One wonders how Pablo Escobar, notorious Colombian murderer, narcoterrorist and one-time most wanted drug lord in the world, would feel about having his life made into a biopic that can best be described as “a hoot.” But being as he perished in a hail of bullets after a years-long international manhunt in 1993, I guess we’ll never know. And that’s just one of many things we will not know about Escobar having watched Fernando León de Aranoa‘s “Loving Pablo.” Indeed, this unintentionally hilarious take, on territory covered much more soberly and with far less reliance on prosthetic bellies in current Netflix hit “Narcos,” is so trashy it may even make you forget a few things you knew before.
Displaying strong potential for cult rediscovery at some point in the future, the film is based on the memoir “Loving Pablo, Hating Escobar” (and don’t worry, of course that phrase works its way into the soapily overheated dialogue) written by Escobar’s ex-lover, Colombian TV celebrity Virginia Vallejo. It follows the course of their tempestuous (natch) love affair which petered out long before Vallejo threw her lot in with the U.S. authorities and assisted in bringing Escobar down. And it is relayed to us in Colombian-accented American English, except for the odd “Hija de la puta!”, “Madre de Dios!” and “Ay, Maria!” That, however is an age-old, potential-audience-widening convention that we might wish were a thing of the past but is very much not the main problem with “Loving Pablo,” which is… everything else.
Penelope Cruz, so exaggeratedly styled she’s basically in disguise as herself, plays Vallejo as a grasping, self-obsessed man-trap in a series of increasingly florid designer outfits, including one particularly bonkers purple thing with a front ruffle that looks like a creature of the sea, which she berates Pablo for not recognising as “Thierry Mugler.” But such sartorial niceties are lost on the boorish mass-murderer, who is played by Javier Bardem in a Michelin-sponsored fat-gut prosthesis that is constantly, hypnotically on display under gaping shirts. It really is mesmerising, especially during one borderline Godardian scene when he runs naked through a forest while helicopter-mounted machine guns riddle his hideaway, and his teenage sex slave du jour, with bullets.
The film’s very first line sets the tone in which it mostly unfolds in thereafter (though it does — regrettably — get a little more serious whenever Peter Sarsgaard‘s DEA official is onscreen, as it does not appear they let him in on the joke). Cruz’s Vallejo, sporting a fluffy hairdo that all by itself elicited gales of laughter at the film’s San Sebastian press screening, looks brittle and anguished in a plush airplane seat, while her voiceover tells us, gargling her ‘H’s like Listerine, “I hhhad often left a hhhouse in the middle of the night because of a man before, but never a country.” It’s a brief foretaste of Vallejo’s dialogue, 90% of which will be in the form of aphorisms about men and/or her own devastating sexual allure. “TV networks are like men, sometimes you have to leave them to be appreciated,” she tells us usefully at one point, while “if you must cry over a man, better to do it in a private jet than a bus” is another valuable and relatable piece of advice. And in this solemn pronouncement — “Things were about to change forever, for my life — and for Colombia” — the formulation suggests the nation ought to be grateful for running a distant second in importance to Vallejo’s overheated loins.
She is fleeing to the US for asylum after Escobar’s death as the film begins. But abruptly we spool back to the early ’80s and another private plane on which a younger Vallejo, then a glamorous TV reporter of the sort who can bat her eyelids and nearby a man’s hat will blow off, is flying to a party hosted by Escobar. He is not yet notorious — the infamous Medellin Cartel will be established that very evening, apparently — but he’s already the lynchpin of an unprecedented class of nouveau super-riche in Colombia. Escobar is, and will remain, married to the long-suffering Victoria (Julieth Restrepo) and has a young son, but he pursues Vallejo anyway, so aggressively that she humblebrags, “he would have scared any woman…but I am not any woman.” She even agrees to help him win political office after he takes her to visit the Medellin slum he is remodeling where he is regarded as such a local hero that apparently all the children are named Pablo. Maybe even the girls, who knows. In any case, Vallejo breathlessly declares “at that moment I decided I didn’t care how Pablo made his money — only how he spent it” which is understandable considering how much of it he apparently spent on her.
De Aranoa, whose recent form has been more solid with “A Perfect Day” and the absorbing documentary about the rise of Spanish political movement Podemos, “Politics Instruction Manual,” has come bizarrely unstuck here. But just because everyone looks and talks like they’re in a telenovela doesn’t mean the production was cheap. On the contrary there are impressively lavish set pieces, including a plane full of cocaine landing on a blockaded highway to the tune of, inevitably, “Let It Snow,” lots of motorcycle drive-by shootings in heavy traffic and the aforementioned helicopter attack.
But telling the story from the perspective of such a vapid character as Vallejo unavoidably makes the film vapid too, with Escobar’s brutal tortures and ruthless murders, his sicario training camps, contract killings, and political assassinations all coming across as troubling mainly because they cause Vallejo to stumble over her cue cards and receive threatening phone calls. “I was hhhaunted by the dead” she announces unconvincingly over a shot of her reclining on a couch with a faraway look in her eyes, scarcely even paying attention to the fashion magazine she’s holding that has her own face emblazoned on the cover.
Vallejo comes across as so repellent, so self-centered and morally bankrupt, in fact, that it’s oddly satisfying to watch her spend the final half hour or so in terrified self-pitying hysterics, often with rivulets of black mascara carving fjords into her thick make-up. But it also works to overshadow Bardem’s growly Escobar, who is given no psychological depth here, just a terrible perm and the droopy expression of a crestfallen walrus. He does, however get to deliver possibly the single greatest performance moment of the year, when, on discovering via phone that the family he thought was safe has been delivered back to peril, he plunges both hands into a huge mound of spaghetti bolognese and holds it aloft, squidging it through his fingers, because that’s a totally normal human reaction to distress.
“What do you want, Pablo?” he is asked at one point. “I want respect!” the terrifying billionaire drug baron replies, and yet that’s the very quality in scant supply here. Which is, after all, perhaps the best thing we can say about this erratically kitsch, guiltily enjoyable artifact: there could be no better way to finally lay the glamorized, larger-than-life mythos of Pablo Escobar to rest than by giving him a biopic as campy and ridiculous as “Loving Pablo.” [C]