Actor Gael GarcÃÂa Bernal burst into international fame in 2000 with Amores Perros, Alejandro González Iñárritu’s extraordinary multi-narrative movie set in Mexico City, and, a year later, Alfonso Cuarón’s equally extraordinary Y Tu Mamá También. Two movies, in successive years, each of which made a very strong claim to being movie of the year; and both from Mexico, and both starring Mexican-born Bernal.
But Bernal soon vaulted the confines of any one national cinema. He made movies in Spain and Argentina, and then right across the breadth of South America when he played the young Che Guevara in Brazilian director Walter Salles’s superb Motorcycle Diaries, and then reached what has to be the Everest of hispanophone cinema, taking a lead role in a Pedro Almodóvar film — in this case, Bad Education. And that, too, has to be a contender for movie of the year (for 2004).
Such a meteoric rise in the movie business is rare unless one has an army of Hollywood publicists behind one; that Bernal came from outside the global empire that is Hollywood-style cinema makes his ascent more amazing. The secret must be that he is a brilliant, risk-taking actor — and one, moreover, who can take such roles as Almodóvar’s tricky transvestite without making heavy weather of it.
Now, in the next phase of his glittering career, Bernal makes his English-language debut in a North American film, The King. Not that it’s going to make him a mainstream megastar any time soon. This is a film that one American critic called ”morally noxious” — largely because it declines to perform any of the usual sentimental moralistic manoeuvres of Hollywood cinema, which are in fact entirely empty of ethical content. It prefers to be ambiguous, multi-layered, and to deal with complex characters who are not simply good or bad, characters whose actions (even their horrifying ones) are in some way understandable.
Bernal plays Elvis Valderez, a young man of mixed Hispanic-white descent who has just been discharged from the navy, and now he’s on his way to find the father he never met. He turns up in the appropriately named town of Corpus Christi in Texas, where his father, David (William Hurt), is a pentecostal preacher running a large church. David also has a family, as he would — a quiet wife (Laura Harring), a doe-eyed daughter (Pell James), and a son (Paul Dano) whose band plays Christian rock music in the church.
If that outline makes The King sound like a melodramatic TV movie, the elements are handled with entirely the opposite tone by director James Marsh and his co-scriptwriter Milo Addica (who wrote the Oscar-winning Monster’s Ball). There is no heavy breathing or rolling of eyeballs. The drama here is beautifully underplayed, allowing the story to build up a considerable amount of suspense as it goes along, and making the moments of extremity more shockingly real.
Bernal is obviously the star of The King, and he delivers magnificently — he has no trouble speaking English and the slight echo of an accent is correct for the role. He projects a great deal of charm in his portrayal of Elvis and it feels like it comes from within rather than simply being laid on to ingratiate himself with his father and David’s family. He is doing that too, in a way, especially as regards David’s daughter Melanie, but it’s also a lot more complicated than that. The fact that he’s sexy to boot makes what happens perfectly believable.
Bernal is stunningly good, but Hurt is as good, and in a role that is, if anything, harder to pull off. It’s easy to take a dislike to Pastor David from the start, but Hurt gives him enough inner life and fullness of character to make him sympathetic. As viewers, we are able to engage with both sides in this difficult agon. James, too, as Melanie, does a fine job of portraying an ingénue unprepared for the pull of her own desires — she has more than a little of the young Sissy Spacek about her.
The characters drive the story: as in the great classic realist novels of the 19th century, it is possible to say here that character is plot. And this without trying to explain them thoroughly; where mainstream Hollywood would tie everything up in a neat pop-psych summary, The King leaves the viewer to puzzle out the character’s complicated motivations, and is all the richer for that. The King is mesmerisingly watchable, despite the occasional desire to avert one’s eyes, and it haunts the memory.