Good morning, readers ☀️
With a little less than two weeks now between us and the 96th annual Academy Awards, it’s high time for me to fulfill my promise to you all and for us together to dig into the current slate of ‘Best Picture’ nominees.
Like last year, this year I retain my skepticism around the Academy’s choices (and encourage everyone interested in my picks for the best from this past year in film to visit my competitive database, where I record my own nominees and winners each year as I have for the past 17 years).
That said, I continue to recognize the broad-reaching power the Academy and its awards still have over the opinions and memories of the general public regarding film — a power so great it’s impossibly hard to write about film each year and not pay them attention.
So, in my continuing efforts to help you, readers, identify what to watch and why or why not, I give you this digest on the ten nominees for the 2024 Academy Award for ‘Best Picture.’
Films are presented in alphabetical order.
American Fiction
Rentable • Comedy • Black as Knight?
Synopsis
Disillusioned with the publishing industry, a Black novelist adopts a more “relatable” sobriquet.
My take
Of all the films the Academy has chosen to recognize with a ‘Best Picture’ nomination this year, this film is by far the one with the greatest social conscience. Yes, readers, you read that opening correctly: In a list of films including (in no particular order):
a courtroom drama about domestic violence,
a feminist’s treatise about gender roles and conformity,
a historical tragedy by profiteering racism,
an understated analysis of the Holocaust, and
a censoriously grim meditation on the atomic bomb,
this other film — about a studious author’s unintentionally popular novel — is the one with the greatest social conscience. I’ll let that sink in for a second.
Alright, “how so,” you ask? Unlike all those other films I mentioned, whose central tensions remove their characters in time, in circumstance, or in reality from the life of the present-day everyday movie-goer who encounters them, American Fiction leans heavily into the relatability of its gripes and, moreover, uses that relatability as the device by which it enlists its own audience into critical (self-)reflection and recommendation for the betterment of tomorrow. Writer-director Cord Jefferson literally concludes the film — {spoiler alert} — by openly asking the audience (with all the hesitant disapproval of a man who has already seen too much), “Exactly what kind of ending would you prefer to see, to make you feel better about all the drama that has previously unfolded?”
This question stings as much as it stalls, especially to anyone who didn’t happen to like the self-portrait of our times Jefferson’s only slightly hyperbolic mirror cast back onto the audience before that point. Would a contrite ending help you feel better: apologies coated in the familiar rhetoric of personal responsibility and ‘ownership’? How about an ennobling victory: the triumph of one man as a representative for all thinking men like him, in love and in valor? Perhaps senseless tragedy: admonishing the value of life — especially ‘virtuous life’ — in an ever so patently corrupt society? Pick your poison, readers; American Fiction certainly won’t for you, but will gaze at you curiously while you actually contemplate the alternatives.
Now, typically I’m not a fan of this (seeming) abdication of directorial responsibility; I think, if you’re going to set a multi-hour cinematic opus before me, (1) know what you’re trying to say and then (2) actually say it (ideally, eloquently). (So, unless you’re actually showing me Clue [Lynn, 1985], don’t wangle alternative endings before me and ask me to pick among them.) However, here I must say, my opinion is different — partly thanks to a good friend and reader who convinced me that, despite American Fiction’s sticker-label of “comedy” (a label which I freely admit fits most technically accurately labelled members of the genre today as well as the term “mammal” still appropriately refers to monotremes and cetaceans; i.e., not the stereotypical Barbies of their kind), American Fiction is actually a tragedy: a tragedy of the modern social consciousness, especially as it defines and addresses Black choice.
Hemmed in by disappointing and personally undermining demands for success, each of the three adult siblings at the center of American Fiction’s story bend near breaking while trying to live authentically within a world that expects, if not requires, something or someone else.
Sterling K. Brown’s Cliff absconds without warning from a heterosexual marriage into the willfully insouciant beds of as many young men and recreational drugs as he can rally;
Jeffrey Wright’s Monk centrally pens an antithesis to his name, to retain at least a dint of the financial and professional solvency he thought he could enjoy within a system that is actually slowly letting him slip into obscurity; and
Tracee Ellis Ross’ Lisa dies in cardiac arrest the moment she steps away from her filially pious work, to reveal her true wants and needs over drinks to her brother.
In each sibling’s case (as in the stories of several other supporting characters in the film), what seems like choice is actually only either social or personal capitulation — not compunction, but capitulation. The characters have not so much choice as the illusion of choice, where real choice is hamstrung by the social and heritable debt — financial and otherwise — past behaviors have carved like a groove into the otherwise still unhewn woodwork of their lives.
In perhaps the film’s most perfect encapsulation of this issue, Brown’s dynamic performance of Cliff embodies the taxed audacity it regularly costs him to establish an identity free of his and his family’s past — especially in the eyes of everyone who knew them. He is riled, worryingly distant, laughable, and — perhaps as the coup de grâce here to any other conception of his character — cheerfully pandering his own radical embrace of this ‘independence’ as an enlightenment to his brother whose own reservations about abandonment importantly look in that light like stifles of real passion. The world he decodes and operates within, for Monk and for the audience, is one in which it’s this or it’s that, authenticity or parody, signature or sinecure; there is no third alternative. So, when a narrative built on these grounds concludes by refusing to adopt any of the likely leading expectations from its audience regarding an ending, I have to see it differently from how I’d see any other film with a similar conclusion. The tragedy in the characters’ lack of choice is ironically mocked by the surfeit of choice given to the audience. Laugh if you want, readers, but I suppose that this bleak irony on choice and opportunity is what earned American Fiction its “comedy” bona fides this year.
I know, readers; that was dark. Let’s take then for a fittingly palliative conclusion to this otherwise dark review of a tragedy-marked-comedy the refreshing coda to another famous comedy, perhaps the most famous finale palate-cleanse of all time:
If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended,
That you have but slumber'd here
While these visions did appear.
And this weak and idle theme,
No more yielding but a dream,
Gentles, do not reprehend:
if you pardon, we will mend.-Shakespeare, ca. 1595
I’m sure, Cord Jefferson would approve the connection.
Temperature check
Hot
Anatomy of a Fall
Rentable • Drama • You Must Choose
Synopsis
The force of a marriage on the edge compels a criminal investigation into its nature.
My take
Props to Justine Triet, not just for bringing a mostly staid European arthouse film into the American cultural mainstream, but moreover for keeping it there, simply by executing excellently on the film’s tantalizingly simple premise: “Did she, or didn’t she?” Of course, as anyone who has already watched Anatomy of a Fall can happily tell you, the truth of the matter isn’t actually that simple; the most rewarding parts of the film aren’t even to do with that initial question. But that question is the jumping-off point, into the personal and intimate interiors that follow.
Sandra Hüller — nearly a two-time acting Oscar nominee this year — takes the weight of these interiors onto her shoulders, in the leading role of the wife and mother charged with the murder of her querulous husband in the mountains near Grenoble, France; but for my money, readers, it’s really Milo Machado-Graner, the boy who plays the accused’s visually impaired ~10-year-old son, who should be enjoying all the laudatory attention here. The boy is simply sublime, with presence and gravitas that unfold like the film itself: from an almost superficially simple beginning to an impeccably complex philosophical ending. How many adult actors, let alone child actors, could reliably pull off such an arch?1 I am and continue to be thoroughly impressed.
Ultimately, however, Anatomy of a Fall, despite all the beauty in its central performances and all the rich and nearly note-perfect writing of those performances on the page, suffers from a consistently lax hand on the editor’s panel. Moments, conversations, entire scenes slip by, packed full of time like a one-size-fits-all delivery box packing air around a box of paper clips. It’s not that I think that all the silent, slowed time is wasteful, readers; with favorite films like Bertolucci’s (1987) The Last Emperor and Wong’s (2000) In the Mood for Love, you already know, I’m hardly an action junkie. That said, I do think that adding time for time’s sake, slowing down the pace of the film beyond what is diegetically or thematically necessary and forcing the audience to wade across conversations and entire scenes like a tourist fording a rushing river on foot, is unfairly cumbersome. We simply don’t earn enough more from each marginal second of silent, nearly motionless “action” to justify keeping every single instant of pro forma courtroom time or pro domo background time in play. While I’d be hard-pressed to point to any single scene or interaction as unnecessary in its entirety (because compositionally the pieces of Anatomy do all feel flush with each other thematically and narratively), by contrast I’d find it easy to trim ten, maybe even fifteen, whole minutes of distributed time from the film (especially once the tone and voice of the filmmaker are well established) to relieve us of its morass — and, moreover, I’d feel grateful if someone did so. Simply put then, although it is certainly not the worst offender in this regard this year, Anatomy’s laxity of time use deducts for me from its overall impact and quality.
Still, even with that entirely fair warning in play, readers, I do recommend you take this one in; it’s certainly one of the better picks this year for the ‘Best Picture’ prize.
Temperature check
Tepid
Barbie
Max • Comedy • Material World
Synopsis
Infraction in the real world ripples through the idyllic anesthesis of Barbieland.
My take
Greta Gerwig continues to impress with this nearly seamless moral comedy of manners on modern gender roles and expectations. A feast for the eyes as well as the ears, Barbie is the punkily anti-corporate intellectual diagram of ‘where we are now’ and ‘how we got here’ no one would ever expect from so mainstream an adaptation of an iconic $1,490,600,000 brand (Mattel, 2024). Rich with cinematic references (see Dockterman, 2023, for a run-down) and two fascinatingly sharp central performances (of two extremely formidable-on-paper characters, mind you; see this clip from Margot Robbie’s “Actors on Actors” conversation with Cillian Murphy for more on this topic), Barbie is clearly the film that should by all accounts be expecting to take home the ‘Best Picture’ Oscar this year, simply because it is genuinely the one film that most successfully marries the roar of the popular cinema with the hush of any expert film-craft.
But, I suppose, if those of us who have already seen Barbie truly paid any attention to its most basic message, we'd already know — well in advance of this month or even the fall film season — that, if any film from the 2023 summer blockbusters will actually walk home with the ‘Best Picture’ prize, it won’t be Barbie herself but her box office husband, of course, immediately deemed a much more “appropriate” winner. Now, why could that be…?
Temperature check
HOT!
The Holdovers (2023)
Peacock • Comedy • Letting It Go
This review is a reproduction of the original, published in the 27th serving of Hot Tea on 17 January 2024. It’s reprinted here in its entirety, to represent this film in the Best Picture slate.
Synopsis
A curmudgeonly teacher at a New England boarding school reluctantly redresses lapses in the educations of students whose parents left them alone over winter break.
My take
Da’vine Joy Randolph is poised to win the Oscar this year for her thrilling supporting work in Alexander Payne’s new film, The Holdovers.
The first Giamatti-Payne collaboration in nearly 20 years (since the pair inimitably collaborated over Merlot in Napa Valley; see Sideways, 2004), it is a thrill to see the two at work together again. Giamatti’s Paul Hunham is a perfect fit for the actor’s talents: a shrill, sheepish, tyrannical, compassionate, insensitive “student of the old guard” who issues Latin from a lectern with as much concentrated fervor as a laser from a high tower — the man must have been such fun for Giamatti to play! For his efforts, I wouldn’t be surprised if Giamatti too walked away with more than one golden trophy this awards season.
However, the queen of this film is, indeed, Da’vine Joy Randolph herself. Rendering a heartbreaking performance as an aggrieved mother on staff at the boarding school where Giamatti’s Hunham teaches, Randolph swims with articulate finesse through both the shallow and slow and the deep and choppy waters her character as written must cross. Perhaps more than any other supporting performance this year — from a male or female actor — she made me believe that she WAS that character; and the emotional story of her arc on paper, when followed with such fidelity, becomes its own reward.
Beyond these central performances and the capable hands Payne and his screenwriter David Hemingson used to respectively direct and pen them for the screen, The Holdovers shines most and best via its depiction of setting: the careful yet expansive designs of the production, the period-perfect make-up and hair, and the tinted cinematography, which together instantly convey the time and feel of the action in each scene. One needs only the single frame of the boys with long shaggy hair in loosened ties amidst the frosty tundra of December’s New England, to understand instinctively the where and the when of the environment.
Certainly a personal Top 10 film this year, The Holdovers is well worth the watch.
Temperature check
Hot
Killers of the Flower Moon
Apple TV+ • Drama • Manifesting Destiny
Synopsis
Racial discontent among the White Westward expansionists motivates the untimely and systematic endings of the lives and wealth of the Osage people.
My take
At this point, readers, I think that it’s pretty clear: The cinema-going world is just too in love with Martin Scorcese. I know; I know! It’s a blasphemy to say so about a man who created such cultural touchstones as Raging Bull (1980), GoodFellas (1990), and Gangs of New York (2002) — especially amongst the film bros who, no doubt, shout his name whenever they shut their eyes to imagine what more they could ever want from the movies — but then here we are, with me saying so (and saying fie on the film bros to boot).
The thing is, Killers of the Flower Moon isn’t a bad film per se. In my modicum of faith to the man I admit myself, I doubt he could ever make a truly bad film — especially now, in his relative dotage (which arguably began ten years ago, after his last truly impressive film: The Wolf of Wall Street [2013]). The man has simply seen too much and consequently knows all too well what is and what is not great cinema, to ever err wildly or veer amateurishly into the truly bad section of the film library. Still, for a director who with a single footstep into directing for the Broadway stage could conceivably handily complete an EGOT — and in particular an EGOT exclusively for Directing, a massively difficult and therefore massively impressive feat only Bob Fosse and Mike Nichols (darn that elusive Grammy Award for Best Music Film) have ever even come close to achieving — Killers of the Flower Moon (along with its predecessor, The Irishman [2019], for that matter) is simply too far from the concise, impactful, and provocative filmmaking of Scorcese’s relative youth to truly add further credit to his otherwise noteworthy legacy.
And let me not place too much blame directly and exclusively onto Mr. Scorcese’s shoulders here; his longtime partner in filmmaking Thelma Schoonmaker, whose talents have crafted some of the most memorably well-edited films in my personal cinema history (e.g., The Departed [2006] for which she won my Pick as well as the Oscar for Editing), is also squarely to blame here. Simply put, where was the editing? Where were the choices? I’m reminded of the lines Katie Holmes’ character speaks in Steve Kloves’ screenplay for Curtis Hanson’s (2000) Wonder Boys, when she questions her writing professor’s personal dereliction of responsibility to his craft and to his audience after she finishes reading his epically long draft for his second long-awaited novel:
“Grady, you know how in class […] you’re always telling us that writers make choices?”
“Yea…?”
“And, even though your book is really beautiful — I mean, amazingly beautiful — it’s … it’s at times … it’s, uh … very detailed. … Uh, you know, the genealogies of everyone’s horses and the dental records and so on, and I could be wrong but it sort of reads in places like, you didn’t really make any choices … at all.”
Now, I won’t type here and say with any level of seriousness that Scorcese and Schoonmaker’s own derelictions this time were nearly so grave as to deserve those exact words; after all, they did make some choices — startlingly few to my eyes, but still some. The point here, readers, is that Killers of the Flower Moon is simply too long a film to not have captivating visuals or enrapturing performances regularly remind us why we’re still watching extended scenes of halting dialogue or personal anguish long after the points of those scenes have already been made.
Take the “You have to sign this” scene, about two hours and nineteen minutes into the runtime — an important scene, a pivotal scene even, which I’d never advocate cutting altogether from the film. The point of the scene is — {spoiler alert} — to illustrate the near culmination of discontent and distrust between Leonardo di Caprio’s relatively gullible Ernest Burkhart and Robert de Niro’s smarmy William “King” Hale, Ernest’s uncle. King wants Ernest to sign a contract, surrendering all legal claims to the Osage land Ernest may eventually have after the passing of his wife to the care and ownership of his uncle, King himself, should anything also ever happen to Ernest. Ernest isn’t so gullible as to let that noteworthy condition on his own health and well-being completely pass him by, and understandably stammers and stalls for time enough in the conversation to figure his way out of signing very possibly his own death warrant. It’s altogether nearly a five-minute scene that, I think, well exemplifies the difference I’m seeing between what I’ll call practically wasted and impractically wasted time.
The practically wasted time? The stammering and stalling Ernest adds to the conversation with King, to avoid signing the contract.
It’s narratively plausible, if not necessary;
it adds to the building dramatic tension about where Ernest’s faith truly lies in the story; and
it illustrates the pressure of King’s demands on the world around him, a pressure that does not stop short of even his own family’s bloody demise.
The impractically wasted time? The thirty-second wordless preämble before the conversation even starts, during which time we wait and watch Ernest’s brother fetch him and walk him out to King’s idling car, plus the minute and a half of conversation time during which King feebly complains about his supposed stomach issues and tangentially works up to regrooming Ernest for his signature after his initial hesitations about giving it.
The preämble is totally unnecessary and wastes an opportunity for accumulated tension between this scene and the previous scene, in which King also ties up a loose end by staging the death of a man who simply knew too much.
Further weakening the pacing, the stomach complaints and the regrooming add nothing to the dramatic tension of the scene itself and fumble opportunities to reïnforce King’s selfish motivations to obtain his ends regardless of the costs.
Perhaps with different actors the stomach complaints and the rambling could have been interesting devices to reveal King’s machinating, implicating his own health and weakness to obtain sympathy and ultimately compliance from his gullible nephew; but de Niro’s King is hardly so crafty to manage those effects. While I can additionally fault Scorcese here for failing to coach his longtime friend and collaborator through a more successful performance during filming on set, ultimately the greater grievance here and elsewhere lies in post-production, with Scorcese and Schoomaker’s approval of this and other scenes whose individual runtimes, given the performances or lacks thereof on screen, are nearly half chaff needing to be winnowed in the final editing process. Mathematically speaking — for all you readers out there who love the calculable world — I’d say the marginal benefit of each additional frame in those many, many half-hearted scenes effectively approaches zero while the marginal cost is always the greater demand on our view-time.
Now, before I become a victim to my own critiques on length and its demands on attention, let me just say, at least the costumes and sets are beautiful in their muddy fidelity to period.
Temperature check
Cold (because I guarantee you’ll look at your watch while you’re watching it)
Maestro
Netflix • Biopic • Candide
Synopsis
A tacit but frank agreement to leave a composer’s many passions uncorked and unmoderated for the sake of his music deeply taints an otherwise happy marriage.
My take
I’ll admit, my first impression of Bradley Cooper’s Maestro was essentially confusion: Why was this obviously queer-friendly depiction of a creative musical icon tethering itself incessantly to the strictures and structures of heterosexual romance? What — did the production studio not think it’d get enough viewers if it made a film about a volatile genius soaked in as much homosexual action as the man really was? Or did Cooper himself need to beef up the role of Bernstein’s wife enough to attract a prestigious actress like Carey Mulligan to the project? Or was it simply a misguided sense of fidelity to the “reality of the times” in which Bernstein lived and worked, when a man was a doting husband to a charming wife first and a philandering partying MSM second? I just couldn’t understand why a film about a man who clearly loved men ever became predominantly a film about the same man’s ardent and arduous love for a woman, let alone why a film about one of the most dynamic musicians of the 20th century ever became a film about any romance at all? The whole thing reeked to me of the style and tradition of the embattled genius romances of the past (e.g.,
Moonstruck [Jewison, dir., & Shanley, wri., 1987];
A Beautiful Mind [Howard, dir., & Goldsman, wri., 2001];
The Theory of Everything [Marsh, dir., & McCarten, wri., 2014]);
and I supposed at least that, by the measure of such a heritage, I should be glad that Bernstein’s affairs with other men were shown in any capacity in Maestro at all, after what popular acclaim the absence of Nash’s gay activities from A Beautiful Mind received in 2001. But this very much isn’t 2001 anymore, so really: what gives? Why this framing? And, most importantly, where was the work?? Even A Beautiful Mind found ways to show the man doing a lot of abstract and cryptological math to arrive at celebrated solutions; it didn’t just show the solutions themselves, premade like prints or recordings we all already have access to. Save perhaps its one signature scene, where was the maestro in Maestro?
Since that initial impression, I haven’t found any smoking-gun evidence to support a clear answer, readers, so abandon that particular hope here if you were carrying it. What explanation I have come to, in order to at least satisfy my own questions, appeals to parsimony only: Bradley Cooper is not a good writer. Let me explain:
Cooper has written exactly two films: Maestro and his own (2017) A Star Is Born. In both cases, he had the fortune of working with acclaimed co-writers: on Maestro Oscar-winner Josh Singer and on A Star Is Born Oscar winner and seven-time nominee Eric Roth. However, despite the contributions by these co-writers on paper, because Cooper was also directing (and acting!) in the films, the look and feel of each when it finally hit the screen, no doubt, leaned heavily into Cooper's own favor: What he wanted to see on screen, how he wanted to see it, in the order in which it all appealed most to him… took precedence, be it accidentally by circumstance (as light passing through a glass could never resist refracting its qualities) or intentionally by design (as a revivalist seeks out to make a known work his own). The content and voice of Maestro in particular should have leaned all the harder, because unlike A Star Is Born, which enjoyed the benefit of a pre-existing source material thrice tried before the American public (in 1937, 1954, and 1976), Maestro left Cooper to his own originating devices, generating a final feature closer to his own personal vision than A Star Is Born really could ever have been. So, we should fully expect that, whatever impression we get from Maestro, it’s truly Cooper’s baby.
Whatever it was we expected to see when we learned a film called Maestro would cover the life and work of Leonard Bernstein, we ultimately did see a film about a man finding a woman to love and marry who was willing to at least accept, if not celebrate, his various impulses for what they were rather than strive to change him. However good or bad a writer Cooper truly is, there’s no way he’s so asleep at the keyboard, that he’d pick that particular focus for the film without having a solid reason behind it. Reading and rereading Cooper’s own leading performance of Bernstein, we can see some clues to identity of that reason.
As Bernstein, Cooper plays on the duality of the artist’s face: one face for the public and another for his private life. In public, he is programmed, sheepish, looking down more often than looking ahead, and triumphant only when literally on the podium. In private, he is direct, territorial — he simultaneously composes and uses the toilet with the door open, he casually fantasizes about killing his father, he crows loudly out the window at getting a big career break before smacking the ass cheeks of his lover… — all before and after his on-screen marriage to Carey Mulligan’s Felicia Montealegre Cohn.
For Cooper, then it seems, the tension in Bernstein’s life isn’t really about his marriage or even his composing at all — compositions pour out of him and onto the screen premade, like prints or recordings we all already have access to, remember? — so, no, the tension in Bernstein’s life is actually between the public and private faces of his work and his relationships. The marriage is just one clear, long-standing example, or arena even, wherein that specific tension can and will play out (viz., when obligations to Bernstein’s own happiness confront obligations he’s made to entertain the world outside himself).
Given (1) this intention to explore the friction between essentially taking from and giving to other people via Bernstein’s life and (2) the great probability that Cooper at least stewarded, if not directly authored, that intention onto the screen, the fact that the intention gets muddled, if not lost, within the plot of Maestro must be due to Cooper’s own hand in telling that story — a culpable hand that the still powerful dance and choral sequences in Maestro, upheld by a strong point of view behind the camera (thanks, Matthew Libatique), further identify as less Cooper’s directing or acting hand than his writing hand. The man just doesn’t know how to originate a good story as a vehicle for so complex a thesis on screen, regardless of how well he can direct each scene or act within it. The scenes do individually all work to show his talents in those arenas; it’s only how they string together, how they make a point in narrating Bernstein’s life, that falters.
So, there you have it, my analysis of what actually went wrong with Maestro: Bad bones undermined:
strong performances (particularly from Mulligan),
solid cinematography,
transformative make-up, and
(of course) superlative sound
from becoming the otherwise impressive manifestations of a debate about the creative and interpersonal costs of living a disjoint life à la Bernstein’s. For the real quality of the man’s music, I wish it’d gone better.
Temperature check
Cold (unless you love performance)
Oppenheimer
Peacock • Drama • Dr. Strangelove
Synopsis
J. Robert Oppenheimer’s determination to invent the atomic bomb leaves scorched earth everywhere he looks.
My take
Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is, by a large margin, the most likely film to take home the ‘Best Picture’ Oscar at this year’s ceremony. Let no one be shocked, readers; already the winner of the equivalent prizes from:
the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (which runs the Golden Globe Awards),
the Critics’ Choice Association,
the Screen Actors’ Guild,
the Producers’ Guild of America,
the Directors’ Guild of America, and
the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA),
Oppenheimer is sliding into home base with as much ease and surety as the sun slides below the horizon every dusk — and represents no less the same everyday dullness of a major celestial event we have all come to expect from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences (AMPAS). In that way, Oppenheimer is, succinctly, the most “by-the-book” ‘Best Picture’ winner since Green Book (Farrelly [dir./wri.], Vallelonga, & Hayes Currie [wri.], 2018). It’s:
‘serious’ enough to not deter the staunch artists in the Academy;
biographical, especially about actual famous figures in science and politics;
male (because the voting body still prefers men);
carefully ‘diverse’ but still all-star in its cast;2
popular enough in the mainstream culture somehow to not displease the populists, who vote for what they ‘liked’ most rather than what’s truly best;
focussed on a dangerous modern issue whose dramatic consequences are underscored by the direction of the plot;
yet remote enough in time, place, or another dimension of distance to not actually perturb more than fascinate audiences; and
big-budget enough to wow and commend the studios, whose influence at the end of the day still governs the industry.
For many, this pedigree is more than enough; awards from several prestigious recognized bodies, textbook features, and a writer-director whose previous work (e.g., Inception, 2010; Interstellar, 2014; The Dark Knight Rises, 2012; Memento, 2000) has regularly decorated the walls and bookshelves of a generation of the movie-going public automatically translate into ready if not blind acceptance that this film indeed is the best film of the year.
I, however, am not so accepting and I hope, readers, neither are you. Now, that’s not my way of saying, “Never upvote this film.” If you do truly think highly of Oppenheimer, if you do truly believe that it is the best film this year, then defend it. I just want you to do so with better (or at least more detailed) reasons than, essentially, “it’s cool!” and “other people say so” — especially because, I actually agree, “it IS cool” (and, obviously, other people are saying so). Being cool (i.e., having:
big explosions,
a complementarily synthetic and occasionally booming score,
abstracted visuals,
dramatic highs and lows, and
an important and colorful lesson on the haziest part of history: i.e., our recent past
) just isn’t enough to merit a place on the podium, especially when there are issues those parenthetical highlights ignore.
For me, Oppenheimer’s biggest issues of all tie back to one identifiable thread: how it treats its women.
Like many other films that have reached this point in their respective award years, Oppenheimer is nearly exclusively male — a characteristic that, as I noted above, actually makes it more appealing to the old-guard, male-leaning Academy viewership. For me, I don’t instinctively favor or disfavor an all-male or an all-female cast;
Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (Weir [dir./wri.] & Collee [wri.], 2003) and
12 Angry Men (Lumet [dir.] & Rose [wri.], 1957)
are two examples of fundamentally male films that are excellent, just as
The Hours (Daldry [dir.], & Hare [wri.], 2002) and
Black Narcissus (Powell & Pressburger, 1947)
are two examples of fundamentally female films that are excellent. What I do disfavor is when a very gendered film like Oppenheimer (or any other) suddenly lapses in quality whenever characters of the opposite gender spend time on screen. No longer a rich, innovative, or elegant portrait of essential truths about the human experience, the film instead then trades in reductive stereotypes that implicate the writer(s), director(s), actors, and editor(s) who let the imbalance make it all the way to the final version. Can’t all the characters in a film enjoy the full dignity of human description, however they relate to the protagonist’s story?
Let’s take Oppenheimer’s two women: Emily Blunt’s sad ragdoll Katherine “Kitty” Oppenheimer and Florence Pugh’s caffeinated nymph Jean Tatlock. Already, these characters are hardly Kenneth Branagh’s impressive and challenging Niels Bohr, Robert Downey Jr.’s shadowy and strategic Lewis Strauss, Josh Hartnett’s upstanding if mildly conservative Professor Ernest Lawrence, or Matt Damon’s friendly but aggressively nationalistic Major Leslie Groves. Why?
No, not because as female characters in a social context that relegates women almost entirely to the home and/or the bedroom they exist almost exclusively in those limited spaces and discuss similarly limited topics. Among others, Beatrice Straight’s Louise Schumacher in Network (Lumet [dir.] & Chayefsky [wri,], 1976) and Laura Linney’s Abigail Adams in HBO’s John Adams (Hooper [dir.] & Ellis [wri.], 2008) disabused us of any notion that ascriptions to intimacy and domesticity inherently require flaccid or flat supporting (female) characters, who are essentially props to the central (male) experience.
No, instead because, unlike those exemplary characters’, their inner worlds fail to escape the prescriptive boxes in which their public stations mean to keep them. I mean, as a duo Kitty and Jean don’t even escape the Madonna-Whore dichotomy of dull, stereotypical, and patriarchal thinking; and, whereas the male supporting characters evidently live rounded lives that extend well beyond the boundaries of Oppenheimer’s interactions with them (e.g., Lawrence teaches courses, has political views, publishes and collaborates with others…; Strauss hardly even speaks to Oppenheimer the whole film between his Senate hearings and backroom meetings), these women seem to have no existences beyond their two-dimensional connections with the leading man, to the extent that when he tells Jean he can no longer see her she actually replies, “But what if I need you? You said, you would always answer.” Does she have NO ONE ELSE?
Disappointingly, even though Pugh fights to retain a dignity in her performance of a sex object, she cannot trespass the boundaries Nolan holds her to from page to frame — and Blunt doesn’t even try. It’s this misuse of what could have otherwise been sincerely interesting and impactful characters in the psychology of the film, on top of the narrative misogyny that this misuse bizarrely involves, that is the foundation of why I hesitate so strongly about Oppenheimer as a film overall.
To make such an otherwise elegant cinematic work and then throw it away on supporting characters and scenes you could fit just as well into any James Bond film implicates a breakdown of the creative process that depreciates the value of the film overall: from year’s best to good try. Nothing can take away the real successes Oppenheimer does have in many especially technical departments (e.g., Sound Editing, Visual Effects), but mixed in with the kind of filmmaking that allows half-hearted characters onto the screen those real successes are an incomplete glimmer of what the overall product could have been in another reality than our own.
Temperature check
Tepid
Past Lives
Showtime • Romance • By any other name
Synopsis
A Korean emigrée and her one-time homegrown boyfriend contemplate their attraction to one another on his fated visit to the U.S.
My take
Celine Song’s somber reflection on the ebbing tides of chanced love was the one film I almost saw but didn’t actually see at last year’s Sundance Film Festival. Despite the film’s prestigious appearance, there was something dull or wanting in even its preview for me, to dissuade me from pulling the trigger and prioritizing it over other options I had at the time. While its wide celebration following the festival initially made me regret the decision as an oversight, my eventual watching of the film later last year surprisingly reconfirmed my initial impressions: Past Lives, while graceful indeed, left me little more than the drawn-out vespers of devotion-turned-ennui, when it really needed to leave a total requiem.
Purporting to be a deeply wistful romantic tragedy, the film is actually a recitation of personal prayers spoken softly by decidedly abstinent individuals who just can’t see past their own self-cloisterings. While their abnegation in the modern era is in a way a novelty, main characters Hae Sung and Nora Moon are hardly the modern Peter Abelard and Héloïse d’Argenteuil; they aren’t prisoners of systems or strictures beyond their influence or control, but merely claim to be, seemingly to add sympathy-drawing gravitas to their own entirely self-imposed drama. Yes, the tides of life flow people together as easily as they ebb others apart; but, in an age of video chats, international work visas, understanding husbands, divorce, airplanes, and polyamory, it seems pitiful bordering on ridiculous that two adults with the interest, time, and ability could not put together a more lasting connection than a sinfully chaste “goodbye, forever” near a waiting car. While, no, readers, I am not and was never looking for this deeply Korean-American film to completely abandon its Korean perspectives for the torrid tropes of Western romantic affairs, the obnoxiously denialistic central thesis of the film still completely took me out of step with its otherwise gentle and contemplative themes. As willing as the filmmaker and her cast and crew were to let their characters marinate in the operant 인연 (inyeon) of their titular past, their implicitly unfulfilled present, and their inevitably despondent future, humanity’s general tendency to realize even its least noble desires especially in romance and sex during such tense moments of frisson as Nora and Hae Sung share in Past Lives, consequences be damned, (see Jane Campion’s elegant The Piano [1993] for one strident example) left the film smacking of an arbitrary inauthenticity to nature I’d expect from only outdated period dramas — Eastern or Western — wherein active social pressures contrive truly insurmountable obstacles to interpersonal happiness and solace.
O, The House of Mirth (Wharton, 1905) fans, say ‘aye’ — this one is for you.
For everyone else, look no further than Wong Kar Wai’s excellent (2000) In the Mood for Love for your wistful tragic East Asian romance; or, for unconsummated romances general, any of these other fantastic films:
Lost in Translation (Coppola, 2003),
Brief Encounter (Lean [dir./wri.], Coward, Havelock-Allan, & Neame [wri.], 1945),
Her (Jonze, 2013),
The Age of Innocence (Scorcese [dir./wri.] & Cocks [wri.], 1993),
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Demy, 1964),
Call Me by Your Name (Guadagnino [dir.] & Ivory [wri.], 2017), and
Casablanca (Curtiz [dir.], Epstein, Epstein, & Koch [wri.], 1942).
Temperature check
Cold
Poor Things
In Theaters • Comedy • Pinocchia
Synopsis
Given a body older than her age, a young girl learns about the world through sampling its many ventures.
My take
Yorgos Lanthimos abhors didactic filmmaking. Quoted in Sight and Sound last month, the filmmaker declared,
When I watch something and I’m being told too many things and being told to feel a certain way, I have a bad reaction. I’ve nothing to gain from watching this very thin, narrow version of life.
It’s natural for me to want to take away things in order to have something to give. You’re taking out things in order to allow people to engage and enjoy it more. And be more energetic too instead of saying, “It’s this and only this.”
The difficulty with making narrative film under this philosophy (cf., Jacques Tati’s brilliant non-narrative [1967] Playtime for an example of filmmaking escaping this difficulty despite being made under essentially the same philosophy) is that, while it clearly leaves the door open for beneficial exploration and experimentation, it seems to repel commitment to any singular idea or set of ideas as a narrative purpose; the party is never full, only ever filling.
True to that conflict, Poor Things is a highly experimental but distinctly atheoretical anthology of a film. Most nearly related to Disney’s (1940) Pinocchio, Poor Things retains the kernels of purpose regarding maturity, trust, and honesty that that previous film admired; but, rather than ever refine any around the fire of a central thesis, prefers to roll onward, collecting ever more flavors instead of serious popcorn on sexual freedom and bodily autonomy, short- vs. long-term pleasure, charity vs. corruption, and reverence vs. rebellion. This “nothing but sugar and violence” attitude, readers, is Lanthimos’ explicit goal; so, in a way the film is ‘well-executed.’ The trouble remains, however, that this ‘well-executed’ feeling is also inescapably one of being distinctly underbaked.
Sure, Poor Things is visually interesting; stark black-and-white into cloyingly technicolor cinematography, quasi-scientific environments featuring Wonka-esque accessories, and a thirty-something woman acting like a petulant three-year-old child all call for and hold the attention; but it’s hard to see how, in the absence of clear direction, this buffet of cinematic desserts amounts to anything more than an array of cinematic confections. Sure, there is talent in Emma Stone’s dynamically aged performance, but absent a distinct root to ground its theatrics the performance feels hollow, enough for an elaborated TikTok reel but not quite enough for a “year’s best” achievement. The whole of the rest of the film is much the same.
The only real exception here is Mark Ruffalo, who imbues his Duncan Wedderburn with such seedy pathos to entice and then disgust the maturing protagonist and her audience, that despite his wiles he remains a sympathetic force and narrative scaffolding for the plot to cling to. His performance is, I’m glad to say, nothing short of the finest yet in his career.
Temperature check
Tepid
The Zone of Interest
In Theaters • Drama • The Banality of Evil
Synopsis
An officer of the Third Reich, his entitled wife, and their insouciant children live bucolic lives just on the other side of the wall from the Auschwitz concentration camp.
My take
Jonathan Glazer is one of our greatest living filmmakers. His Birth (2004) and his Under the Skin (2013) already lived vividly in my memory as masterpieces of the form, well before I sat down in the theater last month to see his latest film, The Zone of Interest. It’s more than that his past films were great; other directors’ films were and are great and still fail to intelligently push the boundaries of style and symbolism narratively and technically the way Glazer’s films have. To see Birth or Under the Skin is to have a simultaneously elegant and unsettling experience that disabuses you of unnecessarily limited notions of how form, color, and music can be combined to deliver narrative and emotional impact on the screen, or did so so memorably for me that my understanding of the cinema forever changed from those first viewings.
So, it was with no small satchel of expectations that I tucked myself into the theater last month, to (at last!) see his latest work — a pleasure that seems to transpire only once every ten years! — and, readers, I was in no way disappointed. Glazer once again brings his inimitable eye and narrative voice to this unique, harsh, and ultimately horrific historical fiction about the life of the officer stationed in charge of operations at the Auschwitz concentration camp. Alongside his wife and their several children who all enjoy the privileges of that station with the blissful ignorance of any aspirational housewife and her liberated brood in the warm and fertile countryside, that officer exemplifies the now often quoted “banality of evil” Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt (1963) described so incisively to retrospectively make sense of the sheer scale of genocidal coördination the Third Reich needed to accomplish its goal of a perfect Aryan state. The man is somewhat lazy, grasping, self-interested, adulterous, ingratiating — ordinary, just ordinary: the picture of ordinariness in hierarchical middle management — and he and his similar family are fascinating to watch and hear exactly because of that quality.
Glazer and his brilliant cinematographer Łukasz Żal, who won my Pick for cinematography in 2019 for his stellar work on Pawel Pawilowski’s (somewhat patriarchal but still) articulate (2018) Cold War, are smart about this opportunity in the ordinariness of the story; rarely do they let a frame go by without implicating the crisis of atrocities just outside the core of the film’s story. Smoke billowing in the background of a child’s backyard birthday party (as in the image above), ash tainting the running river where the officer casually fishes while his children play nearby, and the silently roaring pulses of the firelight through the evening curtains insist that the characters and their viewers relentlessly confront and consequently either accept or ignore the atrocities just on the other side of the garden wall in order to go on living.
This understated approach to an everyday analysis of the function and reality surrounding a camp like Auschwitz is the film’s greatest strength. Where other films this year saturate themselves and therefore us in their audiences with their indulgences, this film marvels in its eloquent restraint. Choosing specifically when and how to escape in sights or in sounds from the language it’s fluently created to tell its story, The Zone of Interest reminds us in its nomination here that there is still a place for truly excellent cinema at the Academy Awards. Expect it to handily take home at least the Oscars for Sound and for International Feature Film.
Temperature check
Steaming
Happy film-going, readers! Til next time!
To wit, this year there are even some historically great film actors who couldn’t pull off far simpler roles with such acute finesse as Machado-Graner demonstrates in Anatomy with his.
Think the intergenerational and intercultural appeal of casting Kenneth Branagh alongside Josh Hartnett alongside Florence Pugh alongside Cillian Murphy alongside Emily Blunt…