SURVIVING PICASSO (36)

Directed by: James Ivory

Starring: Anthony Hopkins, Natascha McElhone, Julianne Moore

The Pitch: Pablo Picasso as seen through the eyes of Francoise Gilot, the longest-lasting of his many mistresses and mother of two of his children.

Theo Sez: With this and JEFFERSON IN PARIS Ivory seems to be pioneering a new genre - what might be called biography-by-osmosis ; or perhaps he's just too tentative a director to put his material into any definite order, or (like the hero of his best movie, THE REMAINS OF THE DAY) too discreet to have any definite opinions about his subjects. The result here is a collection of incidents from the life of Picasso, more or less random though clearly intended to showcase his controlling, pernicious side. By all accounts the original book - Picasso: Creator and Destroyer - was cruder in its attack, presumably focusing more on its heroine, Picasso's mistress and the daughter of an abusive father, becoming a tale of her emancipation from domineering men ; Ivory (who is nothing if not tasteful) must have recognised the tackiness of using the painter's genius as a pawn in some Women's-Lib tract, for this Picasso is a softer figure, unsentimental but not unreasonable or particularly unfeeling. Unfortunately this also makes the heroine seem rather a ninny - shocked and distraught when he shows her an owl devouring a cat, when clearly all he means to illustrate is the struggle of Life - and makes the film itself seem a little pointless, necessitating lots of last-minute scenes in which Picasso's associates testify to what a bastard he really is. Basically, it's hard to see how a good movie could have been made of this - it's too diffuse for much impact and, above all, it doesn't know what it wants. Plus, though Hopkins is too good an actor to be embarrassing, his Life-Force performance, all grimace and gesticulation, often makes his Picasso seem less a great Artist than a particularly enthusiastic English teacher.