Surviving Picasso (1996)
A film review by Ivana Redwine
Copyright 1996 Ivana Redwine
(Warner Brothers 1996)
Starring: Anthony Hopkins, Natascha McElhone, Julianne Moore, Joss Ackland, Peter Eyre, Jeanne Lapotaire, Diane Venora, Joan Plowright. Directed by James Ivory. Screenplay by: Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. Adapted from: "Picasso: Creator and Destroyer" by Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington. Running time: two hours, three minutes. MPAA rating: R.
WARNING: This review contains spoilers!
Although SURVIVING PICASSO is a good-looking, easy-to- watch film, I found it to be more like a good cable-TV docudrama than the big screen character study I was hoping for. It seemed more concerned with lovingly recapturing the details of period costume and setting than probing the depths of the characters' psyches. It even goes so far as to recreate the look of old photographs of the characters from the popular magazines of the day. In addition, the actresses seem to have been picked more for their physical resemblance to the people they are playing than for their acting ability.
I think that the script is the film's weakest point. Rarely lingering long enough on any one scene to explore anything in depth, the choppy and heavy-handed script relies on an intrusive voice-over narration to keep the story from falling into chaos.
I expect a lot from Merchant-Ivory, and in some ways this film does deliver. It has high production values, wonderful settings, and a fine performance by Anthony Hopkins that almost overcomes the script. But the film lacks the sensitivity and complexity that I have come to expect from Merchant-Ivory. However, I base my expectations on their earlier films adapted from literary fiction, while the credits for SURVIVING PICASSO claim that it was adapted from "Picasso: Creator and Destroyer" a best-selling biography by Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington.
SURVIVING PICASSO is actually a Merchant-Ivory-Wolper production, and so it is not surprising that it has that big- budget biopic feeling. I think that fans of Merchant-Ivory will be disappointed that the main characters, Francoise Gilot (played by Natascha McElhone) and Pablo Picasso (Anthony Hopkins), have been dumbed down to comic-book level. The performance of Hopkins is strong enough to give the character of Picasso some resonance. However, McElhone's portrayal of Gilot consists mainly of projecting an aura of sad grace and giving a resigned smile once in a while. It could have been that McElhone needed better direction or that the material she was given to work with was simply intractable. In this connection it should be mentioned that even though Gilot is the point-of- view character, she is delineated even more sketchily than Picasso.
The movie focuses on the period from about 1943 to the early 1950s when Picasso shared his life with Gilot; it also takes brief excursions into his romantic relationships with other women. However, instead of fully developed characters like those in HOWARD'S END and A ROOM WITH A VIEW, I never gained much insight into any of the characters in SURVIVING PICASSO, including Picasso and Gilot. Also, I didn't perceive any chemistry between Hopkins and McElhone, which made their whole relationship seem not quite believable.
When I heard that Merchant-Ivory was making a film on Picasso and Gilot, I was excited, recognizing the rich dramatic and emotional potential a story about these two people has. I was disappointed to see that Merchant-Ivory opted instead to present these dynamic people as one-dimensional stereotypes. Picasso's artistic oeuvre shows him to be a multi- dimensional man whose emotions ran the full spectrum, ranging from the tenderness and serenity of his Rose Period to the chaos and violence shown in his portraits of weeping women. Instead, in SURVIVING PICASSO we are presented with an overemphasis on only one facet of Picasso--he was an "enfant terrible" who saw it as his privilege as an artistic genius to selfishly use people in general and women in particular.
I am starting to re-read Gilot's memoir "Life with Picasso." >From it I can gather that she was more complex than the woman portrayed in SURVIVING PICASSO and her relationship with Picasso had more nuances than this film even hints at. In the film, Gilot is presented as little more than a long-suffering angel who eventually awakens to what a cad her man is.
There are good scenes in the movie, but their strength is often undercut by the overall heavy-handedness. For example, there is a scene where Picasso shows pictures to his dealer, including work on what critics now call his Weeping Women Series. (Although the paintings used in the film are not actual Picassos, they are close enough to be effective.) The scene is used to reinforce the unrelenting theme of the film--Picasso's self-absorption eventually turned all the women he loved into the living, breathing equivalents of his portraits. The scene isn't bad in and of itself, but the point it makes is made too many times and in too many ways in the film, and it is made at the expense of creating fully-faceted characters.
Another strong, yet heavy-handed, scene also illustrates Picasso's "enfant-terrible" persona. Picasso forces Gilot to watch as a bird of prey swoops out of the sky, takes a scrawny cat in its talons, and carries it away to its death. I found this to be a powerful visual metaphor that draws parallels between the predatory bird and Picasso, the predatory man. Again, the scene taken by itself is good, but in the context of the rest of the film, it becomes trite because it is yet another didactic episode.
There are some films that merely entertain, while others go beyond that and take us to a deeper understanding of the human heart. This film doesn't get beyond the point of mere entertainment, and while there is nothing wrong with entertainment, I was hoping for something more given Merchant-Ivory's reputation and the rich subject of Picasso and Gilot. I think this movie is worth seeing, but I wouldn't blame anyone for preferring to wait for it to come out on videotape.
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