PAIN AND GLORY – a movie review by Gary Smolker

I saw PAIN AND GLORY last night.

It is an artsy movie about an extremely successful writer, movie-director, movie producer.

It traces his life.

It begins when he was a little boy, living in extreme poverty with his mother.

It then jumps to a time in his life after he has obtained great success as a sensitive writer telling the most interesting heartfelt love stories, he  had magically directed the movies he wrote and thereby had successfully created great wealth for himself through writing, directing and producing compelling movies.

Writing is a compulsion.

The great writers yearn to write, to reveal, to be authentic.

They have an urge to tell.

They are willing to go to that place of telling that makes writing come alive.

What they write goes straight from their heart to the page.

They present their real self, as a real person.

Their candor is charming, disarming and refreshing.

In a culture where character can be as malleable as Play-Doh, they stand out.

Most of this movie shows the audience the main character’s daily life after he lost the joy of being alive.

Writing, when committed honestly, is an act of of exposing.

The word “EXPOSITION” comes from the Latin exponere, defined as “to explain or to put forth.”

During most of the movie he is miserable, because he could not save his lover from drug addiction.

The audience sees that his sense of failure and shame paralyzed him.

But in the movie he is so truthful, the intimacy and authenticity about him creates a bond with the audience, that favorably connects the audience to him.

The audience loses emotional control – the audience is moved to love him, because even though he was miserable he was also fun.

He was a mixture of creative prankster, tortured soul, poet, charmer, and quirky businessman.

He had an alluring mixture of of strength and warmth that compels the audience to care about him.

He was lively, and hip, and interesting, while being miserable.

That makes the audience love him.

He is a refreshingly politically incorrect  unplugged character.

That makes the audience love him.

He was the sort of person you immediately connect to: simultaneously approachable but inaccessible.

His style was his substance.

He was extremely style conscious.

He was an extremely interesting earnest person, full of finesse.

I want to own the kind of t-shirts he wore.

I want to live in the kind of home he owned.  It was cozy and sunny and full of character.

The audience roots for him, wants him to get his joy of life back.

About 40% of the movie focuses on the pain he endured artistically, romantically, physically, mentally, and emotionally while he was a successful writer, director, producer.

Another 40% of the movie shows what his life was like later, after he voluntarily quit writing and directing and producing movies while at the height of his financially and artistically successful career.

The movie compels the audience to understand the focus required to be a writer, the focus required to be a director, and the focus required to be a movie producer.

The movie forces the audience to understand the heart break he suffered from losing his lover – a drug addict.

That heartbreak caused him to stop writing, to stop directing and to stop producing movies.

After his lover – another man – was no longer in his life, writing required more focus than he was able to summons up.

The intensity of the actor acting out this man’s life makes the audience understand that writing another screenplay would require more focus than this extremely sensitive heart broken man felt like summoning up.

It is a forceful profound movie which ends when a pleasant memory makes him happy; once he becomes happy he then starts writing an autobiographical sexually charged story titled FIRST DESIRE.

Throughout the movie he had a buoyant spirit powered by a self-generating energy.

The writer and director of this movie are masters of technique, larger than life masters of connecting the dots.

In my opinion this movie tells such an authentic story, seems so true, it must be autobiographical narration.

Everyone has a story to tell, but the version the writer of a movie and the director of a movie are willing or able to tell is not necessarily the story most worthy of telling.

I wonder: Is the person on the screen really the writer, really the director, or really someone he or they are/were close to?

This is a breathtakingly seductive movie.

Whoever made this movie has a lot of energy, a lot of vitality, a great inner-fire, an off-the-charts IQ, intestinal fortitude and heart.

It is easy to understand why the writer and director and producer of this movie are successful, a whole other stratosphere professionally.

They understand both substance and structure.

The main character in this movie is a strong and compelling person.

This movie speaks to your state of mind.

This movie is a Rorschach test, a telling symbol which reveals your position in society.

It will become radioactive in the minds and lives of sensitive people who see it.

Copyright © 2020 by Gary Smolker, All Rights Reserved