Beltane Full Planting Moon
I often see movies well past their sell-by date. Tonight, for instance, I got around to seeing Goya’s Ghosts, a Milo Foreman piece from 2006. This has Javier Bardem, Natalie Portman and Stellan Skarsgaard as Goya. It must have been so named because the character Goya seems to have a very slight role in the movie, a go-between role between the church and the daughter of a wealthy family arrested by the Holy Office, aka the Inquistion, aka the predecessor office to the last job held by the current Pope, Benedict.
How dangerous it is to have dogmatic or ideological people in power. With no need for evidence or facts, with no system of truth seeking committed to verifiability the church, the monarchy and the aristocracy can be confident in their decisions with no checks or balances. Goya’s Ghosts shows that much better than it shows much about Goya either as a man or an artist.
It does show the suffocating nature of unchecked, self-righteous power as it also shows the dramatic political and military events through which Goya lived, again without illuminating Goya’s life. A strange set of choices.
As a costume drama focused on the turmoil of Europe in the late 18th and early 19th century, the movie worked for me. As anything about Goya, it did not.
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