Awards-season films

As I begin this round-up, just before the Oscar ceremony, I’ve seen only two of the nine Best Picture nominees, but this is the season when all the award candidates come to DVD in a rush, so I’ll be getting a steady diet, and updating this survey as they and other award-worthy films come to home video.

I’m going to start with the missing “tenth nominee,” namely The Florida Project (MC-92, NFX), which will certainly make my list.  Its only Oscar nom was for Willem Dafoe as Best Supporting Actor, and his performance was definitely an embellishment, but Sean Baker’s film has a lot more going on – its neophyte actors, its setting, its themes, and the humor and heart of its storytelling.   Foremost is the preternaturally poised and charming Brooklynn Prince, as the 7-year-old Moonee, who lives with her young single mother (Bria Vinaite) in the shockingly-mauve Magic Castle motel (where Dafoe is the sympathetic but overburdened caretaker) on an Orlando strip just outside Disney World, along with other “hidden homeless” parents and children.  It is literally a hand-to-mouth existence, but it is also a “magic kingdom” to Moonee and her friends, as they free-range over a tacky but kid-friendly environment, delineating both the deprivation and the delight of their enchanted existence.

There must have been something in the air, or the water, or the White House, for 2017 to welcome several films about a beleaguered nation in direst peril.  Two were nominated for Best Picture, but neither was my personal favorite on the subject of Dunkirk.  Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk (MC-94, NFX) was a technical marvel (a good deal of which I missed by watching at home) with visual bravura, complex storytelling, and excellent actors, but did not in the end really satisfy me either as history or drama, more like an action flick with historical gloss.  I readily acknowledge it might have been different as a more immersive experience.

Somewhat better at the history and drama, Joe Wright’s Darkest Hour (MC-75, NFX) stands or falls on Gary Oldman’s impersonation of Winston Churchill, who’s as perpetually present here as he is absent from Dunkirk.  Oldman does breathe some new life into the figurehead (as did John Lithgow in The Crown), but it still amounts to hero worship, and special pleading.  Ben Mendelsohn is good in the uncharacteristic role of King George, as are Kristen Scott Thomas as Clemmie and Lily James as the lovely typist who is our window into war room.  The film is not especially convincing or revelatory, but it is atmospheric, and suitably dark.

The Dunkirk movie I liked best was Their Finest (MC-76, NFX), which puts a frame on the event that is more humorous than super-serious, and leaks some of the hot air out of the other two.  Directed by Lone Scherfig, with an engaging lead in Gemma Arterton, and sterling support from the rest of the cast, the film follows an ambitious young woman into the film business, and into the making of a propaganda film about the Little Ships and Operation Dynamo, to serve the same purpose as Mrs. Miniver, to engage American popular support for Britain’s war effort.  After the elaborate CGI effects of Nolan and Wright, it’s a hoot to see how the movies at the time simulated the masses of men waiting on the beach at Dunkirk, by filming through a painted glass panel.  The rest of the film has a similar demystifying and humanizing effect, as a wartime rom-com.

Earlier in the year, I saw two films nominated for Best Original Screenplay.  The Oscar winner was Jordan Peele for Get Out (MC-84, NFX), though he was denied for Best Picture and Best Director, as was Daniel Kaluuya for Best Actor.  This is another film that strikes me as a good-but-not-great extended episode of Black Mirror, which is indeed where I first took note of Kaluuya.  The premise is certainly provocative, and I can see that genre trappings might have helped sell a thoughtful perspective on racism, and bring it to a wider audience.  I get the horror-show metaphor for slavery by other means, but there came a point when I tuned out on the twists of the plot.  On second viewing, I was more impressed with the witty double-meaning dialogue of the beginning, but just as put off by the blood-splattered zombie ending (though I can imagine the cheers going up among black audiences). 

Won’t have to look again at The Big Sick (MC-86, NFX), an early-year favorite that received token recognition with a screenplay nom.  This is a film that delivers all its pleasures on first viewing, and they are substantial, beginning with the script by Kumail Nanjani and Emily Gordon, firmly grounded in the truth of their actual history together.  Kumail has already endeared himself on Silicon Valley, and he is paired with the equally endearing Zoe Kazan.  Trouble is, his parents are trying to arrange his marriage to a nice Pakistani girl.  “Emily” gets sick bigly, and Kumail must interact with her parents in hospital waiting rooms.  They are Holly Hunter and Ray Romano, so the riffs are pretty funny as well as wryly truthful, as is the whole film under the direction of Michael Showalter. 

I guess I must take back all the snarky things I’ve said about Greta Gerwig.  I’ve generally found her to be an oppressively free spirit, but in the wake of Lady Bird (MC-94, NFX), her first solo effort behind the camera, I have to acknowledge her artistry.  Clearly autobiographical in spirit, if not in fact, it follows the passionate and troublesome senior year of a Catholic high school girl in Sacramento, yearning to go to New York for college, despite her family’s sketchy finances.  One of the most amazing aspects of Saoirse Ronan’s pitch perfect performance (BTW, have you ever heard her natural Irish accent?) is coming across as more Greta than Greta, without slavish imitation.  Laurie Metcalf has been justly celebrated for her role as Christine’s (aka Lady Bird’s) mother, a psych nurse working double shifts to keep the family afloat, while Tracy Letts, in a gentler role than usual, is the sympathetic but superannuated dad.  Swift, funny, clear-eyed but affectionate, well-judged in every scene, Ms. Gerwig’s Oscar-nominated directorial debut certainly ranks among the best films of the year.  How could I not love a film whose central moment appropriates one of my own key insights (or lifts it from the same place I did, wherever that was, as a fellow English/Philosophy major) – that love and attention are the same thing?

Here’s a brief detour to a film that is not in any awards discussion, but may give you a glimpse of the next Greta Gerwig, if you’re in the mood for an accessible, inoffensive Millennial rom-com.  Noël Wells writes, directs, and stars in the transparently autobiographical Mr. Roosevelt (MC-73, NFX).  She’s trying to make it as a comedian in LA, when she hears from her ex-boyfriend back in Austin that her cat is dying.  Impulsively, she flies back and finds out that not only has her cat died, but another woman has moved in with her ex.  Very much part of the Austin milieu, this is a witty and promising calling card for Ms. Wells (late of SNL and Master of None).

I’m going to enter a minority report on Call Me by Your Name (MC-93, NFX).  Luca Guadagnino’s film did not turn me on, as it did so many others.  I did not fall in love with either precocious teen Timothée Chalamet or grad student Armie Hammer, or the sensuality of a ripe Italian summer.  Nor with the former’s father and latter’s employer, archaeologist Michael Stuhlbarg (though Amira Casar is nice as the boy’s mother).  Perhaps I am a dried up old man, but I did not see this film as the critical consensus did.  I saw vacancy where many were filled with emotion.  I found the whole production slick and overblown.  Not without merit, but the film did not call my name.

Another minority report:  I fervently disliked Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (MC-88, NFX), by writer-director Martin McDonagh.  I’ve never seen so many good actors so utterly wasted; I’m not even going to list them, to protect the innocent.  Somehow Frances McDormand and Sam Rockwell won Oscars for this mess, and at least in her case, an argument could be made for her performance.  As in Olive Kittredge, she makes a sympathetic character out of an angry, strong, and difficult woman, but the material never rises to anywhere near her level.  To call the tone of the film uneven does not begin to address its lack of plausibility or coherence.  Is it an unfunny comedy, an unmoving tragedy, or a limp thriller?  I didn’t believe or care about a minute of it.  Watch if you must, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.

With a predilection for documentary realism, I’m not generally a fan of movies dependent on CGI, though sometimes I simply have to acknowledge the state of the art.  I, Tonya (MC-77, NFX) was most acclaimed, and justly so, for the performances of Margo Robbie as Tonya Harding, and Allison Janney, cannily cast against type as her odious mother, deliciously evil.  Director Clark Gillespie sets a breakneck pace that is impossible to sustain throughout, even when driven by well-chosen pop songs of the era, but the film is grounded in a mostly truthful script, about the self-described redneck girl determined to make it big in the prissy, princessy world of figure skating.  Especially after watching the recent winter Olympics, it was fun to revisit early ’90s competitions, and I was particularly impressed (as with the tennis in Battle of the Sexes) at the way superhero and fantasy technology has been adapted into sports movies, for more seamless verisimilitude than heretofore.  I’m sure Margot Robbie and Emma Stone are fine athletes who worked themselves into shape, but CGI turns them into convincing professionals.  Fast, funny, factual, and even insightful, I judge this film to be an 8.1.

I approached the anointed “Best Picture” with mixed feelings.  Neither creature features nor Latin American “magic realism” have ever been my thing.  But I love Sally Hawkins, and I definitely appreciated Pan’s Labyrinth, so I had an open mind toward Guillermo de Toro’s latest, The Shape of Water (MC-87, NFX).  The film also features many familiar faces (mostly welcome):  Richard Jenkins, Michael Stuhlbarg, Octavia Spencer, and Michael Shannon (though is he ever going to be cast against type, as a good guy?).  The unfamiliar face is the most striking, the Amazonian fish-god played by Doug Jones in a dazzling meld of make-up and CGI effects.  Our girl Sally, a mute cleaning woman in a nefarious military research facility where the creature is alternately studied and tortured, falls in love with the figure in the water.  The affair is worked out with some plausibility, at least emotionally, but I myself did not fall in love with this “beauty and the beast” fairy tale, even with its cinephiliac gloss.  So while I don’t call bullshit on the Oscar win, this film was not the best in my book.

Phantom Thread (MC-90, NFX) is another film for which I cannot work up the expected enthusiasm.  In my view, filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson looks magisterial but misguided.  He is a master of style(s), but his understanding of story and character is not congruent with mine.  I am left dazzled but befuddled.  It’s no surprise that my favorite of his films, Inherent Vice, tells someone else’s story.  In fact, he seems much like the character played here (impressively but opaquely) by Daniel Day-Lewis, a British fashion designer in the 1950s.  Both of them piece together designs that are striking and impressive, but outlandish and inhuman.  Lesley Manville is cut from the same cloth, as the sister who is the no-nonsense business and personal manager of the sensitive, odd artist.  Vicky Krieps is the waitress whom our Pygmalion plucks from obscurity to be the next in his succession of model-muses.  She is not a person to be dislodged, however, and makes unprecedented demands on the fragile genius.  Is this a love story, or a tale of mutual mania?  Don’t ask me. 

Be forewarned that I have an inherent bias toward films in which we see a linotypist setting copy – shades of my father! – after the reporters have done their work, and before the pressmen and mailers can do theirs.  Roll the presses, and you’ve won my attention and affection.  So it’s no surprise that I loved The Post (MC-83, NFX), like Spotlight and so many other newspaper films, even though I can go either way with Steven Spielberg films.  A few of his signature scenes are a touch much here, but on the whole he’s shooting a good script with masterful ease.  The astounding cast manages to match very familiar actors to historical characters in a way that offers a double layer of recognition.  Starting of course with Meryl Streep as Kay Graham and Tom Hanks as Ben Bradlee, but the rest of the large cast comprises a who’s who of quality cable tv stars, too many to mention here, but you’re sure to glimpse some of your favorites.  Many strands are woven through the story of the Washington Post and the Pentagon Papers, rapidly braided with plenty of historical context and highly-pointed contemporary relevance, about government lies and freedom of the press.  So of the Oscar nominees, I would have voted for The Post as Best Picture, while citing Lady Bird as Most Perfect Picture.

In the category of Best Documentary Feature, the Oscar-winner Icarus (MC-68, NFX) was a fascinating mess – too long and too scattershot – but timely and suggestive.  It starts as filmmaker Bryan Fogel takes PEDs to improve his performance as an amateur long-distance cyclist, and to unmask the failure of testing to reveal cheating.  He enlists as his guru the head of the Russian anti-doping lab, and the film takes an abrupt turn when that flamboyant character becomes central to the state-sponsored doping scandal that got Putin & Co. banned from the Olympics.  So what starts as a narcissistic project turns into a very telling inquiry into how Putin and his cronies operate, borrowing in style from the Citizenfour playbook.

A far better film, but also timely and suggestive, was Steve James’ Abacus: Small Enough to Jail (MC-73, NFX, PBS).  Now here’s an accomplished documentarian (Hoop Dreams, The Interrupters), with an intimate approach that opens out into a wealth of important and overlapping themes.  Abacus is a bank in NYC’s Chinatown, which was the only one prosecuted for the mortgage meltdown of a decade ago.  All the big banks paid huge fines without ever admitting guilt and never going to trial, but Abacus is taken to court in what amounts to a show trial.  On top of a conviction of their own innocence, the Chinese family had three daughters who were lawyers and could mount a multiyear defense amounting to millions of dollars.  The personalities of the patriarch and founder of the bank, along with his wife and daughters, and the community of Chinatown, become as important to this multidimensional film as the outcome of the case, which is suspenseful and eye-opening throughout.

Whether or not you’re already a fan of Agnès Varda’s The Gleaners & I and The Beaches of Agnès, or all the other films of her 60-year career, you ought to see Faces Places (MC-95, NFX), a thoroughly charming and characteristic collaboration between the 89-year old doyenne of the New Wave and a young French street-artist named JR.  He has a photo booth van in which they drive around to villages (as in the French title, Visages Villages), and invite people they meet into the booth, which immediately produces large-scale portraits.  When JR finds a surface he likes – abandoned brick house fronts, sides of barns, water towers, etc. etc. – he and his crew paste up huge images of local appeal.  Then Agnès films the reactions of the locals, as she and JR banter along.  The result is a miracle of delight and substance, a roadtrip into the heart and soul of France.

Netflix gives wide distribution to Oscar-nominated documentaries, not just streaming but actually producing them.  The unjust deaths of black men have been well documented over the years, but Strong Island (MC-86, NFX) is a very strong and personal addition to the genre, with much to make it more than a story you’ve heard before.  (Though you have heard it before, with distressing regularity.)  Yance Ford’s brother was murdered twenty-some years ago on Long Island, in a case where he was transformed from victim to suspect, and the white triggerman never charged.  Ford dives deep into the case, and into the legacy of pain and disbelief in his family, as well as revealing his own transgender experience.  It’s an intimate and unflinching self-portrait of a family under the greatest duress.

The final nominee is also on Netflix, and probably a worthy exposé, but I’m sorry, I couldn’t get more than a few minutes into Last Men in Aleppo (MC-80, NFX).  The sight of a crying infant being unburied from the rubble of a bombed building was too much for me.  The humanitarian crisis of Syria and the wider Middle East is beyond my ability to comprehend or to bear.

So my personal fifth nominee would be Jane (MC-87, NFX).  Apparently as plain and simple as its title, Brett Morgen’s film relies on rediscovered footage of Jane Goodall as a twenty-something English rose, lovingly shot by her husband-to-be, living alone amidst a community of chimpanzees in the depths of Africa.  You can readily see why she became an international media sensation – lovely, captivating, brave and determined.  And with latter day interviews, and some filling in of the intervening years, you can see how Ms. Goodall has put her celebrity to good use, and the wisdom she has distilled from her experiences.  It’s interesting to compare personalities and fates between her and Dian Fossey (about whom NatGeo also did a doc series).  This film is as artful as it seems plain and simple.  See for yourself.

While on the subject of documentaries worth seeing on Netflix, let me highlight two that merit their high MC ratings.  Restless Creature: Wendy Whelan (MC-87, NFX) follows the prima ballerina from twenty years of headlining for the New York City Ballet, through a late-career injury and extensive rehabilitation, to the reinvention of herself as a dancer – a beautiful, brutal, and inspiring journey.

Also beautiful and brutal, but rather dispiriting, is Chasing Coral (MC-86, NFX), which documents the widespread phenomenon of coral bleaching, caused by rising ocean temperatures.  The viewer is captivated by the passion of the coral scientists and researchers who set out to capture the process, the life and beauty it destroys, in time-lapse underwater photography.  It’s a quest, but when the results are shown to a conference on the subject (and to us), all faces take on a funereal aspect, literally watching an ecosystem die from climate change.  If facts don’t convince you, feelings might.

This year’s slate for Best Animated Feature was not as strong as last year’s, with two nominees I have no intention of seeing.  The winner was Coco (MC-81, NFX).  Pixar’s film is not on the level of Up or Inside Out, let alone Toy Story or the studio’s other early hits, but still was appealing.  It followed more in the vein of its owner Disney with Moana, trying to be authentically multicultural, in this case by exploring the mythology of Mexico’s Day of the Dead.  Full to the brim with humor, color, music, and family feeling, Coco checks all the feel-good boxes in a story about the afterlife, in which half the characters are skeletons.  The protagonist is a plucky 12-year-old boy who defies his shoemaking family’s ban on music, in force since the long-ago disappearance of his guitar-playing great-great-grandfather.  Coco was his little girl at the time, but now she is the venerable matriarch of the clan.  Checking out how successful the film was, I realized that of the fifty top-grossing films of the year, Coco was the only one I’ve seen, aside from Wonder Woman and Dunkirk.  Keep that in mind when evaluating my movie recommendations.

The Breadwinner (MC-76, NFX) approaches the gravity of Takahata’s classic Grave of the Fireflies, in portraying the survival (or not) of children in the direst of situations, in this case a mother and two daughters who have to navigate a narrow path to get food on the table in Kabul, after the Taliban have thrown the father in jail for no reason.  I have to agree with the IndieWire reviewer that Nora Twomey’s film “cements Ireland’s Cartoon Saloon as an animation powerhouse worth mentioning alongside the likes of Pixar, Laika, and the great Studio Ghibli.”  (He forgot Aardman.)  Like the The Secret of Kells and Song of the Sea, this film does drag a bit at times, but the simple graphic style is versatile and surprisingly expressive, like an excellent children’s picture book, and the story is worthily multicultural, giving a picture of Afghanistan from the perspective of its own history, even though the film is essentially a Western production (and decidedly PG-13).

I would have enjoyed presenting Loving Vincent (MC-62, NFX) at the Clark.  I’m sure art historians might quibble with the investigation of Van Gogh’s last days in this film by Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman, and painting aesthetes might sniff at jejune imitations of his style, but I still found the film remarkable in its unprecedented animation by thousands upon thousands of oil paintings.  The technique is something like rotoscoping, in that a live-action original is being rather woozily animated, but here it is not a digital process.  It’s created from a succession of painted frames based on Van Gogh’s iconic images, painstakingly executed by more than a hundred artists, in slightly varying styles, generating a pictorial kaleidoscope and an indelible homage to the beloved artist.  (The DVD includes a most interesting “making-of” extra.)

[I’ll be back to catch up with the nominees for Best Foreign Film, and other loose ends.]