Citizen Ruth (1996)

Film: Citizen Ruth (1996)

Stars: Laura Dern, Swoosie Kurtz, Kurtwood Smith, Mary Kay Place, Kelly Preston, MC Gainey, Tippi Hedren, Burt Reynolds

Director: Alexander Payne

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2021 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different one Alfred Hitchcock's Leading Ladies.  This month, our focus is on Tippi Hedren-click here to learn more about Ms. Hedren (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

After Roar, Tippi Hedren occasionally made films, but largely settled into a world outside of proper stardom, working definitely but never in serious projects.  She made appearances on TV shows (including Hart to Hart and Chicago Hope), and worked alongside her daughter a couple of times.  She made a cameo in The Birds II, which she later regretted doing, and had a memorable role in David O. Russell's I Heart Huckabees.  She also had a small part in yet another significant director's career.  While with Chaplin, Hedren got a much-discussed (within the film) character who ends up a cameo in A Countess from Hong Kong, the director's final film, we saw the inverse in Citizen Ruth, where Hedren plays a much-discussed (within the film) character in the first movie of an Oscar-nominated director, Alexander Payne.  Today we're going to close out our month-long look at Tippi Hedren with a peak into this movie, which announced the career of the man who would make Election, Sideways, and Nebraska.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is the story of Ruth Stoops (Dern), a mother of four with substance abuse problems who becomes pregnant with a man she barely knows in the opening scenes of the movie.  After finding out she's pregnant, she's scolded by a judge, who recommends that she get an abortion to avoid jail time.  When Norm (Smith) & Gail (Place) find out about this, they tell their anti-abortion group & start to sponsor Ruth's life, insisting she have a baby.  Ruth initially doesn't like this, and nearly gets the abortion when it turns out one of the members of the group, Diane (Kurtz) is actually a pro-choice advocate in disguise, but when each group offers her $15,000 to go through with the decision, she is caught in a national firestorm over whether or not she should have the child, bringing in major leaders of both sides (played by Reynolds & Hedren).  When Ruth, in the middle of a drunken stupor, miscarries, she ends up tricking them into giving her the money, running away from the spotlight with little resolution as to what happens next.

Citizen Ruth is a biting commentary, and one that doesn't shy away from skewering both sides of this political hot button.  One would assume that the anti-abortion crowd would be rife for a politically liberal director like Payne, but he's just as ruthless in taking on the pro-choice group, particularly the way that neither side is particularly interested in what Ruth wants, seeing her as an easy pawn in this debate.  Dern plays Ruth perfectly so that the audience struggles to have sympathy for her.  It's clear from the onset that Ruth would make a horrible mother (she has far too many personal demons to responsibly take care of a child), and that she won't be able to carry this baby to term without doing drugs, putting the child at risk...but no one seems all that interested in that reality.  The film is perhaps too broad at times (Ruth doesn't show a lot of personal growth, and while that might be in-character, it hurts the script which is asking for some growth in her), but it's fascinating, pull-no-punches stuff from a debate that oftentimes feels like everyone is coming with no understanding for the other side's position.

Tippi Hedren, like many of her films post-Hitchcock, only gets a small part here.  She and Reynolds are both fun as late-breaking movie stars brought in to add a certain cache to the debate.  We don't need background from these figures, and Payne knows it-the audience understands that these genuine celebrities (in real life) translate their personas in this world onscreen.  As a result, though, I leave Hedren's month a bit melancholy.  The actress gave two incredible performances onscreen for Hitchcock, and while she worked with major directors afterward, it's fair to say she never really escaped his shadow, and certainly never made anything as good as The Birds and Marnie.  Considering the truly horrible nature of their relationship (based on Hedren's later statements), this is a pity for such a distinctive star.  Next month we will finish off our year devoted to Hitchcock with one last leading lady, one who would be something of an antithesis to many of the women we've discussed this season (and the Hitchcock prototype).

OVP: Director (2004)

OVP: Best Director (2004)

The Nominees Were...

Martin Scorsese, The Aviator

Clint Eastwood, Million Dollar Baby

Taylor Hackford, Ray

Alexander Payne, Sideways

Mike Leigh, Vera Drake

My Thoughts: We are starting the final week of the 2004 Oscar Viewing Project.  We will be hitting three articles this week (I cannot promise the days that these will land as I have a very busy "real life" week ahead, but they will happen at some point between now & Saturday)-Best Director, Picture, and My Oscar Ballot, as well as kicking off our 14th season on Sunday.  You've been with us a while (and if you haven't, there's links to a bunch of our past contests below to catch you up), so let's get started with, I don't know...Clint Eastwood (movie stars tend to get first billing in Hollywood, so commencing with him feels the most natural).

Clint Eastwood's films of the past decade have been marked by political appraisals of his offscreen behavior, most notably viewing his pictures through the lens of his 2012 appearance at the Republican National Convention, but while his movies have always had an anti-establishment vibe, it does feel like they have taken on a more noted libertarian tone in the past 10 years (though, not to give away the ending of Million Dollar Baby, but this one does as well even if that's not its most marked characteristic).  Eastwood does imbue a sense of anguish as his camera moves through the story of Maggie's eventual tragedy, but it also doesn't add a lot.  Blue-tinted cinematography & thoughtful whispering next to a routine story might make for solid popcorn fare, but it never feels all that elevated, and while that's fine, if you're going to give someone an Oscar, they should be elevating the actual picture beyond what is on the page.

That's what Martin Scorsese brings to The Aviator.  Scorsese was very much in the throes of his "please give me an Oscar" phase in 2004 (he'd get more experimental in the years after The Departed), but just because you're making Academy-friendly movies doesn't mean they can't be great.  The Aviator knows that you can't have Howard Hughes without also bringing in the true glamour of this figure, and trying to show modern audiences why his final chapter was so unusual to the public-at-large.  Scorsese does that, exhibiting a rapid descent for Hughes, but also giving us a truly fully-fleshed out movie, with long insightful chapters into the figure (and side characters who escaped his gravitational orbit like Katharine Hepburn & Ava Gardner).  It's a biopic with perspective.

That's not the case with Ray.  Taylor Hackford's look at singer Ray Charles came along at a time when musical biopics were all the rage (we're in another run of that right now thanks to the recent blockbuster success of Bohemian Rhapsody), but the problem with them was that they were so cookie cutter, and while Ray was one of the most successful examples of this, it was hardly the first (most of the musical biopics of this era were clearly stealing from the very successful Temptations miniseries that aired in the late 1990's).  Hackford doesn't help Foxx bring out enough of Ray Charles, who always feels just-out-of-reach to the audience, which is a problem when the biopic is focused directly on him.  As a result, you leave the film humming a lot of great music, but not feeling like you've understood the man behind the songs in a way you don't understand all musicians.

Alexander Payne brings a better understanding to his characters in Sideways, which doesn't have the handicap of being based on a real person, and therefore can expand a bit what we're trying to understand about these figures.  Payne's approach is to let everything sit, much like a fine glass of wine allowed to breathe, and have the audience first get to know the main quartet of players before letting our opinions of them change too much.  This hands-off approach gives the film a relaxed feel, which some don't love, but I quite enjoyed because as things happen it feels more meaningful.  Conversation is an underrated way to get across key life events in a film (when we're trained to focus more on events), and Payne does this beautifully (it helps that he's also a writer), having the most pivotal perspective shifts happen simply through a conversation with someone you don't realize is changing your life.

Our final nominee is Mike Leigh, the only person we won't be returning to later this week for Best Picture.  Leigh's movies are always thoughtful & no one quite knows the power of shifting perspective like Mike Leigh.  This is true of Vera Drake, where Leigh puts the early focus on our main character, someone we're meant to think we can understand just by looking at her, and then watch as we learn things about her that we otherwise couldn't have realized.  This is a challenge that Leigh undertakes knowing the risks-if we feel like we're not alongside Vera's family, gaining additional understanding of the title character, it will feel rather conventional, but Leigh utilizes his leading lady's excellent performance to full effect to make Vera Drake feel like it's filled with surprises as we move to its conclusion.

Other Precursor Contenders: The Globes have always favored a movie star for this category, so Clint Eastwood began his eventual date with Oscar as the victor for the HFPA, beating out Scorsese, Payne, Mike Nichols (Closer), & Marc Forster (Finding Neverland).  BAFTA didn't go for Million Dollar Baby anywhere, so they gave their trophy to Mike Leigh, here over Forster, Scorsese, Michael Mann (Collateral), & Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind).  The DGA also went with Clint Eastwood, here over Forster, Hackford, Payne, & Scorsese.  I have to assume, considering he hit all three precursors (and was nominated for Best Picture) that Marc Forster was just out-of-reach of Oscar (honestly-how many people can claim an Oscar Best Picture nomination, as well as a Globe/BAFTA/DGA nod and still not be a nominee?).

Directors I Would Have Nominated: We'll get into the "My Ballot" later this week so I won't talk too much here about it to save spoilers for later, but I do wonder why the Academy didn't go for Zhang Yimou for a nomination.  House of Flying Daggers was a directorial achievement of the highest-order, and there was conversation leading into the Academy Awards that he might be the surprise (instead they went with Mike Leigh)...it's a pity considering he has yet to be nominated in the years since that they didn't take this opportunity.
Oscar's Choice: It was relatively close at the time, but Eastwood prevailed once again, keeping Marty in the Oscar wilderness for a few years longer.

My Choice: Scorsese, and it's not particularly close-this is the only film that feels like you watch and think not only that it's excellent, but that it's being driven by great direction.  Behind him (in order) is Alexander Payne, Mike Leigh, Clint Eastwood, & Taylor Hackford.

Those were my thoughts-how about yours?  Are you over on Team Clint or would you like to relax with me on Team Marty?  Do we think Mike Leigh, who was at one point pretty fashionable with the Academy, will ever win an Honorary Oscar or is his moment past?  And how did Marc Forster dominate the precursors but strike out here?  Share your thoughts in the comments!

Also in 2004: Actress, Actor, Supporting Actress, Supporting Actor, Original Screenplay, Adapted Screenplay, Foreign Language Film, Animated Feature Film, Sound Mixing, Sound Editing, Original Score, Original Song, Art Direction, Cinematography, Costume, Film Editing, Visual Effects, Makeup, Previously in 2004

Past Best Director Contests: 2005, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2019

OVP: Adapted Screenplay (2004)

 OVP: Best Adapted Screenplay (2004)

The Nominees Were...

Richard Linklater, Julie Delpy, & Ethan Hawke, Before Sunset

David Magee, Finding Neverland

Paul Haggis, Million Dollar Baby

Jose Rivera, The Motorcycle Diaries

Alexander Payne & Jim Taylor, Sideways

My Thoughts: I'm writing this in advance of last night's Oscars (we'll have a ceremony recap later today), so I don't know which film joined our winner of this category (I'll reveal it in a second if your memory isn't solid), but I'm excited to remind everyone today that while the Oscar season is now over for 2020-21, it's pretty much always an Oscar season on TMROJ, and it's been 2004 for a number of weeks now (if you're just joining us, click below for links to past 2004 Oscar contests, we do new ones every Monday & Wednesday).  We are hitting the writing categories this week, and we're going to start with the one film that hasn't been discussed at all, Before Sunset, the "sole screenplay" nominee of 2004.

I always think it's a little weird that sequels are automatically adapted.  Like, it's not being adapted from anything-the story is totally created from scratch.  That is, however, my only complaint about this nomination.  Before Sunset is one of my favorite movies, not just of 2004, but in general.  While every film in the Celine & Jesse trilogy is a masterwork, this one is the best, knowingly reexamining our concept of what a cinematic romance is, and giving us a love story with a genuine ticking clock approach.  The writing is so sophisticated, distinguishing well between the vibrant "it's all going to be like this" optimism of your twenties with the knowing (but not yet weathered) approach of your thirties to love.  I love this movie so much (the Nina Simone ending!), and I cry every time I see it.  It's heart-wrenching, uplifting, & totally brilliant.

Before Sunset is not the only one of these films totally in love with dialogue (and love at a certain age), though.  Sideways is magnificent in that regard as well.  A simple concept (two unlikely friends, only one an actual bachelor) go on an expedition through wine country where they meet two women, one of whom changes their life forever.  But Sideways is a total winner of a screenplay in the way it embraces dialogue.  Think of the snobbery-fueled tirades that Paul Giamatti goes on (still the only performance of his that I liked, though not as much as the collective world did), or Virginia Madsen's "The Life of Wine" monologue.  These might not work-this is pretty sophisticated conversation...it's not necessarily meant to be relatable to most of the audience.  But it works because it's high-quality & because film is sometimes about learning about a world you don't know, encountering lives you haven't seen before but understand better for watching them.

This is part of what happens in The Motorcycle Diaries.  Certainly few of us can relate to the world of a young Che Guevera.  But while The Motorcycle Diaries is beautiful, its script doesn't really work for me.  The character development around Che isn't strong enough, and it's a bit tedious & plodding throughout the middle of the story.  There's not enough there, particularly when it comes to the central relationship (no growth...are they meant to be tacit lovers, soulmates...what's the deal?).  Few films have I wanted to love more (and didn't) than this movie as this is exactly up my alley, but Motorcycle Diaries came up lacking for me in terms of story.

This is also true of Finding Neverland.  The movie is less up-my-alley than the moving, Malick-adjacent Motorcycle Diaries, but it is about a writer (always my favorite biopic subject).  However, it doesn't really have enough perspective on its main character (JM Barrie), and it doesn't have enough hints to the magic of Peter Pan.  This lack of perspective hurts the movie as it moves on, as we don't have a strong enough understanding of what makes this a profound moment for Barrie...obviously the happenings are sad, but where does this land for him, why can he create a timeless classic from this story.  The screenplay is too lifeless for us to make the connection between the two.

Paul Haggis would become something of a pariah in my world the year after Million Dollar Baby (fun fact I'm sure I've stated throughout this & might say again-my first date with a guy was to Million Dollar Baby), and while I didn't like the movie, this is not Crash.  The central story in Million Dollar Baby isn't a bad one-a woman trying to find the father figure she never had, someone who could celebrate her talents...it's a good story, and the acting is solid (if not exceptional) enough to ground it.  The film's treatment of Maggie's family is awful (Margo Martindale, a great actress otherwise, is genuinely bad in this role), though, and it's not breaking any new ground plot-wise.  Still this is not a bad screenplay.  It's not just an Oscar-worthy one.

Other Precursor Contenders: The Globes combine their writing categories so there is no adapted or original distinction, and thus we have three adapted nominees in their five choices: Sideways (which won), Finding Neverland, and Closer, a movie they liked much better than Oscar.  The BAFTA's split, and true-to-form in 2004, went somewhat their own way, giving Sideways the trophy but making room for The Chorus and Closer over Before Sunset & Million Dollar Baby.  WGA also gave their trophy to Sideways, here, though, the only skipped Oscar nominee was Finding Neverland, and they went with Mean Girls in its place.  And while I know that a collective generation of gay men might protest, that WGA indication wasn't proof that Mean Girls nearly made it to the Oscars-I would assume Closer was the sixth place finisher.

Films I Would Have Nominated: I, however, would've found room for both.  Honestly-the Adapted Screenplay field was so good in 2004 it's a shock that Oscar came up with such a tepid list of contenders, and it's particularly maddening that they did so with Closer and Mean Girls both sitting there, ready to be plucked.

Oscar's Choice: There was no stopping Sideways-this might have been the surest bet of the night in 2004.

My Choice: I can't pick anything other than Before Sunset.  Sideways is excellent and a very respectable winner (a deserving silver it gets from me), but Before Sunset is part of my DNA at this point, and I cannot deny it.  Coming behind are Million Dollar Baby, The Motorcycle Diaries, and Finding Neverland, in that order.

Those are my thoughts-what about you?  I know I'm in the minority here considering the hosannas it got at the time, but is anyone with me for Before Sunset over Sideways?  How much better would this lineup be if you bumped two of the also-rans in favor of the gemlike Mean Girls and the controlled Closer?  And what do you think about sequels automatically being adapted?  Share your thoughts below!

Also in 2004: Foreign Language Film, Animated Feature Film, Sound Mixing, Sound Editing, Original Score, Original Song, Art Direction, Cinematography, Costume, Film Editing, Visual Effects, Makeup, Previously in 2004

Past Best Adapted Screenplay Contests: 2005, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2019

Downsizing (2017)

Film: Downsizing (2017)
Stars: Matt Damon, Christoph Waltz, Hong Chau, Kristin Wiig
Director: Alexander Payne
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

You don't need to have a great idea to create a great movie, but it helps.  Films like Casablanca, Brokeback Mountain, Titanic, Lawrence of Arabia-these are hardly anyone stretching the noggin too hard on creating something seismic on the screen, but they are all indisputable classics because even if the idea is simple, the acting/writing/direction/general movie magic that comes from these pictures ultimately results in a truly spectacular combination, and thus a truly great movie.  But a great idea onscreen can also lead to some of the best cinema that I can remember, and some of the most inventive.  Children of Men, Melancholia, The Conformist, The Seventh Seal-these films are great concepts that are beautifully delivered, and probably riskier than the above-mentioned films because at worst Casablanca will become a boring romance if executed poorly.  Children of Men executed the wrong way becomes a ridiculous mess.  Quite frankly, it becomes Downsizing.

(Spoilers Ahead) The latest from Alexander Payne centers once again on a middle-aged man Paul (Damon) living a life that he feels beneath him, but hasn't really put in the effort to try and improve his situation.  This is also the plot of Election, Sideways, The Descendants, and Nebraska, and in all of these films the chief protagonist ends up gaining his esteem back by using a woman's vision of or dream for the world without really acknowledging he's basically taking from her, a fact Payne needs to work that out with himself at some point.  Anyway, Paul happens to be in luck, as there is now a technology that essentially changes your size, moving you toward being about five inches tall and in the process you get to live like a king, as the cost-of-living is insanely small, and you basically can retire even with just several hundred thousand dollars.  He and his wife Audrey (Wiig) decide to take this irreversible plunge, marketed initially as a way to stop the effects of climate change but mostly as an economic shortcut, but at the last minute, after Paul has already shrunk himself, Audrey pulls out and decides not to shrink herself, causing Paul to be stuck as a small man forever without his wife.

The film then follows Paul as he learns about this new world, and himself, mainly through the eyes of a lascivious playboy named Dusan (Waltz) and an overeager Vietnamese activist named Ngoc Lan (Chau) whose prosthetic leg he accidentally damages, basically becoming her surrogate leg in the process by helping her.  We learn that she lives in abject squalor even in a shrunken state, trying to keep people who can't afford to stay alive in this smaller state in a state of happiness, and continuing to fight for the world even when she's less than a foot tall (she was shrunk against her will, a side effect of this process by a dictator abusing the technology).  The film ends with a story that's been in the background of the picture (arctic methane emissions) rocketing to the forefront, as the creator of the shrunken technology realizes human beings will be extinct regardless of his shrinking actions, as the methane emissions are too great and people's willingness to change is too slow.  As a result, they go deep underground, and Paul nearly joins them before deciding that he loves Ngoc Lan and decides his role is to fight for change in a doomed world, rather than contribute to an unknown future below ground.

If that sounds like a lot of plot for one 135-minute movie, it's because it is.  Alexander Payne's movie is hardly short on good ideas.  We have the cruelty of fate with Audrey abandoning Paul and our constant need to find purpose in a life that doesn't show an obvious one (Paul only realizing his future by copying someone else seems a bit of a cop out).  There's the way that we show abject selfishness in that the only way people can be convinced to save the planet is by improving their own lot in life, or how humanity is still constantly wanting to subjugate others into the lesser, as is evidenced by how a technology that should provide more than enough for everyone still leaves a lower-income class and is dismissed by those who can't benefit from it.  There's the question over whether or not it's better to be part of something grand or stay with what you have, even if it might not be helping the long-term in favor of the short-term.  All of these are great questions, foundations for a movie.  It's a pity that Downsizing never takes the time to have an actual perspective on any of them.

This is largely Payne's script's fault, though I'll get to Damon's role in it in a second.  As soon as he's brought out a new idea he squashes it just as quickly.  Look at how we don't follow, say, Audrey's life after she abandons Paul or even see the immediate followup of major events, instead letting large time jumps gloss over the fact that the script has no idea what to do with these major life events in the short-term.  Every time a cool idea is brought forth, it is pushed to the background once again, given a short shift by either Ngoc Lan or Dusan when Paul wants to discuss, giving us little insight from Paul himself about what he thinks of all of this newness.  Payne's essential problem here is that he's world-building without actually doing anything with the movie.  This would potentially be forgivable if it was the first few episodes of a series or a movie with a planned sequel, but the ending is clearly finite, and so we're left with a lot of cool ideas where virtually nothing happened.  Contrary to popular opinion (see also Interstellar which has many of the same problems though at least attempts a plot, unlike here), this makes a bad movie, which is what Downsizing is.

The central performances don't really help save the picture.  Damon plays Paul as a blank slate, someone who seemingly has never had a concrete opinion in his life before he meets Dusan and Ngoc Lan, which kind of makes him pathetic, something that I don't think Damon's performance really gets.  These other two characters are polar opposites in their ideals, but at least they have a perspective on the world, and are quite frankly contributing something to the picture.  I can't remember the last time I saw a drama so centered around an Oscar-winner that had such little insight into him as a person, which shows that I don't think Damon really got this script or assumed his movie star status would make up for his lack of character in Paul.  It's easy to rag on Damon these days considering his foot-in-mouth public comments, but he is more than capable of giving a strong performance onscreen, even recently (he's very good in The Martian).  This, though, is the worst I can remember seeing him onscreen.

The rest of the cast doesn't save the film either.  Waltz has become insufferable with his Inglourious Basterds routine, a film that he deserved that Oscar for, but it's hard to remember that when he is so mind-numbingly smarmy in every role since.  Wiig cannot find any humanity in her admittedly unlikable character, and Payne loses interest in her when she stops being a plot point, so she doesn't have time to redeem herself (couldn't we have at least had Paul confront Audrey at the divorce proceeding so we get some sense of where her life went?).  The one actor who is getting plaudits is admittedly the best one; Chau has the showiest role, and has all of the film's best moments.  However, even she plays her character so surface-level it's hard to understand if there's much that she hides from the world, and I'll admit that sometimes it felt a little bit like Payne's script was poking fun at her cultural differences from Paul more than with her, as was evidenced by my largely white, straight, and male audience at the showing I went to laughing at lines that I don't think were supposed to be perceived as funny.  All-in-all, the fact that she's getting Oscar talk is cool (it's really a crime that Asian actors don't get better roles/attention in Hollywood), but this isn't close to one of the five best performances of the year.  It's a broad role that should have at least some specificity, and well, it doesn't.

OVP: Election (1999)

Film: Election  (1999)
Stars: Matthew Broderick, Reese Witherspoon, Chris Klein, Jessica Campbell
Director: Alexander Payne
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Adapted Screenplay)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

When I do reviews on the blog, by-and-large they are for films that I have already seen.  However, I decided recently when I was re-watching films that I haven't weighed in on the blog, and in particular when those films are part of the OVP, that I should probably start sharing a more comprehensive overlook of my thoughts on the film, since we'll either be discussing it in the future, or I never gave my overall picture of the film when we did our OVP write-ups.  This is to say that there's nothing really snap about that judgment ranking up there-I've seen Election multiple times through the year, and caught it again last night on cable.  However, since it's never been reviewed on the site, and since it was nominated for an Oscar, I figured I'd do a quick dive into the movie once more.

(Spoilers Ahead) Alexander Payne has not been particularly celebrated around these parts, but that wasn't always the case for me.  In fact, once-upon-a-time, I actually quite enjoyed his work.  Movies like The Descendants and Nebraska haven't been as sharp or as insightful as his earlier work, and while I still have a major miss left in his filmography (I've never seen Citizen Ruth), what easily keeps me hoping every time I go to one of his pictures is the sharp and biting humor of Election, by far his finest film.

Election is the tale of a student body election in snow-covered Omaha, where an affable-but-kind-of-a-loser teacher Jim McAllister (Broderick) is the faculty advisor to the student government.  He has found something of a nemesis in a perky-but-abrasive senior named Tracy Flick (Witherspoon) who seems intent to win the presidency of the student body.  Flick creates so much ire to Mr. McAllister that he convinces dumb but lovable Paul Metzler (Klein) to get into the race, thereby creating an all-out-war against Flick, who is determined to win at pretty much every cost.  Things get complicated when Paul's younger sister Tammy (Campbell) starts a rebel third-party candidacy in retaliation for Paul inadvertently stealing away Tammy's secret girlfriend.

The film could so easily have devolved into a serious of caricatures of naive and simple-minded Midwesterners (like, say, Nebraska), but that's not the direction that Payne takes it.  Perhaps because he has a source material to rely upon for story structure (something several later films didn't have), he is able to keep the story pretty well-rounded.  You end up seeing all four characters' angles, and you also get to see as a result a pretty even-keeled story.  I think Payne's vision of the film is to hate Tracy and perhaps sympathize with McAllister, but he leaves it open enough to make you realize that pretty much everyone here can be both the villain and the hero.  Even someone as seemingly innocent as Paul is a bit of a conundrum; he's incredibly sweet and nice, but he's a terrible candidate when compared to Tracy, and he's really only able to compete with her because he's hot and a football player.

The dialogue in the film (its sole Oscar nomination) is some of the sharpest of the 1990's.  You have so many quotable lines, and the script really lends itself to building on to the story.  The four main characters and their internal monologues aren't just funny, but they build into the delusions that they carry about themselves.  We see that, say, Tammy doesn't think she's a lesbian, even though she's only ever been attracted to girls or that Paul is supposedly so sweet but is really only interested in Lisa because she was willing to have sex with him.  Narration in films is always an extremely tricky thing, because it makes the rest of the script lazy or repetitive if it's too expositional, but Payne's script adds by giving us things that the dialogue isn't quite taking us toward.

The other nomination that the film should have landed was a lead citation for Witherspoon.  While I admittedly have to see both a few nominees from that year (Swank, McTeer) and a few just-misses (Weaver, Winslet, Stone), I still feel pretty confident in asserting that Witherspoon would make my personal Top 5.  Her work in this film is easily the best so-far of her career.  She manages to find that fine line between making Tracy a villain or a "rhymes with witch" (it would be so easy to do both) and instead makes her extremely driven, tormented-by-imperfection, and someone that will either end up in an insane asylum or Congress (insert joke here about them being one-in-the-same).  One of the genius moves of the film is to not let Tracy get her comeuppance about tearing down the posters, and instead end up pretty much exactly where she expected, with Mr. McAllister ending up the complete loser chucking milkshakes at limousines.  Sometimes in life that happens, and I love that Payne was able to deliver the bitter without shoving down the sweet like he had to, in, say, Nebraska (man I did not like that movie).

Those are my thoughts on this film that is shockingly fifteen years old (can you believe it?!?).  What are yours?  Do you still long for the days when Alexander Payne made films this sharp?  Do you think that Election would still be able to muster an Oscar nomination these days?  And who gets your vote-Paul or Tracy (or a write-in for disqualified Tammy)?  Share in the comments!

OVP: Director (2013)

OVP: Best Director (2013)

The Nominees Were...

Alfonso Cuaron, Gravity

Steve McQueen, 12 Years a Slave

Alexander Payne, Nebraska

David O. Russell, American Hustle

Martin Scorsese, The Wolf of Wall Street

My Thoughts: Frequently, you have to wonder what drives someone to split their ballot between Picture and Director in the Academy.  In so many people’s minds, these are essentially the same thing.  The director helms the picture, is involved (and many times, responsible) for where it heads and almost every aspect of the film’s ultimate product.  It seems smart that they are synonymous in the minds of voters.  And yet, on occasion, even when they have the option not to, they end up splitting the vote, which was the case with 2013, when the Best Picture winner beat the Best Director winner and vice versa.

It’s hard to argue with the results, at least when it comes to Best Director, however.  Gravity is clearly a director’s achievement.  It takes a visionary to conceive of something so vast and yet so clearly rendered.  It isn’t that we haven’t gone into space before as a cinematic audience: Gene Roddenberry and George Lucas have ensured that we have ventured there countless times before.  But Alfonso Cuaron managed to do something we haven’t felt in a long-time: he made it real and within our reach.  Though of course Sandra Bullock is floating around in some earthbound feat of technology, you can feel the sheer grandeur of the heavens, the enormity of the earth, and even more daunting and petrifying, the stunning infinity of what goes beyond our atmosphere.  Cuaron’s direction uses that pressure, the way that we cling to the world we know, as vast and expansive and insanely large as it may be to an effect I’ve never seen before in a movie.

Steve McQueen also knows how to play a bit with the world beyond our own, though he does it in a far more controlled environment.  Set in the American South, 12 Years a Slave, the best choices that McQueen makes as a director aren’t the wide expanses of the humid South, but instead by showing us the moments just beyond our hero Solomon’s reach-McQueen gives us just enough side moments, with hints of future atrocities that are taking place on neighboring farms or indications of the thousands of other men and women put into slavery.  The actual central story occasionally veers too closely to a traditional narrative (mostly because it’s based on a true story), and I wasn’t wild about the framing of the ending, but there are so many distinct touches in this film that you can easily forgive the occasional tangent into the expected.

The Wolf of Wall Street was Marty’s eighth nomination for Best Director (and his twelfth overall-the man will be discussed quite a bit in our OVP write-ups).  Therefore, it’s not unexpected for Marty to be in this lineup.  What is unexpected is the way that Marty can continue to create controversy.  I know that one of the conversation pieces about Wolf of Wall Street was regarding Marty’s alleged glamorization of Jordan Belfort’s life, but let’s take a step back and wonder what this actually meant.  Unlike, say, Nebraska (oh, we’re getting there), Wolf is a film that can pull multiple different angles and viewpoints into its web.  Certain people defended Scorsese’s opulent, oftentimes garish look into the world of wealth-at-all-costs, others lambasted him for turning Belfort into a humane victim-of-circumstance.  Personally, I was in the middle, but the fact that Scorsese can still create a movie that is epic in scope and be the most rightfully controversial of the bunch is a testament to his continued care toward his filmography.  The Wolf of Wall Street is occasionally overlong, but it’s always fascinating to watch, and Scorsese continues to have something fascinating to say to the audience.

That’s less than I can say for Alexander Payne in Nebraska (see, we got there).  Payne’s lack of a directorial vision is clear, or at least it’s clear and far too convoluted to be celebrated.  The movie is essentially supposed to be about the debilitating way that Alzheimer’s rips apart the moments we expected to have as we got older, and the way that only a few family members know you through your life and get to be there for the good, and more so, the bad.  However, through Payne’s lens these interesting thoughts that the script occasionally has are bounded down by trying for too many “let’s-show-how-simple-the-flyover-states-are” comic moments and too little unearned payoff, particularly with the two sons and their journey.  Payne rarely has anything interesting to say with where his camera is pointing, frequently just catching reaction shots and not lingering in a way that made Election far more interesting than expected.  If his filmography is going to continue to be a downward slide, my hope is that the Academy at least realizes this so I don’t have to continue to watch his increasingly tepid and boring pictures.

The final nominee is another director who has traded the more interesting for the conventional.  There’s more to like in American Hustle than Nebraska, mainly thanks to the occasionally interesting performances and the outlandish but fairly accurate makeup work (I think this will probably be my last gripe in this direction, but what was AMPAS thinking skipping American Hustle for that trophy?).  However, Russell’s work itself is a total letdown.  This film is too all-over-the-place in where it takes its characters and frequently takes tangents (like the entire Robert de Niro extended-cameo thing) that go nowhere and has the characters so constantly second guess themselves that you leave not knowing who they were, and not in a good way (the only way that the ending pays off is if we care enough about Bale and Adams’ characters to actually feel that the wool has been pulled over our eyes, and we don’t know them as their true selves enough for that to payoff).  All-in-all, a step down from the interesting places he took The Fighter a few years back, and like Payne, a continual lack of payoff in his work.

Other Precursor Contenders: Best Director is one of those rare fields where the Globes, Guilds, and BAFTA awards all have the same number of nominees (aside from the supporting actor races, this is the only OVP category where this is the case).  Therefore, we should expect uniformity, and for the most part that's what we received.  The Globes gave their top trophy to Cuaron, but skipped Scorsese in favor of Paul Greengrass for Captain Phillips.  The DGA Awards also honored Cuaron, and also found room for Greengrass, but in this case it was at the expense of Alexander Payne.  The BAFTA Awards also honored Cuaron (sensing a trend here?), also honored Greengrass, and once again we saw a miss for Mr. Payne.  All-in-all, Greengrass was clearly the sixth place and one of the odder misses considering that Payne's picture is even if you throw out your opinions of the film, less of a director's achievement on paper.

Directors I Would Have Nominated: I certainly would have found room for Sofia Coppola, who created something mesmerizing and a uniquely true vision in The Bling Ring (her films, unlike Payne's, continue to get more interesting and add to her overall filmography, even if less people and critics are seeing them).  I also would have found room for Spike Jonze's Her, a monumental look at the ways we learn to love and use technology to replace humanity in our lives.  And I'd finally like some sort of recognition for Richard Linklater's continued brilliance with the Jesse-and-Celine trilogy, all three of which were wonderful, with Before Midnight being the most bitter and perhaps the most "directorial" of the films.

Oscar’s Choice: Oscar continued the trend of honoring Cuaron, with McQueen and Russell falling behind.

My Choice: I'm going to go with the consensus here-Cuaron's work in creating a unique filmic achievement in Gravity is too difficult to ignore, and why would you want to?  McQueen follows, with Marty, Russell, and Payne coming behind.

Those were my thoughts-how about yours?  Did you also find Cuaron to be the perfect choice for the winner, or were you hoping for McQueen?  Does anyone else feel that Payne and Russell continue to have less interesting things to say the more celebrated they become?  And why is Marty immune from this trend?  Share your thoughts, as well as your choice for Best Director of 2013, in the comments!

Also in 2013: Actress, Actor, Supporting Actress, Supporting Actor, Original Screenplay, Adapted Screenplay, Foreign Language Film, Animated Feature Film, Live Action Short, Animated Short, Sound Mixing, Sound Editing, Original Score,  Original Song, Art Direction, Cinematography, Costume, Editing, Visual Effects, Makeup, Previously in 2013

Past Best Director Contests: 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012

OVP: Nebraska (2013)

Film: Nebraska (2013)

Stars: Bruce Dern, Will Forte, June Squibb, Stacy Keach, Bob Odenkirk

Director: Alexander Payne

Oscar History: 6 nominations (Best Picture, Director, Actor-Bruce Dern, Supporting Actress-June Squibb, Original Screenplay, Cinematography)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

I swear I used to like Alexander Payne movies.  I remember adoring Election the first time I saw it; so snappy and full of cuts and bruises and truth.  I remember thinking that Sideways, while yes, a tad overrated, was a strong movie with some great sequences and a killer performance from Virginia Madsen.

Yet when I saw The Descendants, all of that changed.  I no longer got the appeal of his wandering camera.  His routine got so staid, much like that of his characters.  Even the bits that I loved about The Descendants (Judy Greer was dynamite in that movie) are gone in Nebraska, which may be the least of the films I have seen in Payne’s résumé.  This is a boring, tired movie with occasional insights but rarely anything approaching realism or perspective.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is the tale of Woody Grant (Dern), a man who is at the end of a long and unremarkable life.  In the throes of dementia, he confuses a junk mail scam for a $1 million lottery win, and sets off from Billings to Omaha, Nebraska, to get his inheritance.  His son David (Forte) is constantly trying to stop him from going on this pointless (and at his age, dangerous) journey, and his wife Kate (Squibb) is frustrated that her husband won’t let this belief die.

Woody and David set out on a mission to get the million dollars (or in the case of David, prove that it’s just a scam), and are eventually joined by Kate and David’s older brother Ross (Odenkirk).  They stay for a while in Woody and Kate’s hometown of Hawthorne meeting with family who believes Woody wholeheartedly, and they, along with Woody’s old business partner Ed (Keach) decide to see if they can get their share of the winnings from a drifting away Woody.

The film has a great plot, and on very rare occasions, says something about its subject.  There’s a scene late in the film (easily the best scene in the movie, and the only one of any significance in regard to Squibb’s acting ability) where Kate and David take on the rest of the family, and secret resentments start to spill out from a family that clearly used to be close but time and alcoholism (Woody is clearly dependent on the sauce, and his son fears he could get there soon) have driven a split between them.  It’s this sort of thing that Payne is at his best with-the ugliness of day-to-day life, and the way we live with such few significant achievements that something that happened decades ago can still feel fresh.

But that’s about it in a movie that tries too hard to be cute, especially in the first half.  It’s easy for the audience to be able to tell that Woody is slowly going away in his mind, and it’s beyond ludicrous to assume that everyone would trust the drifting Woody and not his rational son David.  The movie also doesn’t find time to resolve some of its more interesting plotlines, such as the part with Angela McEwan, who plays a woman whom Woody dated in his youth and she clearly hasn’t let go of, or the nastiness of Woody and Kate’s marriage (I hated that last little kiss, since it ran contrary to almost everything before it).

This would be a film that would be easy to forgive, but like American Hustle before it, it decided to be nominated for an Oscar, and so that tougher lens goes up (I honestly wouldn’t have thought about this film for a second and dismissed it as a small work from a significant director were it not for those six big Oscar nominations).  While I thought that Dern was fine, I don’t see anything truly great going on here-this is a man who drifts through his performance, but stoicism and keeping the same expression doesn’t mean deep and nuanced, and I feel like we’re projecting a bit on Dern rather than him lending to us.  Squibb’s work is even less consequential-she’s an old woman swearing and talking about sex, which for some reason people always respond to, but that’s it.  In a year where Sarah Paulson was finding such in-born evil or Octavia Spencer was struggling with tough love and Emma Watson was channeling vapid and materialistic, this is a slot the Academy decided to just give away?  Over even Oprah Winfrey and her scene-stealing in The Butler?  Come on-you can do better.

And before I end this diatribe, I have to say that the most disappointing nomination was Phedon Papamichael’s for cinematography.  Just because a movie is in black-and-white doesn’t make it serene and beautiful.  It’s just a lack of color, and to get it over Lubezki’s captivating To the Wonder or Sean Bobbitt’s bayou murkiness in 12 Years a Slave is an absolute crime.

Those were my thoughts-what are yours?  Do you agree with Nebraska’s nominations?  Do you think that it will win any Oscars?  And what do you wish Alexander Payne would tackle next?