Politics, painting
and persecution

>> Milos Forman is back in form with the morally ambiguous period piece Goya’s Ghosts

by MALCOLM FRASER

For the director of such classics as One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Amadeus, Milos Forman fell off pretty hard in recent years with The People vs. Larry Flynt and Man in the Moon. So my hopes for Goya’s Ghosts, centred on the famous 18th-century Spanish painter, were low; I was pleased to discover that it’s actually a return to form, lesser than Forman’s best films but far ahead of his recent work.

Portrayed by the dependably solid Stellan Skarsgård, Goya isn’t so much the hero as a conduit for the story. The powerful Catholic Church grudgingly tolerates him in spite of some controversial works, since he’s also a portraitist of the rich and powerful. Brother Lorenzo (Javier Bardem), himself a client of Goya’s, distracts the church hierarchy from persecuting the painter by suggesting that they ramp up Inquisition tactics against perceived subversives in the population. Among those rounded up is Inés (Natalie Portman), an innocent daughter of nobility who’s tortured into confessing a trumped-up sin and then thrown in jail. When Skarsgård is convinced by her family to interfere, he ends up complicating matters for Bardem. The three characters cross paths again 15 years later, when the Napoleonic army invades Spain and topples the monarchy and the church.

The film has a quality sorely lacking from most movies today: moral ambiguity. Bardem is nominally the villain, but never demonized; Goya himself is an opportunist who has a moral centre of sorts, but is happy to stay out of politics as long as someone is paying him to paint. The story also implicitly criticizes the mob mentality of the masses, who get behind whoever’s in power with equal fervour.

Forman and his co-screenwriter, Jean-Claude Carrière, bring out the humanity in these deeply flawed characters, and though the parallels to today’s geopolitics are obvious, they never beat the audience over the head with them. The actors are all excellent, especially Portman, who’s equally convincing as the young noblewoman, the crazy hag she becomes after 15 years in the clink, and her own brazen courtesan daughter. Briskly paced and with a perspective that’s somehow both cynical and humanistic, Goya’s Ghosts is the perfect antidote to the usual period-piece treacle.

Goya’s Ghosts opens this
Friday, Sept. 7

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