A mere ghost of Forman's past

"Goya's Ghosts" is Milos Forman's first film since 1999, but you sincerely wish it wasn't. A logy, rambling period piece, it feels about as far away from the spirit of "Amadeus" as it's possible to get with wigs and britches. Focusing only incidentally on its title character, the new film wanders distractedly around 19th century Spain in search of a cohesive idea, or failing that, a through line, but it doesn't come up with much beyond the hard-to-dispute observation that power is a gateway to hypocrisy.

The movie begins during the reign of the doltish Charles IV (who indeed bore an uncanny resemblance to the perfectly cast Randy Quaid) and continues through the Napoleonic invasion and French occupation under Joseph Bonaparte, ending with Napoleon's defeat by the British. In the first half of the film, Goya is marginally involved in some Inquisition intrigue involving Natalie Portman's naked torture and subsequent fondling by a priest. Timely as the themes are, they have little to do with Goya except as they concern his role as a well-connected go-between.

Played by Stellan Skarsgard, the great Spanish painter not only remains a passive bystander in his own story, but a credulous dupe besides. It's hard to square this image of a genial but definitely slow-on-the-uptake Goya with his work. Considered to be the last Old Master and one of the first modernists, Goya's work was provocative to the point of being subversive and often so dark as to border on the macabre. His painting of the family of Charles IV was so gleefully tactless it was later described by the French critic Theophile Gautier as looking like a portrait of "the corner baker and his wife after they won the lottery."

Forman's Goya paints with the same brutal frankness but displays none of it in life. When Inez Bilbatua (Portman), the daughter of his friend and patron, the wealthy merchant Tomas de Bilbatua (Jose Luis Gomez), is summoned by the Holy Office after refusing a bite of glazed suckling pig in a tavern (the Inquisitors accuse her of "Judaizing"), Goya half-heartedly agrees to help and comes to regret it. Meanwhile, Bilbatua's own efforts to save her are unsuccessful and the artist's muse that went in the dungeon comes out 15 years later gray-haired, dirt-caked and sporting a broken jaw. She looks like Madame Lafarge after a bar fight.