Shuffling ideas from “Fitzcarraldo” and “Dances With Wolves” yields the cinematic equivalent of a term paper for Imperialism 101 in “Even the Rain.”
Gael Garcia Bernal plays a liberal director making a film about Christopher Columbus in Bolivia, where he hires indigenous people as extras and quickly finds his parable of colonialism mirrored by real life. His star indigenous actor (Juan Carlos Aduviri) is an agitator who leads a protest against an international firm that seeks to steal access to the community’s well water — even the rain, it seems, can be privatized.
Scene after scene makes the same familiar point about the evil axis of European Christian capitalists vs. the noble suffering of the poor, righteous, exploited Indians, in both the present day and the Columbian era. By the time the actor’s been burned at the stake by overzealous missionaries in the film and arrested and abused by cops in reality, the point no longer needs to be made.
The film achieves a mild uptick in the final act, with a surprise change of heart and a race to save a little girl, but up till then it’s thickly earnest — a conquista-bore.