BEFORE: I had two choices of linking coming out of the Bergman chain - OK, actually I had three but I didn't see the one that would connect to the 2009 version of "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo". The two that I was aware of were Lena Olin and Peter Stormare. It turned out that Peter Stormare had a very small role in yesterday's film, he was just a guy who lifted up a box and helped carry it. It would have counted, but that also would have felt a little cheap, and maybe desperate - so I'm kind of glad that I'd already decided not to follow that path. Both paths would have led me to where I want to be in late January, which is to watch "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" on January 28, and then from there I know I can link to my February movies. So it really didn't matter, I could choose whichever path had more movies I wanted to see sooner.
So, Lena Olin carries over from "Fanny and Alexander".
THE PLOT: In 1950's Cuba, a professional gambler falls for a woman heavily involved in the revolution movement.
AFTER: It's strange, though I went from a Swedish Bergman film to a Hollywood film directed by Sydney Pollack, and a film set in 1907 Stockholm to one set in Cuba in 1958, the films do share something in common - they both begin during the Christmas season. "Havana" runs until New Year's 1959, though, and the story in "Fanny and Alexander" plays out over a year or two.
I put this film on the schedule months ago, though, without knowing about the January tie-in, also I couldn't possibly have known that it was about the Cuban Revolution that put Castro in power, or that the U.S. would come as close as it did to having a violent revolution of its own, as it did on January 6. I can't really compare the two, because one was successful (history is written by the winners, it seems) and the other was not. But maybe that's the only real difference between the two terms - a revolution can result from a successful coup? I'm going to have to check up on that. For that matter, let me stop here and read up on the 1959 Cuban Revolution, because that took place a bit before my time. I lived my whole life with Castro in charge of Cuba - not that it mattered that much to me as a kid growing up in Massachusetts.
OK, I paused and read up on the Cuban Revolution, and there aren't that many parallels to the Trump coup attempt, if anything Trump fits the Batista template more than the young Castro one. President Batista was known for being more dictator-like as time passed, plus he had developed a taste for exotic foods and elegant women. Plus he was elected as President of Cuba in 1940, then got a second term through a military coup and overthrew the election in 1952. Hmm, it is sounding a bit familiar, I'll admit. Cuba was then plagued by high unemployment and crumbling infrastructure, while Batista had links to organized crime and took money from foreign countries at the expense of his own country's economy. Again, sounds familiar, it's all typical behavior for a tyrant or despot.
Fidel Castro, along with his brother Raul and Ché Guevara, were the leaders of the rebel faction, and the U.S. supported Batista at first, but slowly shifted support over to the rebels, by way of the CIA due to various arms embargoes. Long story short, on December 31, 1958 there was the Battle of Santa Clara, and the rebel victory caused Batista to flee to the Dominican Republic. Cuba was somewhat divided at first, a Cuban general took over the Presidential Palace and appointed Carlos Piedra as President, but then by January 8 Fidel Castro had arrived in Havana and appointed someone else.
(This is where the comparisons to the failed Trump coup really end, because Castro's rebels seemed like a bunch of well-armed, well-trained, organized rebels with a plan, and the Trump bunch was just a crowd of dumb, misguided rednecks with zip-ties. Even if they had taken over the Capitol building, which they didn't, what was their next move? Burn the electoral college votes? There were back-up copies. Start lynching Democratic senators? I'm pretty sure that would have led to the army taking back the Capitol by force. Most of these Trump insurrectionists just walked away after they lost interest, I guess because they realized that taking over a government, which they didn't, would then mean they'd have to run it, and that sounded too much like work.)
But when I saw the crowds at the end celebrating the Cuban revolution breaking in to the casino and tearing up the joint, tipping over the gaming tables, I couldn't help but think about the recent break-in at the Capitol building. Different time, different country, different situation though. But had Trump's coup worked, it would have put another dictator in power, similar perhaps to the way Castro became a dictator over time. Notably, Redford's character here contrasts a dictator with a poker player here, pointing out that a poker player might lose a small hand now and again on purpose in order to win a bigger hand later, and a dictator would never do that, he would only play to win power now, and then to try and retain it. I believe this to be true.
Redford's character, Jack Weil, is a poker player, always looking for the next big game, and for a casino to back him in a game so he can win a bigger pot. He's also got an eye for the ladies, and here he helps out a beautiful woman who he meets on the ferry over to Havana, she pays him to switch cars as they drive off the boat, because she's smuggling something. Everyone's up to something, it seems, but she's got supplies for the rebels hidden in her car. (NITPICK POINT: Weil finds the hidden walkie-talkies inside the car door, but he doesn't notice the two very prominent boxes on the back seat?) When Weil finds out that the mystery woman is married to Arturo Duran, one of the leaders of the revolutionary movement, he backs off, and goes back to setting up his big poker game at the casino and plying American tourist women with daiquiris and mojitos and sleeping with two of them at a time. Well, that kind of is why THEY came to Cuba in the first place. (Merry Christmas!)
The next morning, there's a report of Arturo Duran's death in the newspaper, and during his poker game (which happens to be with a number of Cuban military personnel), Weil asks about Mrs. Duran, which is not really a bright idea. Still, he persists until he finds where she's being held and tortured, and uses his poker winnings to bribe her military guards and secure her release. Somehow, for him, two American women can't possibly equal the one mystery Cuban rebel of Swedish descent. Bobby Duran crashes at his apartment, cleans up real nice, but she's gone back to the rebels before the Cuban officials track Weil down.
It's no good, Weil's in love and drives through a war zone in his Cadillac convertible to find her - she's hiding out in her husband's childhood home, they shelter in place there for a while and he tells her that after one more big poker game, he's going to arrange for both of them to leave the country by boat, and go wherever she wants. Things seem all set, until Weil is beat up by two Cubans who seem to imply that Arturo Duran is still alive somewhere, somehow, and now Weil's got a terrible choice to make. Should he sail off with the woman he loves, or work to find her possibly-alive husband and step out of the picture? Or should he just go and play in the big poker game that he spent so much time and effort to arrange?
No spoilers here, but I'm satisfied with how it all shook down. It's a good, twisty plot with more and more revelations as things progress. Who hasn't gone to a lot of trouble to land a job, only to find after a few days' work that they've sort of lost interest in it? Who hasn't sat back and watched a regime change in a government and been stressed about whether there's going to be a peaceful transfer of power, or if things are going to get violent instead? This sort of thing is all too timely right now, I'm afraid.
Four years later, in 1963, we see Jack driving down to Key West once a year, even though he knows that the ferries are no longer running. Still, hope springs eternal. The U.S. has a new President, it's a new decade, sort of, and things are looking up. (Sorry, Jack, but things don't turn out very well for JFK in 1963...)
For a long while, this was the only Robert Redford film that I hadn't seen. My first wife was a big Redford fan, and made me watch a bunch of his movies, and then as a part of this blog I managed to fill in most of the gaps, and this was one of the few hold-outs. Last year I caught up with some of his newer films, like "Our Souls at Night" and "The Old Man & the Gun", but I think by now there are another few newer ones that I haven't seen, like "The Discovery" (2017), "A Walk in the Woods" (2015) and "The Company You Keep" (2012), but I'm not really in a rush to see those. I think over the years I've covered the vast majority of his filmography.
Also starring Robert Redford (last seen in "The Old Man & the Gun"), Alan Arkin (last seen in "Stand Up Guys"), Raul Julia (last seen in "One from the Heart"), Tomas Milian (last seen in "Amistad"), Daniel Davis (last seen in "The Prestige"), Tony Plana (last seen in "Bombshell"), Betsy Brantley, Lise Cutter, Richard Farnsworth (last seen in "The Outlaw Josey Wales"), Mark Rydell (last seen in "The Long Goodbye"), Vasek Simek, Fred Asparagus, Richard Portnow (last seen in "Desperately Seeking Susan"), Dion Anderson, Carmine Caridi (last seen in "Some Kind of Wonderful"), James Medina, Owen Roizman, with a cameo from Dennis Farina (last seen in "What Happens in Vegas").
RATING: 6 out of 10 roulette wheels
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