Evita

Although Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s 1978 West End musical was a huge hit in its day, it is hard to say why from Alan Parker’s screen transposition which is basically its very familiar theme song recycled over and over and packaged with lavish production values.  The latter is of such high quality that one can only wish that the film had been a conventional historical drama for there is a yawning (and that word is very appropriate) mismatch between the dramatic potential and its realization.

Madonna plays Eva Duarte, the illegitimate daughter of a provincial landowner in Argentina who follows her older lover, Agustin Magaldi (Jimmy Nail), a singing Lothario, to Buenos Aires, sleeps her way into high places and eventually teams up with Juan Perón (Jonathan Pryce) a right-wing army officer who will become Il Presidente. As Argentina's First Lady she is snubbed by its high society but becomes the idol of  the lower classes (that is, the bulk of the population) for her charitable work before dying of uterine cancer at the age of 33.

That’s about as much as you can glean of the history for the screenplay by Parker (Oliver Stone, who at one time was going to direct also gets a credit although apparently he did not actually contribute anything) and the Webber-Rice songs reduce it to a generic mush.  Perhaps in the late ‘70s on stage, with the excitement of live performance  this was not an issue but watching it on screen at a 20 year remove it feels like Parker is doing a big, serious version of Annie (1982) with Perón replacing Daddy Warbucks. 

If only the songs were anywhere near good.  And if, other than "Don't Cry for Me, Argentina" which we get in various iterations, you can distinguish the songs from the sung dialogue and Antonio Banderas’s sung narration (the only song that comes close to being memorable is the Evita-Juan duet ”I’d Be Surprisingly Good For You”, which displays a level of wit which is in abeyance for the rest of the show).  Banderas’s character is particularly annoying as he turns up in nearly every scene in different guises to perform his duties. Also estranging is the style of the musical numbers, predominantly rock opera-ish with no feel for the time and place of events (when Magaldi sings a tango number his presumably dubbed voice sounds like someone out of the school of Harry Connick Jr.)

The whole thing is an interminable slog, historically vapid, musically dull and dramatically inert with probably a role that Madonna should have commanded gone to waste for want of imagination.

 

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