Central Station

Walter Salles seems to have learned everything important about how to make road movies (Motorcycle Diaries) from the shortcomings of this film. But you have to give him credit for going Brazil instead of Hollywood, where the rule is "when in doubt, more sexy fun. Or at least be sure it's fast." The slow pace of Central Station shows how much director Walter Salles and editors Filipe Lacerda and Isabelle Ratherty trusted the story they'd shot.

They're over-confident. This is such a worthy story with too much slack in the middle. The second act - all of it on the road - shows little of Dora's (Fernanda Montenegro) real motivation. In fact, the conflict between her actions and words defuse her character's strengths. She is a clever, conscience-free pensioner eking out a living writing letters for illiterates at a dollar apiece. She doesn't mail them. In other words, no one cares. After reluctantly taking a stray boy whose mother is run down by a bus, Dora tries to return Josue (Marilia Pera) to his useless father. But she believes that children should never return to bad fathers. She is one of those children. Dora tries to impose the lessons of her past on Josue, first by not sending the letter Dora penned for his mother - cruel but trivial - and selling him for adoption - callous and self-interested. She finds a little humanity through a friend's conscience. Dora rescues the boy when she's convinced that the brokers sell the kids for organ donation. But she keeps the payment.

When Dora flees with Josue, she never becomes desperate. She lies and steals, gets drunk, goes broke. She sweats, but then everyone sweats on a Brazilian bus. In the many prolonged scenes, the filmmakers try to show us who Dora and Josue really are against the blue and golden back country of Brazil (not what I saw on my visit). To sustain the duration, I wanted to see inner motivation revealed (okay, she talks about it, but that's not film, that's theater) or their desperation heightening. The second act flags as Dora's original motivation goes soft (to get rid of the boy), and no new motivation clearly emerges.

In the third act, Dora learns that Josue's father intended to find the boy's mother in Rio. And in a moment, she turns from her lifelong anger and prejudice against her father. Did he really love her, but simply couldn't find a way to tell her? Dora leaves the boy with his two grown brothers, allowing him to hope that the man will return.

Central Station is a good example of a bad idea: saving the drama of the main characters' inner conflict until the third act. It shows us her epiphany, but not the change. She was ruthless and venal, and now she's broke and admits that her heart has always been broken. A genuine insight about being alive, but not a change, not an arc.