OVP: Ragtime (1981)

Film: Ragtime (1981)
Stars: James Cagney, Brad Dourif, James Olson, Mary Steenburgen, Howard E. Rollins, Jr., Elizabeth McGovern, Donald O'Connor, Pat O'Brien, Mandy Patinkin, Debbie Allen, Norman Mailer...as well as very early performances in small roles from the likes of future stars Jeff Daniels, Fran Drescher, & Samuel L. Jackson
Director: Milos Forman
Oscar History: 8 nominations (Best Supporting Actor-Howard E. Rollins, Jr., Supporting Actress-Elizabeth McGovern, Adapted Screenplay, Cinematography, Art Direction, Costume Design, Original Score, Original Song-"One More Hour")
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

There are very few films remaining that have been nominated for 8+ Oscars that I haven't seen (the stats are harder to find than you'd think).  It's an even shorter list if you don't count movies that weren't cited for Best Picture...in fact, it's now a list that doesn't exist at all.  Only five films have received over eight nominations for the Academy Awards at the Oscars without a Best Picture citation, and with today's review I've seen them all: They Shoot Horses, Don't They (the only one to get 9 nods), Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Dreamgirls, The Dark Knight, and 1981's Ragtime.  Based on the celebrated novel by EL Doctorow, this movie is a gigantic, all-star extravaganza linking together historical figures with fictional characters so unknown they don't have names, and kudos have to go out to the casting director for putting a number of future superstars onto the call sheet.  But the question is-why did a movie get this kind of adoration but (despite having a very prestigious source material & director), didn't get a nod for Best Picture?  Let's take a look, shall we?

(Spoilers Ahead) I have never read Doctorow's novel (shame on me, I know), so I don't know if this is faithful or not, but the movie is largely a tangled historical web that eventually settles on one storyline in the back-half of the movie.  Essentially we have a lot of figures, some real-life (McGovern as famed model Evelyn Nesbit, Cagney as Fire Commissioner Rhinelander Waldo), and other characters, major characters in the film, who don't actually get names (Dourif plays "younger brother" while Steenburgen plays "Mother").  The film shows racism, as well as classism at the turn of the century, with newsreels featuring figures such as Harry Houdini, Teddy Roosevelt, and Stanford White (played by Mailer in the movie) to give us a sense of time (and its passage), while checking in on the lives of the main characters in the movie.  The back-half of the film, however, focuses almost exclusively on Coalhouse Walker (Rollins), a fictional figure who is a black man who has made something of a career for himself as a musician, but will not forgive a group of firefighters who destroyed his car while he was driving down-the-road.

The movie's focus on Coalhouse was probably inevitable, but arguably the wrong decision for the movie as it's more interesting in the first half of the movie.  The vignette-style stories almost have a Terrence Malick "figure out the plot" kind of coherence to them.  It's not remotely as arbitrary or abstract as Malick, but I quite liked the idea that we were getting a series of short stories rather than one larger narrative, but the Coalhouse plot, which ties together all of the loose figures in the film, almost feels anti-climactic compared to the looseness to Forman's approach to the movie.  It seems impossible that an anthology tale would have been greenlit in 1981, but it's where the movie works best.  When it focuses on Coalhouse it becomes more predictable, and more reliant on the actual figures at-hand, and the acting is a bit over-the-place here.

McGovern & Rollins got the Oscar nominations, and they do have the showiest parts (though it was Steenburgen who scored at the Globes, and it was Randy Newman's score that most deserved the AMPAS recognition), but Ragtime is a movie that doesn't really allow for standouts in the traditional sense, and I left wanting more from both actors.  McGovern plays Evelyn Nesbit as somehow a dope and a brainy girl, someone who knows how to manipulate every situation but doesn't always know that she's doing it (a girl too pretty to lose), but it only sometimes works when McGovern makes Nesbit in on the joke.  One wonders if this nomination was in part due to McGovern's shocking display of nudity about a third of the way into the picture, where she nonchalantly sits on a 100-year-old couch with her breasts on full-display.  It's better than the meek-and-mild Steenburgen (who adds little to her character) or Patinkin's overbearing director, but it's an ingenue part that probably needed a more seasoned actress to make it work.

Rollins grounds his character a bit more, but honestly I left this performance with something to be desired as well.  His righteous anger is warranted, but you can't quite compromise the man we initially meet who quickly becomes a doomed vigilante within Rollins work.  He seems to only know how to reason in Shakespearean speech, so often out-of-place with the rest of the cast's more naturalistic performances, and you don't leave understanding enough of his motives.  The Academy could have done worse here (considering it was the sentimental 80's, a nomination instead for Cagney's humorous but one-dimensional fire commissioner could so easily have been cited instead), but I left the performance wishing for more, and glad that ultimately the Oscars picked John Gielgud in Arthur, a more fully-realized creation.