Nothing much happens in "Mondays in the Sun" except that somehow, and ever so slowly, life goes on, until of course it doesn't. But the movie makes one more point. It's a great point, but it could have been made in half the time.
That point is that for most people, life is work. Without it you have nothing, even if there's still food on the table. Fernando Leon de Aranda's movie watches as four laid-off shipyard workers cannot get over their loss. They have no identities, except as ex-workers, and the bitterness all but dominates their lives.
Javier Bardem plays a laid-off shipyard worker battling the feeling of worthlessness in Fernando Leon de Aranda's slow-moving but eloquent film.
(Lion's Gate Films Via AP)
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The movie delineates a little society of the embittered. The leader -- or at least the most charismatic -- is Santa: big, burly, a proletarian off a Marxist mural. If the movie were French, he'd be played by Depardieu; since it's Spanish, he's played by the great Javier Bardem.
Bardem is so effortlessly good, it may be worth the two hours just to watch him seethe and scheme and huff and puff. You're always afraid he'll blow the house down. But of course he doesn't: He just seethes and schemes and never blows the house down.
Santa and his pals gather at a bar near the shipyard, owned by another ex-worker who wisely invested his severance pay in the place (the others just let theirs slip away and now live on the tab). Small problems beset them, but of course their true enemy is within: It's the sense of worthlessness that being unconnected gives them.
Poor Jose (Luis Tosar); he laments that his wife no longer respects him, and worries that she will leave him for another man. But even though he loves her, his anger so consumes him that he cannot be counted upon for civil behavior, which in turn makes her want to leave him.
Then there's Lino (Jose Angel Egido), who keeps trying to get jobs even though he's too old. Soon he's dyeing his hair, stealing his son's teenage wardrobe and doing everything possible to prevent employers from understanding how far beyond 50 he is. It's funny, but it's heartbreaking.
Maybe the worst off is Amador (Celso Bugallo). His wife has left him, a source of profound embarrassment according to the macho mandates of Spanish male culture, but he soldiers grimly on, hoping desperately that she will return.
Without its being stated, it's clear that we are in some sort of suicide derby: One of these hurtin' ballplayers will do the trick, almost as a sacrifice to warn the others to take command, give up their bitterness and re-engage life.
As I say, it's a long and relatively underdramatized film, but it's powerfully true.
Mondays in the Sun (113 minutes, in Spanish with subtitles, at the Outer Circle) is rated R for profanity and intense psychological situations.
