Juan José Campanella trusts actors to make complicated feelings easy to follow. We value his warmth and clear storytelling, though the scripts can grow sentimental and arrange events too conveniently to get the response he wants.
Fi1m perspective
Campanella is at his most persuasive when he lets a conversation run. In Son of the Bride (2001), his direction of the ensemble gives the longer dramatic scenes their force. We were moved by those scenes because he gives the actors time to make the family's feelings matter. We recommend his work for that patience with performers, while wishing he were sometimes less eager to tell us what to feel.
He worked in American film and television during the 1990s before returning to Argentine features. With El mismo amor, la misma lluvia (1999), writer Fernando Castets and actor Ricardo Darín established the central creative partnership of that work. Luna de Avellaneda (2004) took his concern with shared lives into a neighbourhood club facing social decline. In The Secret in Their Eyes (2009), memory and justice became the subjects of a story moving between two periods. His clear storytelling helps us follow people trying to resolve things that have stayed with them for years.
30 Rock (2006), for which he directed episodes, is a useful reminder that his work extends beyond Argentine drama. We rate the series highly, once its ensemble has settled, for its sharp writing and precisely judged foolishness. Tina Fey and Alec Baldwin make the workplace friction worth staying with. That fits the broader picture of a director at ease with actors, although we would not hand him sole credit for a comedy whose writing and performances are so central to its appeal.
The reservations matter when a script starts forcing events towards the desired emotional response. The Secret in Their Eyes occasionally falls back on contrivance and sentimental dialogue, weakening the feelings it wants to convey. His attention to performance remains a virtue, but it cannot make every unlikely development convincing. Animation in Metegol (Underdogs) (2013) extended his work towards family audiences, a sensible direction for a storyteller so concerned with reaching people. Start with Son of the Bride for the ensemble, and allow for a director who sometimes insists on an emotion the actors have already made clear.
Biography
Juan José Campanella is an Argentine film and television director, writer and producer. He was born on 19 July 1959 in Buenos Aires.
After studying at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, he directed episodes of American series including Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, House, 30 Rock (2006), Halt and Catch Fire and Colony. His feature films include The Secret in Their Eyes (2009), which won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, as well as El mismo amor, la misma lluvia (1999), El hijo de la novia (2001) and Luna de Avellaneda (2004).
