Column:

Reputation can't save film

By Dan Moore

Published Feb. 2, 2007

"Volver," the latest from trendy director Pedro Almódovar, is supposedly a black comedy. Some people die, and some protagonists do bad things, but for the most part, it's no darker and less comical than the average Ben Stiller vehicle. Neither a good comedy nor an effective drama, it can't even dethrone "Arsenic and Old Lace" as the best film about average people hiding dead bodies. Far from a weighty piece of filmmaking, this is so flimsy and irrelevant a work that if it were an American original, it would be forever doomed to a place in the Hallmark Channel's daytime rotation.

Almódovar is a brilliant technical director, and "Volver" is the most lovingly filmed comedy this side of Woody Allen. But Almódovar's brilliance is set apart from the film as a whole. He seems unable or unwilling to aid in the storytelling with his camerawork and editing. Because of this, characters mostly exposit through clunky, unwieldy dialogue. In one scene, protagonist Raimunda's family is watching a report about a fire on the news, and her sister helpfully tells her daughter, "That's how your grandparents died." Considering they died four years before, and the family just got back from the cemetery, this comes as something less than revelatory.

Penelope Cruz, who is excellent, given the weak material, stars as Raimunda. She is forced to take the blame after her daughter kills her husband in self-defense. The supposed black comedy begins when instead of calling the police, she drags her abusive husband's body into the restaurant next door and dumps him into the freezer.

The remainder of the plot is a hodgepodge of clichés and coincidences, the likes of which usually aren't seen outside of airport bookstores. Her supposedly dead mother appears to her sister; a movie's hungry crew is miraculously filming next to the restaurant, which luckily enough, Raimunda is watching while its owner is away. All of these contrivances come together in a sort of deus ex machina fashion for a final revelation that is so inane and devoid of foreshadowing or poignancy that it seems like some kind of Andy Kaufman-esque straight-faced punchline.

And this surreal, earnest ending is probably the funniest thing about the movie. Fart jokes and sitcom-style sequences, in which a character hides under a bed and in car's trunk, seem to appear out of solemn duty to the genre.

That it isn't funny is a real problem because as a drama it falls laughably short. Its featherweight plot with faked deaths and un-discussed family secrets seems lifted out of a soap opera. Its generations of women exude cheesy emotion and have clichéd bonding moments amid the intentionally bizarre, murderous story. One suspects the movie was originally titled "The Sisterhood of the Traveling Corpses."

I'm not sure what "Volver" was supposed to be, but it's an unequivocal failure in any genre.