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Critics, Reviews and previews of movies Reviews Movie Havana (1990)

The romance of Sydney Pollack's sprawling, atmospheric "Havana" is real, but it has almost nothing to do with love. Instead it concerns a place, the city of the title, which is hurtling toward irrevocable change and is very near the brink. The year is 1958, the time a densely eventful week between Christmas Eve and New Year's, in the last moments before the overthrow of Fulgencio Batista's regime. The mood, as shaded by these circumstances, is one of abandon, denial, desperate festiveness and mad risk-taking in the face of imminent danger. Drawn across this wildly colorful canvas is a halting, equivocal love story in shades of gray. "Havana" brings together Jack Weil (Robert Redford), an inveterate gambler ready to test himself by taking the chance of a lifetime, and Bobby Duran (Lena Olin), a much younger, more mundane beauty who is linked by marriage to Fidel Castro's cause. At her most blandly idealistic, Bobby talks of the revolutionary spirit as being "like a song people sing together." "You want to change the world, Bobby?" Jack counters, once the two have established a bantering conversational intimacy, if not much of a physical one. "Change me." But in spite of Mr. Pollack's best efforts, a screenplay (by Judith Rascoe and David Rayfiel) that devotes long and loving analysis to Jack and Bobby's uneasy involvement, and most of all a seemingly irresistible dramatic model (namely "Casablanca"), the problems of these two little people never truly count for much more than a hill of beans. Why not? Casting is part of the reason, and not simply because the two stars seem so noticeably incompatible. Mr. Redford, intuitive and dashing as ever in scenes that let him match wits with male actors who are his contemporaries, looks weathered and remote beside the fresh-faced Miss Olin, who for her part appears barely friendly at times. Mutual respect and admiration flow intermittently between them. But there are no real surprises, and certainly no sparks.(www.nytimes.com)