Esquire Magazine

September 2004

Y Tu Mamá También gave Gael Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna the same big break, with nearly opposite results.

POP QUIZ, HOTSHOT. You are a young, boyishly handsome, vaguely effeminate Mexican actor. Your latest film, in which you play a callow horndog tooling around the countryside with his very best amigo and a sexy, accommodating older woman, has shattered box-office records at home and achieved proportional success abroad--the kind of numbers that make opportunistic Hollywood execs think crossover. The film's director has just been offered the third installment in the insanely lucrative Harry Potter franchise. It is slowly dawning on you that you stand at a critical juncture in what you are surprised to find yourself actually thinking of as your career. As one of Mexico's new It boys, you'll be in a position to cherry-pick the best Spanish-language roles and establish some impressive leading-hombre credentials. On the other hand, you can already smell the plush leather interior of the Carrera you'll be able to buy with your check from the new Spielberg flick, in which you've been offered the challenging role of Wacky Ethnic Sidekick #3. Integrity versus visibility. Craft versus dinero. What do you do?

Depends on who you are, it turns out. It's now been three years since Y Tu Mamá También put the men back in ménage à trois; few moments in recent movies have rocked audiences like the one in which Julio and Tenoch, both undulating against the woman of their adolescent wet dreams, lean around her stunning naked form and start soul-kissing each other. And like test subjects in a controlled experiment, the film's talented and courageous stars, Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna, have set off on nearly antipodal career paths--one inspiring, the other dispiriting. (For those of you who can't recall offhand who was who, García Bernal was the floppy-haired one with the soulful eyes and winning smile, whereas Luna was the floppy-haired one with the watchful eyes and charming smirk.)

Of the two, García Bernal had the higher profile prior to Y Tu Mamá, having made an arresting debut in Alejandro González Iñárritu's Amores Perros. He's opted for the high road, and he's not fucking around. Can you say Che? Opening this month, The Motorcycle Diaries, directed by Walter Salles (Central Station), follows the young Ernesto Guevara, then a privileged med student no less cheerfully self-absorbed than the rest of us, as he and a buddy journey about 8,000 miles from Buenos Aires to Lima, encountering a variety of conscience-jarring locals en route. The film was faithfully adapted from Guevara's own account of the period (some of it contemporaneous, other bits retroactively revised) and purports to depict the slow yet seismic evolution of a revolutionary; at times, you can almost see the fault line widening behind Che's eyes.

For all its scrupulous compassion and vivid location work, The Motorcycle Diaries is a bit of a snooze. Salles works so strenuously to avoid self-conscious mythmaking--a laudable goal-that he allows the movie's rhythm to become plodding and cozily anecdotal; the growing urgency in García Bernal's performance isn't echoed by the filmmaking. But it's remarkable nonetheless to watch the shrewdness with which the actor conveys Guevara's gradual transformation. There's no eureka moment, no epiphany--just a series of psychic gearshifts that manifest themselves in the character's carriage and tone of voice. Even at the climax, as a disgusted Ernesto swims across the river separating the staff of a leper colony from its patients (care to guess in which direction?), there's still a sizable disjunction between the man onscreen and the legendary firebrand lurking inside our heads. García Bernal respects proto-Che's embryonic state, but unlike Salles, he manages at the same time to capture something of his passion.

Passion, in varied and sometimes destructive forms, is the subject of another startling García Bernal showcase, Pedro Almodóvar's Bad Education. Almodóvar, of course, is Spanish, and so are the various characters García Bernal plays in the film. But from the moment you first see the actor strut into the frame in full drag-looking uncannily like Julia Roberts, only prettier--you can see why Almodóvar dispensed with national pride. If Guevara's identity is in flux throughout The Motorcycle Diaries, the identity of Bad Education's semiprotagonist, an aspiring actor, is so dizzyingly fluid that it's impossible even to give the character a name. He is ingenuous one moment, lascivious the next, and his mutability allows G.G.B. to demonstrate a range that confirms him as one of the most gifted actors of his generation. That he won no prize at Cannes, where the film was the opening-night attraction, is due only to Almodóvar's decision to withhold it from competition. Bad move, Pedro. Nobody, alas, is likely to suggest that Diego Luna was robbed. His own post-Mamá career, while not an outright embarrassment, nonetheless serves as an object lesson in the way Hollywood pays lip service to diversity while quietly marginalizing anybody not named Halle or Denzel.

Kevin Costner cast Luna as a free-grazing farmhand in last year's underrated western Open Range, but the character, known as Button (how cute!), exists solely as rifle fodder: He has to be injured halfway through the movie so that Costner can make taciturn goo-goo eyes at nurse Annette Bening. He is one rung up the evolutionary ladder from the random, frequently ethnic Enterprise crew member who ventures onto each episode's strange new planet in order to give Kirk and Spock something to avenge. Still, that's more respect than Luna is accorded in The Terminal, in which he's just one of several handy minorities providing Tom Hanks with a tour of America's melting pot in microcosm. We don't even get to see him woo Zoë Saldana's fetching immigration officer; once Hanks has brought the two together, the movie loses interest, cutting from their first tentative conversation straight to the wedding.

This month sees the release of Criminal, Luna's second English-language starring role. (As an act of charity, I will ignore the first, except to note that every single review of this picture, without exception, included the word Swayze.) Ironically, Criminal is itself a remake of an Argentine movie called Nine Queens, about an amateur swindler who gets recruited by a professional con artist to assist him in pulling off a major job. Given that the film was coproduced and cowritten by Steven Soderbergh (under the pseudonym "Sam Lowry") and directed by his longtime assistant director, Gregory Jacobs, this is vanity filmmaking at its most inessential: a wan, dutiful facsimile of a movie that wasn't very distinctive to begin with. Imagine a Mamet caper minus his arrestingly staccato dialogue, culminating in a twist that you've been dourly anticipating since roughly scene three, there being nothing else to occupy your attention. Now imagine it in slow motion.

In the original, Gastón Pauls gave the neophyte a memorably erratic personality, alternately cunning and befuddled. Luna, who acts most of his scenes opposite the great John C. Reilly (Chicago), seems to have decided that his best bet is to exhibit no personality at all, lest he upstage his costar. In the film's best scene, Luna's character uses his knowledge of Spanish to extort a higher percentage of the profit from his desperate mentor. But while the sequence works conceptually, there's no emotional charge to it, no sense of this kid's exultation in using his outsider status as a weapon. After a while, it seems to be the actor himself who's wary.

To be fair, all of this isn't quite as schematic as I'm making it look. Garcia Bernal made an appearance in something called I'm with Lucy, starring Monica Potter, playing one of the heroine's several blind dates. Luna has the lead in a new movie called Nicotina, which I can't really address because I walked out of it at last year's Toronto Film Festival after determining that the catalog description--"Mexico's answer to Guy Ritchie's Snatch"--was hideously accurate. It's also possible that Luna simply knows more English than G.G.B., making the latter's virtue a linguistic accident. But it seems more likely that García Bernal is following the lead of Spanish heartthrob Javier Bardem, who tends to keep his distance from Hollywood, while Luna is taking his cue from former Almodóvar regular Antonio Banderas, who has long since embraced the town. One of these men has been nominated for an Oscar. The other is married to Melanie Griffith. Little more need be said.