Frankly,
it is not hard to fathom how a couple of amateur thieves managed to walk off
with a spectacular haul of Pre-Columbian art from the National Museum of Anthropology
in Mexico City. The alarm had been broken for three years and the guards also
happened to be drunk. Alonso Ruizpalacios largely lets the museum staff off the
hook in his free interpretation of the 1985 Christmas Eve heist. He also choses
to skip over the thieves’ connection to narcotics traffickers. However, the
perps really were slacker veterinary students—that much is true in Ruizpalacios’s
fabulistic Museo (trailer here), which opens this
Friday in New York.
Museo is the sort of
film that warns us through voice-overs right from the start that what we are
about to witness will be filtered through the narrators’ lies and biases—and it
will revisit that theme again just before the moment of truth. For the time being,
we watch Juan Nuñez get the germ of the idea while working a crummy summer job
at the museum and subsequently refine his scheme while he and his best pal Benjamin
Wilson are aimlessly scuffling.
Due
to an accelerated renovation schedule, Nuñez and the reluctant Wilson must
carry out their plans on Christmas Eve, but that turns into a blessing in
disguise. However, it forces Wilson to leave his ailing father during what will
presumably be his final Christmas, introducing a continuing source of tension
that threatens to divide the friends during their misadventures. Ironically,
stealing the priceless artifacts turns out to be the easier part. Fencing the
hotter than hot goods is far trickier. However, Nuñez knows a guy in Palenque
who knows a guy in Acapulco. Along the way, Nuñez will also meet his great
movie lust, Sherezada, an analog for Mexican sex symbol-starlet Princesa Yamal,
who was implicated in the 1985 robbery.
Usually,
when films alter history it is for the sake of punching up the drama, but Ruizpalacios
and co-screenwriter Manuel Alcala do the opposite, covering up all the really
seedy and lurid parts (full story here). The absence of the drug and antiquity trafficking
ring the real-life Carlos Percher Trevino became associated with is a conspicuous
white-washing of history.
On
the other hand, Ruizpalacios builds considerably more tension during the big
heist sequence than probably the case for Percher and his accomplice, Ramon Sardina
Garcia. In place of the wider criminal conspiracies, Ruizpalacios gives us a
mediation on th Mexican national character and a rebuke of the prejudice often
leveled at indigenous Mexican descendants, such as Wilson.
Gael
Garcia Bernal is sufficiently petulant as the entitled Nuñez, but it is
Leonardo Ortizgris who really connects as the loyal but conflicted Wilson. It
is also great fun to watch Simon Russell Beale steal his scenes as the dodgy
art collector, Frank Graves. However, the Museum is the real attraction in all
its modernist glory. This was the first time the museum granted limited access,
which Ruizpalacios shows it off nicely, from the plundered statues of Aztec gods
to grand courtyard. The design team also seamlessly recreated the museum
interiors for the extended heist sequence.