Original Sin (2001)

"Original Sin" arrives in 2001 as a sweaty, gorgeous, deeply silly piece of work, drawn from Cornell Woolrich's 1947 novel Waltz into Darkness, in which Antonio Banderas plays a Cuban coffee magnate who orders a bride from Delaware and receives Angelina Jolie instead. She is not who she claims. He is not who he claims. Neither is remotely trustworthy, and the film spends two hours watching them lie to each other with great enthusiasm and minimal clothing. Michael Cristofer directs as though the camera itself were perspiring.

The story unfolds in late nineteenth century Cuba under Spanish rule, which sounds like raw material for a searching look at colonial power, race, and empire. It is not. Cuba functions as wallpaper, a humid backdrop for stolen money and slow poison, and the closest the screenplay comes to a political thought is the observation that wealthy men own plantations. The con at the center is personal, not systemic. Jolie's Julia is a femme fatale in the classical mold, deployed for erotic suspense and nothing else. As the priest, the detective, and the bodies accumulate, the film offers no thesis beyond the suggestion that desire makes people stupid.

There is no lesson here, no sermon, no moment where a character turns to the audience to explain how they ought to feel about the world. That absence is, in its way, restful. The film's only agenda is getting Jolie and Banderas into a room together, and it pursues that agenda with the single-minded devotion of a much better movie. Ebert admired it. Most everyone else did not. The Razzie nomination stands. We are left with a lush, incoherent, entirely unserious melodrama whose cultural consciousness registers as a flat line. Some vintages are simply meant to be drunk quickly and forgotten.