Movie Review of Goya's Ghosts

Between the Spanish inquisition and Napoleon's invading French Revolution, the muses of Spain's greatest painter, Francisco Goya, started to go bump in the night. In the 2007 film, Goya's Ghosts, the artist's involvement in Spain's most tumultuous period is a story that captures how the impact of art is often more retrospective, rather than revolutionary. At the turn of the 19th century, Goya was a distinguished court painter for Spain's King Carlos IV and the surrounding royalty, merchants as well as clergymen. Though, as the Holy Church went full court press with the Inquisition and France's Revolution rattled royal walls, Goya's work transformed from idyllic regal portraits into dark inner visions of corruption and disaster. While not Ghosts in the literal sense, Goya became haunted, and subsequently inspired, by the shadows of torture and revolution; forming his tenebrous style of painting.

Goya's Ghosts is a film born from an epically inclined production, with Milos Forman directing, Saul Zaentz producing, and Jean-Claude Carrière writing, depicts Goya just as this darkness began to take hold. Forman and Carrière crafted a script that represents where Goya's dark visions came from, instead of diving into the depths of that world. Rightfully so, as Spanish writer/director Carlos Saura, explored this realm of Goya's later works in the 1999 Spanish release of Goya in Bordeaux. In Saura's film Goya roams his "Quinta del Sordo" (Deaf Man's House) in Bordeaux, France, stricken with deafness and a tortured soul. Goya's Ghosts searches the onset of Goya's decent as a man destroyed, but as an artist evolved, as his lavish years in Spain were overshadowed by religious and political upheaval.

The cast of Goya's Ghosts is a well suited historical soirée, with some intriguing collaborative reunions on the production end as well. For one, Milos Forman and Saul Zaentz have reunited from their glorious Academy Award winning saga about Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the film adaptation of Peter Shaffer's play, Amadeus, not to mention their Oscar winning adaptation of Ken Kesey's novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Goya's Ghosts also reunites screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière with Milos Forman from another Academy Costume favorite, Valmont, and reunites Carrière with producer, Zaentz from their adaptation of Milan Kundera's novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being. From the latter also comes the reunion of Swedish actor Stellan Skarsgard, who plays the title role of Francisco Goya. Skarsgard is no stranger to the historical epic, with parts in Spielberg's Amistad, King Arthur (2004), and as Hrothgar in the 2005 adaptation of Beowulf & Grendel, as well as the barnacle adorned Bootstrap Bill in the Pirates of the Caribbean films.

Goya's Ghosts opens with a group of Clergymen scowling at a series of satirical etchings crafted by Goya. These works, though not described in the film, were Goya's Caprichos, a series of 80 prints with satirical depictions of ignorance in the ruling class and the church, as well as in the prevalence of superstition. The series was adorned with the caption, "The Sleep of Reason produces Monsters", and Goya himself described them as "the innumerable foibles and follies to be found in any civilized society, and from the common prejudices and deceitful practices which custom, ignorance, or self-interest have made usual." With this the film introduces Brother Lorenzo, played by the sly Javier Bardem (Before Night Falls, The Dancer Upstairs), whose complex hypocrisy embodies much of what Goya was reacting against. Lorenzo at first defends Goya's work as a voice of truth, but at the same time encourages Father Gregorio, played by Michael Lonsdale (Munich, The Remains of the Day), to reinstate the practices of the inquisition to help weed out heretics and growing secularism.

We come to see that while Lorenzo protects Goya from the Inquisition, acting as a patron, his actions are the cause of much of the artist's distress. Lorenzo's complexity comes in that he embodies superstitious rule of the church, but as he conforms politically to the French Revolution, also the corrupt hypocrisy of revolutionary oppression rationalized as the rule of reason. The other level of Lorenzo's character embodies how Goya was patronized and protected by the privilege of his talents, but also a source for Goya's scathing brushstrokes in his dark satires.

Enter Goya's muse Inés, the beautiful daughter of a rich merchant played by Natalie Portman (Closer, V for Vendetta). She appears throughout Goya's work as a model with an angelic presence, something Lorenzo takes notice of as Goya paints his portrait. The clever foreshadowing of Lorenzo's defiling relationship to Inés comes as Lorenzo points out her face asking Goya how he abstains from passionate desires in working with such angelic and impressionable young women, then in Inés who while being painted by Goya points to the unfinished portrait of Lorenzo and asks why that man has no face. When Inés is called before the Inquisition under the accusation of being a Jewish heretic, her father persuades Goya to call upon his powerful friend Lorenzo to help. There is so much underlying symbolism in how these character interact through Goya's paintings, that one could dedicate another essay to it.

The ensuing scene of Goya and Lorenzo's visit to Inés' family is brilliantly crafted in Goya's Ghosts, becoming a philosophical and humanist stab at the absurdity of torture. An all too relevant comment in the current criticism of torture as a means to truth. Without spoiling the scene, it will just be said that some may hope that today's leaders are made to confess their origins as apes. The film is further layered in symbolism when Lorenzo "agrees" to visit Inés in prison and tries to "help" her case. The foreshadowing of his character rains down in a storm of the unspeakable as he rapes the impressionable and vulnerable Inés, both mentally and physically. This entire dynamic conveys the metaphorical into the visceral, from a symbolic theme Goya portrayed in his later works of corrupt and deceiving ruling bodies devouring their children of Spain.

This is most representative in Goya's famous work, Saturn Devouring His Son, featured briefly in the end credits of Goya's Ghosts. The painting depicts the Roman God Saturn, who devoured his children in fear that they would overthrow his power. Goya's theme here has been interpreted as Spanish rule, the fatherland as Saturn, devouring its citizens, the children. Goya himself, while in retreat in France, always sought to return the people of Spain to its motherland, displaced from his nation, geographically and psychologically. This was part of Goya's dark obsessions in old age and is symbolically depicted in the film as Goya tries to reunite Inés, defiled by prison and Lorenzo, with her daughter Alicia, also played by Natalie Portman. The very daughter born of Lorenzo's rape and Goya tries to achieve reuniting mother and daughter using his friendship in Lorenzo's influence.

Of course it isn't apparent to Goya that the child is in fact Lorenzo's, but in the end it becomes the very ghost of guilt in Goya's artistic struggle. This also plays into the alleged rumor that Goya was father to his housekeeper's illegitimate daughter, Rosario Weiss, though this was in later years and not in the scope of the Goya's Ghosts. While hardly the extreme situation of Lorenzo and Inés, it may yet be another layer of Goya's thematic struggle in trying to reunite a child to their origin, whether mother, father, or nation. This is seen fully in the film Goya in Bordeaux, were Goya is living his last days with his lover-housekeeper and the daughter, Rosario, who tries to know and understand Goya as he comes to terms with his ghosts through reflecting on his life.

The triangle of Goya, Lorenzo and Inés in Goya's Ghosts captures the painter's position under royal and religious patronage, but also in opposition, or as critic to it. In Inés he searched for beauty, as he did in many paintings, but was also haunted by the ugly ghosts of Spain's darker side, hence Lorenzo. The very man who proclaimed Goya as holding a mirror of truth towards corruption, cloaked in royal gowns and religious crowns, a man made to face his own ugliness in the end. The last image of the film is of Inés, in full mental regression, holding the hand of an executed Lorenzo being carried away by cart. She carries a child she thinks her own, but one she found abandoned in a pub raided by French revolutionaries. Her true daughter, Alicia, left a whore atop the balcony of the new ruler of Spain, King Ferdinand VII, who was at the height of Goya's decline from royal favor as an artist.

Layer upon layer of symbolism emulate from these characters, showing Goya as a tortured man trying to make sense of these dark times. He is the observer, as he stands in the crowd of Lorenzo's execution, seeing each individual for what they are. Ferdinand, as a leader whose power resorts to violent means no different than before, turning the people of Spain into whores, as they juggle their loyalty between Spanish nobles in bed with the church, or French revolutionaries as bringers of liberty through destruction. Alicia, as the whore-child who doesn't know her true parents, or embodied within the larger consequences of now knowing her motherland. Inés, a decrepit body and failing mind, still grasping the hand of corrupt rule in Lorenzo carried away as the product of his own abuse of power.

As much as Goya's Ghosts is about its title role, Francisco Goya, he is nestled into the backdrop of the action, which reflects how his art, once a beautiful lie to the ruling classes, became ugly to them, in his mirror of truth. Another clever foreshadowing is depicted in a scene where Goya reveals his finished portrait of Maria Luisa of Parma, wife of King Charles IV (played by Randy Quaid, who holds a striking resemblance to Charles' as seen through Goya's portraits). The Queen, Maria Luisa, is a powerful woman, but not of the kindest physical features and when Goya paints her portrait with such an exact eye for her true appearance, it shocks the court, and she storms off defiant of her own ugliness. A highly literal symbolism of what Goya would endure in his later years through his satirical works, depicting the ugliness of the ruling class.

Goya's Ghosts, as mentioned, is layered in meaning that renders a complex portrait of Goya's spiral into near madness, from which his only escape was painting the ghosts of the deformed nation he called his motherland, Spain. As an artist, his works could only agitate those of corrupt power, and as the end credits roll interspersed with his paintings, we realize that art carries the impact of capturing time; a reflection of the destruction and ugliness of revolution and corruption. No matter how much the artist aspired to see change, to instigate a revolution of his own through truth, the power of his art was felt in retrospect.

The film's drawback is the loss of authenticity in using non-Spanish or French actors, Javier Bardem being the only convincing Spanish accent. Stellan Skarsgard is himself Swedish, but brings a subtle, yet strong energy to the role of Goya, hopefully catching some praise for this highly underrated performer. While the film falls short somewhat in how ambitious the production and story is, it is satisfying within the context of appreciation for Francisco Goya. Goya's Ghosts offers much of what Milos Forman has become known for as an artist himself; charm, wit and unapologetic insight of humanity's duality tugging between good and evil.