SURVIVING PICASSO
A film review by Scott Renshaw
Copyright 1996 Scott Renshaw
(Warner Bros.) Starring: Anthony Hopkins, Natascha McElhone, Julianne Moore. Screenplay: Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. Producers: Ismail Merchant, David L. Wolper. Director: James Ivory. MPAA Rating: R (brief nudity, adult themes) Running Time: 125 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
I'm not sure what it is that inspired the highly respected Merchant Ivory production team to turn from fiction to biography, but I wish they would drop it already. For years, director James Ivory, producer Ismail Merchant and screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala turned out exceptionally well-crafted adaptations of novels commonly held to be too difficult to film: A ROOM WITH A VIEW, HOWARDS END, THE REMAINS OF THE DAY. Then last year they made JEFFERSON IN PARIS, a study of Thomas Jefferson in which Nick Nolte looked as bored in the title role as the audience must have been watching him. SURVIVING PICASSO is not nearly as paralyzingly dull, but it demonstrates once again that real people seem to elude Ivory and company.
Frequent Merchant Ivory collaborator Anthony Hopkins stars as celebrated artist Pablo Picasso, who is a living legend in his 60s when the film opens in occupied Paris in 1943. Picasso is all too aware of his own celebrity, and uses it to seduce impressionable young women like aspiring artist Francoise Gilot (Natascha McElhone). Francoise becomes his lover and the mother of two of his children, despite knowledge of the previous lovers Picasso has taken in and abandoned like Marie-Therese (Susannah Harker) and Dora (Julianne Moore), to say nothing of his wife Olga (Jane Lapotaire). Francoise believes it will be different with her, but eventually discovers that Picasso uses far more than he loves.
SURVIVING PICASSO is a particularly frustrating piece of work because you can see what it is Ivory was trying to do. Francoise is introduced early as a strong-willed woman who risks the wrath of her domineering father (Bob Peck) when she decides to pursue her artistic career, setting up a conflict between Francoise and Picasso in which he has greater difficulty reducing her to yet another of his weeping conquests. McElhone, a newcomer with piercing eyes, brings out the intelligence in Francoise, but she becomes a distressingly passive character, even more so when she becomes a narrator for flashbacks. Her unique personality has little chance to emerge, and even seems to be contradicted directly by a voice-over near the end in which Francoise notes that Picasso "made me strong." It is a baffling conclusion, since she seems infinitely stronger before their relationship begins.
Picasso himself is similarly enigmatic, played by Anthony Hopkins as an egomanical bon vivant, turning his fame into a method for making people feel insignificant, and honored merely to be in his presence. Ivory and Jhabvala do a fine job of showing us the effect of Picasso's behavior on those around him, but they are much less effective at showing us the man himself. It does not help that we are never able to see Picasso's own work to reflect his personality (his estate did not allow them to be used), making his art little more than a footnote to SURVIVING PICASSO. The film-makers remain distant, showing us bits and pieces of Picasso's life, like a speech to a Communist Party conference, without connecting them to the man he became. We are never allowed inside the passionate artist; Hopkins is technically proficient, wandering accent notwithstanding, but his is a role which seems designed to be observed rather than understood.
You can always count on a Merchant Ivory film to look splendid, and there is superb work once again from cinematographer Tony Pierce-Roberts and production designer Lucianna Arrighi. It is a beautiful environment they have created for this story, but the characters in that environment are disappointing. There are several moments in SURVIVING PICASSO which inspire a curiosity about this fascinating man, notably his rivalry with contemporary Henri Matisse (Joss Ackland), but there is always the nagging sense, as there was in JEFFERSON IN PARIS, that Ivory doesn't really have a point of view. His biographies are safe, almost documentary detailings of events in an individual's life which do not add up to a story. Picasso and Jefferson were both fascinating historical figures with private and public lives full of contradictions, and they should have made for great drama. Ivory simply seems too respectful of his subjects, content to lay out events like they might appear in a history text without much in the way of interpretation. The irony is that he has been able to take far more internalized fictional characters, like THE REMAINS OF THE DAY's James Stevens, and make them extraordinarily vivid. He has not shown the same facility with bringing life to characters who actually lived.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 abstract artists: 5.
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