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Paul Asay
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Movie Review

Rio de Janeiro is best known for its sun and the Son.

The nearly 100-foot-high statue of Christ the Redeemer stands atop Corcovado mountain, spreading its arms wide, as if to embrace the entire city. The sun beats down on Rio’s beaches—beaches so filled with sunbathers and tourists that it can be hard to see any sand. Millions of tourists flock to the city every year, and for some, it might seem as though this corner of Brazil is paradise. A place untouched by the worries of the world.

Ruben and Eunice Paiva know better.

Ruben was a left-leaning Brazilian congressman in the early 1960s. But when the government was toppled by a military coup in 1964, Ruben was forced out and into self-imposed exile. He and his family—wife Eunice and five kids—returned five years later, but the military dictatorship is in control. And by 1970, that dictatorship feels increasingly under pressure: Terrorists are kidnapping foreign ambassadors and exchanging them for the release of political prisoners. The country’s rulers want to stamp out this insurgency now. Left-leaning protestors, journalists and educators are increasingly scrutinized.

Oh, and one-time politicians, too.

They come for Ruben on a gloriously sunny day—a holiday, when the Paiva family might’ve well gone to the beach. Several men walk into the house, armed and prepared for trouble. They tell Ruben they’d like him to give a “deposition.” As Ruben dresses for the trip, his daughter, Nalu, asks if she could borrow one of his shirts.

“Do I have a choice, Nalu?” he says with a smile, while a stranger with a barely concealed gun looks on. “And where’s my kiss?”

Nalu, clueless about the room’s looming peril, gives him one. And she asks why he’s putting on a tie.

“I’m just helping these gentlemen,” Ruben say. “I’ll be back soon.”

But he wasn’t back. Not that day, or that night, or the next day. That deceptively mundane goodbye launched the family into a nightmare one can barely contemplate.

The sun seems to always shine on Rio. But on Jan. 20, 1971, the Paiva family entered into a dark, uncertain night.


Positive Elements

I’m Still Here, based on a real story, doesn’t spend much time on Ruben’s political leanings. Instead, it focuses on his role as a father. And it seems like he was one loving dad.

Keeping track of five kids—three of them teenagers—isn’t easy. And one could perhaps argue that Ruben is a little too lenient. But he clearly adores his kids, and they love him right back. The picture the film paints of the Paiva family is one of love and laughter, joy and hope. And much of that seems to be the result of Rubens’ buoyant spirit.

Eunice brings her own smiling energy to the family. But when Ruben disappears, her role expands exponentially. She must search for her husband. She must figure out how to pay the bills. She shields her children as much as she can, but when protection is no longer possible, Eunice tries to keep their spirits up. For example, when a newspaper photographer takes a family picture of them all and encourages the children to be a bit more dour, Eunice consciously undermines his efforts. “Smile,” she tells her children. “Smile!”

A bit of a spoiler here if you’re not familiar with the real story of Ruben Paiva: He never comes back. And in the ensuing years and decades, Eunice becomes a tireless advocate for her husband and other people who vanished during Brazil’s 1964-1985 military dictatorship. She’s determined to find out what happened to them and to exact admissions of guilt from those responsible. But we learn that she also became a lawyer who advocated for Brazil’s indigenous peoples in the years following.

Spiritual Elements

We see a couple of shots of the Christ the Redeemer statue in the background and in home movie footage. The Paiva children attend a religious school, and one scene takes place in the school’s chapel (wherein a couple of nuns walk in). When Eunice asks one of the men who came to take her husband what he does for a living, the stranger says, “I’m a parapsychologist.”

The real Eunice Paiva was a devout Catholic who reportedly celebrated Mass every week. But we see little of that piety in I’m Still Here.

Sexual & Romantic Content

Four of the five Paiva children are girls, and three are teens who love to talk about boys—be they boyfriends, or celebrity crushes, or guys they would like to date. When the eldest, who’s called Veroca for most of the movie, is about to leave for London, for instance, her sisters envy her for how she’ll meet “an English boy.” (She also appears to take some contraceptives along for the trip.) All the children (and occasionally their friends) are seen in revealing swimsuits and midriff-baring tops.

Before heading to England, Veroca spends a great deal of time in the company of other teen guys and girls. While there’s no obvious romantic link between Veroca and anyone else, she does lounge around with two of them in one scene, her legs draped across someone else’s lap.

After being held by the Brazilian army for several days, Eunice takes a long, long shower. One of her girls watches through a crack in the door, and she—and the audience—gets a glimpse of both the side of her breast and the top of her rear end. The scene features a lot of skin elsewhere, too, though it’s not designed to be titillating: Rather, it’s meant to remind us of how vulnerable Eunice is, and how hard she feels like she must scrub herself to be free of both the physical dirt and emotional toll of her captivity.

Ruben and Eunice often express their affection for one another, with Ruben telling listeners that his wife is the most beautiful woman in the world. As teens dance and sing to a French song, Eunice tells another woman that she’s glad the teens don’t understand French.

Violent Content

The day after Ruben is taken for his “deposition,” officials come to take away Eunice and her second-oldest daughter, Eliana, too. They’re eventually forced to put hoods over their heads so they won’t know where they’re going. Once in custody, Eunice is locked in a dingy, bare, almost lightless cell.

Eunice spends 12 days in captivity. And while she’s never subjected to any physical violence, some of her fellow prisoners aren’t so lucky. As she’s being questioned, her interrogator drops his cigarette butt on the floor and snuffs it out with his shoe—drawing Eunice’s attention to the blood spatters there. One person is dragged through the hallway, begging for help. Screaming can be heard behind closed doors. Eunice hears someone singing on the other side of her cell wall. She then hears a guard open the door, demand quiet, and then a thud—suggesting that the guard hit the singer.

The Pavias’ family dog gets hit by a car and left, dead and bloody, in the streets. Eunice wraps the small corpse in a blanket, and she and her crying children bury the animal.

We hear that terrorists kidnapped the Swiss ambassador after shooting the ambassador’s bodyguard in the head. (The bodyguard survived, and the ambassador was eventually set free.) Police shove teens around during a traffic stop. “They were really aggressive,” one teen reports later.

[Spoiler Warning] We later learn that Ruben died in custody.

Crude or Profane Language

According to the movie’s subtitles, two f-words and one s-word are uttered. We also hear (or rather read) “a–,” “b–ch” and “d–n.” God’s name is abused twice, once with the word “d–n.” As an adult, Marcelo Paiva, Ruben and Eunice’s only boy, has become a writer; he asks a fan whether she thought he included too many swear words in his book. When the fan says no, Marcelo nods to his mother: “She picks on my language,” he says with a grin.

Drug & Alcohol Content

Shortly after the kidnapping of the Swiss ambassador, Veroca and her friends drive around Rio, blasting music and passing around a marijuana joint. When they’re caught in a traffic stop, they quickly put out the joint and hope the military won’t notice.

The next day, Ruben jokes with Veroca about hanging out in a “playboy’s car.” Veroca jokes back. “I thought a playboy was someone who drank whiskey and smoked cigars all day,” she says—referring, of course, to Ruben himself.

Men and women smoke cigarettes. Nula, who’s probably about 13 or 14, tries to smoke one of her mother’s cigarettes. But when her brother, Marcelo, walks in and asks to take a drag, she says no.

Parties involving friends and family often feature wine.

Other Noteworthy Elements

When brought in for questioning, Eunice is asked how long her husband has been associating with “communists,” “terrorists” and “extremists.” Eunice tries to explain that while Ruben was a member of the left-leaning Labor Party when he was in congress, he hasn’t been involved in politics since their return.

That may technically be true, but Eunice does learn that Ruben was involved in helping some folks being persecuted by Brazil’s military government: He and his friends had kept this secret from their wives to protect them.

That protection trickles down to the Paiva’s children. Eunice refuses to talk about the bald realities of her husband’s captivity when her younger children are in the room—going so far as lying that Ruben is still on a “trip” and will be back soon. Even when she hears a reliable statement that Ruben died in custody, she doesn’t tell her children right away. When she decides to move the family to São Paulo shortly thereafter, one child worries about what will happen if Ruben comes back and doesn’t know where they went.

Eunice lies elsewhere, too. Sometimes she lies after her husband’s captors tell her to. Other times, she lies in an effort to get more information about Ruben.

Conclusion

In the first scene of I’m Still Here, we see Eunice floating in the warm waters off the coast of Rio—watching with a mild sense of concern as a military helicopter muscles its way through the sky.

Beauty—be it found in a locale, or a movie, or in life itself—can sometimes hide something more troubling.

The Paivas lead, it would seem, a beautiful life in I’m Still Here (based, as mentioned, on a true story). Ruben works hard to make it so. He hides his own secret (and he would say honorable) work to protect his wife and children. To save them the pain and the worry.

And, for a while, it works. Certainly the Paiva children loved their father and created wonderful memories with him. Certainly Eunice lived a life that would be the envy of many—to live in a picture-perfect place with a picture-perfect family. Perhaps it’s telling that those photos form a recurring theme in I’m Still Here: the capture of softer, prettier, more innocent times.

It can feel, at moments, as though Ruben and Eunice were doing their best to tell their children a cherished bedtime story—one without pain or drama, where everything would be fine and everyone would live happily ever after.

But happiness is often more hard won than those bedtime stories tell us. With all due respect to Shakespeare, truth and beauty can often feel estranged from one another. It takes work to reconcile the two.

I’m Still Here is, in a way, a story about that reconciliation. It’s about what happens when lives are shattered but the living goes on, when people must piece together both beauty and truth from those broken pieces. Nominated for three Oscars—Best Picture; Best International Feature Film; and, most deservedly, Best Actress for Fernanda Torres—the film is more than an examination of one of Brazil’s most difficult bits of history. It’s an homage to finding meaning and direction when Plan A flies out the window. It’s a reminder that real beauty goes deeper than languid blue waters or smiling family portraits: It’s about the strength and resilience we find inside ourselves, and each other, when life doesn’t feel very beautiful at all.

The same could be said for the movie itself, perhaps.

I’m Still Here is PG-13, but it feels harder than that. A bit of partial nudity, some language and, certainly, the storyline itself can make this a difficult watch. The Paiva children do things that many parents wish they wouldn’t. The Paiva parents aren’t exactly picture-perfect role models themselves.

But underneath it all, we do find here a strength born of affection; a resiliency born from trial. Even a beauty found in hardship.


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Paul Asay

Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.

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