Oscar bait

Though different from all others, this is traditionally the season where Oscar contenders for “Best Picture” reach the screen, but this year, when the watchword is “unprecedented,” many are reaching the home screen rather than theaters, so I will be able to survey the candidates that much sooner.  Of those I’ve seen and reviewed already, I would include The Trial of the Chicago 7 on my nominating list, but probably not Da 5 Bloods (which is not even the best Spike Lee film of the year).  The film I am most eager to see and review is Nomadland, but until then I will add candidates to this post as I see them.  (I will do another post about other critical favorites, most of which are Oscar longshots, but will certainly be included on my best of the year list, such as the previously-reviewed First Cow and Never Rarely Sometimes Always.)
 
There’s no subject that Hollywood loves more than itself, so Mank (MC-79, NFX) is one of the frontrunners for the “Best Picture” Oscar.  And since that subject interests me, I enjoyed David Fincher’s well-made representation of Golden Age Hollywood, even while I wondered what’s in it for those without a similar obsession.  I also give Fincher points for his homage to his long-deceased father through filming the elder’s screenplay, and credit his portrayal of Herman Mankiewicz as the epitome of screenwriters who migrated from New York to Hollywood and created the talkies.  The inside-baseball is tasty, but it certainly helps to know a lot about the players, the game, and its history.  Many familiar characters parade across the screen, but few stand out on their own, without foreknowledge of the historical figures.  So this is a movie about the writing of Citizen Kane, with Kane-like flashbacks that untangle the film’s connections to Hearst and Mayer and Thalberg.  The emphasis on Upton Sinclair’s candidacy for CA governor on a socialist platform in 1934, and its undermining by a media campaign of disinformation and innuendo, gives the film a contemporary resonance.  Gary Oldman is persuasive as Mank, and so is the rest of the cast.  Recasting the black & white visual style of Kane and other Forties classics into widescreen HD video is a neat trick, but again most appealing to connoisseurs.  The character of Mank lives up to his reputation as the wittiest man in Hollywood, but we don’t get deep into his demons, or his relationships, except with Hearst consort Marion Davies (Amanda Seyfried), whom he betrays with his portrayal of Kane’s second wife.  I can’t imagine this film making much sense at all without a detailed memory of Citizen Kane itself, but it’s a pretty good prompt to trotting out that 80-year-old warhorse once again.
 
Chadwick Boseman’s final role makes him a lock for Best Actor, as a jazz trumpeter in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (MC-88, NFX), a sentimental posthumous choice, but well-deserved nonetheless.  Viola Davis also is an Oscar contender as the blues singing title character, in an appropriately monumental performance.  Before there was Bessie Smith, there was Ma Rainey, and August Wilson wrote this play about her in 1982.  Transferred to the screen and put in the context of the Great Migration, we first see Ma performing in a Mississippi tent, where the Black audience “know jes’ what she talkin’ ’bout.”  And next as part of an elaborate stage show up north, before coming to the main action, a recording session in Chicago.  Her backing band arrives long before Ma, much to the frantic anxiety of their white manager and the “race records” producer.  The band retires to a basement rehearsal room, and the quartet makes some marvelous verbal music, till the brash young cornetist with big plans and dreams of his own wails his featured solo, in a shattering performance by Boseman.  “The Mother of the Blues” arrives in an imperial huff, and the action moves upstairs to the recording studio, where she clashes with the white moneymen and her obstreperous young horn man.  The hot day gets hotter, till the dramatic climax.  George C. Wolfe is primarily a theater director, but I didn’t hold that against him in this adaptation, where the theatricality seemed thematically appropriate and conducive to the language, literary and musical.  This film will definitely rank among my Best of 2020.  I look forward to producer Denzel Washington’s further screen adaptations of August Wilson plays (after he directed and starred in Fences, also with Viola Davis).

One Night in Miami… (MC-83, AMZ) is another adaptation of a play, and another reason for a possible reversal to #OscarsSoBlack.  Regina King directs her first feature, in an adaptation of a play by Kemp Powers (who also was co-writer and co-director on the Pixar animation contender Soul).  It’s a fictional rendering of a real event, the night in February 1964 that Cassius Clay took the heavyweight crown from Sonny Liston, and later met with his friends Sam Cooke and Jim Brown in Malcolm X’s hotel room.  The one-act play that is enacted there is skillfully book-ended by a bit of backstory and foreshadowing on each of the characters.  The acting is excellent and the dialogue is resonant, both of that time and of this, on subjects like Black power and the purposes of celebrity.  Leslie Odom Jr. is persuasive as Sam Cooke, just as he was with Aaron Burr.  Aldis Hodge embodies Jim Brown’s glowering strength, so familiar to me from his glory days in Cleveland.  Eli Goree fits the bill, physically and in youthful exuberance, as Clay-about-to-be-Ali.  Kingsley Ben-Adir has been praised for his Malcolm, but I thought his smooth performance lacked some of the fire and steel of the original, though admittedly this film catches him in a period of doubt, between disillusionment with Elijah Mohammed and the revival of his mission in Mecca.  Each of these characters was a hero to me at the time, and I never quibbled with the veracity of their portrayal in this very satisfying film, even if some events are telescoped or transposed to this one night.
 

Even though there are several Oscar winners involved, no one is talking about an Oscar for Let Them All Talk (MC-73, HBOm), and rightly so.  Meryl Streep is always a pleasure to watch, but this film is unlikely to garner her 22^nd Best Actress nomination.  She plays a highly successful and entitled novelist, crossing on the Queen Mary 2 to accept an award in England.  For company (or material?), she invites two old college friends she hasn’t seen in decades along for the cruise.  Neither Dianne Wiest nor Candice Bergen will be in line for another Oscar nom, but it was nice to see those actresses as well, at their (and my) advanced age.  For further support, Meryl has nephew Lucas Hedges to help out and advance the plot, such as it is.  Steven Soderbergh is not in line for another Best Director Oscar either, but does deserve some credit for continued innovation in his restlessly inventive career.  He shot the film in two weeks, essentially as a one-man crew with an advanced digital camera, allowing the actors to improvise within a story outline.  One of the best aspects of the film was his roaming all over the abovedecks/belowdecks aspects of a luxury liner.  But the many attractive elements of the film do not coalesce into a compelling or revelatory – or even very entertaining – story.  Long ago, I made an Atlantic crossing on the original Queen Mary, more or less in steerage, but it was fun to see the modern version, even if the cruise, like this movie, is “a supposedly fun thing I’ll never do again.”

Another film that Meryl tries to save, and may even turn into a garbage “Best Picture” nom, is Ryan Murphy’s The Prom (MC-55, NFX).  I’m rather surprised to have watched it, and even more surprised not to have hated it.  La Streep is joined by Nicole Kidman and James Corden, as failing Broadway performers who try to burnish their careers by taking up a cause.  Which turns out to be a lesbian teen (Jo Ellen Pellman) who wants to take the date of her choice to her high school prom (adapted from a real news story, but for Pence-ive reasons moved from Mississippi to Indiana).  Inflated from stage to screen, the production certainly has energy and polish, and a bit of heart, or at least a paper cut-out of one.  The message of inclusivity and acceptance is hammered home, but with a smiley face.  There have been a number of admirable adaptations of Broadway shows this year, but this one does not fall within the dress circle.

Speaking of unlikely candidates in the Oscar hunt, another I was surprised to watch, and liked more than expected, was Borat Subsequent Moviefilm (MC-68, AMZ).   Yes, it’s mainly an exercise in gross-out humor, but it also works as sharp satiric documentary with many laugh-out-loud moments.  We all know about Giuliani’s performance in the film, but Pence was also pranked by Borat, as were assorted other right-wing gatherings.  Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat looks somewhat more impressive after seeing his Abbie Hoffman in Trial of the Chicago 7.

In a just world, so obviously not in this one, the shoo-in for the Best Documentary Oscar would be Frederick Wiseman’s City Hall (MC-88, PBS).  He’s already been given an honorary Academy Award for career achievement, but none of his forty-plus films has won, so he keeps churning them out at the age of 90, and this portrait of his hometown of Boston is one of his very best.  The notorious Brutalist building of the title provides the focus of the film, but its scope is the entire city.  And here let me tip my cap to Wiseman’s longtime cinematographer John Davey for the photo essays that separate the various segments devoted to indoor scenes and meetings – his feel for the city is remarkable.  This is the street-level Boston that I know.  More than any other Wiseman film I can think of, City Hall has a star, a main character that we come back to again and again.  Appropriately enough, it’s Mayor Marty Walsh, mostly unknown to me heretofore but a hero to me henceforward.  Son of Irish immigrants, former labor leader, recovering alcoholic, dedicated public servant, he’s plain-spoken and seemingly authentic.  Like Lori Lightfoot in Steve James’ similar – and similarly great – portrait of Chicago, City So Real, Walsh emerged as an unlikely progressive candidate in a crowded field, but now he’s into his second term after a landslide reelection.  Needless to say, I learned all this elsewhere, since Wiseman’s approach is always to throw the viewer into the scene without explanation or identifiers, and just let the matter at hand unfold in something like real time.  That’s why this film runs to 4½ hours, too long a sit even for me, but easy to break up into bite-sized segments.  If you’re familiar with Wiseman, you know what to expect, because his method never varies, patient fly-on-the-wall observation, and subtle editing to make a statement without assertion.  If you’re not, many of his films, all portraits of places and institutions, are shorter and more accessible than this, and most are available through Kanopy, if you have access through your library.  Catch up with City Hall on PBS.org till 1/20/21, by which time Marty Walsh may be President Biden’s Secretary of Labor.

P.S. (1/17/21):  Biden did name Walsh to the Labor post, but as you know, other stuff has been going on down in D.C.  I’ve rounded off this post by inserting one more likely Best Picture nominee, and will begin another post when the actual nominees are named, to culminate when I actually get to see Nomadland.