Review: Pain & Glory

Image courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.

Looking back and moving forward is the best way to describe the theme of "Pain & Glory," the latest film from the great Pedro Almodovar and the director's best movie in 13 years. As the title says, it's a film about pain, both the physical and spiritual kind, while the glory is mostly considered by the film's lead character - a retired filmmaker named Salvador (Antonio Banderas in what is likely a career best performance) - as a thing of the past.

At the film's beginning, Salvador, who no longer makes movies due to a series of physical ailments that make it painful for him to move around too much, is contacted about an upcoming screening of a film he made 30 years before that he didn't like at the time, but has now achieved status among critics as somewhat of a classic. At the time, Salvador had a falling out with his leading man, Alberto (Asier Etxeandia), because he didn't believe his performance worked well in the picture, but he's now come to respect it.

Salvador reconnects with Alberto, and their friendship gets off to a rocky start after Salvador, during a question and answer session on their film, once again insults Alberto's performance. It also doesn't help that Alberto gets Salvador hooked on heroin to compensate for the lack of relief from the medications he takes. Alberto takes an interest in a piece of writing titled "Addictions" that he finds on Salvador's computer, and wants to turn it into a stage production, but Salvador refuses on the grounds that the work is too personal.

But he eventually relents, leading to one of the film's most moving sequences after Alberto is approached by a man named Federico (Leonardo Sbaraglia), who inspired a key character in "Addictions" and was Salvador's former lover, after a performance.

Scenes from various periods of Salvador's life are intertwined throughout the film, and it's only during the very last scene when we realize exactly what Almodovar is up to. It's a clever ending that makes you view the material a little differently than at the time you were watching it.

There are some lovely scenes depicting Salvador's childhood, during which he is raised by his mother (Penelope Cruz) in a small Spanish village. Salvador and his mother live in a home that looks like a cave, and it's there that he will have a formative experience involving an illiterate young man who has agreed to paint their house in exchange for reading lessons from Salvador. There are other scenes from a seminary where Salvador grudgingly attended school and flashbacks to moments with his ailing mother before she died.

Clearly, Salvador is a stand-in for Almodovar and the film feels as if it's a deeply personal one. Federico, who was a drug addict at the time of his affair with Salvador, tears up during a line in Alberto's performance of "Addictions" in which the play's author notes that he doesn't know if  Federico was saved by the place he ran off to, but that the cinema saved him.

Many filmmakers - most notably, Federico Fellini - have made autobiographical films about the making of movies that grapple with such topics as upbringing, artistic stasis and mortality, so it's no surprise that "Pain & Glory" has seen some comparisons to "8 1/2." It's the director's most openly emotional film since "All About My Mother," and it's a tribute to the concept that while great art is often borne out of pain, the glory that results has a healing power. This is one of Almodovar's best films and one of the finest pictures of the year.