Butler's Cinema Scene

Edgar Ramirez

“WASP NETWORK” My rating: C+ (Netflix)

127 minutes | Rated: TV-MA

There’s some interesting history on display in “Wasp Network,” the latest from veteran French auteur Oliver Assayas. But as drama this one’s a head scratcher.

The film begins in the late 1980s in Cuba, with Rene Gonzalez (Edgar Ramirez) bidding farewell to his wife Olga (Penelope Cruz) and their young daughter and heading out for another day of piloting planes for the Castro regime.

Except that Gonzalez steals an aircraft and heads to Florida, where he claims political asylum. Before long he’s been hooked up with anti-Castro insurgents, flying dangerous missions to Cuba and elsewhere.  Some of those assignments involve carrying loads of narcotics which are financing plans to destabilize or even overthrow the island’s Communist government.

Meanwhile back in Cuba Olga must live with  the fallout of being the wife of a traitor.

Wagner Moura

Enter a new Cuban character, Juan Pablo Roque (Wagner Moura), who risks sharks and rip tides to swim into Guantanamo Bay where he defects to authorities at the U.S. base there. Soon Juan Pablo, who has a taste for the high life, is rubbing elbows with expatriate bigwigs in Miami, wooing the gorgeous daughter (Ana de Armas) of Cuban exiles, and flashing a Rolex.

Yet a third plot emerges with the appearance of Gerardo Hernandez (Gael Garcia Bernal), a Cuban operative who informs poor Olga that her husband, far from being a traitor, has been sent to spy on anti-Castro groups in Miami.

At one point there’s a digression to follow a Venezuelan “tourist” (Nola Guerra) who plants bombs in Havana hotels in an effort to destroy Cuba’s fledgling tourism industry.

Assaya’s screenplay plays it coy for the first hour. It’s not until the Hernandez character appears that we realize Gonzalez and Roque are not defectors but undercover agents.  This delayed reveal is meant to build suspense but mostly it leaves us mystified.  Why are we supposed to care about these two? What are their motivations?

Adapted from Fernando Morais’ nonfiction book The Last Soldiers of the Cold War, “Wasp Network” reeks of authenticity.  It was shot largely in Cuba featuring a slew of familiar Latin American actors. 

Penelope Cruz

Once must assume, given the Cuban government’s participation, that it’s meant as a tribute to the undercover agents who risked imprisonment to report on and foil anti-Castro schemes. There are scenes of ex-pat gunmen terrorizing visitors to a Cuban resort and air-dropping propaganda leaflets over Havana (the Cuban government allowed them to proceed rather than deal with the mess of shooting down an American airplane).

Okay, so the Castro Cubans are our protagonists and the Cuban exiles are the heavies. Except that it doesn’t really feel that way; Assayas seems to avoid making a stand here (possibly because an openly pro-Castro feature film faces limited commercial options).

Moreover, the characters are mostly ciphers.

Ramirez and Bernal’s characters  are rather colorless (yes, a spy avoids drawing attention to himself, but still…); far more intriguing is Moura’s overnight playboy, who takes to American capitalism with a vengeance (or is that just his cover?).

The bright spot here is Cruz.  The filmmakers do their best to make her seem the socialist drudge, but heavy-framed glasses and a leather apron can’t disguise her star quality.

Here’s the real problem: The film scrupulously avoids examining how the characters feel about living in a free and open society after spending their entire lives under Castro-style totalitarianism. Do they have no doubts about returning to a nation where life’s basic necessities are rationed and speaking one’s mind can lead to a firing squad? What are their thoughts on the Big Mac?

Now that may not be heroic, but it’s definitely human.

| Robert W. Butler