By Stephen Hunter
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, May 21, 2006; N01
In one of Washington's slicker beaneries, a joint full of men in $300 haircuts and $3,000 suits, and women who like men in $3,000 suits with $300 haircuts, an impossibly handsome man sits in a back booth, attracting stares, moony looks, flirtatious glances.
And, sitting across from him, is the movie star Andy Garcia.
Okay, folks, a little joke. Garcia is the impossibly handsome one, but curiously enough he goes all but unnoticed in the Capital Grille. Possibly that's because Washington as a whole is too narcissistic to notice other people, and all these swell-looking swells swilling joy juice can't be torn away from their own reflection in their companions' glasses. But, more likely, they don't notice him because he looks so much like them. He's unerringly found the local power look and it fits him perfectly, even as it enables him to fit in perfectly: tailored blue suit, a glossy head of thick, dark hair that looks to have been trimmed by a $300-a-shot tonsorial professional, one of those muted checked ties, little round horn-rim Italian architect glasses. Why, you want to call him "senator" or "your honor" or "senior partner" or "Mr. Chairman."
But now you have to call him "director."
The dark, intense Garcia has morphed, seemingly without much travail, into the director of "The Lost City," an evocation of the Havana of 1958. He should know: He was in the Havana of 1958, having been born there in 1956, and stayed through to the Havana of 1961, when he was removed to a Miami boyhood.
"My parents found me out back, marching as if in one of Fidel's parades," he says with a laugh. "That's when they knew it was time to get out of there."
Otherwise, he doesn't have much to laugh at. The movie, which opened Friday in Washington, is a dark meditation on the pain of history as it focuses on a single family. Working with the great (late) Cuban novelist G. Cabrera Infante, he's fashioned the story of the Felloves -- three handsome sons (he plays the eldest) of a distinguished professor and liberal -- who one by one fall victim to politics in the years 1958 to 1961. It ends with the survivor leaving Cuba much in the way that young Andy Garcia left Cuba: with painful memories of the casual lifting of money and jewelry by Castro airport agents from emigres in the last few months when it was still possible to fly out of the troubled island.
"That's real," he says. "I remember that; they opened the suitcases, they looked at the wallets, they took the watches, the money, and off we went. "
So while Garcia says evenly that the reason he made "The Lost City" was "to honor Cuban music and culture and my parents, who brought me here," it's possible that he's still angry. The city, after all, wasn't lost innocently; it's gone, in his view, very much like the money in the suitcase and the watches. It's lost because somebody stole it.
Thus, now and then, he'll flash with dark rage -- it's something he does so well on-screen that it's become a trademark that's helped him up the rungs from a supporting role in "The Untouchables" to starring in "Internal Affairs" and "Night Falls on Manhattan" -- which isn't an actor's trick. He is, after all, of the Cuban immigrant population in Miami, and he shares its anger at what was lost.
And, like them, he's still fighting.
Although "The Lost City" isn't an overt film, it's also not one of those soft-on-El-Comandante valentines of the sort affiliated with more liberal filmmakers like Oliver Stone. Its particular target seems to be Che Guevara, the Argentine professional revolutionary who had a leading role in the Cuban Revolution and for a time was commander of La Cabana Prison, where he supervised the execution of former Batista security officials.
Guevara has been portrayed before in the movies, almost always positively. His is also a face that launched a million T-shirts, and with his movie-star visage and look of dark intensity, he's become a universal symbol of rebellion. The fact that after his adventures in Cuba he roamed the world as a guerrilla without portfolio and was killed at a young age (39) in Bolivia by troops trained (and possibly led) by U.S. Green Berets hasn't hurt him a bit -- career-wise, that is. (He'd be an old blowhard now if he'd lived! He'd be contributor to Fox News with a couple of scandalous divorces behind him!)
But Garcia -- who actually is the man born to play Che, with his good looks, his fiery temperament, his abiding Latin macho -- isn't buying any of it.
Thus his controversial Guevara is a sexy, insouciant young man who radiates ruthlessness, confidence and political certitude to the level of unpleasant zealotry. He's played by the actor Jsu Garcia (no relation), who is seen in an early scene shooting wounded Batista troopers and proudly proclaiming that the ends justify their means.
Oops. Trouble.
"We've had issues with some film festivals who don't want to show the film," Garcia says intently. "I expected that. It's a political area. My movie's less political than, say, 'Good Night, and Good Luck,' but it's about a political time.
"If the portrait of Che is negative, it's Che's fault, not mine. [Screenwriter] Infante captured the personality, the cynicism and the beauty of Che. We didn't get an ugly guy as Che Guevara."
He thinks that Che has been romanticized to such an extent that he's no longer recognizable. "People have turned him into a hero. They don't know what he did. If you tell them, they say, 'Oh, that's not the truth.' At a certain point, people are going to have to learn the truth."
At the same time, he rails against those who understand him too easily.
"Why am I a conservative because I'm anti-Castro? Why can't I just be what I am? Why is it black and white? I'm not sure they even know who Castro is!"
He's confident that his out-of-the-closet anti-Castro fervor hasn't and won't hurt his career in a town where offers have grown up and blown away on far less compelling issues.
"I can't say that it's hurt my career. I don't really believe my peers judge me that way; I trust them too much for that," he says. "But if it hurts me, that is no reason not to speak the truth. My parents brought me here to speak the truth. What I'm not prepared to do is not speak the truth because it's unpopular."
The film has not had an easy time to the screen; Garcia's been working on it for 21 years, the past 16 years with the Infante script, and the story he tells is a familiar one of creative problems, studio problems, financial problems, script problems, all of them seemingly insoluble until finally he found himself in the Dominican Republic with less than $10 million in investments and less than 35 days to shoot. Golfing buddy Bill Murray was there to help out, in a role based on Infante himself, a rogue with a puckish sense of humor.
It all began, Garcia says, with an idea back in 1985 to do a movie about a cabaret owner in revolutionary Havana, a "Casablanca"/"Doctor Zhivago" kind of story. It was at this time he discovered the fiction of fellow Cuban emigre Infante, then living in England. Infante had the unusual accomplishment of being hated by both the Batista and Castro regimes (he wrote under a pseudonym because the Batistas regarded him with such hostility). After the revolution, he was for a few years a leading cultural figure and even served as Cuban cultural attache in Brussels. But he soured on Fidel and Fidel soured on him, and he left Cuba in 1966, ultimately becoming a vocal opponent of Castro.
Infante met with Garcia in London and agreed to work on a script. Over the next few years, Garcia would call him every few months with an idea. The novelist would respond: "Hmmm. It's possible."
Finally, in 1990, the script arrived, all 350 pages of it.
"It was way too long. It was a novel disguised as a screenplay. But when I read it, I thought, 'How do you cut history?' "
Ultimately, he got it down to 240 pages -- "I always knew it would be a long movie" (the film's about 2 hours 20 minutes). But executives didn't get it and investors thought it was too long. He was helped throughout the process by his longtime friend and mentor Frank Mancuso Jr., who executive-produced the movie with Garcia.
Anyone who sees the film now and has a passing familiarity with the island nation may be forgiven for thinking that Fidel, in a mind-blowingly liberal mood, allowed this anti-Castroite into Cuba to shoot because it contains some footage -- not archival -- of the Havana of today, including both the Moro Fortress, which was headquarters for Batista's security apparatus before the revolution, and the Malecon, the beautiful road that fronts the Atlantic along the seawall. But the truth is, that footage was recovered from a film vault where it had been stored under the name "Hello, Hemingway." Garcia believes it's footage that was shot for, but never used in, the 1990 film "Havana," starring Robert Redford and Lena Olin.
So he's finally done it: The film is conservative, if not in its politics (it shows Batista's regime in its full sordid violence), certainly in style. It's kind of a big '50s novel, one that begins with a family table brimming with family life and watches as the years pass and attendance at the table gets thinner and thinner. It's conservative in its artistry, replicating Gordon Willis's cinematography in the "Godfather" films (in one of which, of course, Garcia starred), shot from the classic, eye-level angle with very little camera motion. Its sense of the past isn't overwhelmingly detailed, but the film captures the ideas of those times, and the loves and hatreds within a family culture.
"The Lost City" may not be the "Casablanca" of Havana, but it is pungent with the sense of the loss of something real. And something that is still very real to Andy Garcia.