2021
OSCAR NOMINATIONS
Considering the scarcity of quality
Hollywood films in 2021, the Oscar nominations arrived as expected with a best
picture lineup filled with movies that feature moments of inspiration but never
jell into cohesive cinema.
Best picture nominees “Belfast,” “Dune,”
“Licorice Pizza,” “Nightmare Alley,” “King Richard” and “The Power of the Dog” made
for much better trailers than full-length movies; even “Don’t Look Up,” which
made my Top 10, doesn’t quite deliver on its initial promise.
“West Side Story,” a remake of the 1961 Best Picture winner, is clearly the finest picture of the year and the strongest competition for Oscar front-runner “The Power of the Dog.”
I’m surprised that Academy favorite Joel
Coen didn’t receive more love for “The Tragedy of Macbeth,” but I was pleased
that Denzel Washington scored a best actor nomination. I hardly expected
nominations for favorite of mine, including “The French Dispatch,” “The Card
Counter” and “Pig,” but I was taken aback that “Passing” and its actresses Tessa
Thompson and Ruth Negga weren’t recognized. I suspect that its story of African
American life wasn’t upbeat enough, with voters preferring “King Richard,” a
predictably uplifting entertainment.
I have no real quarrel with the best
actor and actress nominees, save the absence of Oscar Isaac for “Card Counter,”
Nicolas Cage for “Pig,” Lady Gaga for “House of Gucci” and Jennifer Lawrence for
“Don’t Look Up,” who gives her best performance since her Oscar-winning “Silver
Linings Playbook.” A pleasant surprise—for someone who hasn’t kept up with the
pre-Oscar predictions—was the inclusion of Andrew Garfield in “tick,
tick…BOOM!” It’s the kind of small, little-seen film that rarely receives
recognition. In the opposite camp is “Being the Ricardos,” that seemed to be
too big to fail, a very ordinary film that scored three acting nominations.
I assumed “The Lost Daughter” would be
among the best picture nominees—it’s a better film than most of the
nominees—but it was good to see its trio of look-alike actresses, Olivia
Colman, Jessie Buckley (both playing Leda) and director Maggie Gyllenhaal for
her screenplay, garner nominations.
Among the supporting nods, Ciarán Hands’
revived my belief in the Academy Award system; this Irish actor has been doing
amazing work for decades and was the best thing about “Belfast.” I’m not sure
what the voters had against two previous winners, Jared Leto, who was hilarious
in “House of Gucci,” and Mark Rylance, who stole “Don’t Look Up” from the
bigger stars.
The nominations for best picture, best
director and best screenplay for “Drive My Car,” the cathartic story of a
Japanese actor-director dealing with tragedy following the win by “Parasite” in
2019 confirms that Oscar voters are more in touch with critical approval than
ever before. (If I included foreign-language films in my Top 10, it would be
among the top 5.)
One of the year’s most satisfying
nominations was for “Summer of Soul,” the reclaimed concert film documenting an
exuberant 1969 Harlem music festival. It may have been the most entertaining
film of the year.
Here’s my Top 10 thus far:
2. The French Dispatch (Wes
Anderson)
3. The Card Counter (Paul Schrader)
4. Pig (Michael Sarnoski)
5. The Tragedy of Macbeth (Joel
Coen)
6. The Lost Daughter (Maggie
Gyllenhaal)
7. Passing (Rebecca Hall)
8. Don’t Look Up (Adam McKay)
9. House of Gucci (Ridley Scott)
10. tick, tick…BOOM! (Lin-Manuel
Miranda)
DRIVE
MY CAR (2021)
Though it takes a long time to get
there—interminable rides inside the main characters red Saab listening to a
tape of Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya”—this Japanese import unearths the deep-seeded
anger, guilt and sadness of the protagonist and his driver.
The best reviewed film of 2021, winning
best picture honors from the National Society of Film Critics, the New York
Film Critics Circle and the L.A. Film Critics, Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s meticulously
directed contemplation on how humans react to personal tragedy plays like a
primer in the different between Eastern and Western people, or at least how
they are presented in most motion pictures.
In almost every American film, characters
are too anxious to share their feelings (especially in this era of reality show
confessions), rarely holding in for more than a few scenes their entire range
of emotions. Hollywood movies, from the beginning, have hinged on characters
confronting one another, be it with loud voices, tears or guns. Asian films,
those not directly imitating the West, allow unhappy characters to brood,
deflect and generally carry on as if nothing has happened, often without ever
achieving resolve.
Yusuke Kafuku (a
relentlessly stoic Hidetoshi Nishijima) is a well-regarded stage actor married
to Oto (Reika Kirishima), a television writer. While their marriage seems
relatively happy, considering that they lost a child at a young age, secrets
create a troubling undercurrent. For Yusuke, that intensifies when Oto dies
unexpectedly.
After this long introduction, Yusuke, two
years later, is contracted to stage “Uncle Vanya” in Hiroshima—an unspoken but
clearly potent symbol of those dealing with loss.
The long scenes of table-reading rehearsals
consume much of the film’s three-hour running time as Yusuke patiently guides
his multilingual cast (actors speak in Japanese, Mandarin, Korean and,
stretching the realm of diversity, Korean sign-language. The rehearsals do have
an unspoken dynamic as Yusuke has cast in the lead a young, volatile TV actor
who he knows had an affair with his late wife.
But the key relationship of the second half
of the film involves Yusuke and a young woman, around the age that his daughter
would have been, assigned to chauffer him during his six-week stay in
Hiroshima.
At the start, Misaki (a convincingly
restrained Tôko Miura) is all business, but slowly—everything in this film
moves slowly—they bond during the long drives from the theater to his hotel
while he listens to the “Uncle Vanya” tape his wife recorded for him. A family
unit of sorts is formed within the confides of the Saab.
I don’t think it’s a great film, but in this
extraordinarily weak year for movies, I understand why it has garnered so much critical
attention. “Drive My Car” offers what American films rarely attempt: a quiet,
understated examination of how people deal with tragedy and the way loss can
bring us together.
BEING
THE RICARDOS (2021)
While it’s surprising that it took so long
for a major motion picture to depict TV legends Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, I
don’t think this is the film anyone wanted to see.
Telescoping all the difficulties of this
power couple into one week in 1952, during the second season of “I Love Lucy,”
writer-director Aaron Sorkin, with his third and least successful work behind
the camera, paints a harsh, uncompromising portrait of Lucy, someone who is
hard to like even as her comic genius and whip-smart humor is shown in full
flower. The film’s drama centers around the uproar at CBS after gossip
columnist Walter Winchell mentions on his radio show that the biggest comedy
star on TV is a communist. (In the late 1940s and throughout the ‘50s, even
being accused of being a communist could end one’s career.)
At the same time, she and Desi announce to
the network and sponsor that Lucy is pregnant and they want to turn that into
the focus of the show until she gives birth. (At the time, pregnancy wasn’t
acknowledged on television, considered an inappropriate topic for families.)
Meanwhile, the real-life marriage of the
first couple of TV isn’t going well.
Like so many bio-pics, even those that avoid the cradle-to-grave story arc, the Ricardos, despite the emphasis on their flaws, never rise above imitations.
Nicole Kidman, made up with a smooth, shiny face I guess to “look” like Ball,” does an incredible imitation, both in her head and hand movements and her distinctive voice. But I’m not sure that was the best approach to the role.
Undoubtedly, Sorkin and Kidman, knowing
that Lucy has probably been seen and heard by more people than anyone in the
history of filmed entertainment, felt
they
had to create a look-alike. Yet Javier Bardem as Desi, J.K. Simmons as Bill
Frawley and Nina Arianda as Vivian Vance look nothing like their real-life
counterparts and are just as effective.
The
structure of the film seems disjointed to me in the way Sorkin has the writers
and producer, shown years later and played by older actors, talking about the
situation and leading into flashbacks of Ball’s film career and how she met
Desi. (It’s sloppily researched also: among other things, they present Judy
Holliday as a film rival to Lucy three years before Holliday made her debut.)
While this isn’t legitimate criticism, what
I really wanted to know and have always been curious about, is why CBS ever
agreed to allow a Cuban-American to co-star in a show in 1951. At that point,
Ball was a minor movie star and had no industry clout. The film offers no
answer.
For devotees of the show, the film
shouldn’t be missed for its extensive rehearsal scenes, cast member interaction
(even though it doesn’t go much beyond what has been talked about in the
intervening years) and the moments that illustrate Lucy’s comedy acumen. For
the rest of us, re-watching a couple of old episodes will suffice.
TICK,
TICK…BOOM! (2021)
There’s something very appealing about
seeing the creative process portrayed on screen—it’s rarely been done
successfully. In this Lin-Manuel Miranda film, the story of “Rent” creator
Jonathan Larson’s writing his earlier failure, “Superbia,” reveals more about
what it takes to “make it” than any tale of success.
The pop musical “Rent,” which took
Broadway by storm in 1996, chronicles a collection of poor struggling artists
(an updated “La Boheme”) in New York City as AIDs devastated the community. It
went on to win the Pulitzer Prize and Best Musical Tony, running 12 years.
Tragically, the 30-year-old Larson died of aortic dissection the night before
its premiere.
This musical is also a Larson creation,
written about his attempt to write “Superbia,” a futuristic musical, as his 30th
birthday approaches (tick…tick) that was staged as a one-man show. Miranda and
screenwriter Steven Levenson (“Dear Evan Hansen” and the TV miniseries
“Fosse/Verdon”) turn it into a lively entertainment and an insightful look at
young ambition, both Larson’s and anyone who has tried to express themselves in
art.
Andrew Garfield, best known as the 2012-14
Spiderman but who has given impressive performances in “The Social Network,”
“Hacksaw Ridge” and most memorably in Martin Scorsese’s “Silence,” holds this
crazy quilt of a movie together as it bounces from his day job at a diner, to
long hours trying to write that one last song to actually performing at preview
of “tick..tick.” I never would have imagined Garfield in the role, but he’s
superb, well deserving of his Oscar nomination.
The musical is filled with believable
characters, not that common for musical adaptations, including Robin de Jesus
as his best friend and Bradley Whitford as a supportive Stephen Sondheim, who
agreed to hear a presentation of “Superbia.”
As a teen, Miranda was inspired by “Rent”
and his admiration for Larson is clear through the picture as is his love of
the Broadway musical. In one of the film’s most memorable sequences, stage
legends Chita Rivera, Bernadette Peters and Joel Grey, among many others, show
up at the diner for “Sunday,” a lament about Larson’s waiter job and the glory
of big production numbers.
For me, this was one of the real movie
surprises of the year; I found “Rent” to be pretentious and dull at least in
the road show version I saw 15 years ago and probably would not have watched
“tick..tick” if it wasn’t available for streaming on Netflix. I ignored my
expectations and saw one of the year’s most entertaining films.
DEADLINE
AT DAWN (1946)
Now all but forgotten, Harold Clurman was
among the key architects of American theater during its creative height in the
mid-20th Century. Among the founders of the Group Theater—an
incubator for modern acting and playwriting—in the 1930s (with Lee Strasberg
and Cheryl Crawford), he directed such landmark productions as Clifford Odets’
“Awake and Sing,” “Waiting for Lefty” and “Golden Boy;” Maxwell Anderson’s
“Truckline Café,” which introduced the world to Marlon Brando in 1946; and
later Broadway hits “The Member of the Wedding” and “Bus Stop.”
Clurman and other Group Theater alumni,
including his wife, legendary acting teacher Stella Adler, reinvented drama by
introducing Method acting and putting the focus on characters’ internal
struggles and motivations as part of a probing, psychological presentation of a
playwright’s work.
As the Method started to influence movie
acting after World War II, Clurman dipped his toe into filmmaking, for the
first and last time, directing this 1946 crime picture.
Scripted by longtime collaborator Odets,
from a novel by veteran crime writer Cornell Woolrich (“Rear Window”),
“Deadline at Dawn” follows a late night-early morning journey through New York
City’s underbelly by Alex, a wide-eyed innocent sailor (Bill Williams). After
blacking out after a night of drinking, the Navy man on shore leave finds
himself in possession of a wad of money given to him by a woman he finds dead.
Fearing that he’s responsible, Alex
enlists June, a cynical dance hall girl, played by Susan Hayward, and talkative
cabbie Gus, superbly portrayed by Paul Lukas, fresh off his Oscar win for
“Watch on the Rhine,” to help him track down who killed the girl, one step
ahead of the mob and the cops.
The smart script by Odets and noirish
location cinematography by veteran Nick Musuraca (“Cat People,” “Out of the
Past”) helps the movie overcome its clunky plot; clearly, the filmmakers were
more interested in ideas and the movie’s menagerie of nighttime characters.
Hayward’s performance is among her best,
just before she became the ultimate Hollywood drama queen, racking up five
Oscar nominations that culminated in her Oscar-winning turn as the prostitute
sentenced to death in “I Want to Live” (1958).
But Lukas gets the best lines and has the
most interesting role in “Deadline at Dawn,” as he offers philosophical asides
and street-wise wisdom to the innocent Alex. His (Odets’) best line: “Remember,
speech was given to man to hide his thoughts.”
PARALLEL
MOTHERS (2021)
The plot of this Spanish film might have
been lifted from a television soap opera yet director Pedro Almodóvar layers
the film with thoughtful insight into human nature through his fully drawn
characters and an overarching connection to the country’s tragic past.
In a film overloaded with plot turns,
Almodóvar’s muse of 25 years, Penélope Cruz, plays Janis, a magazine
photographer who connects with Arturo (Israel Elejalde), a well-known
archeologist, during a photo shoot. She’s hoping he can expedite a request to
excavate an unmarked grave where her family believes her great-grandfather was
buried by Fascists after he was executed during the 1930s civil war.
The horrors of the past hang heavily over
the film even as the plot turns toward personal problems. After giving birth as
a result of an affair with Arturo, Janis begins to doubt the child’s paternity;
a DNA test confirms that she isn’t the mother and most likely her child was
switched with the newborn of a younger woman who she shared a room with in the
hospital and gave birth on the same day.
When Janis and the young woman, Ana (Milena
Smit) reconnect, they end up living together and raising the child together. At
the same time, Arturo keeps popping back into Janis’ life.
In lesser hands this film would be a jumbled,
cliché-filled throw-away, yet Almodóvar’s pointed dialogue and obvious sympathy
for the women and their various dilemmas turn “Parallel Mothers” into a
heartbreaking study of womanhood.
Cruz gives one of her best performances as
Janis, a careful, old-fashioned woman who guides the viewer through the
complexities of life the director throws onto the screen. Smit matches the
veteran actress in their emotional intense scenes together as does Aitana
Sánchez-Gijón as Ana’s mother who prioritizes her acting career over being part
of her daughter’s life. And, as in almost all recent Almodóvar films, Rossy de
Palma is a presence as Janis’ best friend.
Since the 1980s, the writer-director has been
among the foremost filmmakers in the world, continuing to bring powerful,
emotional, sometimes outlandish stories of modern women to the screen.
THE
GREEN KNIGHT (2021) and THE LAST DUEL (2021)
I guess the 14th Century is
where it’s at, as two major films, set on opposite side of the English Channel,
were released last year. While Ridley Scott, one of Hollywood’s most
accomplished directors, with three major stars, delivered a plodding “Duel,”
the lesser-known David Lowrey (“The Old Man & the Gun”) works magic with a
Middle Ages fantasy in “Green Knight.”
Beautifully photographed and directed,
this offshoot on the Round Table legend based on a 14th Century epic
poem tells of the journey by Gawain, a low-regarded nephew of King Arthur to
pay his debt to the monstrous Green Knight.
Gawain’s destiny is determined when an imposing knight rides into a Christmas gathering of Arthur’s court challenging anyone to swing their sword on him. The caveat of the challenge is that the challenger must endure the same blow from the Green Knight in a year’s time. Gawain, who has led a life of debauchery up until now, wants to prove himself to his uncle, the King. So he takes up the sword and foolishly beheads the monster, who promptly picks up his head and rides off reminding the young man that he’ll see him in a year.
Impressively, he doesn’t dodge the
challenge, determined to prove his worth and earned knighthood. In December, he
sets off on the journey where he encounters real and ghostly obstacles.
Dev Patel, who I’ve been underwhelmed by
in the past (“Slumdog Millionaire,” “Lion”) shines as a man who is determined
to rise above his natural tendencies even if it costs him his life. He makes
you believe every fantastical trial he endures on his way to the Green Castle.
Alicia Vikander, whose career seems to have
stalled since she burst on the scene in 2015 with “Ex Machina” and “The Dutch
Girl,” which earned her an Oscar, stands out as both of Gawain’s love
interests, first as a local girl and then as a noble woman. Also memorably are
Joel Edgerton as a mysterious hunter who lives near the Green Knight and Sarita
Choudhury as Gawain mother who conjures up all sorts of strangeness.
But the key to the film’s power is the
vibrant look created by cinematographer Andrew Droz Palermo (“A Ghost Story”)
and production designer Jade Healy (“I, Tonya” and “A Beautiful Day in the
Neighborhood”).
In “The Last Duel,” French knight Jean de
Carrouges (Matt Damon sporting an awful mullet), a hot-headed ruffian, keeps
getting undercut by his former best friend, Jacques Le Gris (Adam Driver), who
steals part of his property and his title while eyeing his wife. While Jean
lacks the sophistication (1380 version) to be part of the in-crowd, Jacques
hangs out with the unsavory, hedonistic Pierre d’Alencon (a blond Ben Affleck),
including participating in his orgies, earning protection from this
high-ranking nobleman.
In an attempt to present all side of the
story, Scott tells the same story three times, from different perspectives.
Unfortunately, only minor differences are revealed; too many scenes play out
three times in almost duplicated form. I appreciated the subtlety, but at 2 and
a half hours, the repetition grew tiresome.
The only reason to sit through the movie is
for Jodie Comer’s moving performance as Marguerite, Jean’s wife. The star of
the TV thriller “Killing Eve” (she won an Emmy for it), Comer also played Rey’s
mother in the last “Star Wars” episode “The Rise of Skywalker” (2019). In “The
Last Duel,” she creates a character with believable emotions, while the three
male stars chew on the scenery.
ON
THE ROCKS (2020)
I’ve not been impressed with Sofia
Coppola’s directing career thus far, but her latest is clearly the most
interesting film she’s made since “Lost in Translation” (2003). The reason is simple:
she’s once again tapped into the genius of Bill Murray.
Since the late 1970s, he’s made everything
he’s been in better, from truly awful films (“Where the Buffalo Roam,”
“Scrooged”) to comedy classics (“Tootsie,” “Caddyshack”). It’s long past the
time to acknowledge that Murray, even as he plays the same character in almost
every film, is among the finest comic actors in film history. He can make you
laugh just by standing there or with a simple sideways glance.
He’s in his element as Felix, the wealthy,
martini-sipping playboy father of Laura (TV veteran Rashida Jones), who
encourages her suspicions that her husband is cheating on her. I’m being
charitable in saying the plot is flimsy, but when Felix starts turning his
daughter’s marital problems into an adventure—he brings crackers and caviar
when they spy on Dean (an unconvincing Marlon Wayans)—the picture comes alive. The
scene in which he talks his way out of a traffic ticket is a classic Murray
bit.
At the heart of the film’s weakness is the
lack of chemistry between Laura and Dean---it doesn’t even matter if he’s
having an affair; the body language of the couple and their conversations make
it clear that they aren’t meant for one another. But the movie tells me
something else.
But that’s easily put aside as you enjoy
the manner in which Murray, so casual, seemingly unrehearsed, creates yet
another comic gem.
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