DVD Title: Goya’s Ghosts
Time: Approx. 1 hr 54 mins
Stars: Javier Bardem, Natalie Portman, Stellan Skarsgard.
Genre: Drama
Rated: R
DVD Features: Behind-the-scenes featurette.
We Recommend: Rent, unless you are a history buff or a Portman devotee.

There’s something for both men and women in the new DVD release Goya’s Ghosts – except for any ghosts. Here’s a look:

- For Her: A period setting with lots of elaborate costumes and eccentric nobles.

- For Him: A period setting with lots of bloody carnage, in this instance the Spanish Inquisition and the invasion of Spain by French forces – the late 1700s and early 1800s.
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- For Her: The charisma of Academy Award Winner Javier Bardem, playing the complicated and duplicitious inquisitor Brother Lorenzo.

- For Him: The ever-appealing Natalie Portman, who appears nude (somewhat) in at least two scenes, although you’re a sick puppy if you get turned on watching a torture and a rape scene (yes, another movie where she’s being tortured… she must be a masochist). She actually plays two characters here, Ines, and her grown offspring.

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- For Her: A love story set against the backdrop of an epic adventure.

- For Him: An exploration of the twisted Spanish Inquisition, when the church insisted that if you were truly innocent of heresy, God would give you the strength to resist confessing to anything you didn’t actually do while being tortured.

This is not to say that men can’t enjoy a good love story or that women won’t find the action elements interesting, but at first glance, I assumed this movie would fall under the category of movies-that-guys-sit-through.

Not at all. In fact, the historical elements of the Inquisition and war are graphically displayed in Goya’s Ghosts, making this one perhaps a bit intense for the more squeamish of either gender. Personally, I find that hacked off limbs and mindless brutality have entertainment value as long as I don’t stop and think, ‘Cool, how’d they do that special effect?’ The gore and violence here serve a purpose: To make you realise it would have profoundly sucked to live in that particular place at that particular time. I mean, c’mon! Torture in the name of God is one thing, but no Starbucks?!

The performances by Bardem (who played the murderous Anton in the Oscar favorite No Country For Old Men) and Portman are powerful as both characters undergo tremendous changes over decades. If you’ve always thought that Portman was more sweet charisma than actual talent, Goya’s Ghosts might convince you otherwise as you watch her lose any trace of cuteness and become a broken shell of her former self.

You feel pity for Ines, a simple girl who is thrown in prison after declining a dish of pork in a tavern – accused of practicing Jewish rituals. Bardem’s monk goes from intensifying the Inquisition to embarrassing the Spanish Church.

Goya’s Ghosts also stars Stellan Skarsgard as Goya, the painter bewitched by the beauty of his muse in a world gone mad, as well as Randy Quaid as King Carlos IV. It was helmed by Milos Forman (who won Academy Awards for directing One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Amadeus) so you know the quality of the production is first-rate. The movie did well in Europe but grossed only $358,148 in the US -- probably because the first time I’d heard of it was when the DVD showed up for me to watch.

I personally rate this one as a rental because the subject matter is pretty heavy and thus not my first choice for repeated viewings, but if you’re a history buff or a huge Portman fan, this DVD might be worth owning.

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Who was Goya?

Goya wasn’t a rainbows and butterflies kind of artist: Instead his sketches were the stuff nightmares are made of. Regarded as the last of the Masters and the first of the Moderns, Francisco Jose de Goya y Lucientes (March 30, 1746-April 16, 1828) was a Spanish painter and printmaker who is known for the subversive quality of his paintings. He was a court painter to the Spanish crown and a chronicler of history. As French forces invaded Spain, the new Spanish court received him as had its predecessors. He captured disturbing scenes of battlefield horror that were not published until after his death. The dark visions depicted in his prints were bleak or had a satirical wit. To say his work was macabre may very well be the understatement of the century. Works such as ‘Satan Devouring His Son’ show a bloodied torso not uncommon in his works. In his defense, high fever left him deaf, and he became reclusive, and perhaps this is why he produced such frightening paintings of insanity, madness, and fantasy.

He lived out his final years in France and died at the age of 82.

Goya’s life was previously portrayed in the films Goya (1948), Goya, Historia de una Soledad (1971), Goya in Bordeaux (1999), and Volaverunt (1999).