Review: I’m Still Here

With I’m Still Here, Walter Salles provides only sparse details about the Brazilian military dictatorship his based-on-a-true-story drama is set under. Instead, the director focuses on creating a fully realized picture of a single family surviving that regime and what the forced disappearance of their husband and father meant for them. I’m Still Here is a picture of devotion and determination, and it rests on the squared shoulders of lead actress Fernanda Torres, who just picked up a Golden Globe for the role. If that win against bigger names like Angelina Jolie, Nicole Kidman, and Tilda Swinton came as a surprise, it’s only for those who haven’t seen this devastating, layered performance.

Torres stars as Eunice Paiva, mother to five kids and wife to Rubens (Selton Mello), a former congressman. Helicopters buzz over the beach and trucks of soldiers trundle by their home, but the Paiva family largely goes about their daily lives in Rio de Janeiro in 1971. The first act sets them up as a loving and close-knit group, bonded by moments of joy both everyday and more momentous. All that time spent establishing their rhythms and connections make it that much more harrowing when Rubens is taken by a group of men with no warning and little explanation. 

I’m Still Here is a story about how people endure, first through larger cultural crises and then through personal ones. Eunice is clearly affected by the trauma she and her children experience, but she also refuses to let it break her. She responds to the men who invade her home with remarkable politesse, and she tries to remain strong for her daughters and son as weeks and months pass with no idea where Rubens is or if he is alive. That son, Marcelo Rubens Paiva, wrote the memoir on which the film is based, and I’m Still Here retains an intensely personal feeling through its adaptation by Murilo Hauser and Heitor Lorega. Its final act makes two jumps in time, and it loses a bit of momentum in the movement forward as it explores the enduring legacy of pain and what healing looks like after decades. Yet the strength of its first two-thirds help this remain a largely gripping film about memory and trauma. 

For all its other merits, Torres is undeniably the drama’s biggest asset. It isn’t just the way she communicates how Eunice reacts in moments of both joy and duress; it’s the performance within the performance. Whether Eunice is trying to appease governmental thugs or put on a brave face for her children’s benefit, Torres ably captures the layers of what her character is feeling and how she tries to contain those emotions.

Most famous for making the critically lauded Central Station and The Motorcycle Diaries (and the less-liked On the Road and Dark Water), Salles takes the standard route with I’m Still Here. There’s little that feels inventive in its construction. Yet this  is a solidly made picture, full of well-crafted production design and performances, even beyond Torres’s tour-de-force. With Adrian Teijido as DP, it moves between 35mm, 8mm home-video-style footage, and archival clips, but the latter appears rarely with the centering of the Paiva family’s experience, rather than the country’s history as a whole. 

Yet it’s impossible to watch this without thinking of Brazil’s recent past under Jair Bolsonaro or other nations whose democracy may be at risk. Despite the period detail,  I’m Still Here isn’t set that far in the past, and the nightmares lived by the Paiva family and countless others under oppressive regimes are always in danger of being repeated. 

“I’m Still Here” is in theaters in New York and Los Angeles starting Friday. It expands nationwide on February 14.

Kimber Myers is a freelance film and TV critic for 'The Los Angeles Times' and other outlets. Her day job is at a tech company in their content studio, and she has also worked at several entertainment-focused startups, building media partnerships, developing content marketing strategies, and arguing for consistent use of the serial comma in push notification copy.

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