In The Beloved (the original Spanish title is El Ser Querido), Javier Bardem plays a demanding, judgmental film director with a daughter who doesn’t like him much.
Bardem doesn’t, however, play a raging, sputtering beast. He plays, in fact, “nothing less and nothing more than a flawed human,” according to Variety‘s Daniel D’Addario.
“Bardem’s character, who insists on everyone else’s professionalism, has an utterly unprofessional breakdown while filming under the baking sun,” D’addario writes.
Bardem: “That takes us directly to the toxic masculinity of his generation and his age — which is my age, which is my culture, which is Spain.”
20th Century Spanish dudes who were raised under Franco, says Bardem, “were educated in a culture that was giving us all we wanted, and we took for granted that we are way more powerful and more in control — we are the driving force, as men. That is absolutely wrong in every sense.”
Wrong in every sense? If guys don’t assert themselves in the face of social bludgeoning and generally try to keep their feet in the gas, they’ll be trampled. Their rivals will open them up like a can of beans.