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Javier Bardem Breaks Big
Actor Javier Bardem arrives at the AFI FEST 2007 presented by Audi closing night gala screening of Love In The Time Of Cholera during held at the Cinerama Dome on November 11, 2007 in Hollywood, California. (Photo by Michael Buckner/Getty Images)
If you’ve been a follower of smart independent movies over the past 10 or 15 years, you’re probably familiar with the work of Javier Bardem. As the star of Before Night Falls, The Dancer Upstairs, Goya’s Ghosts and Jamón, Jamón, the quirky 1992 romantic farce that marked his first big role, Bardem has blossomed into an arthouse favorite who, as the result of critical acclaim and his unmistakable charisma, has been afforded the privilege of dipping into huge Hollywood movies. (Remember him as the shot-calling heavy in the Michael Mann thriller Collateral?)
It’s an enviable position—and one that looks as if it’s about to undergo a noticeable shift. The 38-year-old Spanish star’s staunchest backers might well look back at 2007 as the year that Bardem really broke out.
This fall, Bardem stars in two of the most highly anticipated movies of the year. The Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men features Bardem as a nihilistic murderer with a graveyard stare and a funny haircut. His performance was one of the most chattered-about at the recent New York Film Festival, where the movie played to enthusiastic houses. Mike Newell’s Love in the Time of Cholera finds Bardem mining the other end of the emotional spectrum, playing a lovelorn character who spends a lifetime making love to every woman except the one he truly loves.
Each film has the potential to make Bardem a major international star. Taken together, his work in the two movies is sure to raise his profile—already at “boldface name” status—to a level he probably never imagined as a teenager trying to land parts on Spanish TV shows.
All the same, he’s exceedingly humble when asked if this is a special time in his career.
“It’s a coincidence,” Bardem suggests of the fact that two of his biggest movies to date are arriving within weeks of one another, “but yeah, I guess it is… People seem to like both movies. You don’t know what people are going to think about them. For sure, it’s something that any actor can be happy with, to work in two movies that are so different from each other.”
“Different” is perhaps not a strong enough term to explain just how little these two movies have in common—or just how impressive it is that Bardem is able to pull off such disparate performances back-to-back. A trained painter who still dabbles with the occasional canvas, Bardem might appreciate the analogy: It’s like watching an artist make pictures of pastoral impressionism in the morning, then switch to postmodern urban realism after lunch.
Love in the Time of Cholera, based on the novel by Nobel Prize-winner Gabriel García Márquez, is about a man named Florentino Ariza (Bardem) and his love—you might call it obsession—for the fetching Fermina Daza (Giovanna Mezzogiorno). The story, set in Márquez’s native Colombia, spans generations, as their mutual but scandalous attraction—she’s been married, he’s an overeager boy—leads to impulsive decisions. Directed by Englishman Mike Newell (Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Donnie Brasco), it’s a bittersweet love story that might just please romantics and cynics alike.
There’s sure to be a surge of interest in the movie, given that its source material—the novel published by Márquez 22 years ago—was recently selected as the reading assignment for Oprah Winfrey’s legion of book club members.
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This story was published in the Fall 2007 MovieMaker Magazine. The headline was:
Bardem Breaks Big
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