‘Citizen Jake’: messy but meaningful

Halfway through “Citizen Jake,” the much-awaited “comeback” film of director Mike de Leon, I was wondering where the film was headed. It had started off promisingly, with Jake Herrera introducing himself to the audience and setting out to prove how different he is from his senator father, his senior namesake, and his brother, a congressman.

Indeed, Jake’s animosity toward his father and brother is fairly explicit, as he tells us and as is obvious in his interactions with them. That is one flaw in the film that I find hard to understand: the many instances when Jake “tells” the story (at times even addressing the audience directly) rather than having the narrative and characters show us what’s what. For such an experienced and much-admired filmmaker to fall into the trap of spelling out everything, including the lead’s thoughts and emotions, is puzzling. Unless, De Leon has gotten fed up with the Filipino moviegoing public’s need to have a literal guide to the story and decided to give it to them.

Anyway, the buildup is compelling and indeed courageous. Jake is a journalist, who, having been fired from his post in a newspaper through the intercession of his father, transforms into an investigative and political blogger as well as a college instructor. It is obvious from the start where Jake’s politics lie. One of his closest friends had been an anti-Marcos activist who struggles to tell his story and the lessons history has taught him to his millennial students. Certainly, fueling Jake’s rage is the fact that his father had benefited immensely from his loyalty to the late dictator Marcos, and remains staunchly allied with Marcosian politicians. His brother is equally busy pushing his weight around and allegedly making his pile from ill-gotten political gains.

But it is when Jake gets involved in the investigation of the death of a female student, who had been close to Jake’s girlfriend, a fellow academic, that he finally moves on from opinion-making to confronting the evils of Philippine society head-on.

At this point in the movie, I chafed at the sudden veering of the film from a political treatise to a whodunit. But as the story winds down, the murder becomes the very illustration of the political rot that bedevils Jake, especially since his family is implicated in the events surrounding it.

A side story is Jake’s relationship with his mother, who abandoned her husband and young sons and has been missing for many years. Jake’s brother accuses him of having been the favored son in their mother’s eyes, but Jake is discombobulated by the discovery that his mother had lived for many years in the United States and had gotten married, all these without telling anyone except for the family caretaker. Though his mother has been dead for some time, Jake is haunted by memories of her, and by guilt at his having moved on without knowing the full
extent of her suffering or motives.

To De Leon’s credit, this messy kettle of motives, memory, and mystery comes to a boil. Things end up intertwined, people fail to live up to expectations or indeed fulfill the worst that is expected of them.

A late scandal is a Facebook post by De Leon expressing his disappointment in his lead star, TV journalist Atom Araullo, who first came to public attention when he became the spokesman for a leftist student group. Saying that Araullo’s journalism was “not the gritty kind but more of the celebrity-centered schlock that sometimes verges on entertainment, even show biz,” De Leon than speculates that “perhaps the journalist was really a closet movie star.”

Well, in “Citizen Jake” Araullo acquits himself as an actor, although as written his role really calls for quite a narrow range of emotion. Indeed, it is his background as a journalist that give his Jake Herrera heft and credibility.

Of the supporting cast, Cherie Gil as the archvillain procurer of young women and Teroy Guzman as Senator Herrera prove to be standouts. They achieve the near-impossible: Making us care for their despicable characters, pawns of the corrupt system that continues to engulf us all.