Truly Based on a Story

To the left is actor Leon Jaramillo. Handsome, fashionable, a sort-of Latin-American George Clooney in his ER years. To the right is Pablo Escobar. Twisted, balding, unkempt, with those blank dark eyes that bespeak an evil unhampered with doubt or remorse. The left stars in a popular biopic miniseries depicting the life of the right, who may or may not have dressed entirely in black, carried a gold-plated pistol, and let his looks go as soon as people starting photographing him.

The show is called “El Capo.” When Jim Dalling first visited Fortuna, I pointed it out to him.

“Have you seen El Capo, Jim? It’s kind of a Panamanian 24.”

I watched the television as Leon Jaramillo stared at the screen in a series of increasingly close close-ups. Some paramilitary-types were closing in on his cave, and him and his two bodacious bodyguards were reacting by posing dramatically and approaching the camera. It was a sequence that may single-handedly have repudiated the axioms of Alfred Hitchcock, namely that lack of action is what leads to suspense. His adversaries always seemed just around the corner, but there was just more cave, and El Capo had time enough to exhaust his catalog of vivid squints.

“No no,” said Jim. “This is a true story. This is all about Pablo Escobar.”

More squints, more bodacious bodyguards, deeper descent into the cave.

“They seem to have taken some artistic liberties, Jim,” I pointed out.

“I think it’s pretty accurate,” he said.

It’s strange how, once you get outside your native tongue, TV and movies get reduced to the thick paint strokes of genre. Dramatic chase, tearful vows and promises, gun fight where nameless goons and policeman are traded but no one with a speaking role dies, suspension of action, betrayal by best friend, scene-where-you-are-sure-the-main-character-won’t-die, his improbable escape, a casual strut from an explosion, an angry police captain barking into a radio in red-faced and spittle-heavy futility.

From what I can tell, Pablo Escobar is the hero of the story, which has him alternating tears with stoic manliness.
“How many Mexican stand-ups can this man survive?” I ask. I am told to shhh. El Capo has taken his shirt off, to be replaced later by an identical black shirt, from a closet full of black shirts and pants and coat-jackets and shiny black shoes.

I recall from the book “Hunting Pablo Escobar,” the man’s naked and coke fueled soccer orgies, binding the hands and legs of a thieving party bartender and drowning him in his swimming pool in front of a house full of guests, shooting down an entire jetliner to kill a single person on it.

Filthy lies. El Capo would never do any of those things. Look at the way he befriends orphans and loves his mother and stays true to his one love, amidst so much temptation in the form of a loyal and buxom security force. And doesn’t use drugs. Or sell them. Not onscreen anyways.

A cop holds a gun to El Capo’s head, but El Capo isn’t nearly as terrified as I am. Not El Capo! Shoot anyone but Pablo Escobar! You just don’t know him the way I do!

But I’ll have to wait next week for the thrilling ten-minute denouement of the gun-held-to-head scene, complete with the hammer-being-pulled-back and the finger-bracing-hard-against-the-trigger. But it’ll take more than a mere bullet to kill El Capo. I’ve seen the man shot dozens of times, in and out through the leg or the arm—anything to get him out of those soiled black clothes and into some new ones.

Three and a half stars.