Loving Pablo (2017)

The Escobar subgenre has become its own small industry, and Fernando León de Aranoa's contribution arrives with a pair of Spain's most bankable stars and a memoir to lean on. Javier Bardem plays the drug lord as a man of appetites; Penélope Cruz plays Virginia Vallejo as a woman who watches the appetites and takes notes. The film chronicles a love affair between 1981 and 1987 against a backdrop of car bombs and cocaine money. It is a Spanish-Bulgarian co-production, a detail worth savoring for the sheer improbability of the financing.

The casting is Latin American playing Latin American, which the setting makes inevitable instead of pointed. Colombian performers fill the supporting ranks while the marquee names arrive from Madrid. There is a woman's vantage point here, borrowed from Vallejo's book, and the film grants her narration and regret, though the camera keeps drifting back to the man with the mustache and the ledger. Any critique of the drug economy is incidental; the movie is fond of the money, the planes, the marble.

Where the film might have sermonized about empire, poverty, or the machinery of capital, it chooses lurid biography instead. That restraint, whether artistic or merely commercial, keeps the proceedings free of messaging. Critically it landed at 31 percent, and the reviews explain themselves. Still, for the cataloguer, this is a clean specimen. No environmental crusading, no body-image discourse, no neurological subplot, no ideological re-reading of the past. Just a handsome, sordid, faintly exhausted romance between a journalist and a monster. The sommelier notes: a thin vintage, served at room temperature.