Movie Review: ‘Evita’ (1996)

Evita (1996): Style, Spectacle, and the Woman Behind the Myth

Alan Parker’s Evita is a film that dazzles with spectacle but struggles to reveal the heart of its heroine. Starring Madonna as Eva Duarte de Perón, Antonio Banderas as Che, and Jonathan Pryce as Juan Perón, the movie adapts Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 1979 rock opera into a lavish cinematic event.

Like Eva herself, the film thrives on style. Parker’s showmanship and Madonna’s unexpectedly poised singing impress, yet the woman behind the myth remains as enigmatic at the end as she was at the beginning.

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A Musical, Not a Biopic

This isn’t Gandhi or Lawrence of Arabia. Evita is closer to a feature-length music video, racing through 26 years of Eva’s life with wall-to-wall songs. Spoken dialogue is almost nonexistent—Madonna delivers only about 140 words in the entire 135-minute runtime.

The film begins in Buenos Aires on July 26, 1952, when news of Eva’s death halts a cinema screening. The nation erupts in grief, and Che, the sardonic narrator, mocks the hysteria:

“Oh, what a circus, oh, what a show! Argentina has gone to town over the death of an actress called Eva Perón…”

From there, the story unfolds in flashback: Eva’s illegitimate childhood, her teenage seduction of tango singer Agustín Magaldi, and her relentless climb through lovers, stages, and political circles until she becomes Argentina’s First Lady.

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Spectacle and Style

Parker excels at staging grand set pieces: Eva’s funeral, massive rallies, and her balcony farewell from the Casa Rosada. Cinematographer Darius Khondji captures both grit and glamour, befitting a woman who wielded style as political power.

The film even holds a record: Madonna’s Eva changes costumes 85 times, surpassing Elizabeth Taylor’s 65 in Cleopatra.

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Music and Performance

The cast recorded all songs in studio before filming, giving the soundtrack polish. Antonio Banderas surprises with sharp delivery, while Madonna—then known mainly for provocative pop—proves capable of restraint and emotional nuance. Her renditions of “Another Suitcase in Another Hall” and “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina” are delicately moving. The new song “You Must Love Me” adds poignancy to Eva’s final act.

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The Missing Depth

Where Evita falters is in its refusal to probe its heroine’s complexity. Beyond Eva’s obsessive drive to transcend her class, the film offers little insight into her motives. Was she complicit in Juan Perón’s harboring of Nazi fugitives after World War II? Did she truly care for the descamisados—the “shirtless ones”—or simply use them as props to secure power? Parker raises these questions but never answers them.

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Blu-ray (15th Anniversary Edition)

• Studio: Walt Disney Pictures / Hollywood Pictures / Buena Vista Home Entertainment
• Video: MPEG-4 AVC, 1080p, Aspect Ratio 2.40:1 (original 2.39:1)
• Audio: English DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1
• Subtitles: English SDH, Spanish
• Disc: 50GB Blu-ray, single disc (Region Free)
• Rated: PG
• Release Date: June 19, 2012
• Run Time: 135 minutes

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Final Reflection

As cinema, Evita is a triumph of spectacle—lavish, stylish, and musically engaging. As biography, it remains superficial, content to celebrate the myth rather than interrogate the woman. Parker’s film entertains, but Eva Duarte de Perón, the ambitious actress turned First Lady, remains as enigmatic at the end as she was at the beginning.

For me, though, Evita carries a personal resonance. My mother, during her first marriage to a Colombian physician attached to the Colombian Embassy in Buenos Aires in the early 1950s, met the real Eva Perón at least once. She remembered how the city’s social elite whispered their disdain in beauty parlors, never fully accepting the First Lady as one of their own. Decades later, I gave her the Blu-ray edition of Evita for Mother’s Day in 2015. By then, dementia made it difficult for her to follow the film, but the gift was a gesture of connection—linking her lived memory of Eva with my own reflection on Parker’s cinematic spectacle.

In that way, Evita is more than a movie. It is a thread between history, myth, and family—a reminder that cinema doesn’t just retell stories, it entwines them with our own.