Oscar contenders

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been catching up with all the Academy Award nominees for Best Picture, and while none would be my pick over The Social Network or Winter’s Bone, most were worthy in their own right (and better than The Kids Are All Right in my book). 

My friend suffers from a family affliction, a half-ironic obsession with the Royal Family, so she was eager to see The King’s Speech  (2010, MC-88) as soon as it came out, even before its large haul of Oscar nominations.  And why not?  With Colin Firth as Bertie, destined to be George VI, and Helena Bonham Carter as the future Queen Mother, and Geoffrey Rush as the idiosyncratic speech therapist who helped the king-to-be to assume his duties as head of state, all directed by Tom Hooper, whom I’d noted for last year’s Damn United – what could go wrong?   Not much did, and I liked the film more and more as it went on, as it got past the jokey byplay featured in previews, and really deepened into a study of an unlikely friendship.  I wasn’t blown away, but was thoroughly entertained, and as moved as an anarchist can be by the personal travails of royalty.  I liked the little girl who played Elizabeth too, and thought about her growing up to become Helen Mirren in The Queen.

I’m not sure what surprised me more about True Grit (2010, MC-80) – how purely entertaining this old-fashioned Western proved to be, or how little of the Coen brothers’ quirky personalities came through?  Nonetheless it was immaculately made, with superb performances from Jeff Bridges as Rooster Cogburn, Matt Damon as “LeBeef”, and Hailee Steinfeld as Mattie, the stalwart young girl who recruits the other two to track down her father’s killer.  But the true star of the film was the dialogue lifted directly from the Charles Portis novel, in an archaic diction that achieved the same unlikely self-contained believability that the harsher dialect of Deadwood did.  (I caught up with the John Wayne version on AMC, and while the Duke had his iconic portrait readymade, plastic smoothie Glenn Campbell and the Disneyesque Kim Darby are not a patch on the remake’s other pair.  How did the Coens follow the original so closely and yet make it so much hipper?) 

An even bigger surprise was Toy Story 3 (2010, MC-92), which more than overcomes the stigma of a sequel.  Like Up, this Pixar animation is fit to play with the big boys, and definitely deserves consideration as one of the best films of the year.  Andy is going away to college, and has to decide what to do with Woody, Buzz, and the rest of his long-disused toys.  The film is both hilarious and effectively tearjerking, as the toys experience a variety of possible fates -- including a garbage truck and a preschool that is not the utopia it seems at first glance -- before finding a safe haven.  The standout among the new characters is a Ken doll, who has as much surprising personality as the dog in Up, though a sinister huggy bear and a discarded baby doll also make a deep impression.  Despite being a cartoon and a sequel, this is certainly among the most powerful cinematic experiences of the year.  It made me go back and check out Toy Story 2, which I had skipped in a prejudice against films with a number at the end of the title, and found it almost equally charming and eye-popping.

Last and certainly least of Best Picture nominees (aside from Inception) is Black Swan (2010, MC-79).  Darren Aronofsky’s intense direction kept me involved till the Grand Guignol turned silly, and Natalie Portman’s performance, both as ballet dancer and crazy person, was better than I expected, but in the end I found this an empty-headed horror film, relying on shrieking chords and shock cuts instead of meaningful characterizations.  A puppet show rather than a genuine backstage drama, this film’s pretension to follow in the steps of The Red Shoes or All About Eve is totally overblown, a traducing of cinema history.

And the final nominees are...

I dutifully took in two final multiple-Oscar nominees in a self-made double feature at Beacon Cinema, both highly competent translations to the big screen of interesting real-life stories, both including in the final credits footage of the real characters behind the stories, but neither of which is likely to make my Best of 2010 list. 

You have give credit to an exuberant director like Danny Boyle for taking on the challenge of such a constricted subject as 127 Hours (MC-82).  The title refers to the time Aron Ralston spent alone in a canyon crevice with his arm caught under a huge boulder, until he did what he had to do to escape with his life.  The first major hurdle is to find an actor with whom we would want to spend extended time up-close and very personal, and one could hardly do better than James Franco.  As it happened, I went to this film immediately after catching a few minutes of him as dropout Daniel in the short-lived but immortal tv-series Freaks & Geeks – that crooked smile charming even in 1999 as a high school student (and now a graduate student at Yale and RISD, not to mention co-host of this year’s Oscar ceremony).  Boyle gets things going with a burst of kinetic exhilaration, multiple images to a pounding beat, as Aron escapes the big city on a Friday night and heads for the canyon wilderness of Utah, for a weekend of biking and hiking, and penetrating the landscape.  Until he falls down the rabbit hole.  Boyle has the opportunity to interject hallucinatory imagery, but from then on, it’s just us and Mr. Franco in very close quarters.  There’s some gore, of course, more horrific than a horror picture, but the essence of this film is still its intimacy and its ratiocination, as Aron confronts his dilemma with the limited tools at hand.

Then I watched a few minutes of the Super Bowl on the big screen -- the Beacon showing it for free -- and went back to another screening room to watch The Fighter (MC-79).  The boxing film is firmly delineated as a genre, a tight box all its own, and it’s surprising to see a director as wacked out as David O. Russell work within the small lighted ring, so indelibly inscribed by a whole range of films, out of which Raging Bull stands as the peak.  Of course, he’s got Christian Bale to go all crackhead crazy for him, as the coulda-been-a-contender, who punched his one-way ticket to palookaville with drugs, but now fitfully tries to guide his younger half-brother to the success he never reached.  Mark Wahlberg effectively plays Micky Ward, and this project is his homage to a hometown hero, the Pride of Lowell.  Unfamiliar with boxing, I wouldn’t know that for three straight years after 2000, Ward’s bouts were hailed as the fight of the year, but this film deals with the decade before, when the craziness of his family – not just his brother, but his manager mother, the formidable Melissa Leo, and a Greek chorus of seven furious sisters – drove him out of the game.  It takes the equally tough and adorably foul-mouthed barmaid Amy Adams to return him to his dream.  All involved acquit themselves well, but in the end cannot escape the boxing movie formula, however true to life it may be.  While I wouldn’t say that The Town was a better film, Affleck’s Charlestown exceeded my expectations by about as much as Wahlberg’s Lowell fell short of what I expect from director Russell, a personal favorite.

Two new documentaries

The Tillman Story.  (2010, MC-86)  The title of Amir Bar-Lev’s accomplished documentary (following My Kid Could Paint That) refers to at least three different stories:  Pat Tillman’s personal story, the story the military made up for propaganda purposes, and the story of the Tillman family’s attempt to get at the truth, and restore the integrity of their son’s life and purpose.  One strength of this film is that it doesn’t force an argument at you, but offers a many-sided portrait that holds together more and more as you think about it.  It would be easy to solicit rage around this subject, and maybe rage is an appropriate object, but even-handed contemplation offers more manifold truth.  Pat Tillman became, unwillingly, a patriotic icon when he turned his back on a multimillion-dollar NFL contract to enlist in the Army Rangers after 9/11.  When the army literally killed him in Afghanistan, they had to make up a story of an All-American hero’s death -- as always in war, “truth is the first casualty.”  His family – mother, father, two brothers, wife – insist upon the real story of his death, as forthright and thoughtful as he had been in life.  We follow as these strands spool out and interweave, free to take sides but not forced to do so.  The final story takes shape in our minds after viewing.  Call it “fratricide” or “friendly fire,” this is a tale with powerful overtones of tragic irony. 

Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer.  (2010, MC-68)  Alex Gibney is among the best of polemical documentarians working today, but his latest does not come up to the standard of Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room; Taxi to the Dark Side; or even Casino Jack and the United States of Money, which he must have been working on at the same time as this film, which shares themes of big money and the corruption of politics.  Not that Spitzer isn’t a character of some interest, but this film is too long and diffuse, goes off in too many directions, suggesting but not proving a number of conspiratorial connections.  No doubt Spitzer made some powerful enemies, and Hank Greenburg of AIG and others parade their satisfaction at his downfall on screen.  The politicization of the Justice Department in the Bush years is well known, but if the whole case amounted to a sting, and a hit job, well then, Spitzer himself was no innocent party.  He manfully if not candidly admits to as much in interview, while also elevating himself with talk of Greek myth – hubris, Icarus, all that.  One might also suggest that there was some ironic, if not causal, connection between Spitzer’s takedown and the financial meltdown of 2008.  But then you add an inside look at the world of high-end escort services, introducing an intriguing array of characters, including one who didn’t want to appear in person so her words are replicated by an actress, and you’ve got a serious distraction.  Overall, Gibney has developed a jazzed-up, argumentative documentary style as identifiable and influential as Ken Burns in his sedate PBS manner, but this film does not get deep enough into the character of Spitzer to invest him with the weight assigned to him. 

Catfish and other fry

Your reaction to a documentary has a lot to do with the expectation of truth that you bring to it.  For me that yielded a response to Catfish (2010, MC-65) that was just the opposite of my reaction to The Cove, each documentary arriving with some question in the air about its relation between fact and artifice.  With The Cove, that skepticism was amply confirmed by the “mission impossible” vibe, so I wound up thinking the whole thing was a hoax, which maybe it wasn’t.  With Catfish, however, the approach was so modest and D-I-Y, that I granted some trust to its reality, and I did not find myself disappointed.  Perhaps some reviewers were put off by the way the film was being pitched, as a real-life thriller, and refused to be had.  But I found the whole operation sincere, if conscious of effect and aimed to a purpose.  But that purpose was not to unmask a Web imposter, but to get to the real person under the mask, and in the process make multiple points about social media, NYC vs. the Heartland, as well as art in the construction of identity and personality.  Ariel Schulman, with Henry Joost, set out to make a film about his brother Nev’s internet romance with not just a young woman but her whole family out in Upper Michigan, and his eventual quest to meet them in person.  To my mind, the DVD extra with the three of them sitting together and answering questions about the film more than confirms their genuine geniality, and the essential honesty and good will of the project.  See for yourself, but for me this is the real deal.

Not so real but fun just the same was I Love You, Man (2009, MC-70), which one reviewer accurately described as the best Judd Apatow film that Judd Apatow had nothing to do with.  Apatow regulars Paul Rudd and Jason Segel are, however, at the heart of this bromance, and writer-director John Hamburg does mix in a good measure of psychological truth along with the gross-out humor, so this tickles the funny bone without insulting the brain.

In an odd coupling, even odder than Paul and Jason, I have to mention another film about the bond between men.  Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1900 (Novocento) (1976) follows the lives of two boys born on the same day in 1900, who grow up to be Robert DeNiro as the padrone, and Gerard Depardieu as the peasant communist, whose lifelong friendship and antagonism comes to a head on Liberation Day in 1945, with the overthrow of evil Fascist Donald Sutherland, whose leering performance typifies this film’s cartoonish approach to the politics of the first half of the 20^th century.  Even after I decided against showing this film in a peasant-themed series I am doing at the Clark next summer, as tie-in to a Pissarro exhibition, I persisted through its original 5 ½ hour length, for the operatic elements that overcame a lot of awkwardness.  I watched it dubbed in English to get the real voice of DeNiro and the other American actors, but perhaps the Italian would have seemed less stilted.  Burt Lancaster wanders in from Visconti’s Leopard, along with many other borrowings from that master, but this film’s ambition of depicting brotherhood with historical sweep would eventually be achieved much more fully in a later Italian epic, The Best of Youth.