Worse yet, his suffering is so intense that he may not care instead of life after death, he’s settling for death before death, a premature leave-taking that’s a betrayal not just of his gifts, but of the time on earth any of us are given. In Pedro Almódovar’s Pain & Glory, Antonio Banderas gives the performance of a lifetime as 60-ish filmmaker Salvador Mallo-a stand-in, more or less, for Almódovar himself-who’s in so much physical pain that he’s uncertain whether he’ll ever work again. In any life, there’s only so much time to do all we want and need to do.
