I'm Still Here (2024)

PG-13, despite being a movie about torture and murder in a dictatorship.  Admittedly, the movie makes your imagination do a lot of the work of what is happening beyond the walls of the prison.  It isn't a light movie by any stretch of the imagination, but it also is about the emotional damage that people experience sooner than the physical, visceral experience.  PG-13.

DIRECTOR: Walter Salles

It's not my fault.  I watched this the day after I watched The Brutalist.  Even more so, I just wrote my blog on The Brutalist, so I have to transition from a life-changing movie to a "Hey, that wasn't bad movie".  When I feel less than enthused about the whole thing, I have to acknowledge that this is a great film that I was very sleepy for.  At one point, my wife and I were eating just to stay awake.  Most of that falls on the fact that we're old.  But some of that falls on the movie for having a lot of...not much happening.

Normally, I tend to be quite skeptical about these kinds of movies.  This is a bad look for me, but I have a harder time watching movies about other country's dictatorships.  Perhaps there is an emotional shorthand that is normally left out in these kinds of movies, but I'm Still Here instantly gets me invested in this specific regime.  Maybe it also might be the fact that I might be living in a bit of a dictatorship right now.  (Oh, Tim!  Such an alarmist!) But the film is smart for the way that it is laid out.  We don't get a ton of information on Rubens Paiva before the movie starts.  We get just enough to know that he disagreed with the regime, leading to his disappearance.  Because the movie wants Paiva's abduction to have emotional resonance, we get to see this idealized version of what family life was like before this moment.  I have no reason to doubt that Paiva was like that, but it also has narrative value.

But the movie hooked me through Fernanda Torres's Eunice Paiva.  The repeated thing that my wife kept on whispering is how like a real family the group felt.  But a lot of that comes from Eunice's role as mother.  When she is taken in for questioning, I thought that this was a movie about survival in a dictator's prison.  And to a certain extent, it is.  But the cinematic real estate that the imprisonment deals with is somewhat shorter than I would have cared for.  There's a reason that it is that short.  I'm Still Here is, unapologetically, about the fallout that comes from a family member disappearing.  Yes, it is a condemnation of the regime in Rio de Janiero in 1970 and how they disappeared dissidents without any real sense of apology or admissions of guilt.  But as political as the movie is, the focus is about how people deal with the unimaginable.

But the movie is 2 hours and 17 minutes.  For an Academy Award nominee, it's about par for the course.  But there isn't much to the movie beyond that point.  We are meant to live with the emotional permanence of this moment.  Sure, emotionally, it is a viable movie.  But Eunice is fairly limited in her choices in terms of what she does beyond this point.  It is hard to critique a movie like this because a lot of the movie is about a holding pattern. Sure, she drives around and investigates where her husband might be.  But I would think that even the filmmakers would acknowledge that this isn't the movie about finding a dead body.  This is a movie about being incredibly quiet while trying to spare one's children from the harsh realities of a government that wants them dead.  

All this kind of leads to something that is almost frustrating to me: two time jumps.  The first time jump makes sense to me.  As a form of epilogue, the movie jumps ahead 25 years.  All of the children that we have grown mildly attached to are all adults.  Marcelo is a famous author and has been confined to a wheelchair.  I don't know if the Paiva family was famous enough that people would have just known the shorthand of the Paiva timeline.  But that jump forward didn't really explain much to me except for the reason for its existence:  a death certificate.  Now, I find the use of the death certificate as a lost opportunity narratively.  It brings up an intellectual goal for the family and the audience.  What it does is take something that is traditionally seen as traumatic and given it a lovely purpose.  With the death certificate, it creates a sense of closure for a family that understood that the patriarch has been long dead. But it also is the closest thing that the family gets in terms of an apology and an admission of guilt.  

But could it be more?  There are so many members of that family.  Couldn't we stick with the multitude of interpretations that the death certificate provides.  I don't know.  I would sooner see less of the direct aftermath and I would love to see the years of processing that it would take to make peace with a father's death.  That reveal is a real reveal.  I acknowledge that it might be some revisionist history to change how the family reacted to the death certificate.  But there was no anger with that reveal?  I mean, the government acknowledged that they murdered a good man.  Yet, there was no reparations.  There was no one to punish for this moment.  I just saw this much bigger moment and it bugged me a bit.  

But the thing that bothered me the most --and it's not that much --is the final coda.  The old Eunice is simply a statement that people age.  Maybe people need to know that Eunice dealt with her husband's death for an incredibly long time. But Eunice is voiceless in this moment.  She is the victim of Alzheimer's so we get this twinge of memory.  But her husband disappears from her memory as quickly as he arrived.  While there is a story to be told of what happens with aging, especially in the shadow of a great tragedy.  But as an afterthought, the only story I got was "That lady got old."  I don't know what that really adds to the movie.

From a technical and a performance angle, it's pretty good.  If I wasn't so sleepy, I might even be enthusiastic about these choices.  But from any sense of objectivity, it's a pretty empty movie.  It is a whole film based on the notion of mourning for two hours.  It doesn't have much unique to say about mourning and that's why it is a bit of a waste.