John Sayles hits the target again in 'Men with Guns'

By Andrea Lynch

COURTESY SONY PICTURES CLASSICS Juan Sayles es un genio.

When I heard that John Sayles's (Lone Star, The Brother from Another Planet) latest film, Men with Guns, was going to be filmed in Spanish with English subtitles, I figured the linguistic confusion would stop there. How naïve to assume that Sayles would be so straightforward. Concordant with his usual tendency to attack each situation in his films with impeccable attention to detail and a refusal to deny any angle imaginable, Sayles has crafted a drama of translation itself--we hear not only Spanish, but English; the native languages of Nahuatl, Tzotzil, Maya, and Kuna; and a strange collection of signs and symbols no simple verbal lexicon can hope to explain. But despite the confusion, the gaps that translation cannot adequately fill, Men with Guns is yet another testament to Sayles's unparalleled ability to communicate precisely what it is to be human through the medium of film.

Indeed, the film itself is a kind of language, and as the story progresses, we become increasingly familiar with the glossary of terms and signs that make up the film's vocabulary. Sayles is a master of the art of repetition, but he never uses the device in a way that condescends to the audience as if it were too stupid to get it the first time--hearing the same phrase again is never a red flashing light that screams "this is important." As characters repeat the phrases we associate with them and as gestures move from one person to the next, their meanings deepen and evolve. By the end of the film, we are fluent enough in the language Sayles has constructed to begin to realize the full meaning of who the characters are and what they are trying to convey.

Part odyssey and part mystery, Men with Guns unfolds in the richly textured urban and rural landscapes of a generic Latin American country. It chronicles the unlikely vacation of Dr. Humberto Fuentes (Federico José Luppi), a well-to-do widower who leaves behind his flourishing urban practice to search for the team of medical students he trained to provide scattered Indian villages with medical care three years earlier. As Fuentes's journey takes him deeper into the heart of his country and further from the naïve idealism that engendered the field project, he picks up a curious assortment of companions along the way: Conejo (Dan Rivera Gonzalez), a savvy orphan who proves an indispensable interpreter and guide, Domingo (Damian Pelgado), an army deserter who disappears with Fuentes's wallet and then returns to hijack his jeep, and Padre Portillo (Damián Alcazar), a renegade priest looking for a ride. As Fuentes searches for his former students only to find that they have all been killed by "men with guns," his quest focuses less on untangling the mystery of why they were killed, and more on searching for meaning in a landscape characterized by suffering and injustice so common that they have become pedestrian.

The unspecified nature of Men with Guns's setting imbues the film with an unsettlingly hypnotic quality. We are never quite sure where we are, and we have the sense that even if we knew where all of this was taking place, a map would do us little good. Like Fuentes, we search for anchors in an environment that meets us with opacity at every turn. But as the journey progresses, sites of meaning and connection begin to emerge, and we realize that, like Fuentes, perhaps we started out asking the wrong questions.

Sayles's tone is never didactic, never manipulative--the story simply unfolds and deepens as he weaves more characters, more myths, and more encounters into the narrative. We never grimace when a character delivers a line that would be trite in another film, carrying too much of a burden to mean anything at all. When Fuentes says, "The world is a savage place," we believe him, and we actually think about what it means for the world to be a savage place.

Sayles's ability to weave cultural myths and traditions into the fabric of his films without making them even remotely resemble documentaries is truly uncanny, and not one of his characters is ever a foil or a simple type. Even the American tourists Fuentes encounters, who could easily have been depicted as obnoxiously foreign and ignorant, transcend categorization. Rather, Sayles lets their encounter (in halting Spanish) with the stoic Fuentes add to the drama of translation by throwing into relief the otherness with which the doctor himself is continually confronted within the borders of his own country.

Perhaps it is Sayles's ability to juxtapose the universal with the local, the archetypal with the particular, that makes Men with Guns at once so accessible and so transcendent. He follows a conversation between Fuentes and Padre Portillo about the nature of faith with a conversation between two guerrilla fighters about what flavors of ice cream they will choose to eat if they ever make it to the "capital." Within the language the film has already established, these two conversations carry the same gravity of meaning. They are Wordsworthian spots of time, moments of connection grafted onto a landscape of confusion and despair.

At the core, John Sayles is just an incredibly gifted storyteller. By this I mean not only the gracefully unfolding mystery that makes up the main plot of the film, but also the individual stories that the characters tell in an extended narration of their identities. Even when these stories are heart-wrenching, they refuse to be melodramatic--like the characters themselves, their simultaneous beauty and horror remain perfectly understated. What else can I say but muy bueno?

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