This movie is a bit old already, having come out in the beginning of 2010. Nevertheless, I recently found myself recalling it, and asking myself, "Why did I hate that movie so much?" I was inspired to ramble in this blog while looking for an answer.
It’s not because I hate Lula. I became a pretty big fan after I read about him in the book A Death in Brazil as a college student, before he became president. These days, I might consider his accomplishments as president to be a bit overrated – but certainly not enough so to explain the revulsion I experienced while watching this movie. And besides, plenty of people that hate Lula liked the movie.
The acting might be part of it. But not necessarily because of the actors themselves. The actor who plays Lula’s father, is pretty terrible here. Yet, he comes across to me as an excellent actor in other films I’ve seen him in. It may be related to the fact that the role he plays mostly calls for him to stagger, bottle in hand, after Lula (in his boyhood form) and try to hit him, while bellowing “You can’t study! You have to work! You have to worrrrrrrrrk!” The mom has a similar lack of depth, though she is the polar opposite. Most of her utterances seem suspiciously designed for posterity, and are mostly very brief monologues about how she takes care of her own children (despite being poor!) or bromides about work first, fun later.
But even then, there are plenty of movies that have shallow, two-dimensional characters but that I enjoyed anyway. Like High School Musical II.
The plot, perhaps? Now we are getting closer to the mark. The story is told as a series of vignettes from Lula’s life, starting with his birth in Northeastern Brazil, jumping to his journey south to São Paulo, then to his childhood as an outrageously cute orange seller in São Paulo, them to the time that he had to borrow a jacket to get into a movie theater, then to the time his house flooded, then to the time he passed a test to become a trainee as a lathe operator, then to the time…. ZZZZZZZZZZZ
There in rarely a compelling reason for a scene to exist other than to show that “this really happened”. However, for perhaps the first time in movie history, a film has managed to show objectively pretty interesting information in a way that becomes less interesting than the same information written on a piece of paper.
The film is thin on conflict. Lula himself resolves his “conflict” with his father by moving out of bottle’s reach of him early on in the film. His relationship with his mother and other family members is perfect. Every negative element in his life, if the film is to be believed, is completely exogenous. Challenges come in the form of very evil people (his father and the police under the influence of the dictatorship), floods, childhood poverty, dictators, disease and death. And Lula can overcome all of this because his mother taught him to be pure of heart.
Tellingly, the film ends after the formation of the Worker’s Party, but before he becomes further involved in politics, and long before his history of presidential campaigning. The conflicts in his life that I am most curious about, regarding the moral and philosophical compromises he had to make to go from leftist radical out of power to a president that maintained intact the economic policy of his predecessor once in power, are conveniently left out, as are the scandals that plagued the end of his first term. In the end, Lula gets the same treatment as his parents – he is reduced to just about the most easily understood essence possible. The problem is that he is a fascinating, complex, and difficult to understand phenomenon.
What’s left? A series of out-of-context telenovela scenes that create a myth about how a poor Brazilian can go the distance by listening to mom. A good recipe for popular success in Brazil I suppose, but not a good movie.
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