My Thoughts: I honestly don't know why I seem to have to drag these write-ups on-and-on-and-on (I now have a bit of sympathy for those people who keep showing up at these awards shows and losing), but here we are, finishing off our fifth OVP awards, with what will likely be the beginning of the sixth OVP near the beginning of February. We've been through almost every aspect of all of these films (see the links below for the curious), but we will now go into a cohesive look at all of the pictures, starting with, for no reason in particular, Captain Phillips.
As I stated above, we've dissected most of these films to death, but when it comes to the overall picture, I cannot help but wonder why it was that this film couldn't find a way to maintain the momentum when it came to the final third that it picked up in its center. The movie is SO riveting when we are showing a face-off between Captain Phillips and Abduwali Muse, a battle of wits between two men with complicated histories. And yet, once it comes to the final third, it's entirely about good vs. evil, and it's hard not to see that the problem lies with the true story aspect of the film. You can't go around making the guy who signed his life's story rights away look anything other than noble. But as a result, this film never really delivers. It has the action, the suspense, but never the true chutzpah to make the film compelling in a way that a Best Picture should be-a Best Picture should challenge the way you think or see a movie, not just merely be watchable for the bulk of it.
That's what makes something like Her so special. Her is admittedly one of those films that would have gotten minimal nominations were it not for the expanded Best Picture field (five years in, I kind of get the appeal of the ten-wide field as Best Picture should tower a bit over the other categories, though I'm completely checked out when it comes to the "random" number of Best Pictures as it instantly puts a smell of putrid on a year if only five films get nominated as opposed to the ten eligible). Her is compelling both because it's a beautiful, rich, and thoughtfully-acted film (there's not a bad performance in the mix, and this includes actors like Olivia Wilde who I am sometimes a bit unsure of), but also because it's meaningful. Her is a film that ten years from now will likely look more correct than it does today-with advances like Cleverbot and an increasing number of people who have friends that they have never actually met (through epistolary methods, a weird throwback trend from the 19th century), the thought of having a relationship with a machine in a similar way to Theodore and Samantha hardly requires any sort of jump in reality. Jonze knows this, and continues to put cold pricklies of "this is about to happen" alongside the warm fuzzy of a true cinematic romance for the modern age.
Nebraska, on the other hand, is less inclusive of the modern age, though it claims to be a part of it. The reality is that this film gets a little close to home as I have relatives that resemble the Grant family in a number of ways. Hell, if you put me in the middle of my next family reunion, I'd be able to point out at least a half dozen Woodys or Kates-people who have long since checked out on change in their lives, but have opinions on what is happening, no doubt. However, the film doesn't get points for correctly identifying a specific aspect of life in the Midwest, and it's the rest of the film that suffers as a result. The younger generation, that of Will Forte's, is what makes this film shift from reality to satire to stretched-beyond-reason-universe. The biggest problem with Nebraska is that it isn't believable. No one could spend more than a few minutes with Woody and not realize that his mind and grip on reality has disappeared, and as a result the entire uproar of Woody becoming a millionaire seems absolutely ludicrous. The film, as I mentioned in the initial review, on rare occasions stumbles across something worthwhile (the scene where Kate has it out with her relatives about decades-old grudges feels like something that distant familial relations, relying more on a sense of duty than a sense of love to continue spending time together, would do in a tense situation), but those moments are so few-and-far-between and the rest of the film is too silly to be taken seriously, certainly when there are so many more worthwhile movies begging to be nominated.
The same could be said for Philomena, a slightly more accurate depiction of aging and the complexities that come along with it (it helps that this is based on a true story in that regard). The film lives and dies with Judi Dench's performance, which is at times wonderful if occasionally it feels like this role was specifically written for Dench, who could do something like this in her sleep. The problem with this is that there is a category to reward Judi Dench called Best Actress, which she already was nominated in and as a result we don't really need Philomena here. This is particularly true because Steve Coogan doesn't quite know what kind of movie he's making, which is a major problem in a way I haven't seen in a major film in recent years. Like Captain Phillips, it isn't willing to demonize its real-life main character, and while it isn't as necessary to make the film interesting, it also isn't interested in demonizing almost any character outside of the nuns. I HATED the way that Dench's son's lover becomes such a crucial aspect of the story and then he barely budges when Dench shows up wanting answers, though he never gives us any explanation about why he fought off talking to them in the first place. There are too many inconsistencies within the narrative, and too many jumps from comedy to drama (as if the film never really decided what it should be). Frequently it feels like a meddling studio executive was breathing down Coogan's back, telling him to make the dramatic film funnier because it's easier to sell one of the three reigning British Dames (Dench, Smith, and Mirren) in a comedy. This hurts the film badly, as it doesn't have the emotional resonance that a straight drama would have done.
The Wolf of Wall Street is not a film afraid to demonize its main character. If you leave the film wanting to become Jordan Belfort, you clearly left halfway through or were so distracted by Margot Robbie's insanely shiny hair that you didn't really have room to care about anything else. The movie, though it does glamorize the lifestyle of Belfort (sorry Marty, I love you, but there's no way around it), also makes the central character wholly unappealing, and you have to have a pretty rough moral compass to want to accomplish what he did in the same fashion. The biggest problem with the movie, for me, was not whether the movie made this lifestyle appealing (again, Margot Robbie and a yacht is pretty high on most people's wish lists), but in the way that it doesn't know how to handle an ending we already know. This is a true story-everyone knows what happens to Jordan Belfort in the end, and at three hours Scorsese's pacing doesn't indicate that to us-he gives us too much side story (the Jean DuJardin part seems written specifically to add a recent Oscar winner to your cast list) and not enough grounding in moving things along. I feel for Thelma Schoonmaker, who purportedly had to cut hours of movie from the film just to get it down to the current time, but we needed to kill more of the darlings, to paraphrase Stephen King. Still, though, the acting was very strong from the three leads, which keeps it a bit more afloat over something like Nebraska.
A film like Dallas Buyers Club (yet another true story in a Best Picture field full of them) uses its real-life origins more as a crutch than as an inspiration. The reality is that this film could never have been made if it wasn't a true story. The ire of watching a bigoted, homophobic man transform into an ally for HIV-victims would have gotten too many protests. Yes, HIV and AIDS affected straight people (and continues to affect straight people), but the reality is that in the early days it affected the gay community far more heavily, and the cold hard fact is that the first significant theatrical film about the epidemic in twenty years shouldn't have been about a man who wouldn't have given a damn about AIDS victims if he wasn't one of them. In this way, the film feels too Hallmark, too cloying to really be taken seriously. It ignores too many aspects of the early AIDS pandemic (particularly that people associated it too freely with gay people, and that President Reagan largely ignored the outbreak because it affected a population that many of his most fervent supporters thought "deserved it"), and it never really succeeds in making Ron anything more than someone who looks out for Number One, and maybe eventually Number Two in Rayon. The performances seem too reliant on tics and weight loss and assumptions, and the movie itself suffers in that regard. This is a bad film about an important subject with actors who can be truly great if they want to be, and it feels like the sort of film that will age pretty poorly five years from now when we look back on this race.
Though it's a bit by coincidence, we'll end this write-up with the three films that actually competed for the Best Picture prize rather than just were nominated for it: American Hustle, Gravity, and 12 Years a Slave. One of these two is not like the other thing, and American Hustle, which amassed a staggering ten nominations without a win (this isn't a record, but it's one short of it), is easily my least favorite of the three. The film suffers partially due to what I usually refer to as a balance problem. This is when an ensemble has characters that aren't at relatively similar interest levels. You find that the humdrum performance of Christian Bale in the lead (and to a slightly lesser extent, Amy Adams) hurts the rest of the movie because you're far more interested in what is happening with Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper, who are not evil enough to be villains but clearly aren't good enough to be victors. Overall, though, I felt like Bale's lack of charisma/gusto in the lead role, combined with a film that frequently doesn't know what flight-of-fancy to pursue next (what the hell is up with Sydney's motivations-someone must know!) left the movie with a bitter taste in my mouth that even subdued expectations couldn't meet, much less ten Oscar nominations.
Gravity, on the other hand, lives up to its task at hand. Yes, the film occasionally has character development problems with George Clooney, and occasionally the dialogue could probably use a pickup, but by-and-large, this is a pretty hard-to-top sort of motion picture. I love the way that it reaches literal and figurative heights with the effects. This is about something that we have seen hundreds of times in movies and television: space, that final frontier, and yet it makes that world come alive again. It also makes space feel big, unexplored, and sort of inspires everyone that goes home from it to wish that we'd move a little bit faster on getting out into the atmosphere. I also think that when it comes to a movie, while subject matter isn't what should be the driving force (a great film can be about ANYTHING), I do love when a film commits to that subject matter. There's no need to push aliens or anything resembling craziness into this movie-it's a roller coaster thrill ride all on its own. Cuaron uses a story about one person, one individual, and the way that they fight back in the face of staggering odds, and not only doesn't make it cliche, he makes it feel fresh.
If we were handing out prizes for treatment of subject, it'd be hard not to give the award to Steve McQueen's blistering biopic 12 Years a Slave. The film comes the closest of any movie that I've ever seen at trying to depict the atrocities of slavery in a real, true way. The movie has in its supporting corners some marvelous performances from the likes of Michael Fassbender, Lupita Nyong'o, and Sarah Paulson, and Chiwetel Ejiofor does the best he can with the lead character (like all biopics, his Solomon suffers from too much "saintliness"-even the best of men have flaws, and we don't get that in 12 Years, which makes him as a protagonist someone we can sympathize with, but not necessarily someone that feels real, instead making him too anonymous in his own movie). At least he's better than the cavalcade of overacting from Paul Giamatti, Paul Dano, and Benedict Cumberbatch that show up for their paychecks but add little other than Snidely Whiplash-style acting. Still, these are pretty small complaints about a film that generally succeeds in almost all of its pursuits. The movie finds ways to seem incredibly claustrophobic-there's few if any scenes (save for the one with Brad Pitt toward the very end) that gives us indications of what is happening in the world (most films would have had newspapers or overheard conversations to give our main characters hope), and there are moments in the film like Solomon's wandering through the woods or with Mistress Shaw that feel so complete you almost expect there to be another movie about these characters (but there isn't, giving us a sense of how widespread and how MANY stories vanished during this time period). The movie is at its best when it finds this almost gothic, harsh reality giving the viewers little reprieve from the devastation on the screen.
