Paradise Lost
PODHORETZ, JOHN
Paradise Lost Andy Garcia breaks with Hollywood to show where Cuba went wrong. BY JOHN PODHORETZ "I had the greatest childhood I could ever want," the actor I Andy Garcia said in 1999. "The only...
...In every respect, from the depiction of Havana nightlife to the machinations of Lansky to Batista's panicked flight from power, The Lost City comes across as a fourth-generation color Xerox of Coppola's towering masterpiece...
...That would have been paradise, for me anyway...
...Why not scream and yell with everybody else in school...
...The Lost City, which just opened in Miami and will appear in major American cities in April, begins in Havana in 1958, as the tight-knit Fellove family is torn apart by the collapsing regime of tinpot dictator Ful-gencio Batista—and by the different ways in which the family's members hope to see Batista replaced...
...The youngest, Ricardo, meets up with Che Guevara and joins Fidel Castro's insurgent army...
...The Lost City's frank and unapolo-getic anticommunism shouldn't be startling, but it is, as there is only one other movie in English (Julian Schna-bel's Before Night Falls) that paints a comparably harsh portrait of Castro and his revolution...
...John Podhoretz, a columnist for the New York Post, is The Weekly Standard's movie critic...
...Fico, the club owner, begins a torrid affair with Aurora, his brother Luis's widow...
...But she is seduced by illegitimate power when Castro decides to use her for propaganda purposes as the widow of a revolutionary martyr...
...What Fico needs is freedom—the freedom to book the musical acts he admires and stage the dance numbers for which Havana was world-famous in those years...
...But where Cabrera Infante's novel is wild and frenzied and very, very peculiar in the manner of 1960s Latin American fiction, The Lost City is stolid, stilted, and schematic...
...But good moviemaking isn't about teaching lessons, it's about telling stories—and the story of the Fellove family is a hopeless nest of clichés...
...Then they passed the law about giving up the rights to your children to the state, and that's when my father said, 'That's enough.' " His father Rene, who had been a prosperous lawyer and farmer, brought the family to Miami and worked ordering supplies for a catering company...
...Garcia has now co-authored and directed a movie called The Lost City that attempts to capture his Paradise Lost at the hinge moment in its history...
...And hopefully it wouldn't have been Batista's Cuba, but a democratic Cuba...
...Alas, good intentions and sensible politics aren't enough to justify a trip to the cinema...
...Garcia wants to show the world that there was a budding democratic opposition to Fulgencio Batista that was shoved aside and crushed by Castro's more relentless, Soviet-backed assault...
...Unfortunately for Garcia, his portrait of the fall of Havana must compete with every moviegoer's memory of the extraordinary scenes in Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather, Part II—when Michael Corleone refuses to go in with his fellow gangster Hyman Roth (a barely fictionalized Meyer Lansky) on a multimillion-dollar investment in Cuba because he sees a revolution aborning...
...What does a 5-year-old kid know about any of that...
...The screenplay for The Lost City is credited to the late Guillermo Cabrera Infante, and it was inspired to some degree by Cabrera Infante's own experimental account of prerevolutionary Havana, Three Trapped Tigers...
...The only one I would change it for was to have grown up in Cuba...
...The Fellove family's pursuit of freedom is costly—Luis is tortured and killed for his part in the failed democratic coup, while Ricardo's Communist fanaticism leads to the death of his uncle, a tobacco farmer whose land is expropriated by Castro's regime...
...Garcia still remembers his days as a native of Castro's Cuba...
...He lived long enough to see his son Andres become a movie star, but he did not, alas, survive to see his son's attempt to educate the world about the ruined land from which his father was forced to exile himself and his family...
...As the owner of the hottest club in Havana, he has to deal with American mobsters like Meyer Lansky (Dustin Hoffman) who want to use his place for their own illicit purposes...
...As he told GQ magazine in 1995, "I was coming home from day school singing 'The Internationale'—the Communist national anthem...
...The paterfamilias, a distinguished professor, seeks change through the country's own established institutions, especially the Cuban Senate...
...Garcia plays the oldest son, Fico, who doesn't have much to do with politics because he has other battles to fight...
...One son, Luis, joins an underground group that also wants democracy but tries to achieve it with a failed effort to storm the dictator's mansion...
...But his hopes are dashed when the dictator's goon squad assassinates the Senate's chief advocate for pluralistic democracy...
...But not Castro's Cuba...
...Even more galling, Coppola was basically in sympathy with Castro, while Garcia tells the truth about one of the most evil men of the 20 th century...
...That would have been heaven on earth...
...I was being influenced by the indoctrination, going with the flow...
...The Lost City is an admirable piece of work, but it's a dispiriting movie...
...Of course, Coppola had millions of dollars at his disposal to re-create 1958 Havana, while Garcia made his movie on the cheap in the Dominican Republic...
Vol. 11 • March 2006 • No. 26
