Sergio is the narrative film debut of journalist and documentarian Greg Barker, best known as a director of political and foreign policy docs such as Manhunt and The Final Year. The film is in fact based on his earlier movie, also called Sergio, about the career of U.N. diplomat Sérgio Vieira de Mello, a figure Barker is clearly very fascinated by to devote both an objective and subjective feature to his international work, both leading up to his death in Baghdad in the 2003 Canal Hotel bombing. Certainly the man was an interesting figure, who devoted his work and risked his life to efforts to bring peace to the Middle East, but this film doesn’t convey that as aptly as it should, Barker perhaps having exhausted the telling of that story to focus more intently on the mans’ personal life.
Narcos’ Wagner Maura plays the Brazilian title figure, aged down about a decade, and the film in a very documentary style introduces the defining dramatic moment (the bombing itself) at the start, to extrapolate off of into the history of Sergio and his work in that region. So the film is structured from a present vantage point of Sergio trapped and dying in the rubble against his life leading up to the incident. To put aside the cliché of this structure, the choice doesn’t allow for a lot of interesting storytelling, except to reinforce Sergios’ values. Garret Dillahunt shares some of these scenes, but is deprived of anything meaningful to contribute, and the directing has no real energy to it. The situation hasn’t any urgency, not till the end at least when we finally see it from a new perspective, but by that point it’s no longer relevant.
Barker perhaps expectantly, doesn’t feel completely at home directing actors either; though he manages to extract some resonant performances out of the talents of Ana de Armas, BrÃan F. O’Byrne, and Maura, his skills serve him better in the films’ depiction of real-life politics and diplomacy. Which is why it was a particularly poor choice to underline the chief story with an often intruding subplot on Sergio’s romance with a young co-worker Carolina.
Maura and de Armas work well together. They just came off of Olivier Assayas’ Wasp Network, so they should. There’s a real chemistry during a handful of scenes and both actors are quite charming. But the development of their relationship here feels like a focus of obligation, that the only side of Sergios’ personal life worth exploring is this affair he had during the last couple years of his life. And as such, it drags and doesn’t ever capture your interest the way it ought to. There’s some compelling facets in the professionalism they both care about exerting, Carolina’s concerns about his own family (who we glimpse only in one too-short flashback), and the nebulous nature of their arrangement given their assignment. Yet Barker and screenwriter Craig Borten don’t much want to dig into this,or don’t know how, and the story that should take precedent is often waylaid by it, to the point it occupies a decent chunk of the films’ second act.
The interesting stuff in this movie about a diplomat is the diplomacy, and the principles that Sergio explicitly values. More than once, a tense altercation is diffused by his tenacity and empathy. And we see the strides he’s able to make to move the Iraqis closer to independence. This being set in the early Bush years, his disapproval of the U.S.invasion and his rebellious actions (such as prohibiting Americans from the U.N. base camp to distinguish their organization from the hostile occupying force) is a nice touch as well, particularly where the film hammers America’s detrimental impact on the region at that time and hones in on Sergio’s troubled relationship with American emissaries represented through Bradley Whitford as Paul Bremer, who’s a highlight of the film. On an opposite ideological wavelength O’Byrne’s composite character Gil is another highlight, he and Maura playing well a tough but stable old friendship.
And I will give Barker credit for conveying the good nature of Sergio and what he was desperate to achieve, even if we don’t connect to him the way the film clearly wants us to. I was also pleasantly surprised that for a film by an American set during the invasion of Iraq there’s no sign of the subliminally jingoistic action war beats that snake their way into “War on Terror” themed movies like American Sniper, 13 Hours, and even well-intentioned films such as Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty. There’s nothing glorified to the conflict, and the movie isn’t particularly interested in the U.S. Armed Forces. It’s a film about peace.
However unlike those movies, Sergio is not particularly memorable in any way. Once again, Barker seems a little out of his element, and his most ambitious artistic choice is a pretty good cut at the end from Maura (who bookends the film through a live televised address) to the actual Sergio in the same context shortly before his fateful departure for Baghdad. The film leaves you with a sense of who this person was and why he was important -but only a sense. And given what he accomplished and believed in, that doesn’t seem enough.
Support me on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/JordanBosch
Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Jordan_D_Bosch
Letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/jbosch/
Comments
Post a Comment