The Most Glaring Omission From This Year’s Oscar Nominations
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Silver Linings Playbook – 5 stars
David O. Russell (Three Kings, The Fighter) has written and directed a special drama/romance, made all the better by a flawless ensemble. Bradley Cooper is just out of an 8 month court ordered stint in a psychiatric ward after having found his wife in the shower with her lover and beating the hell out of the former. Cooper is also bipolar. Under police supervision and ensconced in the Philadelphia home of his OCD, Philadelphia Eagle fanatic, bookie father (Robert De Niro) and supportive mother (Jackie Weaver), Cooper plots his way back into his wife’s heart, enlisting the help of a neighbor (Jennifer Lawrence) who has a few not insubstantial psychiatric and familial problems of her own. Unfortunately, he does this while forswearing the medications that will keep him on an even keel.
The film seamlessly portrays the pressure and effect of mental illness on a family with the Herculean effort of love and commitment it takes to manage it. Intertwined is a beautiful, engaging love story.
Cooper is rightly nominated for Best Actor. His performance is riveting, and no easy feat. He presents a character plagued by demons, trying to hold them back, while leveling off to actually grow. As I walked out of the theater, my estimation of Cooper as merely a more electric Ryan Reynolds was erased, and Daniel Day Lewis’s turn as Lincoln seemed humdrum in comparison.
Jennifer Lawrence, also nominated, also wows. She is wounded and in crisis, and as she reaches for Cooper, her desperation and need are palpable. De Niro, who I wrongly suspected might have been nominated for best supporting actor as a nod to his overall body of work, is touchingly desperate as a father who carries his own mental disability as well as the weight of failing his son. Last, but certainly not least, the film’s fourth nominee Jackie Weaver plays Cooper’s mother lovingly while communicating the weariness of someone who has been required to hold a tenuous family together. The rest of the cast is also very funny, especially a portly Chris Tucker, who plays a patient from the psychiatric ward with a penchant for self-furlough.
This is a tough film to make. Mental illness does not lend itself either to yuks or romance, and without Russell’s deft hand, it could easily have been offensive, pat and/or schmaltzy. Cooper’s outbursts are funny, but that is because he’s a funny character whose disability has removed his filter. But Russell does not sugarcoat the illness, and when Cooper is manic, we are scared for him and those around him. Lawrence is also hard, mercurial and often tough to take, and normally, she would have been the whore with a heart of gold. In fact, her damage requires Cooper’s strength and the two share a strong chemistry.
To be able to construct a sweet, original romance from such stuff is both an achievement and a damning indictment of almost all romantic comedies/dramedies that have so little to say about people. This is the best movie of the year.
Homeland – 2 stars
The buzz was so strong I couldn’t resist, so I queued up the discs for Season 1 and me and the wife settled in. What was not to like? I’d been impressed by Damian Lewis ever since his turn as Captain Winters in Band of Brothers, and The Manchurian Candidate set-up was intriguing. Better, the series started off with a bang as Sgt. Nicolas Brodie (Lewis), a Marine held in captivity by al Qaeda for 7 years, calls his wife (Morena Baccarin) to tell her he’s been rescued just as she is dismounting her lover, Lewis’s Marine buddy. The CIA operative who suspects his allegiance, Carrie Matheson (Claire Danes), is so committed that when her boss Saul Berenson (Mandy Patinkin) threatens to expose her excess, she offers him her body. So far, so good.
But boy does this show get ragged, if not in a hurry, eventually. There are many reasons.
1) Could an American be turned against his government ala’ Laurence Harvey? Sure. He could be a ticking time bomb. But could an American be turned into a ideologically driven, pray-to-Allah daily in his garage Muslim who has accepted in his marrow that he must strike the blow against his homeland? Perhaps, but with absolutely no backstory on Lewis’s character, and the thin gruel provided as his impetus, the leap is too far.
2) As Lewis’s Javert, Danes is a bi-polar freakout queen who regularly tests the limits of her family friends, coworkers and meds. She is singularly miscast, laughably over-the-top, made even more annoying by her love of jazz (which, we’re led to believe, is intricate and riffy like her mind), and is horribly written. My favorite line is when she directs the apprehension of a dangerous sniper, warning other agents over the radio that he is to be considered armed and extremely dangerous. When her mentor tells her to be careful, she responds, “this is not my first polka.”
I’ll concede. Her signature move – the bug eyes and quivering trout mouth – is pretty awesome.
She is wonderfully lampooned here by Anne Hathaway in this SNL skit, but upon reflection, it’s not so much a goof as a faithful rendition.
3) Danes is presented as a tough cookie, but she soon lapses into a simpering “I never got asked to the prom” victim and it becomes more and more difficult to take her seriously as a CIA pro.
4) Danes’ mentor, Mandy Patinkin, is as interesting as Carlton your Doorman but that doesn’t prevent a pretty involved, sleepy subplot about his wife leaving him.
5) There is actually a line where the al Qaeda man who has turned Lewis says, “And they call us the terrorists.”
6) Apparently, if you are going to authorize a drone strike on a school, it is always best CIA practices to videotape the Vice President, the deputy CIA director and the Secretary of Defense making that decision.
On the upside, the sister of our good friend is in the show, and whenever she appears, we point and remark at how similar the two are in appearance and mannerism. Every time.
Ah, the corruption of celebrity.
Pulp Fiction – 4.75 stars
The exploration of the Tarantino oeuvre ended last night as me and the boy watched Tarantino’s opus (I will not subject my son to Death Proof from Grindhouse or Tarantino’s contribution to Four Rooms unless he’s really bad). Pulp Fiction is audacious in its break with continuity and vibrant in dialogue. The film is essentially a series of riffs (and nobody riffs better than Samuel Jackson and Christopher Walken) or two person sketches. A stunning follow-up to Reservoir Dogs, the movie is a pop culture totem, demonstrating Tarantino’s love for kitsch as well as his sharp ear for a modern, urban, tough guy patter, Spillane-meets-Quisp.
Almost all of the performances are brilliant. I’ve criticized Tarantino’s reclamation projects, but his insistence on JohnTravolta (over Daniel Day Lewis) was exactly right. In the words of Tarantino’s agent, at the time, “John Travolta was at that time as cold as they get. He was less than zero.” But Tarantino would not budge, and as hit man/enforcer Vincent Vega, Travolta is just the right amount of cool and introspection to Jackson’s ferocity. When the boss’s wife (Uma Thurman) mistakes his heroin for coke and overdoses, Travolta snaps out of his own drug-induced laze and, in one of many comic but harrowing scenes, becomes electric. The performance is artful, it resulted in an Academy Award nomination, and it resurrected his career.
If there is a criticism, it is of one vignette, after Jackson and Travolta accidentally shoot a man’s head off in their car. They need to get off the street, and end up at the home of one . . . Quentin Tarantino. Even the introduction of “The Wolf” (Harvey Keitel), a Mr. Fix-It who arrives to assist the stranded duo, cannot save this halting sequence or Tarantino’s amateurish acting. Rank has its privileges, but this particular hubris was detrimental.
But that’s a minor bump in the road in this highly engaging and original flick. Related — The Pulp Fiction Oral History: Uma Thurman, Quentin Tarantino, and John Travolta Retrace the Movie’s Making.
Full Metal Jacket – 4.5 stars
The first half of Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, based on Gustav Hasford’s novel The Short Timers, is flawless. Marine privates Joker (Matthew Modine), Leonard Lawrence (Vincent D’Onfrio) and others are trained with their class at Parris Island by their Lord and Master, Marine Gunnery Sergeant Hartmann (R. Lee. Ermey). Kubrick depicts the indoctrination and transformation of Marines in a manner that is tragi-comic, lyrical and, at the end of training, deadly. Penned by Kubrick, Hasford, and Michael Herr (Dispatches), the dialogue has the stamp of authenticity (Hasford and Ermey were Marines and Ermey, first hired as a technical advisor, had actually been a drill sergeant at Parris Island during the Vietnam war). The process of creating cohesion and toughness is brutal and efficient, and its unsparing nature produces effective warriors, but it also damages the fragile D’Onofrio.
The second half opens with a concise commentary on the problems of an occupying army, memorably introduced by the sultry voice of Nancy Sinatra. Despite such promise, the film becomes less engaging. Modine is sent to Vietnam as a correspondent for Star and Stripes and he wants desperately to get in “the shit.” He does, during the Tet Offensive, and what he sees is the hard killers from Parris, broken, unmoored and wreaking havoc. The film plays out as a series of barely connected set pieces, which is in stark contrast to the single-mindedness of the first half.
I strongly recommend Matthew Modine’s diary and Herr’s Vanity Fair piece on Kubrick.
Argo – 4.5 stars
The pace is brisk, the acting for the most part superb, the feel genuine, and the final act white-knuckle. Ben Affleck’s tale of the clandestine evacuation of 6 Americans hiding in Tehran after the storming of the American embassy is almost as incredible as the actor’s improbable rise as a director after a long plummet from the heights of A list actor.
What is true is that 6 Americans made it out of the U.S. embassy into the hands of Canadian embassy personnel and that a fake sci-fi movie was created as cover for their exit posing as the film crew. That’s about the sum total of what is accurate in this movie. Affleck takes this nifty premise and constructs a gripping yarn around it, one that is lessened only a little by Affleck’s leaden acting as CIA operative Tony Mendez and a shopworn and unnecessary theme built around his family woes. Affleck’s handling of the storming of the embassy (which was very accurate) and the tense escape via the airport (a near complete concoction) is assured, and the creation of an Alan Arkin Hollywood producer for comic effect is savvy.
After Gone Baby Gone, The Town and this film, Affleck is a top 5 director. Imagine that.
Somewhere – 1 star
Sofia Coppola’s fourth feature is a return to the lackadaisical moodiness of her breakout film Lost in Translation, but instead of a disconnected and lonely established actor (Bill Murray) in Tokyo, we get a young Hollywood star (Stephen Dorff) when he is not working, every bit as disconnected. He lives in the Chateau Marmont, beds beautiful women regularly, spends time with his daughter (Ellie Fanning), and fights ennui. Unlike Lost in Translation, however, Dorff and Coppola don’t have jet lag or the outsider in a foreign land to explain or sustain the languid pace and feel. Dorff is also no Bill Murray. The latter registered pathos and bemusement in an understated manner, while Dorff (Blood and Wine, City of Industry, Feardotcom), who normally plays the heavy, lacks the chops and just seems tired. He is not aided by Fanning, who seems adrift, and the two fail to convey any familial connection.
The result? Coppola has made a film about a bored person that is boring. While the director is intrigued by long repetitive scenes (identical twin strippers who perform for Dorff, Dorff’s daughter performing a routine on ice, lots of freeway driving), the feeling is not mutual, and the scenes play interminably. Most others just feel like your own day if you were a dull Hollywood actor.
This doesn’t even work as the anti-Entourage. Mood pieces can be nice, but you need some meat on that bone, and Coppola’s paltry output (4 features in 11 years) is perhaps explained by the fact she has little to say.
Kill Bill, Vol. 1 – 2 stars/Kill Bill, Vol. 2 – 0 stars
After taking my boy to Django Unchained, we started a concerted effort to watch the Tarantino catalogue. When he asked about the Kill Bills, I told him they were films made primarily for children, but were so violent, if cartoonishly so, that children probably shouldn’t be allowed to watch them. Of course, Tarantino is a visionary, having anticipated an audience of children of a wider breadth than I could have imagined, scads of 24 to 36 year old slacker geeks, still living in Mom’s basement, deathly terrified of footballs and baseballs and supervisors and real women, banking retirement on mint condition comic books, their only meaningful relationships having been 2 to 3 minute internet trysts with the various Jenna Jamesons cranked out of the San Fernando Valley with increasingly worrisome regularity.
This is their crack cocaine.
Volume 1 is stylish, meticulous, occasionally funny and inventive but a mostly tiresome abscess of a picture. As if any enjoyment derived from the first picture required penance, Volume 2 is that contrition.
Zero Dark Thirty – 5 stars
In The Hurt Locker, Kathryn Bigelow exhibited an expert feel for the milieu of a bomb disposal team in early post-Saddam Iraq. While her depiction of the mechanics of the team was the subject of debate, the desolation and immediacy of her scenarios was spot on, evoking the overburdened and overwhelmed sensibility of better-equipped invading/liberating armies since the time of the Romans. What kept The Hurt Locker from being a great film was the simplistic protagonist, Jeremy Renner, a danger freak and little more, with whom we were required to spend too much time.
In Zero Dark Thirty, Bigelow again utilizes a simplistic heroine, CIA officer Jessica Chastain, whose entire persona is a relentless “get bin Laden” zeal. Fortunately, the story Bigelow is telling is an intricate intelligence bureaucracy procedural and Chastain is progressively morphed from the driver of the story to an observer. To her credit, she remains disciplined and does not stray from the confines of her role. Chastain is emblematic of the effort and the desire to fight al Qaeda and eliminate its leader, and the film has refreshingly little interest in what makes her tick, her relationship with men, etc . . . the story is quite enough. This film is much like United 93, authentic, thoughtful, and gripping, even though we know the end.
Two other aspects make this picture extraordinary. First, it deals with politics in a subtle yet effective manner, opening with a clutter of 911 calls on 9-11, which creates the urgency necessary to begin the story, and acknowledging certain political realities (the failure of the CIA on WMD, the changing domestic political tenor on enhanced interrogation, and the Obama administration’s moves with regard to same) without gettng bogged down in their import or advocating for any particular position.
Second, of some controversy, Bigelow shows torture. Torture assuredly occurred and was also assuredly of value in the war against al Qaeda. Just ask new National Security Advisor John Brennan: “There has been a lot of information that has come out from these interrogation procedures that the agency has in fact used against the real hard-core terrorists. It has saved lives.” The histrionic attacks on Bigelow’s film because it merely shows torture demonstrate the exact false and forced narrative that Zero Dark Thirty eschews. It is depressing that Bigelow had to actually say, “”Experts disagree sharply on the facts and particulars of the intelligence hunt, and doubtlessly that debate will continue. As for what I personally believe, which has been the subject of inquiries, accusations and speculation, I think Usama bin Laden was found due to ingenious detective work. Torture was, however, as we all know, employed in the early years of the hunt. That doesn’t mean it was the key to finding bin Laden. It means it is a part of the story we couldn’t ignore.”
Bigelow’s statement is echoed by Mark Bowden, author of Black Hawk Down: “Torture may be morally wrong, and it may not be the best way to obtain information from detainees, but it played a role in America’s messy, decade-long pursuit of Osama bin Laden, and Zero Dark Thirty is right to portray that fact.”
Juxtapose the statements of Bigelow and Bowden with the criticism of actor and activist David Clennon (“Torture is an appalling crime under any circumstances. ‘Zero’ never acknowledges that torture is immoral and criminal”) and you have the difference between Zero Dark Thirty and the spate of shit message movies that Hollywood churns out every year to show us the right path. The Clennons are terrified. By showing that torture may have gotten certain results, sweet Lord Almighty, we have endorsed torture, which we cannot hope to condemn unless we show it was a masochistic folly of absolutely no intelligence value.
Perhaps we can delete the great line where one interrogator tells Chastain to be careful because the domestic political winds are shifting and she doesn’t want to be “the last one holding a dog collar” and substitute it with, “you know, upon reflection, this stuff we’ve been doing . . . It’s just morally wrong and maybe even criminal.”
Beasts of the Southern Wild – 4.75 stars
A 6 year old girl, Hushpuppy (Quvenzhané Wallis) lives in functional squalor in a poor, bayou fishing community – The Bathtub – cut off by a levee in Louisiana. What passes for the comminity’s teacher tells her that one day, the ice caps will melt, the Bathtub will be swamped by water, and prehistoric beasts will roam the earth. As a storm comes, most of the inhabitants evacuate, except for Hushpuppy, her disturbed father, and some boozing stragglers and abandoned kids. They create a floating bar, a drunken, drifting haven, but their world is dying around them.
This is a mystical, beautiful picture, told primarily through the eyes of the girl, who speaks to her dead mother and imagines beasts marauding her world. The breakdown of her surroundngs after the flood, the fevers of her own imagination, and her introduction to civilization (they are forcibly evacuated) is gorgeous and moving and Wallis’s fierce maturity is captivating.
This is a real life fable (“a passionate and unruly explosion of Americana”, per A.O. Scott) with barely a semblance of a plot, so beware – it does meander. But it is rightly nominated for a Best Picture Oscar, as is Wallis for Best Actress. Her confident, self-possessed performance is one of the strongest child turns I’ve ever seen. The non professional actor Dwight Henry (he’s a New Orleans baker who read for the part during down time and reluctantly took it because he was starting a new business) is also noteworthy, giving a raw, jarring performance. Filmed on location, the film’s rendering of nature reminded me of Terence Malick, but unlike Malick, first- time director Benh Zeitlin connects with actors as well as his surroundings. I’ve never seen a film quite like it.
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