Central Station

By the time you read this, Central Station will be gone from the theaters. Which is too bad if you didn't see it, because it's a great film. Directed by Brazilian film maker Walter Salles Jr. and set in contemporary Brazil, it tells the story of a cynical middle-aged woman and an orphaned boy who end up together on an unlikely quest for the boy's father. The boy, Josue, looks for family and a place where he can belong; the woman, Dora, finds a renewed sense of hope and compassion for others.

It sounds a little hokey, and in the hands of a most Hollywood directors it would be. But this is no Hollywood film. It is a film whose characters are real people struggling to get by in the harsh world of Brazilian poverty. It is a rich and beautiful film that does not smooth over the moral ambiguities and messy reality of life. If it offers a message of hope and compassion, it is no false or simple hope, but a hope hard won from the struggles of life.

Dora, played by Fernanda Montenegro, is a retired schoolteacher who makes ends meet by writing letters for illiterate people in the noisy and crowded Central Station of Rio de Janeiro. Most of the letters are love letters of varying degrees of sincerity, and most do not get mailed--they end up torn up in the garbage or put into a drawer to "think about." For some of the letter writers, such as the man who sent letters to ten different women promising that each is "the only one for me," we can almost understand her deceit. However, Dora's cynical view of life can see no good in any of the letters, so none get mailed.

One of her letter-writers is Ana, who writes to the father of her nine-year-old son Josue, played by Vinicius de Oliveira. The father has never seen his son, and reportedly is abusive and an alcoholic. The letters go in the drawer, unmailed. When Ana is killed in a bus accident, Josue is left orphaned and alone in the station. Dora at first refuses to care about the boy. This is a harsh world of urban poverty, and street kids are plenty.

Slowly she finds herself getting drawn into this Josue's life, despite her cynicism and the boy's defensive pride. Caught between the self-defensive walls she's built around her and the compassion that she cannot suppress, she tries to help. She learns of an "International Adoption Agency" that will pay her for the child, so she trades him for the money for an expensive TV set. But soon she finds out that the "adoption agency" really has more sinister plans for the boy. After a night of trying not to care, her conscious gets the better of her. She rescues him from the agency and finds herself on the run from some thugs and drawn into Josue's search for his father.

The story is as much about Dora overcoming her cynicism and despair and coming to see the good in other people as it is about finding Josue's father. But what makes this movie so remarkable, and so different from most American movies, is that nothing is ever clean cut or black and white. Dora remains caught between her desire to be rid of Josue and her desire to see him safely taken care of, even to the end. Josue's father emerges in the end as neither the worthless drunk that Dora sees him as, nor as the heroic carpenter that Josue insists on, but rather as both--neither saint nor devil but something in that flawed and gray area where most of us actually live.

Central Station stands out from most American films for two other reasons. One is that its characters are poor people struggling to survive and find meaning in their life. The picture of Brazilian poverty is neither sentimentalized nor overdone, and the story does not revolve around some rags to riches fantasy. In Hollywood, poverty is to be rescued from; in Central Station, poverty is a fact of life and people living in poverty can find value and meaning in their lives.

The second reason this stands out from American films is that the main character of the story is an ordinary-looking middle aged woman. She is not a young-looking fifty-something actress with thousands of dollars of plastic surgery, nor is she an old woman looking back on lost youth. She is a middle-aged woman living her life in a story that does not revolve around age or beauty. For an American film, this is almost inconceivable. Hollywood lives on the marketing of youth and pre-packaged beauty; for women especially. When an American movie does revolve around a middle-aged woman, she is either paired with someone young and "beautiful" or reminisces on the days when she was young (played by a young and "beautiful" version of herself). It is in foreign films that you will find normal, plain-looking people like the rest of us.

If Central Station does offer a realistic and compassionate view of Brazilian poverty, it doesn't offer much in the way of class struggle. The politics of who is poor, and why, are not the point of this film. The facts of oppression are certainly present. If Josue and Dora find redemption and hope they find it within their world, not by changing their world. In that sense this is not an activist movie. But there is a deeper message here about the worth and dignity of human beings and the value of compassion that might be lost in too political a treatment. The point of the Central Station is that compassion is not easy, but struggled for. Right and wrong are not simple points on a moral compass that tell us which way to go; rather they are the struggles of the journey itself, when we wrestle with the ugly realities of life and find our way through without losing our soul. John Chapman