than Jackie, and arguably the bolder of the two. Its palette is darker, even as its sensibility is less somber, more playful... Rather than having characters merely talk about the distinction between grim reality and expedient myth, this film builds that distinction into its very structure, giving Neruda a fictional antagonist ostensibly invented by Neruda himself. It's a thriller in which the thrills are manufactured, and everybody on screen knows it.

Although informed by the busy workings of history, politics and personal affairs, "Neruda" proceeds like a light-footed chase thriller filtered through an episode of "The Twilight Zone," by the end of which the audience is lost in a crazily spiraling meta-narrative. Who exactly is the star and author of that narrative is one of the film's more enticing mysteries.

Bernal, swallowed by his fedora and his 1940s suit, becomes a character written by Neruda in this magical-realist fable reminiscent of the weirder, less accommodating films of Raúl Ruiz. Sometimes Neruda beautifies fascism in a nostalgic glow of tertiary color the way The Conformist did, sometimes it uglifies it along the lines of Cronenberg's version of Naked Lunch. It brings to the cinema the kind of literary biography that traces only a short period in its subject's life.