Review of Cuba

Perhaps the reason I like this film so much is because I don't, normally, like the cinema of Richard Lester. I've always found it too frenetic to be funny and too fragmented to be involving on any human level. However, CUBA is, arguably, the most misunderstood picture to close out the decade of the 70s. It is a brilliant visual satire of a society in total materialistic collapse with every character in the picture (save the white knight James Bond figure played by Sean Connery who is rendered completely ineffectual by the chaos that is tumbling down upon him)is literally on the take. What is extraordinary here is that the mise-en-scene is as visually dazzling and stylistically coherent CAPTURING chaos as it is satirically barbed, subtle and consistently ingenious. You really have to WATCH this movie. There's always something inventive and extremely droll going on around the edges. The supporting cast of Jack Weston, Hector Elizondo, Walter Godell, Martin Balsam, Chris Sarandon, Denholm Elliott and Alexandro Rey (unrecognizable)was flawlessly assembled but because the film doesn't ANNOUNCE its satirical intentions and Lester refuses to telegraph his gags and put anything in the center of the frame, most people came away from the picture pooh-faced. Well, there is one other problem with CUBA and Lester has to take the brunt of the responsibility for it which is, in his corrosively ebullient fervor (and perhaps because, as a director he never responded to women very much), he left poor, ultra-lovely Brooke Adams out to dry as a character. It's clear that he has nothing but contempt for the "Casablanca" aspect of the story involving her and Connery but he should have done a better job disguising the fact. I think Connery is terrific in his role making the pathos of his Gable-like flawed hero comical and deeply affecting. Lester was even more successful in JUGGERNAUT satirizing a genre while squeezing the maximum thrills out of it at the same time. CUBA doesn't work successfully on both levels in the way that JUGGERNAUT does. But it is the most impressively detailed and dynamically precise cinematic rendering of what the last days of a politically corrupt regime looks like - as it goes into free-fall - that a mainstream commercial film maker has ever given us.