It was coincidence that I watched films that contained historical news footage, two films, both very moving for their historical significance and for their scripts and acting.
The King’s Speech (2010), which won several of this year’s academy awards, captured well both the cultural trauma of a failing empire on the brink of war―actually during the pause between WWI and WWII―and the personal childhood traumas of Albert (George VI) that led to his speech impediment. The skill of Colin Firth to capture the voice that I’ve heard in the old news footage was remarkable, as was his subtle depiction of a man who never wanted the duties of kingship but handled the burden with such care as to endear his subjects to him during the war.
I would expect nothing less of Firth, whose depiction of the character George Falconer in A Single Man still moves me. Geoffrey Rush as the speech therapist Lionel Logue was equally solid. His grandson’s research on the decades that Logue helped Albert in speech and confidence was well compressed into the time frame of the film.
Andy Garcia is one of those strange edgy actors, as is Bill Murray, whose range between comedy and tragedy is pretty impressive, so it was no surprise that Garcia chose Murray for the role of the sardonic writer in The Lost City (2005). I knew Garcia was Cuban, and I knew the story of Batista’s fall and Castro’s rise from the perspective of my Spanish teacher, Mr. Piñero, the Havana newspaper editor who fled Cuba and became a professor at St. Mary of the Plains College in Kansas―what a sad story he told of leaving his grown children behind―but I did not think about how long ago it was that Garcia must have gone into “exile” (as he put it in his commentary on the film).
Being raised in Cuba, having a musician’s and composer’s sensibility, and having to deal with a dictator who used the arts as a social-realist tool, these elements of Garcia’s life came through in the film’s depiction Fico Fellove, a Havana cabaret owner who loses two brothers and an uncle to the revolution and whose parents encourage him to leave Cuba and start over in NYC. In his commentary Garcia explained that the vast majority of the actors in the film are Cuban, and that’s when it hit me, the influence of Cuban musical art on the U. S. So many of the young men and women who fled around 1958-60―some of them were still children―have spent the past 40-50 years contributing to the arts here. They are my own age or slightly older. My whole lifetime has been a time enriched by Cuban art.
The film really captured the music, the style, of Garcia’s homeland. And it captured the political upheaval in the “epic” style of the film and the news footage. Bill Murray said he knew he had to do the film even though he thought no one would watch it. I’m glad he did, for it is in following Murray’s films that I found The Lost City . . . and finally understood what Mr. Piñero was trying to say about his homeland to a lunkheaded Spanish student in 1971.
