Seneca (Movie Review)

Rating:

New York indie films can be hit or miss. Still, Armando Riesco and Jason Chaet’s earnest movie Seneca, about a Puerto Rican actor’s personal and professional stagnation, is penetrating and at times cathartic.

Set in New York City and Puerto Rico, actor David Seneca (Armando Riesco) is coming to grips with many things at once: the demise of his marriage, the lack of big breaks in his profession, and a reluctance to confront the demons of his past in Puerto Rico. Call it a mid-life crisis, one that will make him reassess everything important to him. 

Riesco, born in Puerto Rico of Cuban blood, is the star, co-writer, and producer of the film, giving us a meditative and multi-layered performance of a man facing a very low point in his life. From the beginning, his character is grappling with a deep sense of self-doubt and unmitigated self-loathing. He’s not clear why this is happening to him, but it begins to unconsciously manifest itself adversely in the people he cherishes. With his wife Bianca (Susan Misner) he is unreliable and lax. With his daughter Annette (Claudia Morcate-Martin) he is indulgent and temperamental. With his best friend Pedro (Moises Acevedo) he is jealous of his professional rise, and with Father Ruben (Tony Plana), his beloved ailing mentor, well, that is what this whole movie is about.

Overall, Seneca is ashamed and angry at not having lived up to the promise of the celebrity he said he would one day become. It is something that gnaws at the root of his daily existence. What happens when the thing you always wanted never materializes? How deep does that failure go? Can your ego subsist on love, family, and friends alone?

Against the backdrop of David’s present anguish, the aftermath of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico breathes heavily in the film. Its tone is haunting and grim. Chaet and Armando who wrote the script before the hurricane shot several key scenes there with a skeleton crew in 2017. They cleverly interweaved, through editing and dialogue, how both harrowing circumstances parallel each other in eerie ways. The film’s tone isn’t all dismal though. Along the way, Riesco and Chaet manage to skillfully spread dabs of humor, whether situational or physical, to good laughs too.

The movie boasts a tremendous cast of veteran actors such as Tony Plana, Isiah Whitlock Jr., Cote De Pablo, Susan Misner, Shirley Rumierk, and Michael Cyril Creighton amongst others, who add a gloss of stature to the film.

Not to be forgotten are the bilingual elements of the story that are properly used organically. The ensemble is mostly Latino and there are many moments of Spanish spoken throughout the film portraying a real authentic sense of the diverse energy of New York City. Ironically, Riesco himself is hard to pin down as an obvious Puerto Rican. He is even confused as German in the movie by his real-life wife, Shirley Rumierk, who plays his neighbor and a potential love interest. But what does a Puerto Rican or a Latino look like anyway in 2019?

Every film intends to elicit a reaction that provokes a different understanding outside our views and Seneca achieves that goal. As the Roman philosopher Seneca The Younger once said, “Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end,” and this story is the beginning of a rebirth, a rebirth from being a prisoner of your ambition to finally appreciating the little things that are and have always been in front of us.