Bertolucci had 1900. Coppola had The Godfathers, George Stevens, Giant; Welles had his Ambersons and Visconti, The Leopard. Now Bille August (the director of 1988’s Best Foreign Film Oscar winner Pelle the Conqueror and then Ingmar Bergman’s hand-picked director for his autobiographical screenplay The Best Intentions) has his House of the Spirits. All these films are sprawling family sagas that interlock generational struggles and historical conflicts; they are equal mixtures potboiler and cultural essay. August scripted his film from Isabel Allende’s Latin American novel of the same name. Niece of the slain Chilean president, Allende’s story weaves a 50-year-long family melodrama with magic realism and knowing political reference points. The movie then adds this incredible, star-studded cast who bring their characters to vivid life. As the patriarch, Jeremy Irons ages 50 years with great authority; Meryl Streep plays the psychically gifted matriarch who is occasionally mute (Is there now a trend toward mute movie heroines?); Glenn Close perfects the role of the repressed spinster twisted by the times and by popular ideology; Winona Ryder is the next generation, luminescent in a role that finally affords her some contemporary bite instead of all that recent costumed frippery; and Antonio Banderas is charismatic as a peasant revolutionary and Ryder’s illegitimate lover. The fortunes of these characters and the life cycle of this family are embedded in the political backdrop of national events as well as the mystical intrigue of the superordinary. The House of the Spirits engrosses the viewer all throughout. Yet there’s something that keeps it from attaining quite the monumental eloquence of these other family sagas mentioned at the beginning. For one thing, August’s characters are drawn in sharper black-and-white contrasts than in variegated shades of gray. It also seems to me that August is a masterful director of smaller moments, one who picks up on the interpersonal gestures and the unspoken dialogue between characters. He is more at home capturing these private exchanges than in choreographing on epic scales. He is more comfortable with documenting details and their human effects than in composing sweeping narrative epics and historical inter-relationships. The emphasis on the story’s magic realism underscores his commitment to the human drama. And, ultimately, The House of the Spirits blends enough melodrama and magic realism and personal conflict framed in political terms to keep virtually any audience happily absorbed.
This article appears in April 1 • 1994 (Cover).
