_The House of the Spirits_ reviewed by Cynthia Fuchs A recent cover story in _Entertainment Weekly_ (11 February 1994) features a conversation among Meryl Streep, Glenn Close, and Winona Ryder, the stars of Bille August's radiantly conventional _The House of the Spirits_. Punctuated by Firooz Zahedi's lustrous black and white photographs, the article is inauspiciously titled "Women Who Run With Wolves.'' While the images speak to a traditional glamour, the women's comments make clear that they are concerned with today's Hollywood politics, in particular its apparently perpetual sexism. "Everyone wants fuckable women,'' says Close. "In this culture, fuckable women are young and thin and up to maybe 34 or 35.'' So, what does a big budget period (melo)drama, set in an exotic locale (Chile) have to offer in response to this ongoing problem? Perhaps surprisingly, the large-scale and sumptuous _House of the Spirits_, based on Isabel Allende's first novel, does address this issue - various economic, social, and romantic restrictions on women - but, perhaps less surprisingly, only in an indirect, self-consciously metaphorical way. For the most part, it's got that epic thing going on, elaborating its weighty, universalizing observations on the Human Condition through - what else? - a family in turmoil, careening over generations, amid national political upheaval, intricate sets and shot compositions (lots of deep focus here), gorgeous landscapes, and excursions into spirit worlds. If it calls to mind big, breathy pictures like _Giant_ or _Gone With the Wind_ (where "fuckable women'' were particular focuses), the movie also calls up Latin American magical realism, with tables that hover just above the floor and ghosts that appear at critical moments. It works like a perfect movie-machine, with precise measures of tragedy and seduction, soap-operatic plot turns, and just-short-of-ridiculous character excesses, all to the requisite emotional effects (tears, laughter, you know the drill). Events unfold smoothly and quickly, passing time is marked by dates at the bottom of the screen, costumes, and aging make up. Its retro-chic is charming, easy, and, to hammer the point once more, very large. Esteban Trueba (Jeremy Irons) is a passionate and often anxious landowner, given to brief lusty affairs with women "not of his class'' (that is, native peasants and prostitutes, one of whom is the sublime Maria Conchita Alonso). His sister, Ferula (Close), watches these power-tripping exploits quietly: she wears black dresses and her hair tied up, and her lips are continually pursed. When Esteban marries the lovely, quite literally "angelic'' Clara (Streep), his settling down becomes a kind of clamping down - his increasing orthodoxy, and especially his obsessions with property (for instance, his wife) and order (for instance, his place in a general hierarchy) are manifested in his dogmatic political views (he runs for the Senate as a Conservative) and an irrational jealousy of the close relationship between Ferula and his wife (Ferula may indeed have "feelings'' for Clara; she is extremely sexually repressed, code for lesbian). The Truebas' perfect daughter, Blanca, grows up to be Winona Ryder (after they send the little girl actor away to boarding school). She is only barely aware that her father also has a bastard son, Esteban Garcia, a product of one of those early lusty liaisons. The already grown-up Garcia (angry at his wealthy father) visits the little-girl-Blanca one afternoon early in the film, running his hand up her leg, so that when he does it again later, to the Ryder-Blanca, she is suitably horrified at the nightmare for which her father is responsible. The hard-to-miss point here is her moral fortitude and the emotional and sexual price she will continue to pay for her selfish father's indiscretions. Blanca is, like her father, attracted to someone not of her class, a worker on the estate named Pedro. But like her mother, she is invested in love and all good things (she is a progressive political thinker, aware that the workers want and need more than imperial caretaking). That Pedro grows up to be Antonio Banderas presumably makes her devotion to him make sense to anyone, except her father, who takes after the charismatic workers' organizer with a rifle on several occasions. You see that the storyline is ardent and grand. (And this is a considerably reduced version of Allende's novel.) The movie is about persistence, and especially women's survival in the face of adversity and things out of control. That the most horrific embodiment of this adversity is Esteban - a father who is hypocritical, hyper-controlling, angry, and despotic - is both tediously conventional and somewhat, slightly, almost contentious. To salvage this potential threat to the order of things patriarchal, he does get "religion,'' as it were, by film's end - specifically when he sees Blanca's bruised face after she has been tortured by the amoral engineers of a coup that he, Esteban, has solicited and found funding for, in U.S. dollars (by the way). More troubling than his conversion and Clara's relentless forgiveness (she returns from the next world to save him as he dies) is Blanca's unending devotion to her poor father. Her mother has instructed her in the ways of women's grace: women don't rebel, they are saints. As acted by the lovely and increasingly subtle Winona (whose perfect face does, after a fashion, approximate Streep's more famously milky-white purity), Blanca remains an intensely, even painfully good daughter throughout. Her rebellion occurs only in the longstanding relationship with Pedro. The lessons here are learned by ever- misguided men, and women in this movie's world continue to carry their wisdom and serenity like barely effective shields against the guys' carryings on. For even if it raises some questions, _House of the Spirits_ is not really about changing the power dynamic in Hollywood or anywhere else. Cynthia Fuchs teaches film and media studies at George Mason University. Copyright by Cynthia Fuchs. All rights reserved. Please do not reprint this review without the permission of the author. This review originally appeared in the Philadelphia _City Paper_.