Evita (1996)

The 1996 adaptation of the Rice and Lloyd Webber musical arrives with a full orchestra and no interest in the casting debates that would occupy a later era. Madonna, a Michigan native, plays the Argentine first lady. Jonathan Pryce, Welsh, plays Juan Perón. Antonio Banderas, Spanish, narrates as Ché. Nobody involved appears troubled by this arrangement, and the film offers no comment on it. The result is a curious artifact: a sung-through biopic that treats its subject as a creature of ambition, appetite, and spectacle, and declines to convert her into a lesson.

The film does center a woman who claws her way from provincial obscurity to the presidential balcony, and it grants her a number in which she addresses the working women of Argentina. Yet the gaze stays skeptical. Ché trails her like a conscience in a leather jacket, noting that the money kept rolling in and out. A critique of oligarchy is present, along with a dim view of Perónist graft, but it is the old-fashioned kind, aimed at corruption in general instead of capital as a system.

If the film lectures, it does so through a cynic, not a preacher. Its political songs sneer at the aristocracy and at the Peróns alike, leaving the audience without a comfortable position. No environmental theme intrudes. No questions of body, brain, or identity are raised. The racial politics of Argentina go untouched. History is dramatized with the usual liberties of a musical, not revised toward a contemporary thesis. The film stands as a monument to a different set of priorities, one in which a pop star could simply be cast as a historical figure and the audience was expected to cope. It is handsome, occasionally stirring, and almost entirely untouched by the social consciousness later demanded of such material. For the viewer seeking instruction, there is little to harvest.