On "The Nominees" (Pt. 2)
Maestro, Past Lives, Napoleon, Elemental, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, and The Holdovers
Part 1 of my Oscar nomination round-up can be found here. I should mention that I’m not going to cover every movie or performance that got a nomination, nor do I have much to say about the technical awards other than that movies are generally too dim nowadays and the sound mixing is too muddy. I’ve yet to watch Anatomy of a Fall, Zone of Interest, or any of the other foreign films, but I’m looking forward to watching all of them in the near future.
Maestro
It looked great but was kind of inert in the story department. Like Oppenheimer, it leaned heavily on the assumption that I cared about a famous man. A key difference is that I am familiar with Oppenheimer’s work—Hiroshima and Nagasaki are two of the most famous war crimes of the 20th century. The work Oppenheimer did continues to reverberate through the decades, and might one day lead to our collective annihilation. So okay, let’s learn a little about him!
By contrast I know Leonard Bernstein wrote the score for West Side Story and mentored Lydia Tàr…and that’s about it. I was born long after his active period and am unclear as to what else he did or why he matters. While I respect the decision to abandon the tired bio-pic beats, the relationship at the centre of the film that has replaced them needed more time in the oven. Bradley Cooper gives a fun, inhabited performance of a famous, wealthy, and successful gay man who loves his wife, and Carey Mulligan does a good job of having her feelings hurt. The men in Bernstein’s life, who were presumably of great importance to him, are given short shrift. In my opinion, if you’re going to tell a story about a man living a double life I think you should show both lives. Bernstein’s homosexuality was a constant, disruptive, presumably essential part of him, but I have little idea who his boyfriends were or what he loved about them.
The mid-Atlantic accents were robust, powerful, the prosthetic schnoz tastefully applied, and the climactic conducting sequence performed with what can only be called gusto.
Past Lives
Celine Song directed this wistful, naturalistic drama that was a pretty big hit despite an absence of stars and a pretty well-worn structure. Working confidently in the “who-will-she-choose” romantic genre (and the “she’s-actually-already-chosen-but-has-doubts” sub-genre), Greta Lee plays a Korean-Canadian immigrant torn between two men and the nations/alternate lives they represent. Teo Yoo plays the childhood friend she left behind who re-appears in her adult life, first as a long-distance quasi-relationship, and then later, once she’s married an American, as a complicating love interest. It’s a little unclear to me why this movie, out of all the other wistful, naturalistic indie dramas that come out every year, broke through in such a big way. My guess is there’s a huge number of people who can directly relate to having their lives divided in a similar way. And I don’t just mean people who immigrate—so many people today move for school or jobs, and these disruptions prompt a lot of “what ifs”. The chemistry between Lee and Yoo is excellent, and the sense of longing palpable. It looked great too.
Napoleon
Joaquin Phoenix plays Bonaparte as a vacant, horny clown who stumbled upwards and downwards amidst the tumult of the French Revolution and its subsequent wars, who was sometimes very good in battle and sometimes not, and whose life is reduced at the end to the sum total of soldiers who died in his pointless wars. I’m glad director Ridley Scott was uninterested in hagiography, but my understanding is that this particular emperor shaped much of the modern world while being a despot who behaved irresponsibly with the lives of others. Scott takes for granted that I have a strong interest in Napoleon, and, like Maestro, doesn’t bother making the case for why he is of general interest. It’s a film largely about a loving marriage on the rocks, and, like Maestro, you don’t really get much of an understanding of what the man and his wife like about each other. My favourite part was near the beginning, when a horse gets shot in the chest with a canon ball—the image took me by surprise, and is likely the only part of the movie I’ll remember.
Elemental
This romantic comedy hinges on a deranged ethnic metaphor. “People” made of water, air, earth, and fire represent vague ethnic/class positions, largely segregated—due to the mortal danger they present to each other—in a colourful version of NYC. The conflict arises when a young fire woman, representing immigrants at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder, falls in love with a young water man, standing in for middle or upper class white people. How will these two lovers make it, when one is in danger of literally extinguishing the other? I don’t want to be too pedantic about this children’s movie, but a notable thing about race and class is that they are socially constructed as opposed to…elemental. Suggesting that immigrants or refugees are fundamentally made of different stuff, and that these innate, physical differences are incompatible or even a potential danger to others is the exact opposite of what we should be teaching children.
That said I don’t think it matters that Pixar has once again built a film around an imaginatively incoherent premise. The animation is lovely, the storytelling is tight, and its jokes reliable if not particularly ingenious. Pixar, once a great innovator in animation, has lost some lustre in the last decade, but I think they’ve just permanently raised the bar so high for a certain style of (American) kids movie that it’s almost impossible to improve upon it. Is Ratatouille or Finding Nemo or the first ten minutes of Up better? Sure, but I’d argue not by a lot, and I suspect most kids are sufficiently entertained by the current output (feel free to weigh in, parents—I’d be curious to know what the intended audience thinks).
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
I remember liking the first animated Spider-Movie, but this new one exhausted me. The moral dilemma revealed near the end of the film is ginned up and phony: Spider-Man either has to let his father be killed so that the integrity of the multiverse and its multitudinous alternate-dimension Spider-People are preserved, or save his father and create all kinds of cosmic havoc, including the potential destruction of all universes(?). This is too much. It’s not about anything the audience could personally experience, even at the metaphorical level. Why has the super-hero genre become so convoluted? What is gained by all this weightless hurly-burly?
The animation is gorgeous, frantically cycling through art styles within the same frame. Scenes are dense with imaginative comic business. It’s also, like its predecessor, refreshingly expressive, with backgrounds that look like fresh abstract expressionist paintings dripping down canvas. Unfortunately it ends abruptly on a cliff-hanger, making it only 50% of a movie. This trend of chopping movies into two parts robs cinema of its primary advantage over television: it tells a whole story in a single sitting. It’s ungenerous to overstuff a movie, as this one does, while robbing the audience of a proper ending.
The Holdovers
I had a girlfriend who absolutely loathed Paul Giamatti. At the time I was sympathetic to her judgement. It felt like there was simply too much relish in his performances, and not nearly enough of the tasteful restraint that made an actor impressive (let alone dignified). I wasn’t drawn in to his characters; they were leaping out of the screen and pressing their entire bodies against me, yelling in my ear.
I also suspect we were both reacting to his appearance, which does not conform to Hollywood’s extravagant standards of beauty. Being young and beautiful, we wanted our actors to be the same. As I shuffle toward middle age, I see Giamatti differently. His rather large commitment to a given performance strikes me as sincere excitement, and it’s infectious. His looks now have the familiarity of a beloved uncle. Put him in the right context, as Alexander Payne does in The Holdovers, and he’s a shinning delight.
Da’Vine Joy Randolph and first-time actor Dominic Sessa turn in excellent, completely credible performances as a grieving mom and an angry, lost teen. Yes, Giamatti’s performance is bigger than both of theirs combined, but the fact that he doesn’t quite fit works for his character, Mr. Hunham, a man whose challenging appearance, smell, and personality have foreclosed the possibility of healthy integration.
The movie is an homage to a very 1970s style of character-driven filmmaking. It looks fantastic, and feels like a very comfortable home for Payne’s current style of storytelling (the pacing is similar to the laidback amble of Sideways). The script isn’t half as original as the films that inspired it. The plot is predictable and not terribly interesting. The writing of the characters, on the other hand, is tight and specific, and when the dialogue revs up during conflict we get some exceptional barbs. It’s particularly good at capturing the viciousness of adolescence and the way bitterness can ferment over a lifetime of disappointment. Fundamentally, though, the film is an opportunity to look at and appreciate Paul Giamatti’s character work, which is excellent. By the end of the film you feel like you truly know, emotionally and intellectually, Mr. Hunham in all his variation. While common in novels, rare is the film, these days at least, that offers us such a deep and sustained look.
Stay tuned for Part 3, which will include my own personal picks.