Best Pictures?

This year’s Oscar nominees for “Best Picture” are a varied and impressive group, and I’m seen more of them than usual before the awards ceremony, thanks to Images Cinema’s reliably fine programming and recently-enhanced projection capability.  So here I will run down four films I esteem, three for which I share little enthusiasm, and two I may see sometime but do not envision as candidates for my favor.

 

Nothing was likely to dislodge Lincoln as my favorite film of the year, which I reviewed here, but Silver Linings Playbook (2012, MC-81, NFX) came closer than expected.  I loved pretty much everything about David O. Russell's exceptionally intelligent, seriously screwball rom-com -- two main characters who dance their way into our hearts, supporting characters who create a community and complete a world, a witty script and flawless direction, tremendously evocative music and embedded movie memories, and above all, a deeply personal touch.  Bradley Cooper was so much better than I expected after limited familiarity (i.e. The Hangover), using his own Philadelphia Italian family experience to make a very plausible bipolar patient acting out his family’s dysfunction.  He’s just been released from the hospital to re-enter life, with the mission of winning back his estranged wife.  Jennifer Lawrence is equally troubled, and equally fine, as a young widow who enlists him as dance partner for a ballroom competition.  His parents are deliciously portrayed by the great Jacki Weaver (of Animal Kingdom) and Robert DeNiro, going far beyond his late-career roles as comically volatile dad, to find real feeling behind the manic front.  For him, as well as for David Russell, having dealt with children with similar mental disorders, the personal experience shows through.  (Russell’s own son has two hilarious walk-ons in the film.)  Funny and heartfelt, ashamed of neither feeling nor intellect, this movie delivers on all levels.  Clearly Russell as director is part of the dance, working closely with actors, cameraperson, and location to wring meanings out of passionate process.  Famously volatile himself, he has refined his working method into a calm determination to tell the story of characters who could go off at any minute.

 

Silver Linings Playbook led me back to a series of earlier film treatments of mental disorder.  Robert Rossen’s Lilith (1964) features Warren Beatty as a trainee attendant at a tony psychiatric residence (reminiscent of McLain’s), where Jean Seberg, an arty and lovely young patient, seduces him into madness.  Appropriately strange in approach, this film, like Lilith herself, tantalizes but does not satisfy.  I remember David & Lisa (1962) from high school, when I definitely identified with Keir Dullea as the semi-autistic young man reaching out of his isolation to the schizophrenic girl played by Janet Margolin.  Frank and Eleanor Perry’s adaptation of Theodore Rubin’s case study is not sophisticated, but remains a reasonably effective independent film.  In The Three Faces of Eve (1957), a young Joanne Woodward cashed in on the Oscar-bait role of a southern woman who shuttles between three distinct personalities.  She’s fine, and so is Lee J. Cobb as her therapist, but the earnestness of Nunnally Johnson’s film is betrayed by Alistair Cooke’s “it’s all true” narration.

 

Michael Haneke’s Amour (2012, MC-94, NFX) ranks close behind my two favorites.  Haneke always wants to take an unblinking look at the horrific, but here the violence is subtler though the torture is every bit as real.  An octogenarian lady has a blocked artery, then a stroke, then another, every faculty whittled away, as her husband cares for her, keeping a vow never to send her back to the hospital.  She dies, and then he dies, end of story.  A fine evening’s entertainment, you think?  Well, maybe not, but a transcendent cinematic experience nonetheless.  Start with the two leads, Emmanuele Riva and Jean-Louis Trintignant, profoundly moving not just in their fine-tuned enactment of old age but in our memories of their youth in movies of four or five decades ago.  Haneke’s direction is reminiscent of Ozu in making a whole world out of domestic interiors, in a film where nothing much happens but everything is connected, in ways that broach questions rather than offer answers.  It’s surprising that such a rigorous, confrontational filmmaker has achieved such broad general response, must be the most unusual Best Picture/Best Director nominations in Oscar history.  Increasingly Haneke is not just implacable, but astrigent, with enough authentic personal emotion to engage, if not to coddle, an audience.

 

I found a lot of things to like in the audience-coddling Argo (2012, MC-86, NFX), but not in a class with the three above. Ben Affleck’s witty well-made thriller, based on historical events, starts with even-handed and convincing depictions of events in Iran leading up to the seizure of the American embassy in 1979.  Then it brings in a crazy but true scheme to get six would-be hostages out of the Canadian embassy by masquerading them as a Canadian film crew scouting locations for a Star Wars ripoff, opening the way to a lot of Hollywood satire, focused on delightful performances by Alan Arkin and John Goodman as producers happy to turn make-believe into spycraft.  Releasing its own hold on reality, the film then builds suspense as the band of pretenders make their escape, through airport checkpoints to the over-the-top finale of jeeps full of militia chasing the plane down the tarmac as it takes off. Affleck himself is effective in an unshowy way as the CIA agent who comes up with the plan and then executes it, and his film is a crowd-pleasing entertainment without being stupid, which does historical service without falsifying too much, though it slights the actual Canadian contribution to the “exfiltration.” Apparently this is the odds-on favorite to get the nod from the Academy, which always loves a movie about movies, and there are certainly worse that have been deemed Best Picture, but there are definitely better choices this year.

I would have been glad to be more impressed with Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012, MC-86, NFX), which is certainly an admirably collaborative independent effort from young director Benh Zeitlin, marked by a charmingly fierce performance from tiny Quvenzhané Wallis.  But it follows too closely and not effectively enough The Whale Rider playbook for audience appeal, making a young girl the savior of an anthropologically-quirky and mythically-oriented culture.  There are moments of magic and deep feeling, but fewer of emotional truth or narrative plausibility.  The Bathtub is an isolated community on the Louisana coast, threatened with destruction by flood (as well as prehistoric beasts released from melting icecaps), where Hushpuppy lives with her father in a multiracial community that lives in poverty, but for celebration.  With some sparkling moments, and with its heart in the right place, this film fails in the end to convince or enlighten, beyond its modest appeal.  My reaction was more “Now wait a minute” than “Oh wow.”

 

Zero Dark Thirty (2012, MC-95, NFX) offers none of the things I go to movies for – characterization, understanding, emotional connection.  It’s all story and action, everything else you have to supply for yourself, and apparently most people do, or at least most critics, but not I.  I did not find the film thrilling or involving in any way, however competently made, and would have felt unclean if I did get into it.  Kathryn Bigelow’s film is a blank sheet on which to inscribe your own views on torture and “counterterrorism” in general.  I did not find my own views either challenged or confirmed.  Though I have been enchanted by Jessica Chastain in other roles, I saw nothing deep or moving here.  It may be arbitrary of me, but where in Lincoln I felt grounded by the sight of actors familiar from other contexts, here I was thrown out of the action by seeing Tony Soprano as Leon Panetta or Andy from Parks & Recreation as a member of Seal Team Six, not to mention Coach Taylor as a CIA station chief.  I have to say I went into this film with an open mind, despite being no big fan of The Hurt Locker, but found my mind closing as the film went on, winding up with a stony refusal to be moved or enlightened.  

 

Speaking of feeling unclean, I was stunned at the audience’s vocal approval of Django Unchained (2012, MC-81, NFX), and also the respectful commentary on the film’s depiction of Southern slavery by two Williams professors at the Images Cinema screening I attended.  To me this was a historical film that had no interest in history but only in movies, and mostly movies I have not seen or do not like.  As someone utterly immune to the appeal of Quentin Tarantino, Django was not for me.  I could see some good things in the film, but my visceral rejection of the Tarantino aesthetic of cartoonish, self-referential violence prevented me from enjoying any of it.  Christoph Waltz and Leonardo di Caprio deliver engaging performances, as the good-natured bounty hunter and the flamboyantly evil slaveholder respectively, but Jamie Foxx and Samuel L. Jackson sound only one note each, as the avenging slave seeking to liberate his wife and the insidious Uncle Tom who surreptitiously runs the plantation.  And the lovely Kerry Washington is utterly wasted as the abused wife.  This film lost me with its opening caption setting the action in 1858, “two years before the Civil War,” and blasted away any conceivable interest with its concluding bloodbath.  Sure there were a few good jokes and some pretty pictures in this mash-up of spaghetti Western and blaxploitation, but nothing to compensate for stomach-turning revulsion.

 

I’ll probably take a look at the other two Best Picture nominees, but can’t imagine either will appeal to me much, neither the film adaptation of the long-running musical, Les Misérables (MC-63), nor the CGI animal fable of Life of Pi (MC-79).  I wrote most of this omnibus review before the Academy Award winners were announced, but the surprising choice of Ang Lee as Best Director (along with the equally surprising omission of Ben Affleck for the otherwise-honored Argo) suggests there might be more to Life of Pi than I expect..  I’ll be back soon with further comment on that and other films of the past year that I like better or worse.