Word: babenco
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...PLAY IN THE FIELDS OF THE LORD. In these politically correct days, most epic journeys into exotic lands are guilt trips, pinning blame for the world's woes on the evil white male. Director Hector Babenco's turgid trek into the Brazilian rain forest accomplishes this and more: it makes the viewer feel guilty for wasting three hours and seven bucks...
...passion for filmmaking, not racial anger, however, that drives the director. "Spike has an appreciation, a love and an inherent understanding of cinema," notes Barry Brown, who worked on editing Lee's films for the past four years. Lee's cinematic preferences run the gamut, from Hector Babenco's Pixote and Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets to musicals such as The Wizard of Oz and West Side Story, a taste inherited from his mother. Lee, who has been called a "black Woody Allen," says he admires Scorsese's work. But suggest that he has been cinematically influenced by others...
...Farrell -- would get lost in translation to the screen. He must have realized that Francis' life is significant not for what he does but for what he dreams and fears. But a movie like this, which concentrates on mundane plot, can only show, not reveal. As directed by Hector Babenco (Pixote, Kiss of the Spider Woman), Ironweed lurks outside Francis' soul, like a tramp at a suburban window, permitting only dumb speculation on his fertile inner life. His ghosts are white-faced extras; his trek up Calvary becomes one long trudge toward oblivion. The movie provides a mug shot instead...
That is the least of his worries, however. Where the movie seems thinnest is in its symbolic attempt to weld Hurt's stagey character to Babenco's overriding theme about cinema as a kind of mental panacea...
Molina's selfless behavior in doing a favor for Valentin and his cadre of revolutionaries rings partially true as another example of romantic posturing. But his pitiful end seems inconsistent with the elevated claim Babenco has made throughout for fantasy. Does hanging onto our dreams make us, finally, irrelevant? Molina's final sacrifice is supposed to prove his redemption; just as his leaving home is supposed to indicate newfound maturity. Unfortunately this sort of pandering to what conventional audiences expect in a hero undermines Molina's integrity...