January 9–16, 1997

movie shorts

Evita

Evita's emotional flatness goes with the territory in '70s-era musicals. The formal extravagance is necessarily combined with thematic blandness: to mount such expensive productions, you need to guarantee a crowd who can afford the priceytickets, which means you don't want to alienate anyone too obviously. Evita is like that, unsurprising, riskless. This despite its ostensible focus on such a difficult, interesting historical character. It gets around the difficulty by takingcelebrity and power as abstractions. There's not much emotional stake in Eva (Madonna) or Che (Antonio Banderas), but lots of fabulous photo-ops and meticulous montages. And despite all the controversies that seem to swirl perpetually around theprincipals — the Perns, Madonna, Banderas and Director Alan Parker — the film is decidedly friction-free and, eventually, a little boring.

—Cindy Fuchs