One Star-Making Performance Can’t Save Kiss of the Spider Woman

The phrase “a star is born” has been overused in the past. But it’s hard not to think of those words when watching Tonatiuh, the young actor who plays Luis Molina, one half of the duo at the heart of Kiss of the Spider Woman. Bill Condon’s new film, which premiered at Sundance last night, is based on the 1992 musical, which was itself based on Argentine writer Manuel Puig’s 1976 novel (and, to some extent, the acclaimed 1985 Héctor Babenco film that won William Hurt an Oscar for the same part). Molina is an awesomely challenging role: a character with an unwavering dedication to conceiving movie-musical fantasies, even as he is constantly (and increasingly) terrorized by the outside world; a character whose colorful front slowly dissolves as he finds friendship and love with a man who is, in many ways, his opposite. Energetic and riveting, Tonatiuh brings layers of tenderness and complexity to the role, letting us feel all the character’s terror, shame, determination, and yearning. Plus, he dances in the movie’s film-within-a-film musical sequences. If only the rest of the picture could match his vitality.

Molina, a gay hairdresser convicted of public indecency during Argentina’s brutal military dictatorship, has been sent to the political wing of a prison and put in the same cell as Valentin Arregui (a solid, if unremarkable Diego Luna), an intense and serious-minded Marxist revolutionary. The chatty, friendly Molina puts up movie posters, pinup photos, and beaded curtains in their cell; Valentin just sits there, quietly reading his Lenin and asking not to be disturbed. But he’s also clearly bothered by Molina’s homosexuality and a weakness he senses in his cellmate. After the prison guards humiliate Molina in front of Valentin, the revolutionary responds, “If a man called me a woman, I would kill him.” Molina, not missing a step, replies, “If a man called me a man, he would faint.” For all his revolutionary ideals, Valentin is bound by macho ideals, while Molina understands in a visceral way the fluidity of gender. (Introducing the film at Sundance, Condon read off a part of Donald Trump’s recent executive order asserting that the U.S. government will now recognize only two genders. He then added, “That’s a thing this film has a different point of view on,” to the audience’s great approval.)

The growing bond of the two cellmates is charted by Molina’s recounting of a fictional 1950s Hollywood musical set in South America called Kiss of the Spider Woman, featuring Ingrid Luna (Jennifer Lopez), a Dolores del Río–type star. Condon shoots these scenes with long takes, saturated colors, and graceful dance moves, as if conjuring up a pointedly superficial and old-fashioned Hollywood romance amid a gritty, grimy, far more physical tale of bonding and love. It is in these musical sequences that Lopez, who also produced the film, seizes the spotlight, a modern diva playing an old-school diva playing a fantasy diva, all of whom might ultimately be imaginary. The actress, who was such a tender onscreen presence early in her career, before she became a pop superstar, is certainly in her element (in a role done onstage by the legendary Chita Rivera), but it’s less a performance and more a series of postures. That might be intentional, but it holds the whole film at a remove.

At first, Valentin is reluctant to hear Molina’s celluloid visions — he’s not interested in movies and other “trivial” things — but over the course of the film, the two grow closer as Molina recounts the film’s plot, which, in its own crazy Tinseltown fantasy way, comes to match their ordeal. By the end, Valentin is even finishing Molina’s sentences. The elegant and absurdly colorful movie musical sequences are meant to stand in sharp contrast to the increasingly grim physicality of the prison, where both Molina and Valentin are terrorized: beaten and poisoned and drugged. But the two worlds also slowly merge.

It’s a delicate operation — far more delicate than it first might seem. Condon, who directed Dreamgirls and wrote Chicago, is certainly conversant with the musical genre. Originally an independent who broke out at Sundance back in 1998 with Gods and Monsters, he’s become a reliable helmer of prestige and studio projects (even if some of those projects, like the final two Twilight films, were atrocities). His proficiency can sometimes mask a certain listlessness. His camera never quite feels like it’s a part of the action, and his films, at their worst, are totally inert. (I think his best work is still 2004’s Kinsey, a movie built around conversation and analysis.) So it’s ballsy of him to try and imitate the ’50s Hollywood musical, one of the most expressive and inventive periods in American film history. And while the musical sequences of Kiss of the Spider Woman have the colorful and sophisticated trappings of their classic forebears — you won’t find the hectic zooms and rapid-fire cutting of Chicago here — they’re largely lifeless. Maybe that’s intentional to highlight the kitsch and artificiality of those worlds. But the sequences are also meant to be dream visions, metaphysical and cinematic escapes into an alternate dimension full of exquisite grandiosity and grace. They shouldn’t fall flat. To make this sort of elegance truly work, especially in such a self-aware manner, one frankly needs a director with a lot more imagination and dynamism than Condon.

Still, at the heart of it all, there’s Tonatiuh, who carries so much of the emotion of the film, expertly withholding when necessary and pouring it all out when called for. Watching the young actor as Molina (and as Kendall Nesbitt, a dashingly macho but secretly closeted magazine assistant in the fake movie), we connect intuitively with the sense of entrapment, as well as the need to carve out small corners of beauty in an otherwise heartless and murderous world. This Kiss of the Spider Woman might be wildly uneven, but it’s hard not to be moved by the sight of a great new talent emerging into the world.