el cantante

So, the neighbs gives me no end of grief for my love of an unlikely Hollywood icon, Marc Anthony, an almost embarassing enthusiasm that I doggedly cling to based largely on his performance in Big Night. Oh, totally, argues the neighbs. He was soooo good at being on screen for two hours and not...even...talking.

I see it differently. Marc Anthony's quiet presence in that movie can't have been easy to pull off. He manages to be a character, practically without speaking, yet never makes a grab for the spotlight. The whole film is an exercise in subtlety, in which the actors do more with their silences and pauses than with their lines. No small feat.

But that's not the movie I want to talk about. I want to talk about El Cantante, a biography of Hector Lavoe starring Marc Anthony and Jennifer Lopez. For anyone who doesn't know, Hector Lavoe was a Puerto Rican singer who innovated salsa music on the Nuyorican Fania label in the sixties and seventies. The film describes his rise as a musician and his descent as a human being into drugs and alcohol among other vices, as described by his estranged wife, Puchi in a series of 2002 interviews.

J. Lo produced El Cantante and gave a remarkable performance as the indomitable Puchi. This role was a huge step out from the simpering, dejected characters I've seen her play in the past (not that that's all she's done, just that that's all I'd seen of her until now). Puchi spends over twenty years with Hector, enabling him, escorting him in his addictions, at the same time bolstering him in his career and loving him unconditionally in perhaps the best way she knows how. Marc Anthony delivers another nuanced, mature performance interpreting the unconventional and troubled salsero.

Several famous salsa artists who performed with Lavoe back in the day paid tribute to him by appearing in the film, and the music is nothing short of sensational. Hector's scenes on stage are accompanied by translated lyrics to the songs he's singing, always chosen sagely from the artist's repertoire to reflect what's going on in his life. The lyrics don't appear as subtitles, instead they are superimposed elegantly on the scene, and the words often appear with Spanish syntax (the noun arrives first, then the adjective materializes ahead of it). The song written for and about Lavoe by Rubén Blades, "El Cantante", appears in a central moment in the film and aptly sums up the unspoken pain and loss suffered by the artist, ever compelled to be the entertainer while those who profess to love him allow him to flounder and, ultimately, to go under.

In general I enjoyed this movie, otherwise I wouldn't be bothering to write about it. I loved the music and was impressed by the performances delivered by actors it's easy to underestimate due to their obscene fame. In my book, in this movie they proved themselves to be worthy of that fame, although for much different reasons than the ones that originally vaulted their careers into outer space. I did feel that El Cantante centered too heavily on the relationship between Hector and Puchi and particularly the good times they shared. Puchi was detested by many of Hector's friends and family members and contributed heavily to his weaknesses; in general, they were terrible to and for each other by all accounts except hers. This viewer, for one, empathized too much with Lopez's Puchi to account for the other character's hatred of her or for Hector's assertion that their differences were irreconcilable. I think the film could also have gone further in exploring other sources of Lavoe's pain: his self-exile from Puerto Rico, the loss of his older brother at a young age, being disowned by his father, the death of his son, and the co-dependent, mutually hurtful dimension of his relationship with his wife.

Having said that, I think J. Lo achieved her stated goal of producing a Puerto Rican film with universal appeal. The film has a distinct flavor that makes it credibly Nuyorican, but you don't have to be bilingual or bicultural to enjoy it and identify with it. Diagnosis: rentable. Check it out.