A family endures a dictatorship in the Oscar-nominated ‘I’m Still Here’

It’s one measure of Latin America’s arduous history that it has spawned so many books and movies about dictatorship. Over the years, I’ve been through scads of them, from novels by Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa, to the landmark documentaries of Patricio Guzmán, to Hollywood thrillers like Missing and Under Fire. What they share is the awareness that history hurts.

Few films have shown this with more delicate intelligence than I’m Still Here, a moving new drama set during Brazil’s military dictatorship that began with an American-backed coup in 1964 and ended in 1985. Based on a memoir by Marcelo Rubens Paiva, Walter Salles’ movie is no political tract or manipulative tearjerker (although it may make you cry). Exploring the dictatorship indirectly, I’m Still Here tells the heroic true story of a wife and mother who steers her family through the rapids of tyranny.

The story begins idyllically on Ipanema Beach in 1970 when we first meet the Paiva family. The father is Rubens — played with easy charm by Selton Mello — a warm-hearted man who was a congressman before the coup, and by Eunice — that’s Fernanda Torres — a rather traditional seeming wife who bakes great soufflés and wrangles their five high-energy children. Theirs is a happy, upper-middle-class family whose home is a kind of Eden, complete with a view of the beach. Buzzing with openness to friends, to ideas, to laughter, to music — the movie’s soundtrack is fabulous — their house is Brazil as we might dream of it being.

Yet such openness is precisely what the junta mistrusts. It tortures or disappears anyone it considers a threat to its notion of an orderly, anti-communist society. Even as the family dances, plays foosball and amiably bickers, we await the dreaded knock on the door. It comes. Rubens is taken away for “questioning,” security men occupy the house and Eunice herself is called in for a nasty interrogation.

Rubens’ disappearance is the turning point in Eunice’s life. Over the next months — in fact, the next decades — she transforms her practical maternal virtues into something mighty. Channeling her grief, she becomes a stronger, tougher, wiser person who protects her kids, digs into the cruel facts of her husband’s fate and learns to fight for other people’s rights as well.

From the start, Eunice is a woman of impressive self-command, and the movie shares that virtue. Salles has always been a gifted director, but earlier films like Central Station and The Motorcycle Diaries were so busy being Artful and Important that they often felt impersonal. Here, you feel his profound emotional engagement. Salles grew up in the same milieu as the Paivas — indeed, he hung out with the kids — and you feel his affection for that family and its values. He captures them — and 1970 Rio — in a way that feels loving and true.

Salles does a superb job of depicting how the dictatorship colored daily life. We see how things could often appear normal, with fun at the beach and happy visits to the ice cream shop. Yet without laying on the violence or heavy-handed moralism — even the secret policemen we meet aren’t monsters — Salles also conjures a pervasive atmosphere of anxiety. We feel it in the sounds of helicopters hovering overhead, the TV newscasts filled with lies, the spasms of fearful mistrust that grows between friends and the way that, once your family is singled out, you’re treated differently out in the world. Like Brazil, their house of freedom is now in lockdown.

The counterweight to the dictatorship is the unglamorous strength of Eunice, who goes from making soufflés to becoming a lawyer at age 48 who helps make Brazil a better place to live. She’s played with surpassing brilliance by Torres whose performance is so subtle, so internal, so quietly shattering that, in a just world, she’d win all this year’s big acting awards. Registering each flicker of emotion as precisely as a seismograph, Torres captures Eunice’s pain and horror at her husband’s fate but also her endurance, her faith that life goes on.

A faith that time vindicates: Even as it’s buffeted by misfortune, the family survives and thrives. At one point, a newspaper photographer comes to take a picture of the family and tells them to look somber — after all, Rubens is missing. But Eunice insists that everyone smile. She will not let them face the world looking beaten.