In the battle for the most forgettable film title of the year, Walter Salles’s surprise Oscar-player I’m Still Here (not to be confused with the Joaquin Phoenix mockumentary of the same title or the very similar I’m Not Here, Todd Haynes’s Bob Dylan biopic) is one of the clear favourites for a podium spot. It’s a relatively fitting moniker, then, for a film that is never really more or less than ‘decent’, a perfectly serviceable retelling of one of the many true nightmare stories from Brazil’s years under military dictatorship that unfurls its tale with solid but rather plain force.
What strength there is comes from Salles’s earnestness in bringing this story to life – its subjects, the Paiva family, were people he himself grew up with in ‘70s Rio de Janeiro, and Murilo Hauser and Heitor Lorega’s script is based on a memoir by youngest son Marcelo Paiva. It’s a story mostly about Marcelo’s mother Eunice (Fernanda Torres), who had to step up and fight to find out the truth after her husband Rubens (Selton Mello), a former leftist congressman and minor anti-junta resistance figure, was disappeared (and secretly killed) by the dictatorship, leaving his family in agonising uncertainty.
Salles makes sure to show us plenty of the family’s loving dynamic before their lives were torn apart – this is as much a tribute to them as it is a cry for justice against the old regime. The result is an effectively sweet opening, its sunny colours and days of endless fun on the beach soon enough contrasted by the dank and acrid makeshift political prisons and suffocating lack of answers. Everything in I’m Still Here happens pretty gradually, and you certainly do feel the 2hr20 runtime as it chugs along, but Salles does manage to use that time to really give you a sense of this family.
As well as Eunice and Marcelo, Rubens leaves behind four daughters, the oldest student age and the youngest still losing her baby teeth, and their dynamic with one another and with their mum, each knowing a different amount about the reality of their situation, is I’m Still Here’s most unique and compelling throughline. Eunice keeps them as in the dark as she can, trying to carry the full weight of the horror herself, and so the emotions can be a little quiet, despite a solid central performance from Torres.
I’m Still Here really doesn’t do anything *wrong*, but its moment-to-moment drama often feels deeply familiar; scenes involving, say, the death of the family dog or a tense argument that ends with an instantly-regretted slap arrive almost as obligations. It’s a film that stumbles back and forth over the line between being novel and insightful about the Paivas specifically and then hitting every possible cliché in the ‘family under fascism’ genre anyway.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 