Film award candidates for 2021

Entering into the season when most award-worthy films tend to be released, I initiate this open-ended post to cover the year’s best films.  Aside from a few films from early in the year that were included in the last awards cycle (such as Quo Vadis, Aida? and The Father), and also the concert documentary Summer of Soul, the only movies I’ve seen so far that are candidates for my top ten of the year are CODA, Rocks, and In the Heights.  This ongoing post will canvas others, as they are released.
 
Rebecca Hall comes from a family of theatrical royalty, and after a substantial acting career, makes an admirable transition to writer-director with Passing (MC-85, NFX), an adaptation of a novel from and about the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s.  Well-made in every respect, with a surprisingly personal relevance for the director, this multi-layered film stars Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga as former friends who happen to meet in the tea room of a swank midtown hotel, where they both are passing for white.  Ms. Thompson’s character is down from Harlem for a day of shopping, where she is the well-off wife of a doctor, well-known in Black cultural circles.  Ms. Negga has assumed a white identity and married a wealthy bigot unaware of her parentage.  Each is trapped in her own way, while perilously navigating a segregated society, and being conscious of the box their ambiguous status has put them in.  In lustrous black & white and an old-fashioned aspect ratio, this is an accomplished period piece with great contemporary resonance, about crossing the “color line” amid questions of identity and intersectionality.
 
I’d say Andrew Garfield is in line for some award consideration for his bravura turn in Tick, Tick… Boom! (MC-74, NFX) as Jonathan Larson, the young composer/playwright of the hit musical Rent, a rock update of La Boheme, which opened the day after he died suddenly of an undiagnosed heart condition, and went on to win major awards and run for twelve years on Broadway.  Lin-Manuel Miranda directs this tribute to the missing link between Sondheim and himself, with verve and compassion.  It’s based on a one-man show created by Larson, after the flop of a musical he worked on through his twenties, and before Rent.  I cannot claim any antecedent familiarity with this story, music, or lyrics, but was quite carried away by its exhilaration and intensity.  This musical pairs nicely with the recent film adaptation of In the Heights, Miranda’s own precursor to Hamilton.  It made me take a look at the 2005 movie adaptation of Rent, which was not nearly as satisfying.
 
Will Smith is not an actor who’s ever been on my radar, but I wouldn’t argue with his front-running status as Best Actor in King Richard (MC-76, HBO Max), a movie that was considerably better than I expected.  Despite Smith’s star power, it seemed odd to foreground the troublesome father’s story in the saga of Venus and Serena Williams (though perhaps their status as executive producers explains this tribute to their dad), but Reinaldo Marcus Green’s direction makes it all pay off, with Saniyya Sidney and Demi Singleton hitting winners all over the place as the young girls, and flashing winning smiles.  Aunjanue Ellis provides a nice balance as their mother.  Without becoming a lecture in CRT, the film conveys a moving sense of what it meant for the girls to cross the color line into the pale-faced world of tennis.  It climaxes in the pro debut of Venus at 14, with Serena waiting in the wings.  The tennis scenes are highly credible (to a non-fan), but the heart of the story comes from the family relationships between mom and dad and the five girls, bred to succeed in their chosen professional fields as much as the younger girls were groomed to be tennis stars.  This film pleases the crowd without pandering to it, and I was happy to follow all of the back-and-forths.
 
I have to enter a minority report on The Power of the Dog (MC-88, NFX).  Jane Campion’s last film (Bright Star) was among my favorites of its year, but this one won’t be, even though I just saw it referred to as the Best Picture frontrunner.  No, I’m sorry.  This chamber piece set in the wide, wild West (New Zealand credibly standing in for 1920s Montana) continually reminded me of one of my very favorite films, Days of Heaven, and every time it did, I responded, “Nope, not as good.”  Campion’s adaptation and direction struck me as heavy-handed, the symbolism laid on with a trowel, every step preordained right up to the big twist at the end.  Still, the scenery is spectacular, and the acting is good, if overdetermined.  Benedict Cumberbatch is the seeming villain, cast against type, a hardcore cowboy who never washes and even sleeps in his chaps.  Jesse Plemons is his apparently more civilized brother, who wears a coat and tie even on horseback, though he prefers his automobile.  When the bad one insults a boarding house widow-woman and her gay waiter son, the good one falls for her; no surprise there, since she’s played by Jesse’s real-life partner, Kirsten Dunst.  Motivations and personal history remain murky, but these actors do make intriguing if not altogether credible characters, as does Kodi Smit-McPhee as the boy.  Much is telegraphed, but twists and turns are manufactured, while souls remain unexplored, the players moved around like chess pieces.  Tense and intense, pretty as a picture, still this film was missing something for me.  Though lush, it struck me as airless.  Went back and watched The Piano, saw all of Campion’s virtues and none of her flaws, totally satisfying in a way this new film wasn’t.
 

My Name is Pauli Murray (MC-73, AMZ) makes an excellent case that we all should know the name of this civil rights pioneer and patron saint of intersectionality.  I’m pulling for this film by Betsy West and Julie Cohen (directors of RBG) to be nominated for Best Documentary Feature.  Murray’s influence runs from Eleanor Roosevelt to Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and the film repeatedly emphasizes that she was out in front of many more celebrated heroes of the movement, whether in bus protests or lunchroom sit-ins, legal strategies or establishing Black studies departments, and finally and most surprisingly, as one of the first women ordained as an Episcopal minister, as well as one of the founders of NOW, even though she/they self-identified as male.  It’s an amazing life, and the film offers an excellent mirror on the times, and how much has changed for the better because of activists like Pauli Murray.

It seems that Aaron Sorkin is becoming a divisive figure.  The Metacritic range on his latest, Being the Ricardos (MC-60, AMZ), runs from 100 to 25, with broad swaths of green, yellow, and red ratings.  Me, I fall into the green.  This film won’t follow his Trial of the Chicago 7 into my best of the year list, but I certainly enjoyed it.  Having grown up with I Love Lucy on the tube, I was put off and then intrigued by Nicole Kidman’s incongruous turn as Lucille Ball, and Javier Bardem as Desi Arnaz.  The rest of the cast is good as well, and Sorkin’s dialogue has its usual zing.  The script conflates a number of actual events into one imaginary week, as an episode of America’s #1 TV show goes from table read on Monday to filming before a live audience on Friday.  Meanwhile Lucy is outed for having sentimentally registered as a Communist in 1936, announces her second pregnancy, and begins to suspect her husband of cheating.  The behind-the-scenes story of producing a hit show was most interesting to me, as was the exploration of Lucy’s creative process and Desi’s producing prowess.  The film is very busy, but continually engaging.

 
Another film I would rank somewhat above average is Don’t Look Up (MC-49, NFX), which I found entertaining in a grim way, if rather too long and scattershot.  Writer-director Adam McKay has a good track record at making serious stuff funny and funny stuff serious, and this film is halfway good.  Leonardo DiCaprio plays an astronomy professor and Jennifer Lawrence is one of his doctoral students, who discovers a comet that he calculates to hit the earth in an extinction event just six months hence.  With the aid of one concerned civil servant, they approach the clueless Trump-like President (Meryl Streep) with the urgent news, which she chooses to sit on and “assess.”  Whether the comet is a metaphor for climate change or Covid or any other existential threat, it is fodder for a lot of satire of our divisive politics and vapid pop culture, some of which hits and some of which misses, but overall goes on too long.  Less would be more, fewer targets would make the aim straighter.  Mark Rylance is rather uncanny as tech mogul with all the answers and none of the solutions, and Cate Blanchette is almost unrecognizable as a Fox-y news host.  And so on and so on, till the big one hits.

Maggie Gyllenhaal writes and directs, with intimacy and understanding, an adaptation of the Elena Ferrante novel The Lost Daughter (MC-86, NFX).  Starring Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley, two of my personal favorites, playing the same character, a professor of comparative literature, at different stages of her life, the result is magnetic and mesmerizing.  The film requires a certain suspension of disbelief and relinquishment of the urge for resolution, but the reward is substantial for following where it leads.  Colman is on a working vacation on a Greek island, where her serenity is disrupted by the invasion of a large and likely-criminal Greek-American family, with whom she becomes enmeshed and implicated.  She develops an especially tangled relationship with a lovely young mother (Dakota Johnson) and her little daughter, who together call up flashbacks to her own troubled mothering of two young girls.  Despite the transparency of Colman’s visage, the character of Leda remains a mystery, perhaps as much to herself as to the viewer.  The setting is a sun-kissed pleasure, and the supporting characters are well-played as the leads.  If you like a straight story line, clearly structured scenes, and intelligible motivations, you might lose patience with this film, but if you want to get up-close-and-personal with some enigmatic individuals, it will keep you riveted.
 
The Hand of God (MC-76, NFX), Paolo Sorrentino’s recollection of his Neapolitan youth in the 1980s, is highly watchable, if not especially deep or coherent.  The film has two patron saints: Maradona, the great footballer who signs with the Naples club and brings them a championship; and Fellini, whose Amarcord is an obvious model for this film, in its celebration of the filmmaker’s home town.  Sorrentino looks back with a skeptical fondness on the family and city from which he emerged, before embarking on his career in Rome, to be memorably fêted in his Oscar-winner The Great Beauty.  As a teen coming of age in an extended and chaotic family, the Sorrentino character pines for his lusty but troubled aunt, adores Maradona, and longs to become a filmmaker.  The film itself lunges between comedy and tragedy, in loosely strung-together vignettes animated by the power of personal memory.  It’s all quite lush and engaging, with a number of characters strikingly portrayed, if randomly episodic and overlong.
 
I’m not going so far as to call Michael Sarnoski’s Pig (MC-82, Hulu) a trough of swill, but I am aghast that so many saw so much more in this film than I was able to.  Nicholas Cage does well by a ridiculously-stylized character and storyline, about a reclusive ex-chef who lives off the grid in the Oregon wilderness, with only a truffle-snuffing pig for company.  The pig is kidnapped, and Cage is forced to return to the world of the high-end Portland restaurant business (with his matted grey hair sticking to dried blood on both sides of his face throughout) to get it back.  Whatever you were expecting, this film is something else, and not in a way that appealed to me.
 
The Tragedy of Macbeth (MC-87, AppleTV) is fascinating on many levels, a notable addition to an impressive roster of film adaptations (Welles, Kurosawa, Polanski).  Joel Coen, working without his brother Ethan but with his wife and frequent collaborator Frances McDormand – paired with Denzel Washington as the murderous title couple – crafts a brilliantly-atmospheric cinematic artifact in Academy-ratio black-&-white.   His De Chirico-style settings call up echoes of Bergman and Dreyer, German expressionism and American film noir.  Shakespeare’s text is pared down and delivered demotically rather than oratorically.  A walk-on character in the play is made central to the plot of the film, which has eerie contemporary echoes.  Though the leads deliver on their sterling reputations, the acting revelation of the film is Kathryn Hunter, playing all three of the weird sisters, plus another character.  This fog-bound chamber-piece should hold your attention throughout, as the oh-so-familiar lines are given a new twist.
 
The Tender Bar (MC-53, AMZ) sneaks in under this heading only because Ben Affleck might get some Best Supporting Actor nominations.  George Clooney’s direction of this fictionalized adaptation of a JR Moehringer memoir is an entirely middle-of-the-road affair, pleasant enough to see but rather tired and out-of-date in its attitudes about masculinity and the writing life.  Affleck is the affectionate bartender uncle of the effectively-fatherless main character, played by the delightful Daniel Ranieri as a kid, and by the appealing but light-weight Tye Sheridan as college student and neophyte writer.  This mildly-comic bildungsroman is not a chore to watch, but nothing we haven’t seen before.
 

The Eyes of Tammy Faye (MC-55, HBO), a feature remake of the 2000 documentary of the same name, is an unnecessary film, except for the unlikely title performance (and likely Best Actress nomination) by Jessica Chastain, who hereby proves that she can play anyone, prosthetics or no.  And Andrew Garfield adds another quality performance as Tammy Faye’s husband, the sticky-fingered televangelist Jim Bakker.  The script is rather thin on character insight and cultural/political relevance, and Michael Showalter’s direction comes across as indecisive and overlong, not sure whether to make the main character a figure of compassion or ridicule.  But the acting and overall design make this an easy-on-the-eyes, if unmemorable, watch.

With two Oscars under his belt, Asghar Farhadi may be in line for another with A Hero (MC-82, AMZ).  After making films in France and Spain, Farhadi is back in Iran, but as always he focuses on ordinary people facing a moral dilemma, and dealing with the justice system and cultural norms.  And as usual, he shifts the viewer’s sympathies from character to character, allowing no easy judgments.  The central character Rahim is out of debtor’s prison on a two-day leave, with a plan to use the purse of gold coins his girlfriend has found (in a fairy tale set-up to a highly realistic film) to get his creditor to release him.  The plan goes awry, and after a change of heart (or scheme?), Rahim tries to find the owner of the purse and return the gold.  Television and social media get hold of the story, and then take it in different directions, turning Rahim from hero to suspect.  Layers of family, community, and society are explored; characters remain naturalistic but elusive; you are left with your own doubts, and all the better for suspended judgment.  As the saying goes, “we are divided by our beliefs, but united by our doubts.”
 
Coming now to the end of January, I’ll close out this post here, and come back with a final round-up of the best films of 2021 as more of them reach streaming availability, with final awards given and my own preferences established.