El Cantante
The salsa explosion of the 1970s has long deserved a movie that would capture the music, the energy, and the loud, proud fusion of Puerto Rican and New York rhythms. Ideally, it would give you a sense of an entire people knocking the planet off its axis with a shake of their hips.
If only "El Cantante" were that movie. Instead, it's a curiously sludgy cross between a Doomed Star biopic and a J. Lo vanity project. Director Leon Ichaso ("Pinero," "Crossover Dreams") knows this turf better than perhaps any filmmaker out there, but even he can't do much with the story of Hector Lavoe (1946-1993), one of the key singing voices of early salsa and, in this account, a self-absorbed, drug-addicted heel.
Salsa superstar Marc Anthony plays Lavoe, and Jennifer Lopez -- Mrs. Anthony -- plays Lavoe's wife, Nilda "Puchi" Rosado. (Lopez also co-produced the film.) "El Cantante" tells their story chronologically, returning every so often to a black-and-white interview sequence, set in 2002, in which Puchi defensively discusses her late husband. "People should remember he was funny," she insists against all the evidence onscreen.
After a street-singing prologue in 1963 Puerto Rico, the boy born Hector Perez journeys to New York City against his father's wishes, quickly learning the musical ropes. In too short order, he's meeting bandleader and salsa impresario Johnny Pacheco (Nelson Vasquez), who signs the kid up as vocalist in trombonist Willie Colon's (John Ortiz) band and welcomes him to the Fania Records family. But first a name change. "Perez is an unemployment line name," says Pacheco, rechristening him Hector Lavoe -- French for "the voice."
Hector discovers heroin and Puchi around the same time, and neither will turn out to be very good for him. By now "El Cantante" is cooking nicely, though, with sharply edited scenes in streets and uptown apartment parties that groove with timbale-fueled cross-rhythms. Colon/Lavoe hits like "Che Che Cole" and "Aguanile" leap off the screen with nearly the force they must have possessed in the early 1970s. If Anthony has a brighter, more aggressive vocal presence than the real Lavoe's confident drawl, you're too busy dancing in your seat to be bothered.
Then comes the descent. Hector starts missing gigs, exasperating Colon and the Fania team. He shows up stoned for his wedding (Puchi's pregnant, as is one of the singer's other girlfriends). He has a breakdown, gets institutionalized, eventually contracts HIV from who knows where. "El Cantante" devotes more than half of its running time to this slow, ugly fall from grace, and the saddest part is that the movie tells us nothing that dozens of similar famous-junkie tales haven't. We've retreated from the vibrant world of Latin music to a generalized tailspin.
If the script or Anthony offered any insights as to why Hector doped or why we should care, that would be one thing, but the star -- like many famous singers tackling an acting role -- hides behind his shades and hairdo. Both character and performance remain passive ciphers. Where's the ambition? Where's the passion?
In the meantime, Lopez hijacks the movie while fuzzing the question of how much Puchi enabled her husband. "El Cantante" presents the character as a roughneck Bronx party girl who loved the high life in all its dimensions but fought -- not too hard -- to keep Hector on the straight and narrow. Puchi bristles when one of the interviewers mutters she's partly to blame, but the movie pulls back from a similar judgment, either out of deference to its producer-star or to keep Latin music's skeletons in the closet.
Ortiz's Colon gets boxed out of the film in contradiction of his impact on Lavoe's career. Even the title signature tune doesn't square in this telling. "El Cantante" includes a nightclub scene in which a young Ruben Blades (Victor Manuelle), who wrote the song, presents it to Hector as a gift. In fact, Blades wanted to record it himself but was pressured by Colon to offer it to the troubled singer.
In the end, whatever drove this talented man to sing and to kill himself with drugs remains unknown. Maybe he was fleeing fame. Maybe he just liked being high. "Men like Hector, they don't get therapy," says Puchi. They don't get honest movie biographies, either.
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com. For more on movies, go to boston.com/ae/movies/blog.
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