It’s that time of year again! The eve of the Academy Awards. For those who are interested, here are my thoughts on 9 of the 10 Best Picture nominees. It was a pretty strong year for films, IMO. My favorites were American Fiction, Barbie, and Past Lives, but all have their virtues and rewards. Note: there may be some spoilers here, so beware if you care about that.
American Fiction, dir. Cord Jefferson
Jeffrey Wright plays Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, a grumpy college professor / novelist who becomes frustrated at what he considers to be hack, cliched fiction about “the Black experience” winning awards and selling like gangbusters while his own novels languish. He decides he’ll show everyone how ridiculous it is by writing his own version under a false name. Lo and behold, it becomes a sensation, and shenanigans ensue. This makes the film sound like a straight-up satire in the vein of Spike Lee’s Bamboozled, but it’s much more nuanced than that. There is a long stretch of the movie spent on the coast of Massachusetts where Monk’s family comes together and interpersonal dynamics play out in a fascinating way. He’s a complicated person with a complicated family whose version of “the Black experience” is very different from the standard tropes of fiction. The satire and the character drama can sometimes be a jarring combo, but Monk’s personal history does help to explain his keen eye for the absurd and his cynical interest in exploiting it. This is a really interesting film with a lot to say that cannot easily be unpacked.
Anatomy of a Fall, dir. Justine Triet
Another film about a writer that ends ambiguously, this one involves the suspicious death of the main character’s husband and her subsequent trial for murder. Their child – who is nearly blind as a result of a childhood accident – is put in a stressful position as the only potential witness. The narrative relies on a distance from the characters’ inner lives that forces the viewer into the role of judge or juror. In some ways this is effective in getting across the point that the truth sometimes can’t be known, and we should choose the most humane response in the absence of certainty. But… it left me cold.
Barbie, dir. Greta Gerwig
Yes, it’s a live action film about a mass-produced plastic doll – and one of my favorite films of the year. I have seen it three times! To say I was not the target audience is an understatement: I have always disliked dolls and “girly” things and hated the color pink. But in concept and execution, I found this to be the most daring and successful work in this category, and in my opinion it is a travesty that Gerwig was not nominated for Best Director. She truly achieved something amazing with this film, which is hilarious, weird, surprisingly moving, and quite trenchant on the topic of gender dynamics. Each time I’ve watched it, I’ve caught clever lines I missed previously and found more things to appreciate in the production design, performances, and themes. I’ve listened to the soundtrack countless times. I’ve read many behind the scenes essays. Yep, I’m a fan.
Killers of the Flower Moon, dir. Martin Scorsese
A semi-historical depiction of a shameful stretch of American history in which white people conspired to murder and steal from Native Americans who owned oil-producing land in the Osage Nation of Oklahoma. Scorsese’s motives in telling this story are laudable, but I found the characters to be thinly drawn and the narrative a mixture of slow and fractured. There is an attempt to honor the perspectives of the Osage, but too much time is spent with Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro and not enough with the tribe members for it to really work. And the romance between Ernest and Mollie is not written or acted strongly enough to be the glue that the film needs to hold the two halves of the story together. It seems emblematic of these difficulties that partway through the film we find out that Mollie is pregnant *again*, with the first pregnancy and child having never been mentioned. Years have passed… who knew? The kids are not important to the plot or characters in any way, except for a third act swerve on Ernest’s part that serves a crucial plot development. Motivations are stated, but not shown in a manner that convinces. But thank Peep for Jesse Plemons and his FBI compatriots, who arrive several hours in and turn what has been a dreary slog of evil into something more limber and interesting.
Maestro, dir. Bradley Cooper
A biographical film about the famous composer and orchestral conductor, Leonard Bernstein. There are some impressive scenes and performances in this film – especially the ones involving Carey Mulligan as Bernstein’s wife, Felicia – but it suffers from a lack of context. Why should all the viewers who don’t know who Leonard Bernstein is care about it? Give us some grounding, at least. What we get is a bunch of fragments that mostly relate to his romantic life, which are fitfully interesting but emphasize jealousy in a way that I don’t like, especially as they seem to pit the long-suffering wife against Bernstein’s various male lovers. Where’s the illumination of what drove him creatively and made him such an important figure in the world of music? We get a big performance near the end, but it’s not enough; there’s no through line from the personal scenes to the professional ones to make this a coherent work. Case in point: Aaron Copland shows up for about 10 seconds, never to appear again. I wanted that story!
Oppenheimer, dir. Christopher Nolan
J. Robert Oppenheimer, “father of the atomic bomb”, is the subject of Nolan’s latest epic, another film that bills itself as a biopic but is largely focused on one or two elements of the main character’s life, leaving huge gaps where important information should be. I did not find this satisfying and became increasingly annoyed at all the time spent on hearings and political backstabbing, which seemed unimportant in the larger scheme of things. On the plus side, the acting and cinematography were good, and I liked the scenes in which a stressed Oppenheimer imagined his surroundings rattling and coming undone around him, as if one of his nukes had just gone off in the distance. Paradoxically, since the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were never depicted, those small-scale moments were when the film came closest to conveying the scope and horror of the destructive power he had unleashed.
Past Lives, dir. Celine Song
A Korean American woman meets up with her childhood friend after decades apart. They have a mysterious connection that might or might not be romantic, though she is now married to an American man. This film feels both meditative and suspenseful, which is quite a feat. Will their lives be upended or no? Without giving anything away, I can say that it is a beautiful and heart wrenching story of split identity and the pull of old ties. We are all amalgams of times, places, and people we have known, and that is even more true of the immigrants among us. There is no easy resolution here, and that feels very true to life.
Poor Things, dir. Yorgos Lanthimos
A twisted take on the tale of Frankenstein, the “creature” in this case is Bella, a reanimated woman with a baby’s brain swapped in for her own. She starts out babbling and pissing herself to humorous effect but is such a precocious learner that next thing you know, she’s off gallivanting around Europe having adventures with a hilariously sleazy lawyer played by Mark Ruffalo. I really enjoyed Emma Stone’s performance, the humor, and the grotesquerie, but was a bit put off by all the sex which was, according to the science fiction premise, pretty much with a toddler… ick. But at least there is some reward for Bella and comeuppance for the assholes at the end.
The Holdovers, dir. Alexander Payne
Paul Giamatti plays a boarding school teacher who is given the unwelcome duty of watching over the students who have nowhere to go during Christmas break. His most gifted student is one of them. Da’Vine Joy Randolph plays the school’s kitchen manager, who has her own apartment (with TV!) and generously (and occasionally grumpily) welcomes both of them in. All three play off each other in unexpected and emotionally rewarding ways, and the end result is a testament to maverick qualities that mercifully leaves off the “this is how they became big successes” coda. Their interactions in the course of this two-week period are enough to make us love them.
The Zone of Interest, dir. Jonathan Glazer
As far as I am aware, this film did not play in any of my local theaters, and it was only available to purchase for $20 before the Oscars telecast. I was not that eager to experience what I gather is a highly stylized take on “the mundanity of evil”, so this is the one best picture nominee I have not yet seen.
