Barcelona: Innocents abroad

"They're against OTAN? What are they for? Soviet troops racing across Europe, eating all the croissants?"

MARTA: You seem very intelligent for an American.

FRED: Well, I’m not.

All you need to know about Fred Boynton is that he is the kind of guy who will try to edit graffiti with a Sharpie. He also likes to tell women that his cousin wears leather undergarments. And he believes in whole “shining city on the hill” thing about America.

Fred, as played by Chris Eigeman, is one of the great characters in modern comedies – if you want to term Barcelona a comedy. Fred is a Navy officer assigned to smooth things over ahead of a fleet visit in the immortal Spanish city. His cousin, Ted (Taylor Nichols), works there as a salesman for a multinational company based in Chicago.

In other hands, Barcelona could have easily devolved into two ugly and/or clueless Americans on the town trying to score with women and baffled by the local customs. But under the deft handling of writer/director Whit Stillman, it never takes the easy way out. As a result, Barcelona is one of the richest and enjoyable films of the past 30 years, one I have revisited many times.

It makes sense. Fred and Ted (Stillman is not being subtle about duality here) are in their late 20s, way past college but still somehow adrift. I was their age when the movie was released in 1994, and it spoke to me in a certain melancholy way about trying to find a path even as you feel like your options are narrowing all the time.

In my case, my Barcelona was Miami, where I moved in the ‘90s from Cleveland — and where I felt that same thrilling sense of becoming swept up in an unfamiliar culture. (And a city that also owns a place in Cold War annals.) An evening out always felt filled with promise and uncertainty, even as it seemed everyone was in on a secret joke but me. But I was ok with that.

The two cousins in Barcelona are constantly questioning their choices, whether they belong where they are. Being confronted with a strange and sometimes hostile environment seems to have untethered them. Both are idealists almost to the point of naivete: Fred about the sweep of American military power and its role in advancing freedom in the world and Ted about the transformational potential of a life in international sales.

The film is set in the mid-1980s – “the last decade of Cold War” as a title card tells us – with Ronald Reagan in the White House and the United States involved in misadventures in Central America. Fred is comically shocked when he comes across anti-American and anti-NATO sentiment in Spain. (It’s called OTAN there.) He can’t believe his Navy uniform makes him a target of anger and mockery. More than anything, he’s outraged when he’s called a facha – a fascist, pointing out that Americans died in World War II ridding Europe of fascism. When the two dodge some angry locals, he gets worked up all over again. “They obviously didn’t mean facha in the positive sense!” he tells Ted.

As a kind of voice for my generation, Eigeman excelled in films such as Stillman’s Metropolitan and Noah Baumbach’s Kicking and Screaming as an acerbic cultural critic, an easily riled ironist. At one point in Barcelona, he goes off on a diatribe about The Graduate and how Katharine Ross’ wedding vows meant nothing to her when “this obnoxious Dustin Hoffman character” shows up. It’s knowing, counter-intuitive, and brilliant.

Fred and Ted are self-aware, loquacious, somewhat narcissistic, mostly hapless, and occasionally unlikeable — not your typical protagonists for a feel-good comedy. But Stillman’s ambitions are greater than that.

In Barcelona, Stillman attempts the difficult task navigating farce, romance, drama and even tragedy. In the movie’s very first scenes, the color of the city is interspersed with a terrorist bombing, telegraphing to the audience that these elements will be intermixed. Ted’s flirtations with fundamentalist Christianity and Dale Carnegie-style positivity are played for laughs right next an attack on a USO headquarters that leaves a soldier dead. Fred’s annoyance over the antipathy shown him by the local leftists seems like a running joke – until suddenly, it isn’t.

It also is very much a work of its time even beyond the Cold War frame. Fred’s view of the military (he was forced to join due to weak SAT scores) is through the lens of 1980s careerism; he defends it to Ted as a good middle-management gig.

The Naval officer is one of the only white-collar jobs where you really must deal intensively with the physical world all day long, and it counts. It is not theoretical. You dominate the elements in all four dimensions without a slip-up, or it gets very wet.

All through it, however, there is a sort of a dreamlike quality to the whole thing, perhaps owing to the sense of these two Americans being unmoored and slowly finding their way through an uncharted land. The film recreates that giddy, transporting feeling when you’re walking home at 6 a.m. after a meeting someone you’ll never quite get out of your mind.

In that way, Barcelona makes the Old World feel new.

PERSONAL NOTE: This entry in Nuclear Theater is later than usual but for good reasons. I’ve been working on a surprise I hope to publish in the coming days. As always, bear with management. I have a day job.

WHERE CAN I FIND IT: You can rent Barcelona on Amazon Prime and Apple TV among other platforms.

ISN’T THAT: Mira Sorvino plays one of the Barcelona women the cousins become involved with. This was right before her breakout role in Woody Allen’s Mighty Aphrodite. Chris Eigeman and Taylor Nichols are still working actors, with Eigeman recently in “The Fabulous Mrs. Maisel” on Amazon Prime and Nichols in the film Babylon.

DUST CLOUDS: Spain, which certainly had its own experience with fascism, didn’t join NATO until 1982. Its entry was bitterly opposed by groups on the Left, including the First of October Anti-Fascist Resistance Groups, known as GRAPO, a militant terrorist organization responsible for a series of bombings and kidnappings.

ARMAGEDDON INDEX: 2/10. The Soviets and friends don’t factor here, but that doesn’t mean everyone gets out unscathed.

WHAT ELSE AM I WATCHING: TV: Shogun (S1, Hulu), Vigil (S1, Peacock), Curb Your Enthusiasm (S12, MAX), Tokyo Vice (S2, MAX). Movies: The Exterminating Angel (Bunuel, 1962), Masculin Feminin (Godard, 1966), Arbitrage (Jarecki, 2012).

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