When will I learn to walk out of a movie that is boring me?! I went to see “Neruda” only knowing that Pablo Neruda (Luis Gnecco) was a Nobel Prize winning poet and I left knowing even less. How much was true? How much was the imagination of the screenwriter Guilermo Calderon and director Pablo Larrain? The last movie I saw by Larrain was “Jackie” and a lot of that was made up dialogue supposedly spoken by the first lady.

Is Detective Oscar Peluchonneau (Gael Garcia Bernal) a real person, a figment of Calderon and Larrain’s imagination and/or a nod to Inspector Jacques Clouseau of the Pink Panther series? Is it Bernal doing all the narration or a mix of him and Gnecco or Emilo Gutierrez (as Pablo Picasso)? Was his wife Delia (Mercedes Moran) as abused, mentally and emotionally, as pictured and being a very smart woman would she have put up with it for so long?

More important, did the meaning of the movie just go above my head? To be honest I really didn’t care whether all the questions were answered or not as I was just waiting for something, anything to keep me watching it for a few minutes, waiting for the film to redeem all the time I was wasting watching it!

For whatever reason, I can no more stop reading a book before ‘the end’ as bad as it may be, and I don’t walk out of a movie until the last scene as boring as it may be.

Save your time and money and don’t see “Neruda”!  

Movie trailer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=neUwXV_cSwM