Glenn Close was right. During her latest awards campaign, AMPAS' favorite also-ran recalled the 1998 Best Actress race, concluding that the rightful winner wasn't Gwyneth Paltrow but "that incredible actress that was in Central Station." While that year's Oscar champion gets a lot of undue vitriol –she's excellent in Shakespeare in Love – it's hard to disagree that the trophy rightfully belonged to the great Brazilian thespian Fernanda Montenegro. The only Portuguese-speaking performance to be recognized by the Academy, this star turn has a special place in my heart. So much so that I feared my love was a product of nostalgia goggles. A re-watch disabused such notions. Montenegro's nominated work remains a towering achievement…
Growing up with a grandmother who loved telenovelas, Portuguese and Brazilian, Fernanda Montenegro has long been a familiar face. Her career, which goes back to the 1940s, started in theater but quickly branched out to television and then cinema. The actress achieved success in all those mediums, winning mountains of accolades and international renown. In summation, she's a living legend, which makes her a fitting recipient for the only Oscar nomination ever given to a Brazilian performer. Others have deserved it, for sure, but Montenegro, a veritable institution, feels like the correct holder of such a prestigious record. Also, she should have won. Many, at the time, agreed, including the jury of the Berlinale and many critics organizations. In retrospection, the race seems like a dispute between Paltrow and Cate Blanchett in Elizabeth, but Montenegro put up a mighty fight.
Walter Salles's Central Station came at a curious point in the actress' career. The late 90s and early 00s marked unsuccessful TV ventures, flops for which Montenegro still received sterling reviews. As her commercial viability as a small screen diva temporarily dwindled, the acting titan's cinematic misadventures paid off. Filmmakers seemed excited to explore her presence once again and not necessarily in tedious Grande Dame roles. For two years in a row, Montenegro appeared in Oscar-nominated pictures, with the 1998 picture becoming the most celebrated work in her extensive career. The project was years in development, and after a decade of wanting to work with Montenegro, Salles finally had a role worthy of the actress. Dora is indeed a formidable character.
She's a retired teacher who now works as a letter writer, selling her services to the analphabet masses that everyday traipse through Brazil's Central Station in Rio de Janeiro. Such descriptions could paint Dora as a saintly figure, but the reality is somewhat different. While she greedily takes money from the dispossessed, Dora seldom sends their letters, either tearing them apart after a critical re-reading or shoving them in a drawer, condemning the missives to oblivion. Not even a child's pleas to finally meet his absent father are enough to melt her frozen heart. Well, not at first. As it happens, moments after she has paid Dora for a letter, Josué's mother is hit by a bus, dying instantly. Bereft, the kid wanders around the train station. Eventually, after much insistence, Dora takes pity on the poor fellow, offering him a home. Or does she?
Overall, the basic plot of Central Station is rather cloying – tracing the process by which a grumpy old woman sees her heart grow ten sizes as she helps a little kid. There's Latin-American Neorealism driving the filmmakers' intentions, manifested in observing the country's struggles. However, the structure is trite melodrama. Of course, as in all narrative exercises, the key to success is not the story but how the story is told. In Central Station, the way a story is performed is what solves it, redeeming issues and elevating the cinematic edifice to celestial heights. Nevertheless, as a stage-trained actress, Montenegro feels like an odd choice for a film so interested in pairing her with non-professionals (the kid, most of her clients). Amid a cast working a strategy of authentic 'being' in front of the cameras, Montenegro is in a constant state of tone modulation, register negotiation. She listens, and she placates, lies too.
Her Dora is a pragmatic manipulator, a stern grifter with little patience for the plights of her fellow humans. What's more, Montenegro doesn't try to hide that essential nature, not even when the letter writer's engaging with her clientele. There's only the faintest hint of fake affability masking the depths of Dora's contempt, a surface-level illusion that would only convince the most desperate individuals. It's notable that the sole instances when Dora seems content, during the film's first half, happen at home, as she shares some hearty laughs with a trusted friend at her clients' expense. One must commend Montenegro's daring briskness, how ugly she allows the character to be, and the harshness she infuses into every line reading. Moreover, Dora seems to find her own cruelty amusing, building up walls that separate her from the world while smiling in merry misanthropy.
Whenever a conscience starts to emerge and our unwilling heroine finds herself caring for the child, Montenegro adds an undercurrent of disbelief to the gradual moral shift. At first, this quality shines in how the more righteous lines lose energy at the end. We see Dora is questioning her choices in media res. Later, the reverse starts to happen. Instead of benignity losing its breath to reveal cynicism, the truth of the sentiment is mushy and hastily covered by put-upon antagonism. It's all in what words she emphasizes or muffles. The anti-social alienation that came so naturally to Dora at the beginning increasingly requires effort, a laborious performance inside another performance. It's as if Montenegro plays Dora as someone who knows she's in a soppy tale about a grumpy old lady learning to love again. She knows it, and she hates it. Indeed, Dora behaves as if, internally, trying to resist where the narrative's pulling towards.
Fernanda Montenegro's presence at the center of this film isn't a shining triumph in the middle of a mediocre effort. Instead, Central Station can explore more heightened levels of sentimentality in its realistic milieu because the leading actress is always there to counterbalance. The relationship between performer and production isn't adversarial but symbiotic. By working in a game of contrast, Salles and Montenegro make each other's work better, more vital, and complex. Subsequently, the rare scenes when the two synchronize are overwhelming explosions of raw emotion. A Fellinian interlude, a nocturnal surrendering to spiritual ecstasy, is one of Montenegro's best moments. Suddenly bereft of the dialogue that characterizes so much of her performance, the actress becomes like a silent movie star. She projects a galaxy of contradicting emotions with little more than a lost look, glistening tears, the stilted physicality of someone giving in to helplessness, to guilt, an epiphany.
Dora's general countenance might soften, her attitude might mellow, but Montenegro never gives in completely. It's notable how the actress rarely regards her little costar as an equal, maintaining a perpetual note of adult condescension that separates them. Her humor is that of an old teacher who, once upon a time, used to placate insubordinate youths. Her kindness is that of a woman hurt so many times she's grown a hard carapace around her heart. Every sadness is surpassed within minutes. Every sorrow shoved into a drawer deep in her mind. Her attachment is that of a pedagogue who's seen many kids pass through her life, never to return. On a personal note, as someone who comes from a family of teachers, I've registered those same facets in many people. Watching Fernanda Montenegro's Dora, especially in Central Station's staggering final shot, is to see a more bruised version of the same women who have populated my life from a tender age.
Maybe all these personal caveats stop me from having an 'objective' reading on the performance. Even so, Fernanda Montenegro's work has enchanted many cinema-watchers since 1998, and, in the minds of some, she's the rightful winner of Hollywood's most coveted little golden man. Would you give her that Oscar?