By Preston Wilder
It’s a week for true stories at the local multiplex, and a week for past Oscar winners to show their class without straining too hard by playing authoritative, larger-than-life characters. Anthony Hopkins is the eponymous beer magnate in Kidnapping Mr Heineken [see opposite page], but the film is unworthy of his Elder Statesman status; Benicio Del Toro does better as Colombian drug kingpin Pablo Escobar – a Robin Hood figure and doting paterfamilias, at least if he weren’t also a paranoid murderer. Escobar: Paradise Lost comes with a silly, TV-movie-ish title – yet the film itself is surprisingly tense and well-crafted, not a biopic but a suspense-driven drama set mainly in 1991, when Escobar is about to give himself up to the authorities.
“How did he make all his money?” asks Nick (Josh Hutcherson) a few years earlier, looking at the fleshy, moustachioed figure who’s grabbed the mike to croon a heartfelt song at his own birthday party. “Cocaine!” replies Escobar’s niece Maria (Claudia Traisac) with a giggle. The mood at the luxury hacienda where the party’s taking place is relaxed and happy. Everyone in Medellin loves Pablo, especially the poor who rely on his philanthropic largesse – and even Maria, first seen opening a medical clinic built with her uncle’s money, doesn’t think the source of that money is a big deal. Colombians have been chewing coca leaves for centuries, she smiles; all he’s doing is “exporting a national product”. Besides, Maria is beautiful and Nick – a young Canadian working on the beach as a surfing instructor – is deeply in love, his relationship with the boss’ niece taking him deep inside the inner circle.
We’ve been here before, a few times. The Last King of Scotland is one example, another tale of a somewhat naïve foreigner becoming confidant to a fearsome leader. The Godfather also comes to mind, though of course Michael Corleone was born into a criminal family (merely tried, and failed, to get out of it). Michael ended up losing his soul in The Godfather, the young Scot in Last King of Scotland escaped Uganda more or less intact. I won’t spoil what happens to Nick – but it’s worth noting that he doesn’t go as deep in the belly of the beast as those other two. Escobar takes care of him, even without being asked (Pablo scribbles a note to himself in passing – then, a few days later, a gang of local thugs who’ve been harassing Nick and his brother are found dead, hung upside-down and burned alive), but Nick never becomes a senior lieutenant, being a gringo after all – at least till 1991, when Escobar asks him to help in concealing his treasure before he goes to jail.
That’s the crux of the movie – much of it takes place over a single night and the following day – Nick faced with a moral decision that’s bound to end badly, whatever he decides. One big flaw in the film (probably its biggest flaw) is that Nick never seems likely to choose the cold-blooded option: like he says, “I’ve never done anything like this before”. Paradise Lost never implicates its hero, or allows him to become corrupted, maybe because Hutcherson (a bland actor at the best of times) is also heartthrob Peeta in The Hunger Games; he remains the likeable outsider, less naïve but still unsullied. There’s no blood on his hands.
Still, the film is powerful. It looks magnificent – the sensual contours of the beach, gauzy hammocks, waves crashing; small towns clustered in majestically foggy mountains; the velvety blackness of the early night scenes, and staggering Benicio with his bushy beard and pot belly – which is part of the point, Medellin being ‘paradise’ to foreign visitors unaware of its problems. The main plot is a long, effective set-piece, with a couple of twists and a memorable turn by a 16-year-old Colombian actor named Micke Moreno.
And of course there’s Benicio Del Toro, two decades after indecipherable Fenster in The Usual Suspects, his sleepy-eyed soulfulness burnished with age into the watchful authority of a jungle animal. Escobar gets a few supervillain moments – quoting the Nazis as he sinks into paranoia (“Feind hört mit”, or ‘the enemy is listening’), or countering Nick’s “Thank God” with a sly “God had nothing to do with it” – but Del Toro also brings out a crude peasant cunning and a kind of heaviness, as when he mops his brow after giving a speech or wades in a pool with little kids clambering over him. The onscreen title (at least on the print I watched) actually leaves out the ‘Escobar’ altogether – it’s just ‘Paradise Lost’ – which is fair enough but a bit ungrateful: the film (unlike Mr Heineken) doesn’t hang on its Oscar-winning heavyweight, but it wouldn’t be the same without him. He turns a true story into a compulsive one.
DIRECTED BY Andrea Di Stefano
STARRING Josh Hutcherson, Benicio Del Toro, Claudia Traisac
In English and Spanish, with Greek subtitles
France/Spain 2014 120 mins
