Evita isn't able to involve us enough to make us cry. We don't make that kind of emotional investment. Evita passes by as distanced from us as a New Year's Day parade. Its characters wave to us from the furiously decorated floats between the marching masses of extras with their placards bearing Evita's picture. The film of the Andrew Lloyd Webber-Tim Rice theatrical piece never becomes a movie.
Film is intimate.
Director Alan Parker either just doesn't seem interested in intimacy or, more likely, he saw this piece as so inherently theatrical that movie intimacy was impossible. He substituted immensity as a compensating value. Antonio Banderas plays the character called Che, who functions in the piece as a one-man chorus of skeptics. He is always present at the periphery, as a waiter, a janitor or a marcher, to sing to the audience his perspective that Eva is substantially less saintly than her admirers perceive her. Almost everything else about the film is utterly literal.