EVITA
Directed by Alan Parker
Starring Madonna, Antonio Banderas, Jonathan Pryce and Jimmy Nail
“Screw the middle classes!”
Great line, right? The moment when Madonna spits those ringing words at Jonathan Pryce’s waxworklike Juan Peron represents one of only two brief occasions when it seems, against all odds, as if 1997’s first — and probably worst — blockbuster, Alan Parker’s Evita, is about to come alive.
As for the middle classes themselves, the only screwing they get is for their ticket money. And they deserve it. After all, what they get is a musical with very few good tunes and absolutely no laughs, which takes itself way seriously and can’t even look its own screaming campness in the face.
It is gloomily appropriate that Evita’s nationwide release coincides with the elevation of Andrew Lloyd Webber to the House Of Lords — hopefully as Andrew, Lord Wubbish of Shaftesbury — alongside his literary equivalent, Jeffrey Archer. Both Archer and Webber represent ‘culture’ for people who have none: one a gifted storyteller with a tin ear for prose who writes about people as if he’s never actually met any, the other a talented tunesmith with no taste. Webber’s music conflates opera for people who don’t like opera, light-classical for people who don’t like the classics and rock for people who don’t like rock: the rock elements in Evita suggest that that the only rock Wubbish has ever heard is Tommy and side two of Dark Side Of The Moon. Evita refines the formula by incorporating history for people who don’t know any, thus becoming an apologia for fascism whilst using Che’s occasionally acerbic commentary as a mechanism for maintaning plausible deniability.
The Perons were, after all, fascists. Presumably at the behest of Oliver Stone, who collaborated with Parker on adapting Webber and Tim Rice’s original stage musical to the screen, we are shown Peronistas disrupting their political opponents’ meetings during an election, unsympathetic newspapers having their offices trashed, plus strikers and the unemployed getting beaten up by troops and cops. However, all this ‘history’ is only there to give epic scale and high-tragic sweep to the protagonists’ huge doomed love; and anyone sufficiently vulgar and insensitive to critique Evita in terms of real history and point out that it’s little more than Mel Brooks’ ‘Springtime For Hitler’ without the laughs would simply be accused of excessive political correctness by the Daily Express.
You guessed: despitre its record-breaking box-office take and its gleaming ranks of Golden Globe nominations, Evita is indeed a dog. To be a little more precise, it’s a great big howling bow-wow of a movie: the kind of cinematic pooch which you only get by hiring gifted but desperate people, spending an awful lot of money on the production and then investing another awful lot of money on turning the end result into a fully-fledged media event. (Definition of ‘media event’: something which you don’t see because you necessarily want to see it, but because, my dear, everyone’s going to see it, and you don’t want to be left out.)
Obviously, no expense has been spared. No-one could ever accuse Alan Parker of not knowing how to put money on the screen: the sets, the locations, the costumes and the talent obviously cost a fortune. And yet, despite the presence of zillions of extras — half the populations of Buenos Aires and Budapest seemingly participated in the numerous crowd scenes — it’s a curiously empty movie: there’s hardly anyone on the screen. (Fittingly, though Peron and Evita continually witter on about ‘the people’, we never hear from any of them.) The Perons, Antonio Banderas as narrator Che — the latter surgically divested of the beard, beret and battledress which would positively have identified him as Fidel Castro’s revolutionary sidekick Che Guevara — are just about the only characters in the movie, apart from Jimmy Nail as the small-time tango singer who first brings Evita to the big city, and he disappears after the first half-hour.
Let’s name the guilty men, starting with the guilty woman. Madonna’s central performance — a triumph of drag-queen diva-hood — is the only possible reason for seeing this movie, and it’s undoubtedly done what it’s supposed to do for her career. It’s brought her the first favourable reviews she’s garnered since her screen debut in Desperately Seeking Susan over ten years ago, and ingratiated her with precisely the kind of people who’ve found her offensive or threatening in the past. Similarly tamed is Oliver Stone, the Natural Born Killer himself, coming in from the cold by hitching himself to Wubbish’s blandwagon and atoning for his previous crimes against the middlebrow sensibility. Jonathan Pryce, a fine actor who has never previously delivered a rotten performance, sleepwalks through the movie in the world’s worst wig, looking stuffed in all senses of the word. For his part, Parker is a steamroller of a director: even his silences are loud, and he could be relied upon to flatten material considerably more substantial than this. Big Dumb is still dumb. And Andrew Lloyd Webber is still Andrew Lord Wubbish.
The crowning indignity isn’t actually on the screen, but in the peripheral media froth: the notion that ‘Evita fashion’ will be this year’s Big Thing. Take it from Britain’s best-dressed magazine: the clothes are hideous, and will only suit drag queens. Biological women who wear this stuff are advised not to have their photos taken: you’ll only be embarrassed when you see the pics again in a year’s time.
So screw the middle classes. The only other worthwhile event, by the way, occurs in a dream sequence when Herself and Banderas are actually permitted to share a scene. In a dance sequence which literally smoulders, the pair of them strike some genuine sparks off each other, and for an instant Madonna’s actually sexy again. But it’s a brief moment, and hardly worth the price of admission.
The plugline for Star Trek: First Contact is a virtual paradigm of ‘media event’ thinking: ‘Resistance is futile: prepare to be assimilated’, but surrender to Evita is not inEVITAble. Face it: you’re better off with The Borg. At least their queen still sports skin-tight rubber and major body piercings.
Big Issue, 1997
