Goya's Ghosts

Sad to say but I still think Natalie Portman's best role ever was in The Professional when she was a kid.  Here in this movie you get the chance to see her act badly-- twice, as she plays the roles of a mother and the daughter.  More on this in a sec.  The film was directed by Milos Forman ("One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest", "People vs. Larry Flynt") and also stars Javier Bardem and Stellan Skaarsgard, both excellent actors.  Immediately I found it kind of odd that all the characters were supposed to be Spanish but were all talking English, and some didn't look very Spanish at all.  Javier Bardem felt like he was a Spanish guy playing an American guy with a Spanish accent so I found his accent a little strange.  The movie was fine but it was more of a political tome about the insanity of using torture to get confessions (timely, anyone?) than it was a film.  So, Natalie Portman played a woman put to "The Question" to get a confession about eating pork.  Seriously.  After confessing, she gets thrown into a prison where she's raped by a monk, has a kid, and has it stripped away from her.  She gets locked there for 15 years until Napoleon rolls in and takes over.  Basically, they show the passage of 15 years on Portman's face by making her look like the girl in the Exorcist and giving her fucked up teeth.  You could almost imagine her looking into a mirror after being done up and laughing her ass off.  Later, Goya finds her daughter who (shockingly) looks just like her except she has dark hair and fucked-up teeth again.  Portman's acting is pretty much just a reaction to what she looks like, and is completely lacking in depth.  After having seen the Goya exhibit at the Prado in Madrid, I'm really disappointed by this film.  Instead of examining the life of this guy, it really just uses him to lecture us about the director's political views.  Some redeemable scenes and educational but will not leave you satisfied.