The Artist (1 hr & 35 min)
The Academy of Motion Pictures did a very surprising and unprecedented thing this past February in its ceremony honoring the best movies released in 2011. For the first time in its 84-year history it gave its Best Picture Award to a foreign made product, this one directed by a heretofore unknown French cineaste, Michel Hazanavicius. And that is not all in the way of surprise with this choice. The picture happens to be (of all things in the 21st century) a silent movie filmed in black and white, with very spare dialogue presented in English-translated intertitles. Actually it is a foreign made American film. Anyone seeing it cold knowing nothing of its origin would assume it was filmed in Hollywood, because it is about Hollywood in the late 1920s, when sound made its way into popular cinema. There is nothing immediately French about it in content or style. It tells of a Douglas Fairbanks type screen idol (French actor Jean Dujardin) who gets put out to pasture by his studio when his audience demands to hear him as well as see him, no longer content just to have him cavort before their eyes. Apparently his voice, which we never get to hear, is not considered suitable for sound production. At the same time, a young woman aspirant (Berenice Bejo) for whom he has opened doors manages to get her start in pictures, and her star rises as his falls. Guess who ends up helping whom by movie’s climax! There is certainly nothing remarkable about that plot device, a fact to which anyone who has seen any of the three versions of “A Star Is Born” can attest.
Before I go any further, let me make it clear that the comments I am making do not amount to a pan review of the picture. I enjoyed watching this frolic. It is sweetly nostalgic, good humored, technically smart and efficient, reasonably well acted, pictorially exciting, full of vitality, and ever so relaxing, with a zinger of a dance number at the end. But these qualities and features in and of themselves do not add up to greatness. And it is my earnest belief that only great movies should be given prestigious awards. Good and commendable are not enough for me when it comes to handing out top honors. We need the good and commendable; bring them on; just do not confuse them with the great ones.
In my estimation that is exactly what the Academy has done, not that they never have before. The trouble with the Oscars is that most of the Academy’s voting members do not have the kind of overview that we expect from seasoned film critics or habitues. I doubt if most of them even get to view the vast majority of the eligible films. They are movie makers but not all movie goers. How could they be with all the behind the camera work they have to do and all the hours of the days and nights of the year they have to spend on their jobs grinding out their own productions? I believe all of them try to be objective – really try – but technicians, which most of them are, are not always the best judges of what constitutes a refined work of art. Smoothness and theatrical flair are often confused with lasting richness. Great movies are more than the sum of their parts and certainly more than the collective sum of the people who put them together. There is much more sweep to the process of assigning Oscar winners than introspective thoughtfulness and seasoned perspective. Sometimes they do seem to get it right. I could name any number of worthy choices they have made. But do not hold your breath waiting for them to.
So what does greatness look like? Read on, and I will try to show you. Three other 2011 movies that were among the nine nominated for the Best Picture Oscar I will now review, any one of them far more deserving of the honor as far as I am concerned.
“The Artist” is not yet available in DVD. The following three are.
The Descendants (1 hr & 55 min)
Most patrons of either the lively or the literary arts place great value upon what we can call transformational stories – those in which an individual (or individuals) who are psychologically challenged or lost or misguided or delusional experience a change, not so much in their lifestyles or in their health or material status as in attitude, perspective or awareness – a gigantic shift at a profound level of being. And this is one of the finest examples in movie terms you will ever discover, thanks to the directing and writing wizardry of Alexander Payne, based upon a novel by Kaui Hart Hemmings.
Our subject is an up-to-his-ears middle aged lawyer named Matt King (superbly played by George Clooney) faced with the imminent death of his wife from a boating accident, the woman kept only technically alive on life support. The setting is that of Hawaii, and in an opening voice-over narration in present time he tells us who reside on the U.S. mainland that life in that fiftieth state is not the paradise we might be inclined to imagine. Sickness and disease and tragedy and death are as much a staple there as anywhere else. So are ornery kids and dysfunctional families, the mention of which brings us to the core of this man’s predicament.
Becoming a widower and experiencing the concomitant grief turns out to be only a part of what Matt faces with the wife gone. He has two very insolent, defiant, foul-mouthed daughters – the teenage Alex (Shailene Woodley) and the nine-year-old Scottie (Amara Miller), neither of whom he has had any part before in supervising. He calls himself “the backup parent, the understudy,” and now with the star player gone forever from the stage he must permanently step into the role by himself. He admits at two or three points that he does not know what to do with them, nor does he understand the real basis for their rebellion. Actually, losing their mother is not all that chews on them. Matt discovers, while his wife lies on the hospital bed comatose and connected to IVs and tubes and machinery, that she has been cheating on him. This news sets him off on a quest for authentic truth and vindication that threatens to derails him but eventually has a strange, transforming, completing effect.
If all this were not enough, he has a legal entanglement. His father’s recent death has left him the controlling interest in a large, extended family trust of real estate property with nineteenth century roots. In that capacity he must soon make a momentous decision that will affect many lives and fortunes besides his own and could have drastic effects upon the ecology of the region in which he lives. Pressures of all kinds come to bear upon him from several directions, and he slowly comes to realize that the choice he makes will be profound and far-reaching for following generations. The ingenuity of the screenplay, co-authored with Payne by Nat Faxos and Jim Rush, is the way that a hospital room serves as a kind of clearing house for resentments, betrayals, unrequited affection and the settlement of more than one kind of delinquent account. I cannot recall a motion picture in which more words are spoken to a corpse by more and varied people. As far as his household is concerned, Matt learns that while it may be too late to give in one direction, one can still learn to do so in another.
“The Descendants” did manage to snag an Oscar for its screenplay and won the Best Picture for Drama Award in the Golden Globes competition. It deserves much praise for its art direction and music too. The entire score consists of Hawaiian melodies and arrangements. And, though I have inferred as much already, Clooney is absolutely magnificent. He gets every reaction shot just right and carries the picture with perfect finesse. He too should have won.
The second and third of my three choices I have already written about. Many in my church have read my comments about them already, but for the benefit of others on the blog mailing list I have decided on a rerun.
Hugo
(2 hrs & 7 min)
Enchantment is defined as a state of being delighted by magical illusion, and there is enough magic, both formative and figurative, in “Hugo” to last us for years on end, not that such a thing is in any danger of becoming extinct. I was drawn to it in expectation of a children’s picture storybook type of adventure. It is that to be sure, set in the Paris of the 1920s. But little did I realize that a much larger legend lay in store beneath those trappings, one with a firm historical basis.
First of all, the children! Hugo (Asa Butterfield) is a little genius of an orphan boy (his age never given, but he looks to be somewhere around twelve or thirteen). After the untimely death of his clockmaker father (Jude Law) he is taken under the sodden wing of an alcoholic uncle, who has the job of winding up and caring for the clocks in the enormous clock tower in the Paris train station. When the uncle disappears, Hugo is left by himself and puts the technical training his father has given him to work supervising the intricate timepieces his uncle has abandoned, unbeknownst to the Parisian population at large or even the station personnel. There he lives, in the maze-like bowels of the tower, where he learns his way around in short order and keeps a peeping eye upon the bustling life beneath his fortress of secrecy, feeding himself through petty thievery. He also tinkers with a mechanical artifact his father has left him, one that is about to change his life and the lives of many around him forever. He befriends the slightly older adopted daughter Isabelle (Chloe Grace Noretz) of a candy and toy store operator (Ben Kingsley), whose place of work is located just below Hugo’s lair. These two youth perform an amazing miracle that opens the book on her adopted father’s forgotten former career as a film maker. Which brings me to the legend attached to the children’s tale!
In a very real sense, the movie is about Kingsley’s shop manager, who turns out to be Georges Milies, a real life pioneer movie maker whom French society by that time had all but forgotten; some thought he had died in World War I. But it would be more accurate to say that his career behind the camera had died because of that war, and Hugo and Isabelle virtually give him back his life and restore him to his rightful prestige. How do they do this? That is the magic and the amazement of this beautiful jewel of a motion picture from the brilliant hand of Martin Scorcese. Before watching, I had wondered, as so many others have, how this creator of hard bitten stuff like “Raging Bull,” “Goodfellas,” “Taxi Driver” and “The Departed” could have taken an interest in the adaptation of a book such as “The Inventions of Hugo Cabret” by Brian Selznick. But I was not far into it when I remembered that Scorcese, besides being a director, is himself a preserver and restorer of old movies. He has been involved in any number of restoration projects. This production, I suppose, is his way of doing for Milies what he has done for so many early cineastes. Google Milies and you will learn far more than the film even begins to tell you. A most amazing man! The screenplay, derived from Selznick’s book, is the work of John Logan.
And yet I do not want to take any of the spot light away from these child actors, who fill out most of the movie’s footage and perform with a grace and a zest and a comprehension that will win over the most impregnable of hearts. There is an 8-minute scene in which they preside over the reviving of Hugo’s mechanical artifact, star struck with wonder and anticipation, one that is unsurpassed by anything involving children on screen within my living memory. It took my breath away.
Not often do you find a movie that is literally first rate in all departments of construction, but what we have here is nothing short of a treasure trove of artistry at work. “Hugo” quite deserves all ten of its Oscar nominations, not the least the five technical awards it actually won. There are unprecedented visual wonders and effects on which the eye feasts, a dreamy, carefree and (of course) enchanting musical score by Howard Shore, and scene after scene that radiates. It is about things broken that get mended, about people with old and wondrous secrets that are brought forth into the light of day, and about the pure thrill of inquiry, discovery and invention. And it all comes off like (what else?) clockwork.
The Help
(2 hrs and 15 min)
During the first two decades of my life as a southerner I suppose I took it for granted that certain types of jobs were assigned by the counsels of heaven and earth to certain types of people, especially blacks. I guess I assumed that “the colored girls” hired by families in my neck of the woods to do such things as washing clothes, scrubbing bathrooms, cleaning floors, cooking meals and baby-sitting us white kids were self-motivated to these menial functions, born with the instinct for domestic labors and supposedly taking pride in their consigned skills. I was too young, callow and unseasoned to know anything at all about the concept of cheap labor. Perhaps I would have confronted such social misapprehensions much earlier, if I had grown up in a prosperous, well-heeled family that could afford to hire such “help.” As it was, I was groomed in a lower middle class, edge-of-poverty, hand-to-mouth flat.
“The Help” is an immediately heart-wrenching but ultimately heart-warming tale, set in Mississippi during the 1960s when the civil rights movement was just getting into high gear – a tale of exploitation, domestic injustice and extraordinary courage. What an explosion it would have set off in that southern mind with which I grew up.
The chief character is Aibileen, magnificently portrayed by Viola Davis, a black nanny who has served a white family for over a generation and has provided the undergirding of affection and self-enhancement to one of the family’s children, the kind she might have lavished upon her own son and only child, who was murdered by white men some time before this narrative begins. She is incredulous and wary when a young white woman journalist from her community nicknamed Skooter (Emma Stone) inquires into her life as a domestic for white families with the intent of writing about these people called “the help.” “Nobody ever asked me [before] what it felt like to be me,” says Aibileen. Skooter opens quite a can of worms with the publication of her work, one that shakes up three white households. Aibileen’s acceptance of her invitation to be interviewed inspires other black women to step forth, including a cook named Minny (Octavia Spencer), whose feistiness and savvy play a big part in raising the sights of all the others.
If I had grown up rich and white, I might not have noticed that “the help” were more aware and informed about white attitudes and practices and mentalities than I might have believed. I might have thought of them as being opaque like furniture or as docile as pets; I might not have realized that they were eavesdroppers who never missed anything going on in their surroundings, as is made ever so vivid in this screenplay, and how would I ever have known how forthright and gutsy they could be when left to themselves to reflect ironically upon their masters and mistresses, no love being lost on them! Slaves out in the fields were worked to back-breaking death. The black domestic servants were killed ever so slowly by fake and condescending kindness. Am I talking here in the past tense? Probably such conditions of household servitude still prevail in some quarters.
There are eloquent and gladdening moments all throughout the film, especially when the story focuses upon these three women. The film deserves most of its many accolades. My only problem with it is the way the white women are portrayed. Just about all of them border on stereotype – petite, prissy, posy, and tending to the neurotic. I feel as if I have met them all before, but not in the real life south. I am sorry that Tate Taylor, who wrote and directed from the novel by Kathryn Stockett, and a fine piece of work he has done, nevertheless felt that he had to resort to white caricature in order to make the three heroines look so admirable by contrast, when those three did not need that shading to stir and excite our imaginations as they do. A little more subtlety in the treatment of the racism would not have hurt. On the credit side, however, I commend Taylor for sharp and penetrating dialogue and for not letting the material sink into bathos and schmaltz. The closing sequence, which I will not disclose for the sake of those who have not seen the movie, is a star in his writing crown and that of Stockett to be sure. I look for more good work from him and more first rate novels from her. These three women will be present to me in my awareness for a long time to come.
To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website: enspiritus.blogspot.com
I welcome feedback. Direct it to bobracine@verizon.net
No comments:
Post a Comment