Movies Up Close

I’ve seen and reviewed all ten movies nominated for Best Picture this year, and from worst to best, here are my rankings with links to each individual review:

10. F1
9. Frankenstein
8. Train Dreams
7. Sinners
6. The Secret Agent
5. Marty Supreme
4. Sentimental Value
3. Hamnet
2. One Battle After Another
1. Bugonia

A noticeable pattern was the surprising pervasiveness of arthouse aesthetics. Other than Marty Supreme and F1, these ten movies feature little in the way of “normal” stories; viewers hoping for familiar characters and formulaic plots will be disappointed. I was happy to see this, but an abundance of risks also means a subset of misses, and there are several big misses on this list. Train Dreams, Sinners, and Frankenstein, especially, bite off more, structurally, than they can chew, leaving themselves open to the most dangerous question for character-deficient cinema: who cares?

Thematically, the films are diverse, but I detect one curious through-line: the hidden emotions of men. The drama of every film on this list except for Sinners, Marty Supreme, and One Battle After Another hinges on a late discovery that a previously inward male character (or monster) has untold depths of feeling. Is this an attempt at image rehabilitation post-#metoo? An attempt to rouse a generation of jaded, isolative young men? Is it, now that Trump and his boorish minions are back on television daily, a form of wish fulfillment?

The op-ed writers can sort that out. I’ll conclude, meanwhile, by hailing the best film of the year: Bugonia. By all accounts, it has no chance of winning the prize, but that might be because it hits too close to home for Hollywood: the maniacal anti-aging regimen of Emma Stone’s character, for example, could be Stone’s actual, real-life routine. One Battle After Another, the odds-on favorite and a good film in its own right, casts all of us as dormant revolutionaries, and maybe we are. But only Bugonia knows that it’s not just the economy and government that have been plundered; it’s our minds, too, which is why the world will watch the Oscars today with—like every gathering of the rich and famous now—an unshakeable skepticism, a tremendous disconnectedness, a kind of hatred, even. The bees are leaving; people are laying face-down, lifeless; someone must be to blame. And our celebrities, beaming for the cameras, sparkling on the red carpet, are giving exactly the wrong performance.

—-Jim Andersen

One Battle After Another finds Paul Thomas Anderson back in the literary world of Thomas Pynchon: underground revolutionaries, secret societies, lovable drifters, juvenile gags. It’s another win for one of the most consistent directors of our generation, although it falls a bit short of his masterworks: Boogie Nights, There Will Be Blood, and Inherent Vice (the stronger Pynchon trip). Anderson loves his revolutionaries more than he loves revolution, which puts him at odds with Pynchon and privileges comedy, not social theorizing, as the movie’s dominant mode. But it’s hard not to enjoy these freedom fighters quarreling, worrying, and scheming their way out of trouble—and for those wanting a deeper viewing, it’s there. Like Kubrick, for example, Anderson zeroes in on the family as a downstream mirror for tyranny; the revolution only resumes once Dad stops being such a hardass. And like the Cohen brothers, Anderson portrays his anti-hippie as a touchy sheep in wolf’s clothing; not since Jeffrey Lebowski has a conservative villain been this pathetic. The real wolves—rich racists in Lacoste polos—are formidable, but even they can’t see that history isn’t linear: they’re on top now, but they might be surprised at what’s in store for them just over the next dip in the road.

Sentimental Value is the latest in the “film within a film” setup, and one of the most interesting. As usual, a troubled artist plots his magnum opus while his relationships with cast, crew, and family reflect back on each other in disturbing and funny ways. Birdman, Drive My Car, and Synecdoche, New York come to mind—excellent company, in my view—but this film plays its premise with a straighter face; one could even call it more serious. It’s certainly more emotional: it knows that children’s grievances against their parents will never be answered, met with eternal dodges and deflections, the slippery pride of former authority. (“Everyone’s mad at Dad, huh?” pipes Stellan Skarskgaard, berated by his daughters for a lifetime of negligence.) It also knows what the family’s deceased mother, a therapist, probably knew: that reliving the past requires both authenticity and distance. When a filmmaker tries to shoot a family story in his childhood home, things go haywire; when he renovates the house and casts his family as renditions of their own ancestors, he strikes artistic—and therapeutic—gold. The opening narration of this deft, layered family study, then, is a lie: houses aren’t people; things and places only displace wounds—offering only the distraction of their sentimental value.

Train Dreams is a melancholy tale about an ordinary man and his ordinary life. Trees, dogs, wives, sunsets, sad faces—there’s your movie. Terrance Malick’s The Tree of Life is the model, but that film is tied together by complex theological wrestling; this and other Malick knockoffs, like 2020’s Nomadland, won’t touch that aspect, so their images remain stubbornly themeless: with no unifying philosophical core, shots of leaves are—just leaves. And there are a lot of leaves in this movie. A more apt comparison, then, may be Forrest Gump: the hero is a simpleton, and the movie wants to confer mythic status on his simplicity, to honor it as a forgotten, unappreciated wisdom; as with all things folksy, overthinking is the enemy—we’ve made life too dang complicated! The corollary to this worldview, though, and its fatal weakness in the age of technology, is skepticism toward actual wisdom, the learned kind, the kind that can be articulated in words or even actions. Neither come easy to Robert, so we’re left with only the space to ponder life, not the tools to do so; the movie is derelict in its responsibilities. Its one insight—which arrives, like everything in this film, through narration, not organic depiction—is that the world is beautiful. Granted. What else ya got?

The Secret Agent is an unsatisfying movie by design. The tale, ultimately, of a nation’s new generation sifting through records of its gravest modern chapter, its uneven narrative flow and tonal detachment mirror the patchwork of a curious, frustrated historian. I admire these structural risks, and the craft is admirable all around, but a viewing challenge like this needs intellectual payoff, and the bounty here is just too weak. Its main lesson is that the study of historical evils, drudgery and all, toughens us up, such that we might stand down similar evils in the present. The point is well taken, but it’s slight, and it’s been made many times before, including in last year’s I’m Still Here, another Brazilian film that covered such similar ground that the two films could pass for remakes of one another. The lesson is also a tad self-serving. The secret weapon against fascism, you ask? Slow, fragmented, historically accurate stories. You’re welcome!

Hamnet is the story of Shakespeare’s fictional wife, Agnes, a devotee to nature and all its powers, who sinks into depression after the death of her son. She’s resentful of her husband, too, whose city business kept him away while it occurred. (Men and their little projects—they’ll never understand.) But wait: William’s new creation has the town talking, and when Agnes witnesses its familiarly-named protagonist struggling with and accepting death, she knows what it’s really about. Maybe there’s not such a gulf between the endless rhythms of nature and the timeless compassion of great art—and, phew, maybe husbands have feelings after all. Of course, to the extent that this movie actually believes that Hamlet is a convoluted, masculine attempt to grieve, it’s wrong. But notice, as Hamlet dies, the audience’s reaction. Not only Agnes but everyone reaches out to comfort him: watching this grand tragedy, they all feel something; they all know, as she does, what it’s really about, and they’re all wrong, each in different ways. The masterpieces hold everything and everyone; no interpretation has authority; like nature, they belong to all of us. A celebration of that shouldn’t be missed, so I place this film among the year’s best—an emotional and meditative modern achievement.

One of the worst Best Picture nominees in recent years, F1 is less a movie than a feature-length commercial meant to drum up American interest in Formula One racing. And even in this regard, it’s dishonest—a wild misrepresentation of the sport that features drivers intentionally crashing into one another without consequence, cars launching into the woods and bursting into flames, lady engineers banging their drivers after discussing aerodynamics, and more. It’s like calling a movie PGA, then showing Happy Gilmore. But I can begrudgingly tolerate sensationalism; what really rankles me about this production is its corporate complacency: even its cliches, which are many, function not to lower the bar for accessibility—their usual and understandable role (if not for an Oscar contender)—but to give the movie a fake reason for existing beyond the obvious one: absorbing sponsorship cash. While movies about rogue bad boys are always paradoxically the most predictable, rarely has the irony extended this unbearably into basic integrity: after spending two plus hours emblazoned with a dozen brand names, vrooming past signs for Qatar Airways, Brad Pitt concludes with the line: “It’s not about the money.” The driver doth protest too much.