OVP: Best Director (1999)
The Nominees Were...
Sam Mendes, American Beauty
Spike Jonze, Being John Malkovich
Lasse Hallstrom, The Cider House Rules
Michael Mann, The Insider
M. Night Shyamalan, The Sixth Sense
My Thoughts: We are into the home stretch on 1999. This is the first time in eons that I don't have a year completed-and-on-deck. I will own that I have the next year picked out (and will be working overtime over the next week to get some of the screenings done for said year), but as it stands right now, we will have a short break between 1999 and our 27th season of the Oscar Viewing Project, though I'll work to keep it as short as possible as despite this being a decades-long project at this point...I don't like the idea of losing a week on it. But that is a problem for future John...today my problems are not getting distracted by the recent Tim Walz VP announcement (giving future readers an indication of what we were all thinking this morning) and to discuss the Best Director nominees of 1999.
We're going to start with Spike Jonze, the only one of these five men who didn't get their film into the Best Picture lineup. Jonze's best trick as a director may be keeping Charlie Kaufman in check. The legendary screenwriter struggles when he's playing both roles, but given he's only writing, he maintains some of his most insane impulses at bay, and we get a coherent, inventive projection in front of us. I love Jonze's plays with space, the way that getting into Malkovich's mind feels claustrophobic the whole time (the audience only feels really free when we're ourselves), and how the film feels on the verge of going into Narnia with the dullness it brings to the real-world before we enter an Oscar nominee.
M. Night Shyamalan became shorthand in the years after The Sixth Sense for a specific type of "the audience doesn't suspect what's about to happen!" horror film that would become en vogue, and he would lean into with lessening results (even today, that's what movie crowds think when they see his name on a picture). But the first movie that he broke out with...it is worthy of decades of hype. The way he moves the camera, every shot feeling deliberate but not necessarily in a way that feels belabored, he gives us so much color (specifically red), and shows how grief and depression can leak into the lives of those around us, to the point where they bear the brunt of that rawness. Horror as metaphor is not new, but it's rarely this succinct.
Similar to Shyamalan, Sam Mendes is crafting a vocabulary in American Beauty that would be copied, detailed, and used by filmmakers in the 21st Century that followed. I love the way that we get this film as a crumpled piece of paper unfolding, us getting layers of dents and bruises in the marriage, in the American Family itself. The way that it explores the limitations of examining your own toxic masculinity, and how it impacts those around you, is fascinating. If we are going to nitpick, I do think that Mendes fails to make the ending work-it's too soft, too predicted-but that's a small complaint, this is some of his best work.
Lasse Hallstrom's The Cider House Rules stands out here like a sore thumb not because it's a bad movie (it's not, it's a perfectly decent movie on its own), but because in a lineup that, even if you don't like the other movies themselves, they all have a very distinct directorial style. That's not the case here. To use Classical Hollywood terms, Hallstrom's film feels very much "director for hire," with a pretty straight-forward approach. That's not all bad-there's a breeziness to Hallstrom's work that makes some of the lighter moments feel effortless, but given the weightiness of the film toward the back half, you need a more heavy-handed director to make it work, and Hallstrom doesn't pull that off.
Our final nominee is Michael Mann, one of those esteemed filmmakers whom it's weird only will ever get one Best Director nomination (Mann is 81 and only makes about a film a decade lately...I doubt he has more than one picture left in him at this rate). The tightness of the movie comes from the editing first, but the direction soon follows-I think the pacing and the way that Mann keeps the audience edgy, always wondering what will happen in a story that they know the ending of, is a trick that's really hard to pull off, but he does it beautifully. Combined with sturdy sound work, Mann ushers through a complicated picture in a flashy box office draw fashion.
Other Precursor Contenders: The Globes started out the long list of accolades that Sam Mendes won in the 1999 awards season, beating Mann, Anthony Minghella (The Talented Mr. Ripley), Neil Jordan (The End of the Affair), & Norman Jewison (The Hurricane). The BAFTA's totally did their own thing in giving the statue to Pedro Almodovar (All About My Mother) against Minghella, Shyamalan, Jordan, & Mendes, while the DGA picked Mendes as their winner atop Jonze, Mann, Shyamalan, and Frank Darabont (The Green Mile). My money for sixth place is on Jewison, a long-time Oscar favorite (he was nominated in this category three times in his career), and hadn't been around for a decade, though Darabont, Jordan, or even David Lynch (The Straight Story) aren't crazy ideas.
Directors I Would Have Nominated: Oscar would spend so much time nominating Alexander Payne for Oscars he didn't deserve recognition for in the next two decades, it's a pity they didn't pick the one time he should have been chosen for a directing nomination, his brilliant satire Election.
Oscar's Choice: Mendes was brand-new, but against a horror film and a director known for featherweight dramas, this wasn't the dealbreaker it might've been in some years.
Oscar's Choice: Mendes was brand-new, but against a horror film and a director known for featherweight dramas, this wasn't the dealbreaker it might've been in some years.
My Choice: I'm going to go with Shyamalan. I think that The Sixth Sense is the type of tight, timeless picture that's rare to pull off, and needs to be rewarded even if I'll own that some of the filmmakers later pictures don't have this sense of discipline. Behind him (in order) would be Mendes, Mann, Jonze, & Hallstrom.
Those were my thoughts-how about yours? Are you staying with Oscar and their first-timer Sam, or do you want to see dead people with me? Do you think Michael Mann should've gotten more Oscar nominations than he did? And am I right that it's Jewison in sixth place (or do you prefer Darabont/Lynch/Jordan)? Share your thoughts in the comments!
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