Oscar & I choose "Best Picture"

Most Oscar nominees arrive on Blu-Ray disk after the awards are announced, so I’m typically late to see them, but this is the rare year when I’m happy to second the Academy’s anointing of Best Picture.  Here I offer my belated commentary on the nominees. 

Spotlight (MC-93, FC #7, MC #2, NFX) definitely earned the award -- important in subject, well-judged and well-made across the board, combining truth and art to tell a real story, explaining while entertaining, documenting while fabulating.  Where to start?  I guess one has to start with director and co-writer Tom McCarthy, who must have set out to atone for his role as the bad Sun reporter in season five of The Wire, by showing exactly what a good reporter does.  He brings “truth of place” to the film; perhaps that’s the proper definition of a phrase I’ve never quite understood, mise-en-scène.  Next, the familiar and admirable cast – Michael Keaton, Mark Ruffalo, Rachel MacAdams, John Slattery, Stanley Tucci, and others – are all highly authentic in their roles.  As are the city of Boston, the newsroom of the Globe, the neighborhood juxtapositions and class distinctions.  Most authentic of all – the job of reporting, what it looks like, what it feels like, as an investigative team delves into the cover-up of pedophile priests by the Catholic Church.  The film portrays journalism as not glamorous, but driven by purpose.  And its purpose is the same as that of the characters of the film, to shine a spotlight on an abuse of power by a big institution preying on vulnerable individuals.

The Big Short (MC-81, FC #40, MC #18, NFX) is almost as good at revealing systemic institutional mendacity, but plays more as a revel than a cautionary drama.  Adam McKay’s film does a good job of explaining the financial crisis of 2007, but lays the glamour on thick, and humor as well, riffing freely on Michael Lewis’ nonfiction bestseller of the same name.  Need a definition of some arcane acronym? -- this film will stop and deliver it through a beautiful blond in a bubble bath sipping champagne, or a celebrity chef making a stew out of old fish, or a pop star at a roulette table.  Plenty of glamour and humor from the cast as well:  Christian Bale, Ryan Gosling, Brad Pitt, Steve Carell, and all the rest, with all but one of the leads a fictionalized composite of the originals in the book.  The movie is somehow anarchic and cogent at the same, eliciting laughs as well as righteous anger.  Reality is freely embellished, but never ignored.  Departures from fact are explicitly flagged by direct-to-the-camera commentary.  You get the feeling that this is how the housing and bank crash actually happened, just funnier.

Hmm, a story about a kidnapped teenager being kept in isolation for years, raped repeatedly and raising a child alone in small garden shed?  No wonder I did not gravitate to Emma Donoghue’s acclaimed novel,  Room (MC-86, FC #35, MC #11, NFX), but when her screenplay was directed by Lenny Abrahamson and embodied in the Oscar-winning performance of Brie Larson, whom I’ve admired since Short Term 12, I was drawn in, and mightily impressed by the result.  Excellent as Brie is, she is overshadowed by the central role of Jacob Tremblay as the five-year-old boy through whose eyes most of the film unfolds, and the love between them is the beating heart of this film.  I won’t say more about what happens, because if you don’t know the story already, I advise you to approach it with innocent eyes.  Moreover, I urge you to have confidence in the sincerity and sensitivity of all the people involved, and not avoid the story as unpleasant.  The last half-hour is a little too rushed to fully convince, as if trying to cram in too much of the book, but otherwise this is an exemplary adaptation of a difficult book, with dimensions far beyond its “woman and child in jeopardy” horror movie aspects.

Just as the first two films in this survey make a pair of sorts, so do the following two, about young women trying to find a place and an identity under trying circumstances.  Brie Larson has a harder passage through isolation than Saoirse Ronan does in Brooklyn (MC-87, FC #18, MC #5, NFX), but the latter is equally effective at making inner struggle visible.  She plays Eilis (whom I learned from the movie to pronounce Ale-ish, after reading Colm Toibin’s book in all ignorance), a girl who in 1952 reluctantly leaves her older sister and mother behind in Ireland to pursue an opportunity that opens up for her in America.  And she in turn gradually opens up to her titular new home, and to a devoted Italian boy who falls hard for her.  Then a family tragedy takes Eilis back to Ireland, where unexpected new possibilities arise for her, forcing her to choose between staying where she’s from or going back to Brooklyn.  Both the star and the film are lovely and emotionally expressive, and Nick Hornby’s screenplay also warms the novel up a bit.  Director John Crowley captures a fond but clear-eyed retrospect on the past, which pairs nicely with Carol, as stories about NYC department store shopgirls in the Fifties.  I was prepared to see through this film after reading a single dismissive review, but wound up watching it through tears and smiles.

I feel more ambivalence about Steven Spielberg than any other major director, but Bridge of Spies (MC-81, FC #20, MC #25, NFX) falls mostly on the positive side of the ledger.  Spielberg is unquestionably a consummate filmmaker, but to me seems to have a shallow, sentimental worldview, with more drive to entertain than to understand, less commitment to truth than to a good story.  He marshals vast talents to create a cinematic otherworld, then populates it with puppets, sometimes letting the strings show.  On the other hand, he frequently works with actors who have the stature to cut the strings and go their own way, notably in this case, Tom Hanks and Mark Rylance.  Spielberg effectively conjures the era when the Cold War was at its height, in telling the story behind the swap -- on a dark, frigid Berlin bridge in 1962 -- of convicted Russian spy Rudolf Abel for downed U2 pilot Francis Gary Powers (plus an American student caught on the wrong side of the Berlin Wall as it was being erected).  Told mainly from the point of view of the Hanks character, the straight-arrow lawyer picked to represent Abel, who comes to appreciate the stoic integrity portrayed by Rylance; he’s later recruited by the CIA to arrange the swap.  Spielberg’s movie magic works in making us a root for a Russian spy, as well as the lawyer’s devotion to due process, in a plot strand with plenty of contemporary relevance.  Where he fails is in the plastic replica of his own birth family, which he inserts into so many of his films, with Amy Ryan wasted as the lawyer’s wife, and mother of their three utterly generic children.  Still, in mood and setting this is a masterful film, marked by two superlative performances.  Stevie’s bag of cinematic tricks reliably conjures life out of projected images, and when my sentiment is in tune with his, preeminently with Lincoln, I am happy to believe in his act.

The Martian (MC-80, FC #44, MC #13, NFX) represents a lot of effort and expense without a lot of effect, aside from special effects.  My god, the stars! – though aside from Matt Damon, they don’t get much to do.  And the SFX! -- the surface of Mars looks terrific, space ships have never looked glossier or sexier, and the same goes for NASA facilities on earth.  Director Ridley Scott certainly knows his way around a blockbuster.  But to me this film smacks of propaganda for a space program to which I’ve never lent credence or support.  It’s fun to see a lot of familiar faces in small roles, but not a lot of characterization is offered, though there are plenty of jokes and amusingly appropriate disco music.  The scientific problem-solving -- amplified from Apollo 13 -- is the most appealing part of the movie, but the political and international setting is thin to the point of transparent.  I can’t deny this sci-fi is engaging to watch, infinitely more entertaining than Interstellar, but I can’t help wondering about the waste of resources involved, and the unexamined calculations of this movie.

The down-and-dirty problem-solving of Leonardo DiCaprio - as a mountain man of the Rockies in the 1820s - is the best part of The Revenant (MC-76, MC #22, NFX), besides the always-magical cinematography of Emmanuel Lubezki.  But director Alejandro G. Iñárritu has never engaged my interest, despite back-to-back Oscar wins.  In his films, there is spectacle aplenty, with bravura flourishes, but ultimately little substance, and shallow insight into character.  Despite the unfulfilled storytelling, the acting is good across the board.  DiCaprio might have deserved his Oscar, if only for what he had to suffer for his art, playing an indigenized guide to a fur-trapping company, who is mauled by a bear and left for dead.  Bad-ass Tom Hardy and carrot-topped Domhnall Gleeson seem to be everywhere recently, always delivering quality performances.  The special effects are wondrous, whether grizzly attack or bison stampede.  But the story is a simplistic revenge fantasy, less sophisticated than the similar but far-superior Jeremiah Johnson of 1972, or even the psychologically complex Hollywood Westerns of the 1950s.  The scenery is magnificent, but there’s a wised-up grubbiness to this tale of endurance, which keeps me on the outside, barely enduring the film.  Despite its basis in historical fact, the story seems made up, and the sense of period more fabricated than lived in.  Still, those vistas…

What can I say?  What causes some people to sit up and take notice -- makes me fall asleep.  And vice versa, no doubt.  I could barely keep from dozing off during the nonstop vehicular collisions and fireballs of Mad Max: Fury Road (MC-90, FC #3, MC #1, NFX).  I stayed awake long enough to take in some of the aspects that won this genre film an Oscar-nom as “Best Picture,” but remained quite immune to its charms.  I am happy to say that I have never seen anything at all of Mel Gibson as Mad Max, and wish I could say the same about this series re-boot, though I’ve come to expect interesting character work from Tom Hardy.  I derive some amusement from Charlize Theron’s perpetual and futile attempts to look ugly – here, cut off my arm (as well as my hair), bloody my face, drain my blood, beat the shit out of me!  I guess the trick is to make live action look like a comic book, and CGI effects look as real as real could be.  In the Metacritic compilation of Top 10 lists, more critics anointed this pile of something as best film of the year than the next three vote-getters combined.  Apparently, partisanship is as rife in film as in politics, and I’m clearly on the opposing side.