Real-life couples working together on the big screen has varying levels of success. In Loving Pablo, Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz capture movie magic with their chemistry as Pablo Escobar and Virginia Vallejo. The duo had an affair while Escobar was simultaneously one of the wealthiest men of the world, and also one of the most wanted by authorities the globe over.
Escobar was married with two kids and the affair with one of Colombia’s more respected journalists—Vallejo—would utterly destroy her career while elevating his status. In a landscape that sadly elevates men for their conquests and belittles women for their role in them, Escobar was seen as a man who could get and control anything that orbits his world.
The entire time this affair was going on, the DEA and the Colombian government had made Escobar public enemy number one. As chronicled in Loving Pablo, Vallejo’s relationship with the drug kingpin began to erode her credibility as a reporter. Seeing an opening, DEA Shepard (Peter Sarsgaard), pursued Vallejo as a way to get Escobar and somehow capture or kill the extraordinarily elusive gangster.
Bardem has a field day in the role. It’s a challenging endeavor. Escobar was a murderer and a terrorist, who was personally responsible for hundreds, if not thousands of deaths, including the bombing of a plane, a government building and cutting the life short of countless law enforcement souls and innocents alike. One wonders what on Earth Vallejo saw in the man. As Cruz and Bardem do their dance, that inquiry fades to the back as each actor brings the attraction into focus. Escobar sought legitimacy. He even ran for a seat in Colombia’s congress at one point. Being linked to the esteemed reporter certainly played into his decision to cheat on his wife and potentially be compromised in his role as the world’s biggest cocaine cowboy.
For Vallejo, as enlivened by Cruz, we see her side as well. Escobar is charismatic, has enormous power, and she fell for it. As she tried to pull away from him, Vallejo discovered the deathly dark side of this man and was consumed by fear. If he could kill children, she could easily meet her maker at any given moment. Therefore, when she was approached by Shepard, it was a complicated situation to say the least.
The biggest thing about Loving Pablo is that there will be, undoubtedly, comparisons to the hit Netflix show, Narcos. Each tale takes different routes in the portraying Pablo angle, even though they utilize the same characters. On Narcos, Vallejo and Escobar call it quits, yet remain on good terms. It is her, in fact, that undercover delivers a phone to Escobar’s wife, so she can communicate with him when he is in hiding. There is none of that in the film. She becomes a pawn in a DEA effort to rid the world of Escobar.
It is fascinating, having completed Narcos, literally the day before witnessing Loving Pablo. Comparisons must be made between the two, even though it is not remotely fair. See, the format of television allows some rich, elongated, character development that a two-hour film just can compete with. Writer-director Fernando León de Aranoa made some difficult choices in his narrative and they completely pay off. He keenly knows that his story has to center around this relationship and as such, utilize the priceless chemistry between his married in real life leads. I could watch Bardem and Cruz as these two for 22 hours if allowed the opportunity. That is the heart of this story, obviously with a film moniker such as Loving Pablo!
Yet, it appears as if Aranoa ran into some difficulties with the relationship aspect of the tale. There was an entire Escobar history lesson that still had to be included amongst the romantic hills and valleys of their relationship. This is a perfect example of how the medium of TV can just do more justice to tales than their cinema counterparts. It is also why biopics are just so difficult to triumph with—so few do! How do you do justice to something so rich that transpires over several years in only a matter of hours? It’s a thankless endeavor, yet Aranoa and his cast do their best.
In Narcos, Wagner Moura was given two entire seasons to craft his character’s arc and as such he did so in a manner that had viewers emotively attached to this man—who we keenly knew was a bloodthirsty madman. When his fate ultimately played out on a rooftop, there was an element of sadness that this “character’s” story was now complete. We didn’t want it to end, and that is an enormous salute to the acting talents of Moura. Yet, for Bardem, he has to work within the confines of the script that Aranoa penned (based on a book by Vallejo). It speaks volumes to the Oscar winner’s talents that he not only takes the character into a different emotive plane than the TV show did, but that we get everything we need to know and feel about Escobar from him in that limited two-hour timeframe.
Cruz’s talents as well achieve a whole nether level of awesomeness in Loving Pablo. The viewer completely feels her stress, anguish, attraction to this man that essentially makes the devil look like an angel. She delivers one of the great performances of her career in the role and even had us looking up Vallejo’s history to learn more about this enormous figure whose shadow looms large over the nefarious legend that is Escobar.
There is one more thing about the film versus the television program. In the TV series, all of the scenes involving Escobar are in Spanish with English subtitles. In the film, they mostly speak English, but break into Spanish on occasion. That took us away from the reality of the situation. Audiences are mature, smart and deserve credit for their astuteness. Loving Pablo should have been in Escobar and Vallejo’s native tongue and only employed English during scenes where she is speaking to the DEA. Just my two cents…
My recommendation is to inhale Loving Pablo and then seek out Narcos. What Bardem, Cruz and Aranoa achieve with the Escobar story is quite commendable. But, it will absolutely leave you wanting more. One should then turn to Netflix and bask in the brilliance that is Narcos. That way, for those interested in the complex and riveting story of Escobar, you can have your cake and eat it too.
Grade: B-