Bardem explores Roads Not Taken
Bardem perfectly cast in nuanced portrayal of man with dementia
THE ROADS
NOT TAKEN
★★★ out of 5
Cast: Javier Bardem,
Elle Fanning
Director: Sally Potter
Duration: 1 h 25 m
Available: Video on demand
Never let it be said that writer-director Sally Potter chooses the easy path. Her last film, 2017’s The Party, was shot in black and white and told a complicated story of seven longtime friends in just 70 minutes, opening and closing on the same shot. Her film Yes, from 2004, was written entirely in rhyming pentametric couplets, like a 90-minute Shakespearean sonnet.
In The Roads Not Taken, she casts Javier Bardem as Leo, a man with dementia who is making his way through one day in New York City in the company of his daughter Molly (Elle Fanning). And as her title suggests, Potter has taken inspiration from Robert Frost’s famous 1916 poem The Road Not Taken. No pressure then.
To say that Leo’s thoughts are wandering would be an understatement. A chance word or a sudden noise can suddenly shift his perception. One moment he’s at home with his personal care assistant, or in a taxi with Molly. The next he’s remembering time spent with Dolores (Salma Hayek) in his native Mexico. Or he’s back in Greece, where he once lived in solitude, writing.
In both these places he’s dealing with regret and uncertainty, which spill into his present life, though he’s no longer fully able to put his thoughts into words.
“Everything is open,” he says cryptically in his first line. Trying to unravel what he means is like deconstructing a poem. There’s much room for interpretation.
Bardem is perfectly cast in the role. I was vaguely reminded of his turn as a quadriplegic in 2004’s The Sea Inside, though in this case the paralysis is mental rather than physical. And there’s
more than an echo of Uxbal, the character he played in 2010’s Biutiful, whose nearness to death allowed him to glimpse goingson from the other side that no one else could perceive.
Here, his dementia gives him the ability to travel through the space and time of his own life, while those around him try to make sense of his actions. Molly has the most patience in this regard, angrily asking her mother, Rita: “Why does everyone continue to refer to Dad as ‘he?’ As if he’s not here?” Mom shoots back: “Well, is he?”
Rita, played by Laura Linney, does much with her small role, and also fills us in on some of Leo’s backstory. Seems Dolores was his first wife and the love of his life, though tragedy drove them apart. He later married Rita, but that ended in divorce and she’s remarried while he lives alone in a tiny apartment next to a commuter train track in the Bronx. “We’re still friends,” she reminds him icily. “I think that’s what people call it.”
The Roads Not Taken is a very personal film for Potter, who started work on the screenplay after her younger brother was diagnosed with early-onset dementia in 2010. I’ll readily admit that it resonated with me more than it might some. I lost my father to Alzheimer’s, and when Molly tells her dad: “However far away you go, whatever they say, you are always you,” I thought my heart would burst.
The film also speaks to one of the world’s great poems, a universe of soulful longing and gorgeous ambiguity in a mere
144 words. “I shall be telling this with a sigh,” writes the poet. But is it a sigh of contentment, or one of sorrow? That makes all the difference.