The Galíndez File (2003)

the audience applauded

Sorry, this movie sucks

Simply Perfect

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

I was multi-tasking today, dividing my attention between the live broadcast of Super Bowl 43 (Pittsburgh 26, Phoenix 23) and this movie, titled as THE GALINDEZ FILE on my DVD box. While the football game was more exciting than most, this flick made it look like a "yawner." Though both were real life attractions, the ball players were risking bruises while the characters in the movie--a true life story (see one of my sources in my comment summary)--were facing the much greater stakes braved by any politically active U.S. citizen: death by torture in a foreign country at the capricious whims of innumerable Cheney- and Rumsfeld-like thugs and their countless mercenary henchmen. Does this mean every American do-gooder will be tortured to death in the full bloom of youth? No. Is it inevitable that your neighborhood organizer will be rubbed out this way? No. (He might even become president.) But no matter who is president, the thousands of evil-doers who make up the "shadow government" (call them black ops, loose cannons, blackwater, off-the-reservation, CIA, FBI, ATF, NSA, homeland security, what have you) "disappear" enough of the innocents they disagree with every year that 90% of the would-be Christians are turned into the "lukewarm" sort the Bible says will burn in hell. These individual stories happening during the Bush years all have been dismissed as "liberal" propaganda by the Limbaughs, O'Reillys, Becks, and Savages of the world. But this sort of thing has been happening for 150 years, with the minions of money ("the love of money is the root of all evil") on one side, and the usually poor (often Christian, Southern, and/or conservative) patriots fighting for truth on the other.This GF movie is a case in point. The composite instrument of the U.S. money men's shadow government--Edward Robards (a well-cast Harvey Keitel) is a game player (specifically, chess). He has absolutely no more feeling for the bystanders brushing too close to his dirty work--past and present--than he does for the wooden pawns in his chess set. After engineering the rendition of a Ghandi-like spiritual cousin of Che Guevarra (Jesus Galindez) from his Columbia University classroom in New York City to his death-by-torture cell in the Dominican Republic, at least four people--including three Americans--had their life snuffed out with the U.S. tax dollars of the day so these "intelligence" people did not have to worry that their dastardly deeds would catch up to them, disrupting their life of exotic resorts, booze, and "professional women" (your tax dollars at work). The main difference between an actual documentary without compelling actors and this fictionalization is that a couple of the Galindez assassination "cover-up" assassinations are moved forward from the late 1950s to 1988, so that the woman victim--history grad student Muriel Colber (Saffron Burrows)--does not seem so remote from the 21st Century. Also, poetic license is taken to make her fate perfectly parallel to her research subject's, with almost as deft and chilling a result as that achieved by the incomparable French director George Sluizer in 1988's SPOORLOOS (aka, The Vanishing).

Saffron Burrows (Wing Commander, The Loss of Sexual innocence) gives a good performance in a film that is predominately talk about the disappearance of a Basque Nationaliost who managed to alienate Fascist Dictators Franco and Trujillo. Make one angry and you have trouble, but two? That's death.Harvey Keitel plays the CIA(?) agent who goes around cleaning up the mess after Burrows starts writing a Dissertation on the disappearance, which was likely aided by the US Government.Guillermo Toledo (Crimen Ferpecto) plays her Spanish boyfriend who carries on her work after she, too, is assassinated for sticking her nose in the business of the CIA and their fascist friends.The film uses most of the evidence known about Galindez, played by Eduard Fernández, who also was a supporting actor in a film that, like Galindez, has disappeared (Alatriste). Where is Alatriste? Cuban actor Enrique Almirante was brilliant as a slimy dictator.

This movie showed here in Los Angeles last night as part of a festival of New Spanish Cinema. Jesus de Galindez was a Basque nationalist who lived in the Dominican Republic after leaving Spain. And then after leaving the Dominican Republic for the United States he wrote a book exposing the Trujillo dicatorship. For this he was kidnapped and taken to the Dominican Republic where he was brutal tortured and killed.The movie uncovers his life through the oddysey of a young woman from the United States who does research on his life, only to find doors blocked everywhere, and false open doors as well. Harvey Keitel plays the US government agent (it's unclear if CIA or FBI) whose assignment is to prevent the facts about Washington's role in the disappearance of Galindez from coming out. Keitel plays this role to a T.At 126 minutes, it's somewhat overlong, and the performance by the actress playing protagonist is a bit goggle-eyed and wooden, but it's a fine movie. Interestingly, it's a bilingual movie, with parts of the dialogue in English, with Spanish subtitles, and in Spanish with English subtitles. It's also fascinating to listen to the different accents in Spanish by many of the characters.

The last film directed by Gerardo Herrero is based on the Manuel V. Montalban's novel `Galíndez' and written to the screen by Luis Marías, a well-known Spanish writer.Galíndez was an independentist from the Bask Country that had to leave Spain since 1939, when Republicans lost the Civil War. He lived first in Santo Domingo and later went to New York as a University Professor. Just after publishing his Thesis about Trujillo as a book, he was kidnapped and disappeared. His body was never found.In the movie, Muriel (Saffron Burrows) goes to Spain at the last 80's to work in her Thesis about `the Ethics of Resistance'. She finds this case so interesting as to decide that Galíndez (Eduard Fernandez) was the main subject of her Thesis, and starts to investigate about his disappearing. All along the film, we will know some interesting characters as the CIA's agent Robards (Harvey Keitel) or Don Angelito (Reynaldo Miravalles), and other less important to the plot as Muriel's boyfriend Ricardo (Guillermo Toledo) or the Thesis' director (John Furey).The story is set in different sceneries (Madrid, Bask Country, New York and Dominican Republic) and there are a lot of flashbacks in the movie. We are seeing two stories in fact, the real of Galíndez and the fictitious of Muriel, but they are in some way the same: the search of the true, and the danger that occasionally this may represent.Technically, the film has no faults. Perhaps a bit confuse in some moments -don't forget this is a thriller, and the mistery must involve the plot- but gripping from start to finish; the photography is excellent, and the main characters are played correctly. If you like thrillers and Spanish cinema, don't miss it!