Evita

Starring: Madonna, Antonio Banderas, Jonathan Pryce, Jimmy Nail, Olga Merediz, Laura Pallas, Julia Worsley
Directed by: Alan Parker
Rating: PG
Genre: Drama
1996

Times Seen:
Tim: 1

Summary: Evita (Madonna) rises to stardom in Argentina, from an unknown actress to the wife of the Argentinian President (Jonathan Pryce).

Review:

Tim: There's a lot to unpack with Evita. It's based on a Tony-award winning play from 1976. Twenty years after its debut, we get the film adaptation. The movie offers very few lines of dialogue, as nearly the entire film is sung. This might connect back the source material, but creates some limitations as well. I thought the film had some strengths, but quite a few weaknesses. In the end, the movie is decent, but it could have been much better.

Here's my biggest complaint with the film- I don't know how much we learn about Eva Peron. Sure, the highs and lows of her life are touched upon in the film, but the music-only approach really limits how much we can dig into her character. It felt like the movie was focused mostly on the music, somewhat on being entertaining, but was surprisingly disinterested in exploring who Peron was. This felt like the biggest miss of the film. I left the movie wishing for a drama based on her life so I could actually understand her. Her motivations had to be more complex than are depicted in the film. I understand from this movie that she was the most beloved and most hated person in Argentina. But, why? Not just the surface-level explanation. What was it about her that contributed to these extremes in people's views? What role did the media play in all this? These things are lightly touched upon throughout the film, but a deeper exploration was necessary. I think this film ultimately does a disservice to Peron. It's not enough just to know the basic skeleton of her story. There's a lot more detail, a lot more complexity that we need to know to understand her life. That simply doesn't here. That bothered me a lot. I invested a great deal of time in this movie and felt like I left it learning far too little.

Now, musically, this film is impressive. The soundtrack was a commercial success and you couldn't turn around in 1996 without hearing "Don't Cry for Me Argentina". The film won 1 Academy Award, for Best Original Song, "You Must Love Me" (it was nominated for 4 others, all in technical categories). That award-winning song is impressive. Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice did impressive work on it. It's not quite as memorable or powerful as "Don't Cry for Me Argentina", but it's effective.

The cast is quite good, especially considering nearly their entire performances are singing. It was this that allowed Madonna to be so effective as Eva Person. Let's be frank, Madonna isn't a good actress. There's enough bad performances in movies to prove this to be true. Fortunately for her, she doesn't have much dialogue here. Her voice is incredible and she is wonderful from a vocal point of view. Her performance is good- it certainly makes things easier that she's mostly singing. I thought she came across as effective. It's probably the best performance of her entire career- she'll never top this high. The movie certainly plays to her strengths, but you have to give her credit. Antonio Banderas was great. Not much is revealed about his character, but he serves as the storyteller, showing up around every turn. I thought Banderas was excellent. His role is fascinating because as much as he's part of the story, he's always outside it, too. His ability to show a range of emotion for Person- sometimes disgust, sometimes love, helped give the film a nice depth. For a supporting role, Banderas makes a large impact on the film. Jonathan Pryce was good, too. I'm not sure he is a great singer and it felt like he was far behind Banderas and Madonna. Still, Pryce is a very talented actor and that is apparent on screen.

I know this movie is a musical and will therefore be longer, but it felt unnecessarily long at 2 hours, 15 minutes. I think it needed to be a good 15+ minutes shorter. The movie is a bit uneven and too many scenes drag on far too long. It's the kind of movie you feel like you could step out of the room and step back in, and not miss much (not that I did that). It has this feeling that nothing all that important is happening at any given time. That lack of urgency hurts the movie.

Now, there's a lot of things I enjoyed about Evita. Alan Parker is a good director and you could tell this was a passion project for him. However, the movie might accomplish its goals musically, but it doesn't do enough to help us understand Eva Peron. I believe that's important if you're going to do a biopic. That hurts the movie and it's a big reason why I'd only consider this a decent film.

Rating 1-10
Tim's Rating: 6.5



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