I always make it a point to watch all the Oscar-nominated films every year–particularly the ones in the horse race for Best Picture–for the particular reason that, despite its flaws, the Oscars is a good measure of the cinematic zeitgeist. Often wrong, of course, but nevertheless still interesting.
A sinking feeling settled over me as I tried to finish my checklist of films to see from last year, however: 2011 was quite an underwhelming film year. Not a bad year, just totally underwhelming. This year, there are nine nominees–and my money is on Michel Hazanavicius’ The Artist
. I love Steven Spielberg’s War Horse
, but it’s too traditional and endearingly silly, and no one’s betting on it. I love Terrence Malick’s enigmatic The Tree of Life
as well, but no way’s this one’s going to win: it’s too polarizing. People I know either really love it, or really hate it. Martin Scorsese’s Hugo
, Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris
, and Bennett Miller’s Moneyball
left me cold, and Alexander Payne’s The Descendants
and Tate Taylor’s The Help
seem like a trifle, although I enjoyed them immensely. But what I hated the most was Stephen Daldry’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
.
The first three-quarters of Daldry’s adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel set me on the edge–what a cloying movie about an annoying boy who sets out on a contrived adventure around New York to deal with the grief of losing a father to the tragedies of 9/11. Beautifully shot by Chris Menges who brings to Manhattan an uncanny combination of the fantastic and the real, what the film suffers from for the most part is its story. None of it is plausible, and parts of is merely incredible waste of incredible talents–Max von Sydow, John Goodman, Viola Davis, Tom Hanks, even Thomas Horn are given roles that are long on the sentimental and short on identifiability. Their characters are like Teflon: Daldry throws all manner of dramatics at them, and they try their best to emote–but nothing sticks. Horn, a talented actor, plays Oskar Schell in an awkwardly written role that makes him a chore to watch. There were moments in the film where I just wanted to go ahead and slap him. I kept reminding myself however that the boy is supposed to be autistic, but if the filmmakers wanted to make his particular social difficultly both real and precocious at the same time, they’ve failed to do so. Instead he becomes very much like a tamer cousin of the monstrous boy in Let’s Talk About Kevin
, for some reason. The only saving grace in this movie is Sandra Bullock, who seems lightweight at first but comes to own the last quarter of the movie, dominating its twist ending as a kind of a reward for those who have struggled so far to watch and finish this film. She reminds us again why we love her in the first place, in movies as disarming as While You Were Sleeping
. But frankly, this is no Best Picture Oscar material. This is not a commendation on the Oscar’s taste. Then again, its taste never was commendable in the first place.
Then there’s The Descendants. I don’t know why I’m thinking this–I like Payne’s follow-up to Sideways
and About Schmidt
very much, but I don’t think it’s the important film everybody’s harking it to be. Sure, it’s an earnest and lovingly restrained melodrama, with great acting from George Clooney and especially Shailene Woodley who plays his headstrong teenage daughter, but it feels underwhelming to me somehow. No matter how hard I try and no matter how charmed I am with everything else about it, I still couldn’t help but say, so what? Family tragedy and adultery meet real-estate moral wrangling in Hawaii, and somehow I couldn’t bring myself to care. Maybe I’ve become a monster, and I have no more feelings. Damn it.
The same blahness also seem to inhabit Allen’s Midnight in Paris–which is strange for me to feel since I am a worshipful Allen fan, having watched all of his films, even the slight ones. Midnight in Paris seem perfectly crafted for my temperaments: it’s the story, after all, of a writer nostalgic of 1920s Paris inhabited by the likes of F. Scott Fitzegerald, Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Picasso, Gertrude Stein, Salvador Dali, and the rest of those luminaries that made that Golden Age more glittery. Then, without any reason whatsoever, he finds a “portal” to that nostalgia. And yet, I found it…meh.
Like Allen, two other masters of film are in the race, and both also subscribe to a patina of nostalgia–Spielberg and Scorsese, the visionaries who helped shape film the way we know it today. Spielberg’s War Horse recalls the =grandness of 1980s epics, informed by the lushness of John Ford. Then again, epics always produce a certain wariness in me: the usual earnestness of the plot, the sweeping cinematography calculated to be breathless, the performances calibrated for Oscar attention, the seriousness of it all… They all combine to make me dread the prospect of having to watch any of it – perhaps the same way most people become allergic to anything “required.” And so it goes. One had to see Steven Spielberg’s War Horse, an epic about a boy and his horse, because it has just been nominated for an Oscar for Best Picture. Based on the Tony-winning play of the same title, it goes Twenty Bucks on the horse-and-boy story, spinning a film set before and during the Great War. And yes, it is sweeping and earnest, clunky in places in that very attempt to be an Oscar movie reminiscent of Oscar movies of the 1980s – but it is ultimately engaging, and by God it skirts the predicable. For the most part, anyway. Jeremy Irvine as the boy who raises the horse manages to have gravity without suffering from the fact that the emotional center here is really the animal. That the film is really horse porn for little rich girls cannot be denied – but this is a good movie, nonetheless. Not a great one from a great director, but it is better than most of anything else from 2011. Does it deserve its Oscar nomination? Yes, it does.
Hugo, on the other hand, was a delight, but I can’t say I liked Martin Scorsese’s film very much, although it had plenty of moments of considerable enchantment. The look of the film is wonderful and whimsical, but most of my pleasure came from the fact that I am a rabid cineaste and I gasped in delight when I found out this film is really a valentine to the early days of cinema. I can see why Scorsese–perhaps the No. 1 Cineaste in the World–wanted to film this story based on the children’s book The Invention of Hugo Cabret
by Brian Selznick. Here we see an earnest tribute to the early fathers of cinema – Thomas Edison, the Lumiere Brothers, Edwin S. Porter, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, among many others… That this is also the story of a plucky orphan slash inventor slash clock aficionado who secretly lives in the bowels of the grand central train station in Paris in the 1920s and who later steals from (and then befriends) a curmudgeon who runs a toy store seems almost beside the point – the point being that this is a film about the history of film.
And maybe that is the film’s flaw: to not being able to carefully bridge the two halves (the two hearts!) of its narrative. Because when it does plunge into its cinematic whimsies, it is a pleasure. But when we are placed back into the world of Hugo’s reality, the film falters–and partly because the supporting characters are buffoonish edging close to irrelevance. I can’t believe I am saying this, but Ben Kingsley, Sacha Baron Cohen, Ray Winstone, Emily Mortimer, Christopher Lee, Helen McCrory, Michael Stuhlbarg, Jude Law, Frances de la Tour, Richard Griffiths, and worst of all, Chloí« Grace Moretz– capable actors all–try too hard to be in a children’s film, and end up with acting so hammy and unfortunate. The only other saving grace here is Asa Butterfield (as Hugo) who alone brims with some acting sincerity. His is the most effective presence in this movie. (The other saving grace, of course, is our privileged entrance to George Melies’ wonderful world. Don’t know who that is? Time to hit those film history books then.)
But this is the year for The Artist
. There’s nothing new about Hazanavicius’ film. In fact it is a celebration of everything old in film–the old “meet cute,” the old romantic comedy arc, in a style as old as anything in cinema: a silent movie in black and white. In this day of Transformers movies, something like this is audacious enough it seems completely new, hence the hoopla and the Oscar love. But what joy this film was! Except during scenes of utter melancholy, this kept me grinning from beginning to end. What this and Scorsese’s Hugo did is to remind us–especially the cineastes among us–of the elemental joy of cinema: pure entertainment with moving pictures. I watched Harold Lloyd in Safety Last [1923] a few days back, and I enjoyed that one, too, immensely. If there’s anything Hazanavicius’ film can accomplish, it is for us to take cinematic nostalgia by the hand and see what we have missed out.
But didn’t Woody Allen warn us something about nostalgia in Midnight in Paris? Oh well.
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