HOUSE OF THE SPIRITS
A film review by Ralph Benner
Copyright 1996 Ralph Benner
No first novel since Harper Lee's TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD has moved me more deeply than Isabel Allende's THE HOUSE OF THE SPIRITS. For days after completing it, I wondered why: among the legion of international readers overwhelmed, I too was dizzied by the swirling romanticism, stoned on the superbly crafted interweaving of close family observation and political raison d'etre -- the most educated of Latin American countries succumbing to the historic inevitability of fascism. But why were there these waves of emotions every so often that crushed me? Why did I suddenly, frequently start welling up, even before the ending? In a word -- Barrabas. Cynics might describe the use of Clara the Clairvoyant's dog as manipulative, and if a reader has never been attached to a pet of any kind, shrugging off his importance isn't only easy, it's fatal to one's receptiveness: Barrabas isn't the center of this sprawling yet intimate epic of the Trueba family, but he is its spiritual symbol. Barrabas, more than celestial Clara, rises from the ashes of ruin.
THE HOUSE OF THE SPIRITS has been compared to Nobel prize winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez's ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE, about a Colombian family named the Buendias and through which Garcia Marquez turns a century's worth of the ordinary and the solitude of their lives into "magic realism." For nearly four decades Latin American novelists, short story tellers and poets who have employed this legerdemain as genre have been the rage among the literati, who have exalted to the most high Garcia Marquez as its master, sometimes without acknowledging that Jorge Luis Borges's A UNIVERSAL HISTORY OF INFAMY carpet rides through Garcia Marquez's most famous work. The smart set doesn't remind us, either, that Cuban novelists Alejo Carpentier, with his THE LOST STEPS, and Jose Lezama Lima, with his PARADISO and Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa were the early laborers-keepers of the path Borges helped explore. There's scarce mention of the first Latin American ever to win the Nobel for literature, Chilean Gabriela Mistral, for her passionately spiritual poetry, and, having become her protege and subsequent winner of the coveted prize, even rarer tribute to Pablo Neruda, whose poems established him as first a symbolist, then surrealist, finally a realist. The same mostly Latin intellectuals, who shower acclaim on Manuel Puig's melodramatics like the fraudulent KISS OF THE SPIDER WOMAN, genuflect to Carlos Fuentes, fake an understanding of Borges's avant garde puzzle making, mention rather cursorily Isabel Allende, as if not to would be the larger crime than not giving her the praise she so justly earns for THE HOUSE OF THE SPIRITS. The reticence may be the result of how machismo has for long governed the established dictates of Latin protocol: the weaker vessel as novelist is not thought to be worthy of serious consideration. Shortly into the first chapters of THE HOUSE OF THE SPIRITS, we're not only hooked, we're in the presence of a writer so graceful and enveloping that how could we be anything but in awe over how, borrowing from Garcia Marquez's metier, she enlarges the experience of a magical mystery tour by breaking our hearts and at the same time fill us with joy? The feeling derived is similar to a comment Neruda made about his most widely read book TWENTY LOVE POEMS AND A SONG OF DESPAIR: "By some miracle which I do not understand, this tormented book has opened the road to happiness for many, many people." ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE might have drown of incredulity had Garcia Marquez not been an alchemist swimmer -- a virtuoso who strokes words into pieces of the hidden St. Joseph's gold and make them, despite the surrounding sea of detail, "glow like embers in the darkness." The lava-like rush that comes at the conclusion of his novel would have been more impacting than it is had, one, he not foreshadowed the storm (one of those irritating genre traits), and two, had he a real or reader-felt emotional investment in his characters and not his technique of transmutation. His is a wondrous, flabbergasting achievement but a queerly cold-blooded "fervor for the written word (as) an interweaving of solemn respect and gossipy irreverence." Allende's a loving tribute to Garcia Marquez, yet, as if using her skills as a long time journalist to dissect and discover what was left wanting of ONE HUNDRED YEARS, an emotional blockbuster. She does the impossible: we glide effortlessly through her entrancing, precisioned prose -- we're never in danger of sinking to her near-bottomless pit of itemization. We're not weighed down by the hocus pocus Garcia Marquez sometimes infuriates with -- like Remedios the Beauty's ascent to heaven without a follow-up (readers wanted a news flash about Heaven) or his pair of doomed lovers fornicating in muriatic acid. And we don't lose our patience as we came close to doing with Garcia Marquez's exasperating repetition of genealogical nomenclature (which required of me twenty pages of notes just to keep track of) or risk tolerance with her like some of us did over the insanity of Puig's belief that it's acceptable to make a heroine out of gay man by sacrificing himself as something or someone he's not, and never was. (Puig's Molina is really a candidate for transsexuality.) With Allende, we reel in a high with no after-effects: she's not only penning a quixotic diary-romance within the realities of Chile's tragedy -- her slain uncle Salvador Allende is here, as well as Neruda, who, as the Chilean Ambassador to France, lost his life during the early stages of the Pinochet coup -- but she's also taking us on an exhilarating journey to the heart of egalitarianism, a doctrine that will be used again in the EVA LUNA stories and her first novel on America, the touristy THE INFINITE PLAN.
As we get deep into Allende's slightly autobiographical novel and come across Clara, her twin boys, daughter Blanca, granddaughter Alba, the "Mora Sisters, the Rosicrucians, the Theosophists, the telepathists, the rainmakers, the peripatetics," we're positive they'd all be perfectly at home in Garcia Marquez's Macondo. Early in HOUSE Allende mocks a priest's visions of hell and damnation through Clara's one-liner, while Garcia Marquez has a priest failing to attract people to his church by using levitation (and one of the many Jose Arcadio Buendias tries to answer the question of the existence of God by attempting to photograph him); in HOUSE there's a builder of animal-based crŠches, in ONE HUNDRED YEARS a maker of little fish; both books have characters who ethereally wander. If Allende's book dedication is any measure, however, I'd postulate she might have been more feministly influenced by Humberto Sol s's 1968 movie epic of Cuban independence, LUCIA, a trilogy of political epochs told from the point of view of three women named the same. And perhaps shaded her novel with factually-based realism out of Patricio Guzman's documentary THE BATTLE OF CHILE. Both of these films tend to expose their explicit political themes: LUCIA tries, with one part delirium, one part melancholy, one part demagogic sexism, to applaud Communism, Castro-style, but what it ends up as is a celebration of true freedom; despite the mandatory exclamation points as virtues of Communism, LUCIA subversively reveals the folly of a bankrupt system by bringing to the surface emotions and sex that betray the very intentions aimed for. And though THE BATTLE OF CHILE seems to have the heaven-sent imprimatur of the dead first Marxist-Socialist president of Chile, by the time it's over, we're fairly sure that any attempt-experiment to enforce Marxism through constitutional law is an unenforceable contradiction. Allende's novel has the feel of an artful polemic, too, but she's a humanitarian foremost; skirting definitive failure and blame, she allows her uncle to escape severe excoriation by more than suggesting his administration was maligned not only by the Conservatives and the military, with assistance from Nixon and Kissinger (we had ships off the coast of Chile during the coup), but also by the huge influx of naive, inexperienced socialist reformers who knew not the ways to navigate and manipulate the otherwise paralyzing labyrinth of bureaucracy. As with LUCIA, Allende frames her women as victims of cultural traps. This pitfall as trait -- building a political and life style base out of pumped-up pride and sexual prowess that is so very distinctive in Latin countries -- is part of the basis that makes machismo the most dangerously attractive of all isms. Those experiences with Latin men, like the women in LUCIA, ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE and THE HOUSE OF THE SPIRITS, would I think agree there's little that's more demonic or demagogic than Latin machismo and the worship of it gone amuck.
This kind of worship tends to discourage equality movements and dampen convictions and helps create a void shrouded by premonition: In ONE HUNDRED YEARS, Garcia Marquez flirts with the "insomnia plague," which, until there's an arrival of antidote, causes the residents of Macondo to forget everything -- even forget that they're forgetting. (A bit like Borges' A THEOLOGIAN IN DEATH.) Readers wait for the plague to be used as a metaphor for what V.S. Naipaul, in his THE RETURN OF EVA PERON, wrote of Argentina: "A country where government has never been open and intellectual resources are scant, the rhetoric of the regime is usually all that survives to explain it. Argentina has the apparatus of an educated, open society. There are newspapers and magazines and universities and publishing houses; there is even a film industry. But the country has as yet no idea of itself. Streets and avenues are named after presidents and generals, but there is no art of historical (and critical) analysis; there is no art of biography. There is legend and antiquarian romance, but no real history." In describing Macondo's banana workers' rebellion that saw three thousand killed and dumped in the sea and later covered up not only by the government but also by all but three of Macondo's residents, and in the novel's very last sentences, Garcia Marquez confirms that denying realities and human rights means being repeatedly condemned to oppression. As Michael Wood's SWEAT OF THE SUN, TEARS OF THE MOON likewise attests, in Latin America this seemingly inherited forgetfulness springs forth the plague of the legacy of Bolivarian machismo -- a fatalism that ensures fascism. (America has its own fascist plague -- the WRWC, the White Right Wing Christers.)
If you either read the novel and weren't caught up in Allende's spell, or didn't read it, you'll most probably dislike Bille August's adaptation of THE HOUSE OF THE SPIRITS, perhaps intensely: he's neither magician nor sensualist and one and preferably both are sine qua non. If, however, you're among those overwhelmed by the novel, then the movie will be like a refresher course; watching it, even with its changes, the original story comes flooding back. That is both praise and caution: Bille August and his too extraordinary cast have given us a labor of love, and no lover of the book could deem it less charitably; the concern is that the big Anglo names, who worked for next-to-nothing salaries in order to help secure the financing, might displace Allende's intimate epic on Chile and become, more or less, guest victimas -- a Juicio en Santiago. There is a risky element of the trickster as we watch August roll out Jeremy Irons, Vanessa Redgrave, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Glenn Close, and, most apparent, Meryl Streep. Some of us even felt fear: that the cast would generate derision, and in pre-release screenings howls from detractors erupted, especially with Irons' flattened, tongue-twisted accent and Streep being at a minimum two decades too old to play a young Clara the Clairvoyant. It's common knowledge that Garcia Marquez has forbade any discussion of ONE HUNDRED YEARS as movie, and it's been reported that he'd release LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA only to a Latin American movie maker. (He had a Latin direct a handful of his own screenplays, including OLD MAN WITH ENORMOUS WING, THE SUMMER OF MISS FORBES with Hanna Schygulla, and I'M THE ONE YOU'RE LOOKING FOR, which had the most promise: about a rape victim seeking out her attacker, only to discover that what she wishes retribution for is what she wants, it lacks the delirious lust that drives such obsessions.) The carpers are saying that, at the least, a Latin should have filmed THE HOUSE OF THE SPIRITS, because, they bitch, how can Irons, Streep, Close, Redgrave, Ryder pose as Chileans when they're unquestionably WASPy and the director's a milky white, frosty Dane? Some of the reviewers are balking that the movie doesn't even look South American. In a desperate ploy to gain audience share, Miramax is printing in full Janet Maslin's favorable N.Y. Times review, yet in it she says that purists should beware: the movie does "not retain the flavor of Allende's setting, which here seems oddly European at times." Nescience knows no bounds: Santiago, like Buenos Aires, was, and remains largely, a carbon copy of a European capital. My travel agent hit it on the head when he said of B.A.: "It's Vienna on a bad day." If it weren't for the co-mingling of Indian-blooded, often serape-clad South Americans in these cities, you'd swear the city dwellers were European. Because so many, especially the ruling class, are of European blood, they see themselves as Europeans first -- as does the patriarch of the Trueba family -- and Latin second. (Colombian Garcia Marquez looks Barcelonian; the late Puig resembled a bit the late Borges, whom few would have tagged as Argentine; and Allende's physicality is now lost to Californization, but in certain pictures she looks amazingly like Jihan Sadat.) I'm more than suggesting that as August casts the principals, he's not to be castigated for not going "native." And, proving the carpers didn't read much of the novel, Santiago is not predominantly used; it's an equal split between a fictitiously named capital and the countryside. Though exteriors were shot in Portugal, what he gave us is more than sufficient.
It takes some time to accept this cast, that much I grant. While the novel has six women who are the hub of spiritual and egalitarian emanations, as if touched by Gabriela Mistral, the movie, because of time constraints, rather daringly puts curmudgeon patriarch Esteban Trueba at the center, with Blanca, his and Clara's daughter, the narrator. In biological and political terms, Esteban is the nucleus of the book: all that happens he's either directly or subversively involved. He's a walking, talking dinosaur of sexism, of archaic conservative persuasion, and as much as a reader wants to hate him, his firecracker responses are Scroogy funny and even when he's at his ugliest -- raping a girl not totally as a means of power or violence but of sexual release, attempting to kill his daughter's lover, denying his bastard Indian son, sleeping with the junta -- there's a suspicion held all along in the reader that he's going to evolve into someone honorable. To play and retain the ruinous stubbornness of Esteban, Jeremy Irons strips himself of his own British voice and gives us something like a hoarse Sam Elliott rattling off a patrician form of Esperanto. Not very long into the picture and up to the point of aging as an old man, when he looks somewhat like Burt Lancaster walking like Borges, Irons is surprisingly butch in his snobbish portliness -- like a tanned, old-world Edward Albee. (On horse and wearing a riding hat, he brings to mind Sam Neill as Albee.) This mutability doesn't hurt him; in fact he may be one of the rarest of British actors who is best not being British, though what makes this apparently true is unfair: his physicality can make one's flesh crawl, as it did for me watching his snot-filled virility in DAMAGE, Louis Malle's insipid rip-off of LAST TANGO IN PARIS. (Or in Harold Pinter's unyielding BETRAYAL.) Working away from his country's sickly, drab demeanor, Irons springs to entertaining life: inexplicably it's his prissified masculinity that makes him so unimaginably right for the twin psychos in DEAD RINGER and equally super-fitting for the chilled-out, postured indifference of necrophilic vampire Claus von Bulow in Barbet Schroder's ghoulish REVERSAL OF FORTUNE. (When Irons declares, "Innocence has always been my position," he earns the undisputed crown for giving the star performance of 1990 -- the most sophisticatedly kinky-sick let-it-bleed assault on drollness since any you-name-it by Sir John Gielgud; it spooked the hell out of me much more than Hopkins' munchies.) Hating his stuffy Esteban is as much "solemn" fun as it is in the novel, but in that August cuts out the symbolic Barrabas, viewers are short-changed of the concluding uplift of spirituality -- a finale which, Allende confessed on a Discovery Channel documentary about sleep, came to her in a vivid dream.
Before the movie began, some audience members wondered outloud what accent Meryl Streep would foist on us as Clara. Castilian? Catalan? A hybrid? The laughs Irons gets from the clods at the beginning quickly becomes one of disappointment when Streep doesn't provide any. There's a second or two of shock that she has the courage to play Clara as a young woman, when no matter what director August does to help her (and it isn't much), the inescapable fact is, there's no way for her to convince us that she can -- and troubling because it's so damn distracting. She doesn't help ingratiate herself to us, either: there's an aura of depression, not the supernatural, hanging around her -- she looks and acts exhausted, not too unlike Julie Andrews's last hour in HAWAII. Allende describes Clara as "the most elegant, discreet and charming lady of (her) social circle," but you'd be hard-pressed to find traces of these attributes in the movie. If you haven't read the novel, then Clara's self-imposed muting will confuse. August changes the focus of the "respectful" at Clara's funeral: gone is "the hodgepodge of delegations -- poor children, students, labor unionists, nuns, mongoloid children, bohemians, spiritualists" and in are the conspirators, right out of THE BATTLE OF CHILE. A minor miracle, though, that we believe it when Streep's Clara says good-bye to Esteban's sister Ferula, played by Glenn Close, or when she makes after-death visitations. She does a great collapse when Irons slaps her, and she wears her hair as illustrated on the cover of the 1986 Bantam book edition. As Clara's parents, Vanessa Redgrave is merely extending her magnanimity from Howards End, and Armin Mueller-Stahl sounds as if he's looping in real time his own performance. Hinting once more at Anne Revere, this time as an Oriental version, Close, who was August's first choice to play Clara some years back (with William Hurt as Esteban), has the movie's one totally manufactured bit -- going to the priest to confess her attraction to Clara. The accusation of the lesbian is in the novel but expressed only by Esteban, but why August thought it necessary for us to have this movie Ferula suffer the embarrassment of the probable truth isn't quite understandable: doesn't August realize that Ferula would literally die before she could ever admit it? Her death is precipitated by having been denied by the jealous Esteban her friendship and loving care of Clara, and likely by her guilt of amorous feelings she couldn't handle. A more satisfactory alteration would have been for Close, before her character wills herself to death, to rage at Irons, because there's plenty to rage about. And no American actress rages more chillingly than Close. (This is the second movie in which she plays a victim to Irons -- the first as the nincompoopy Sonny in REVERSAL OF FORTUNE.) Am I the only to have noticed that when Ferula's & Esteban's mother dies, the size of the coffin wouldn't be quite up to the task?
Allende describes Blanca as having "Arabian eyes," a "Moorish, languid air about her. She was tall and well endowed, of a rather helpless and tearful temperament that roused men's ancestral instinct for protection." Winona Ryder looks neither Arabic nor tall and teary, and the toughness she brings to the role is duality: to compress the tragedies within the family tree, August has Blanca endure what her own daughter Alba does in the novel -- the torture of the junta. (Allende has Blanca and her beloved Pedro escaping to Canada while Alba is left behind and repeatedly violated by one of Esteban's offspring.) This change unobjectionable in that the story lines of Blanca and Alba are much the same, but what isn't acceptable -- and is the movie's biggest mistake -- is Ryder's narration. Her voice is so ordinary, overly uninspired and lacking of resonance and out of pithy sync with the sweeping emotionality of Allende's plangent language that both the author's and our sensitivities get mugged.
Watching Bille August's version, I was startled by what fidelity he held to the narrative itself; compacting the novel's major scenes, he gets to the quick of each and only in a few major instances did I feel he skimped glaringly: the truncation of how the Conservative politicians, in cahoots with the military headed by Pinochet and assisted by American hanky panky, sabotaged Salvador Allende's attempts at social and political reform, and the absence of Barrabas. The lack of the former is easier to pardon because author Allende, as the niece of the slain Chilean president, provides a safety net for herself: she's practically taking aspirin to reduce the rising fever of socialism and her political scenes are all clich‚s and truisms. Her most daring bit is using Nobel-winning Neruda as The Poet and having him die under Pinochet's junta, a death that passed in America without regret. (Neither Richard Nixon in his recollections nor Henry Kissinger in his two bloated volumes of mendacious memoirs have the decency to call the junta they supported to account for the outrage, probably because Neruda was in fact the Chilean Communist Party's candidate for president in 1970, and his politics caused him trouble as far back as 1948, when he was indicted as a subversive and had to escape to the Andes on horseback.) The Poet is not included in the movie, and American involvement is only insinuated.
Barrabas's absence is another matter altogether. Being a sucker for dogs, when in the novel Barrabas is assassinated as political warning, I don't think I'm the only reader who quickly choked up. The shock and cruelty of it seemed like rivets pounded into the heart. When Esteban has the dog taxidermied as rug for Clara, at whose feet he died, there's a riff between intention and outcome: the rug was done to please Clara the eternal spiritualist, but she will have no part of it; she condemns the remains to the basement. But Barrabas rises from the cellar in two moments of such breathtaking love that I still get goose bumps thinking about it: when Clara dies, her beloved granddaughter Alba is found after the funeral to be sleeping on Barrabas, and, after Esteban slowly acknowledges and regrets that his acquiescence to the military in order to "save" the country from Allende has been submission to fascism, he surreptitiously works to free both his daughter and her lover from the hands of Pinochet's henchmen and, as if to cleanse, decides to open up his Santiago home and put on loving display Barrabas. "Let's leave him here," he says, "this is where he always should have been." Though Allende claims to like -- and approve of the changes for -- the movie, August only proved that a movie maker could make THE HOUSE OF THE SPIRITS. Unlike ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE, which is rather like a movie fantasist's dream of a screenplay never to be dared, HOUSE isn't an insurmountable challenge -- in that the story is factually based, its magic has receptive narrative continuity. What August proved even more is that the next time around, probably as a deluxe TV miniseries, the book will be in the hands of a sensualist like Bertolucci or perhaps a fantasist like Hector Babenco, or better yet Humberto Sol s (who could bring out the appropriate melancholic refrains over failed Revolutions, as he tried to do in 1975's CANATA DE CHILE) and marvellous facets of imagination like green hair, Nivea's head, Clara's twins and the Mora Sisters will return and, above all else, Barrabas will rise, not fall.
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