"The Liberator" ("Libertador"), a retelling of the life and Great Deeds of Venezuelan political leader Simón Bolívar, opens with a sense of purpose, as the South American icon arrives to his palace the night of Sept. 25, 1828, only to discover armed horsemen storming the gates. Aided by longtime lover Manuela Sáenz, he boldly exits through the balcony and runs for his life.
The bulk of the sequence occurs in a single shot that follows Bolívar (Édgar Ramírez) from the back as he arrives to the presidential palace and up the stairs before hearing the commotion on the ground floor. It's show-offy, to be sure, but assured and enveloping in a pleasing, old-school style. Sadly, the stillborn, risibly amateurish biopic that follows never captures the verve of those opening moments. Director Alberto Arvelo thinks he's making the South American "Lawrence of Arabia," but with its shrill, over-the-top performances and butt-ugly framing, his self-important history lesson approximates a big-budget telenovela with delusions of grandeur.
Brief flashbacks to Bolívar's childhood appear as he tries to elude his would-be assassins. We see his 9-year-old self running away from his mother's funeral, a moment pilfered from the funeral of Eva Perón's father in "Evita." (The difference, of course, is that Alan Parker actually has a good eye for composition.) "The Liberator" abruptly cuts back to Bolívar's courtship of María Teresa del Toro (María Valverde), the woman who would become his only wife, in Spain circa 1802. Their ill-fated union is awash in sun-dappled vistas, horseback rides and swoony lovemaking that highlights Valverde's supple breasts but manages to cut around Ramírez's beefy buttocks.
How does Arvelo solve a problem like María? He swats the character away like a bothersome fly so that he can get back to the business of inelegant mythmaking. After she dies of yellow fever, poor, noble-born Simón flees Venezuela and becomes a decadent playboy in Napoleonic Pa-ree. Two figures intervene to remind him he was born to lead: his idealistic tutor Simón Rodríguez (Francisco Denis) and moneyed Brit Martin Torkington (a hammy Danny Huston), a figment of screenwriter Timothy J. Sexton's imagination that represents England's interest in the allegedly charismatic dilettante-turned-revolutionary.
Bolívar returns, much like Simba to Pride Rock, to take on Scar, er, the Spanish army, but the highly touted battle sequences are, frankly, a mess. Confusing and shoddily shot, the carnage reaches a climax of sorts when the rebels try to overtake the Spaniards by taking over a very symbolic bridge to freedom while Fearless Leader yells “Push, dammit!” It's not the only scene that generates unintentional laughs, but it is by far the most delicious.
The problem with "The Liberator" actually stems from Sexton's wordy – and painfully by-the-numbers – screenplay, which works overtime to build the mystique of Bolívar as a flawed man who nevertheless became this independence engine for Latin America but fails to establish much of an actual personality for the historical figure. Any hint of danger that Ramírez brought to Carlos the Jackal in Olivier Assayas' phenomenal miniseries Carlos has been neatly ironed out, replaced by stoic heroism. We keep being told he was a great leader, but the film refuses to dig too deep beneath the dashing façade. There's are more shadings in Ramírez's shoulder freckles than in the cipher he plays. An underwhelming screenplay is done no favors by Arvelo's flavorless direction, and much less by Gustavo Dudamel's wall-to-wall, dot-every-i score.
"The Liberator" does dabble in some reasonably engaging palace intrigue once Bolívar ascends to power to referee a deeply divided continent, but the political rifts are explored in only the most shallow ways, as cogs in Arvelo and Sexton's narrative. They also get points for sly revisionism; they suggest Bolívar died in a way that doesn't quite resemble what we'd been taught in history class. They also manage not to waste the character of Manuela Sáenz, played with no-nonsense aplomb by Colombian actress Juana Acosta, the way they did María. She injects the right dose of kickass vivacity that is so absent in this substandard, astonishingly empty historical epic.
"The Liberator" is now playing at area theaters. See it, if you must, at the Tower Theater in Little Havana.
