Goya's Ghosts

Milos Foreman's Goya's Ghosts features Stellan Skarsgard as the famous painter Francisco Goya. In the opening moments, his life is relatively tranquil as he spends his time painting brilliant portraits of the Spanish elite, but muse Ines Bilbatua (Natalie Portman) is soon wrongly imprisoned by the Spanish Inquisition for practicing the Jewish faith. Ines' father 'negotiates' with the treacherous monk Father Lorenzo (Javier Bardem) for the release of his daughter by torturing him during a modest dinner, thereby exposing the hypocrisy inherent in the Spanish Inquisition's manner of obtaining confessions. Lorenzo signs a document claiming that his parents were primates, humiliating himself in the eye's of the church, and forcing him to flee to France. But before his departure, he takes advantage of Ines while she is in prison, leaving her pregnant and destitute. The rest of the film deals with Goya's attempts to reunite Ines with her daughter, 15 years later, after the French have invaded Spain following the French Revolution. Lorenzo eventually returns as a prominent revolutionary, a married family man who is none to happy to learn that he has fathered another child.

Goya's Ghosts suffers in its pacing. Everything happens so quickly that we're never given the opportunity to bond with its characters. The scenes lack emotional depth and most of the actors, save Randy Quaid and Natalie Portman, cannot demonstrate any fluid multidimensional range or talent. Their lackluster performances are likely and ironically the result of Foreman's talent. Everything about this film suggests that it could have been a great movie. The subject matter is intense, the setting tragic, the historical period dynamic. But the scenes seem as if they were shot according to a strict production schedule that left little time for multiple takes, and, consequently, when we find ourselves caught in a moment where we should be emotionally involved with its subject matter, caring for the plight of its characters, we aren't, and we don't, Foreman struggling in his attempt to skillfully craft a tragic sensibility. Editing may be the problem here as well. Perhaps if another half an hour was added it would have given us more time to build an appreciation for the characters and their relationships with one another (it's as if we're supposed to immediately fall for them). But that extra time is not present, and without stronger performances by Bardem and Skarsgard, it likely wouldn't have made much of a difference.