A painter among the powerful, witness to brutality

[Ian David]

There is so little emotionally or intellectually at stake in most popular entertainment that Goya's Ghosts, Milos Forman's challenging, compelling and wildly uneven film, shoots like a cannonball into the solar plexus. I can't remember when I've been so physically and mentally shattered.

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Goya (Stellan Skarsgard), like most artists since the dawn of civilization, takes his commissions where he can get them, whether from complacent King Carlos (Randy Quaid) or wily Brother Lorenzo (Javier Bardem), a priest of the Inquisition.

The film opposes the painter, a consistent chronicler of the human comedy, with Lorenzo, iron weather vane who crushes souls as he is buffeted by the political winds of change.

When Grand Inquisitor (Michel Lonsdale) chides Lorenzo for having his portrait painted by the artist whose etchings criticize religious hypocrisy, Lorenzo becomes even more vehement in rooting out heretics. One suspect is Ines Bilbatua (Natalie Portman), a merchant's daughter, and likewise, a Goya subject. Her refusal of suckling pig in a Madrid tavern raises suspicions that she is Jewish. She is arrested and tortured in scenes that make you cover your eyes.


Goya (Stellan Skarsgard) and a portrait of Inquisition priest Brother Lorenzo (Javier Bardem).


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