Argentina 1985 (2022)

Rated R, more for description than for anything else.  The movie chronciles what a dictatorship did to its citizens and the descriptions are grizzly.  While there isn't anything on screen to really see, considering that most of the movie is in a courtroom involving legal drama, it's still pretty harrowing to listen to.  It falls into the category of "too depressing."  Hard R, despite seeing nothing.

DIRECTOR: Santiago Mitre

Okay, I was going to go for one more, but then I saw that I was going to have to write about Argentina 1985 and admitted it was too much for me to do.  This movie, guys.  I know some of you absolutely love this style of filmmaking and cinema.  Me?  Good golly, I could not have been more bored.  For a guy who doesn't necessarily mind boredom, this may have pushed me into a bad place, which is odd because I love taking down conservative governments. (Note: It is the next day and I'm more tired than I've ever been.  God really wants me to write about Argentina 1985 while holding onto vestiges of sanity.)

Anything I write about Argentina 1985, for the most part, will be more of a criticism of me than of the film itself.  It happens sometimes.  Sometimes, I am so out of my depth that all I can do is gripe about things.  I genuinely believe that there's actually a pretty populous audience who might herald this movie as one of the greatest films ever made.  A lot of the problem comes from two things: A) I don't love legal dramas and B) I'm painfully American.  Okay, "painfully" might be a bit tough.  But I can tell you with 100% certainty: I have little to do with Argentina or Argentinian history.  Yeah, the intro text does a little to help me get on board of Argentinian history.  But it's extremely dense and very quick.  The movie assumes that I know a lot about not just dictatorships in Argentina, but this specific regime and the things that they have done.  It's not like you absolutely need to have a background in this stuff.  After all, there are some quintessential universal themes throughout the movie.  But I will tell you what does kind of hurt when you don't really know what's going on, the appreciation of character.

Strassera, the protagonist of the film, is aggressively flat affect.  There are blips and peaks in his anger or outrage.  But the dude is in lawyer mode the entire movie.  From moment one, we don't really have an understanding of who he is beyond his underdog archetype.  Yeah, I'm not into law stuff, as I mentioned.  Most law movies, including and especially this one, really are a bunch of talky-talk and little showing.  When that kind of stuff happens, you need dynamic characters to really imbue the story with some levels.  Do you need proof?  "You want the truth?  You can't handle the truth!"  Okay, so that was the witness, but that's the climax of a pretty heated scene.  We quote that line because it is the most memorable.  Jack Nicholson gives that line so much life and it is a good thing that he does.  If anything, that line is something that could be a throwaway line.  It's in the passion of the moments that these scenes happen.  Instead, the protagonists, Strassera in particular, plays it so close to the vest, it almost comes across as Columbo.  

And with Columbo, while Peter Falk might have been able to ingratiate himself to audiences by pushing other characters into losing their cool.  After all, Tom Cruise emoted a little bit in A Few Good Men, but it caused Jack Nicholson to really emote.  None of that.  This sounds awful, especially if you've seen the movie, but thank God the victims of the atrocities emoted somehow.  I want to talk about the victims of the dictatorship because that's where I appreciated the film as being a film.  The politics and the relationship to criminals in this piece was completely lost on me, but there is a pretty long montage that is absolutely worth watching.  If I had to guess, this is going to be the clip for the Academy Awards.  But there is an element of the Holocaust happening with the testimonies going on.  Yes, the goal of the story is how the underdog lawyer took down a regime that no one thought that he could beat.  But that really takes second fiddle to the anguish that the victims of this regime went for.  Now, I would say that would be enough to hold up a movie.  After all, those scenes stayed with me. But the movie is two hours and twenty minutes.  (Again, meeting the criteria of being too long, too depressing, and too sexual.)  

Maybe this is where I rally against the long runtime.  As I mentioned, most of the movies this year just go on too long.  But the bigger issue is that a lot of these movies just try doing a bit of everything.  That's the problem.  This should be a movie about the victims.  I get that the victims are needed to tell a compelling courtroom drama, but everything that wasn't about the victims kind of fell flat.  There's one victim, in particular, who had to give birth in a car and had her baby taken from her.  Just to establish how graphic this scene was, there's talk of an umbilical cord and how someone who had just given birth was forced to work for the entertainment of the soliders.  This is a major moment in the testimony.  But instead of focusing on the lawyer, who plays a prevalent part in the story, what if the story was shorter and focused on her getting to the point of testifying against the regime?  Okay, I'm going to put my foot into it, but if we're looking at arcs, that lady had far more of an arc than the protagonist of this piece. From moment one, Strassera knew what he had to do.  He was a little ho-hum about the whole thing. But he never really goes through a change.  Ocampo at least has the moral crusade behind him.  But that woman's story is the most powerful. Imagine seeing her recovering from her ordeal and knowing that she'd be shamed.

But there's one reason to stand behind the movie as it is.  I mean, I've made it pretty clear that this was a bit rough for me. But in terms of universal storytelling, I do want to talk about something that actually plays out pretty nicely.  I like the idea that old people can change their opinions.  I know, it sounds like I'm being ageist.  But I would like to stress what's going on in the United States right now and in the whole world.  There is this notion that "I've been around the block" as a means to avoid confrontation.  The older generation had drunk the Kool-Aid when it came to the regime and, because they may have supported it based on misinformation, felt the need to defend the regime, regardless of how much information came out against the regime.  But I do like the value of listening.  That woman's testimony changed the mind of one woman.  There's this whole obsession with being right and I adored the simple phone call where the mother of the prosecution was able to shift her perspective, even for a second.  Sure, her son was prosecuting the regime.  She has the most reason to change her mind.  But it was still this moment reminding us that we should fight for what's right.

I know that I probably watched a good movie and I just didn't like it. That's not my favorite feeling in the world.  I should be able to have my own opinions. But I also see that there was a valuable and politically important story.  It just did very little for me.  That's on me.  That's less so on the movie.  If you are reading this and deciding whether or not to watch it, maybe read up more on it than just using my narrow-world point-of-view.