Votes for Women!

Suffragette is a fairly straightforward Hollywood-style movie, although Suffragette is a British film, perhaps more emotionally akin to last year's The Theory of Everything than to anything else I can think of at the moment. [The following may have some spoilers, but this is all historical fact, so none of it ought to be particularly surprising if you know what happened to British suffragettes in the years before the '14-'18 War.]

Sarah Gavron's film follows a young working woman in 1912 as she becomes politicized around achieving greater rights for women in a country (England) that doesn't extend rights to women. This fight about women's rights (especially the rights of working women) is fought under the banner of voting rights. In this way Suffragette has obvious debts (in style as well as structure) to last year's Selma. Gradually Maud Watts, the film's main character (played by Carey Mulligan) comes to understand that she actually has no rights whatsoever in England. She is beaten, imprisoned, tortured by London police, her child is taken away from her. She is disowned by her husband, fired, kicked out of her house, and reduced to homelessness on the streets of London. Her body, she finds out quite clearly, is not her own, and she has no recourse to fight any of these assaults upon her her person or her family. And so she decides to join the suffragettes, and the suffragettes decide to fight.

All of this is shown to the audience in an emotionally rousing, sentimental style, and the film does its best to spend time awaking all of the feelings we have about justice and motherhood and bodily integrity. In this way the film succeeds somewhat and is a crowd-pleaser, but it is not my kind of film. The older white-people crowd will love it – the audience I was with applauded when the film was over – and the film in many ways makes people feel good about beliefs that they already possess. Yes women should have access to their children; no one oughtn't to be fired for a political view; no one oughtn't to be sexually available to one's employer. Yes women are just as smart as men; no women oughtn't to be kicked out of their houses by their husbands; yes women ought to be able to vote.

But, then, these women are also terrorists, let us make no mistake. They become criminals, existing outside of the law, defying a government that affords them no protections. And here is where I am pretty sure that my read of the film differs from the read of its intended audience. For me, Suffragette became a film about unchecked state violence.

At numerous points in the movie, police literally beat peaceful protesters until they are bloody and then they arrest them and imprison them for any amount of time they wish. The police violence on the bodies of civilians goes absolutely unchecked. Here, for me, is where the film becomes more interesting. Watching this violence onscreen we might be in Harpers Ferry or Auschwitz or Selma or Ferguson or Baltimore in 2015. Police in Suffragette act with absolute impunity. They are the law and there is no law above them to check their actions because the bodies broken by their violence possess no rights of their own. In this way Suffragette, if it is a film about the struggles of working-class white women in Britain in 1912-3, can also be read about violent resistance to police brutality and unjust governments across the globe in 2015. It certainly called up for me police violence against black bodies in the U.S., the violence that says that people from non-European countries deserve no protections under the EU, and certain Republican presidential candidates' refusal to accept immigrants from other countries, including Mexico.

Ms. Bonham Carter

But the film also conflates "voting rights" with other problems, and this is where I got a bit confused by the film's politics. Many of the problems I articulate above – problems with the lack of rights attached to women's bodies in Britain before the first World War that the film addresses (men's presumed sexual access to working-class women, women's rights over their own children, the gender pay-gap) – are really unrelated to voting rights, or at least their links to voting rights are not made clear by Suffragette. This is, perhaps, one reason why one easily jumps to thinking about other injustices in the world rather than thinking deeply about the means the women took to achieve their desired political result. Because this is a sentimental film, the whole thing becomes about justice and injustice in the generic. These are women who couldn't get any newsmedia to cover their struggles and so they resorted to terrorism to get media attention, including suicide terrorism. The film, for reasons I find baffling, isn't really interested so much in these political tactics as it is in "good" and "evil". In this way Suffragette to my mind falls far short of a film like Selma, a movie that discusses political realities and the decisions with which activists must grapple when attempting to achieve political change.

In any case, Suffragette should do pretty well with Oscar, I'd wager. Expect a nomination for Carey Mulligan and maybe also one for Helena Bonham Carter (both are great). Ben Whishaw is also great, but his character is "bad" and in a picture this sentimental he won't get any awards love. A costume design nomination seems like an easy get, here, too. And Alexandre Desplat will probably get one for his score. In short, expect a couple. As I said, this is a crowd-pleaser.

 * * *

Oh! One last word. There was some brouhaha during the marketing of Suffragette about the film's (white) actresses posing in t-shirts that contained the phrase "I'd rather be a rebel than a slave" as a way of marketing the film. My opinion of this kerfuffle is that it was (like most things that happen on social media) a too-quick, knee-jerk reaction that practices both an anti-historicist view of political struggles and (as my reading of the film reflects) a too-strict view on readings of cultural products like films. For me, Suffragette was about the immigration crisis in the EU and unchecked police violence against black bodies and the gender pay-gap in the U.S. Representations always make meanings that vary from their ostensible subject matter, and to attempt to restrict the word "slave" to a particular historical period erases real instances of the enslavement of bodies that are ongoing in the world today.

Walking on Air

I thought Robert Zemeckis's movie The Walk – which is based on a story told in James Marsh's Oscar-winning 2008 documentary Man on Wire – was a trifling bit of fluff.

I had heard tell that The Walk was an exciting movie, that it took some time getting started, but that once Philippe Petit, the tightrope walker who put a wire between two corners of the Twin Towers, got onto his wire and started walking across, the movie was really going to get going.

I had also heard that people were getting sick in this movie, getting vertigo or becoming disturbed somehow by the dizzying heights portrayed in the film. (This obviously appealed to me.)

But... The Walk is, more than anything else, a kind of whimsical fairy tale. The screenplay is designed like a children's story, and it is actually narrated by the actor playing Petit (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) from the balcony at the top of the Statue of Liberty's torch. He tells us the story from there, while pulling rabbits out of hats and making coins appear from behind the ears of ingenuous children.

One might say that there is more to this film than whimsy, but The Walk insists on a kind of triviality, one that believes in the magic power of mimes. Throughout the film Petit talks a great deal about Art with a capital A, and he believes that his walk is a grand, superb artistic gesture. Frankly, I am inclined to agree with him. But Zemeckis's film is not interested in Petit as an artist, despite the number of times the word art is repeated in the screenplay. For Zemeckis, the protagonist of The Walk is a kind of magical grown up who can show us all what it is like to be a child again. Petit is reduced from what he thinks he is (an artist) to a kind of street magician, a latter-day Peter Pan who refuses to grow up and from whom we all can learn how not to be old. I don't know about you, but I think that kind of thing is silly.

The Walk is also a miniature love letter to the World Trade Center towers at the center of the film. This is understandable, and this aspect of the film is The Walk at its best. Near the film's end a character says something like "People have hated these towers since construction began on them, but now that you did what you did, people say they love the towers – they say that the towers mean something to them now". The actor who says this line, Steve Valentine, renders it beautifully, and embedded in his delivery is what happened to the towers in September of 2001, and what Petit did as an artist to change how people saw the towers. (The Eiffel Tower had its haters when it was first erected in 1889, as well.)

In short, the likability of the film's star and the sensational quality of the narrative the film wishes to tell are both undermined almost irrevocably by The Walk's writer and director. There was a cool film hidden in here somewhere, but maybe the cool film to which I refer is actually just Man on Wire.

Oscar Nominees 2015: Part 2 of 12

Part 1.
Part 2 of 12:

American Sniper

6 Nominations

• Picture
• Actor: Bradley Cooper (American Hustle, Silver Linings Playbook)
• Adapted Screenplay: Jason Hall
• Film Editing: Joel Cox (Million Dollar Baby, Unforgiven) & Gary D. Roach
• Sound Mixing
• Sound Editing

Director: Clint Eastwood

Cast: Cooper, Sienna Miller, Sammy Sheik, Luke Grimes, Navid Negahban, Jake McDorman, Keir O'Donnell, Eric Close, Cory Hardrict, Eric Ladin

This movie is awful. I am not sure that it is a huge surprise that a genre-picture directed by Clint Eastwood has made such a huge splash with the Academy, but it is certainly strange that a movie no smarter than, say, Predator or Rambo, a movie that is way less intelligent than a movie like Three Kings or Jarhead or this year's superb Fury should be nominated over any other film. But here we are and this movie is selling tickets like nobody's business. People seem to love this film's combination of gun-violence, anti-Arab sentiment, and video-game aesthetics. I found this combination irresponsible and deeply troubling. It's also basically little more than a shoot-em-up picture with some excellent acting. That said, Bradley Cooper really is great in the movie, and in a crowded category, he deserves his nomination as much as anyone else does. The nomination for Screenplay, however, is a bit of an absurdity; the characters speak in clichés and the script consists mostly of obvious, thudding symbols like bibles and rifles falling in the dust. This is making millions right now at the box office, though, and it should win plenty of statuettes come Oscar night. One more thing: this movie showed up very, very late to the party, and still managed to pull off six nominations, something other latecomers (Selma, Cake, A Most Violent Year) were not able to do. That it did this is mostly due to Eastwood's popularity among the Academy, but its tardiness still hurt it, otherwise we'd have seen nominations for Sienna Miller, here, and for Eastwood himself.

Will Win: Adapted Screenplay, Film Editing, Sound Mixing, Sound Editing

Could Win: Picture

My Rating: #65 out of 73

The Theory of Everything

5 Nominations

• Picture
• Actor: Eddie Redmayne
• Actress: Felicity Jones
• Adapted Screenplay: Anthony McCarten
• Original Score: Jóhann Jóhannsson

Director: James Marsh

Cast: Redmayne, Jones, Charlie Cox, Harry Lloyd, David Thewlis, Emily Watson, Simon McBurney, Alice Orr-Ewing

Well, I loved Harry Lloyd in this, and Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones are both good (I loved Jones in last year's The Invisible Woman). This movie, though, is just so similar to The Imitation Game, and that is decidedly not a good thing. Still, it seems to have staying power. Redmayne won the Screen Actors Guild Award, and he may take the Oscar, too, although I don't think he will: Oscar tends to like its lead actors older. But it is definitely possible. All of this is a snoozefest. I don't want to keep complaining about this year's season, but most of the big films bored me to tears. The Theory of Everything, does have more redeeming qualities than Imitation, and it also has a weird love triangle that is at least intriguing.

Will Win: Score

Could Win: Actor

My Rating: #56 out of 73

Whiplash

5 Nominations

• Picture
• Adapted Screenplay: Damien Chazelle
• Supporting Actor: JK Simmons
• Film Editing: Tom Cross
• Sound Mixing

Director: Damien Chazelle

Cast: Miles Teller, Simmons, Paul Reiser, Melissa Benoist, Nate Lang, Austin Stowell

Well this is an excellent film. This is one of the best of the Best Picture nominees and one of my favorite films of the year. It's riveting filmmaking and the fact that it did as well as it did with the Academy is a shock and a delight to me. I was especially pleased to see this film's editor, Tom Cross, get a nomination. He deserves it. The editing is perhaps the most exciting thing in the movie, and this in a film that is a white-knuckled ride; I left the movie raving about Tom Cross, as well as Miles Teller and JK Simmons. Everything about this movie is just great.
Will Win: Supporting Actor

Could Win: Adapted Screenplay

My Rating: #9 out of 73

Foxcatcher

5 Nominations

• Director: Bennett Miller (Capote)
• Actor: Steve Carell
• Original Screenplay: E. Max Frye & Dan Futterman (Capote)
• Supporting Actor: Mark Ruffalo (The Kids Are All Right) 
• Makeup

Director: Miller

Cast: Channing Tatum, Carell, Ruffalo, Sienna Miller, Vanessa Redgrave

This is very good, but its nominations are a little odd here – note that there is a Best Director nomination, but not a Best Picture nomination. This is an indication of respect for the movie but not affection. (My own review reflected this feeling when I saw it, as well.) Steve Carell's nomination here is unfortunate, because it could so easily have gone to David Oyelowo for Selma. Still, it's not undeserved; just unnecessary. I don't think it can realistically hope to win any Oscars on February 22, either. It's a very, very good movie, but I don't think anyone really loves it that fiercely.
Will Win: N/A
Could Win: Makeup
My Rating: #14 out of 73

Inspiration, Overcoming, and Oscar Bait

Somewhere near the end of act two of Angelina Jolie's Unbroken, the evil Japanese man who runs the P.O.W. camp where U.S. Olympian slash soldier Louie Zamperini is imprisoned forces the other Allied soldiers in the camp to punch Louie in the face. All of them. Louie takes their punches like a champ, screaming at his fellows who don't want to slug him Just hit me!

Jolie's film is a little bit like Louie at this moment in the movie.

It isn't that there aren't problems with the movie. There are plenty of them. But, like its hero, Unbroken seems to me a sort of resilient little guy. It tries and tries, and it wants to be something amazing. And as much as you might want to punch it in the face, it's just going to get up and stand there staring at you in defiance.

Unbroken, for the record, is based on a book by Laura Hillenbrand, and if you didn't know this before you started the movie, you will once you start watching. Anything that could happen to Louie Zamerpini happens to him. Hillebrand stuffs new events into Zamperni's life as though accretion will make him interesting, much like she did in the narrative she created that spawned Seabiscuit back in 2003. He is a first-generation immigrant; he takes control of his life as a small child by focusing on running; he runs in the Olympics; he is a bombardier in the Pacific theatre in the Second World War; his plane crashes not once but twice, and the second time the plane goes down in the Pacific and he survives. Then he survives in the middle of the ocean with only a tiger for company for like 45 days by literally catching sharks with his bare hands; he is finally rescued... by the Japanese; he is beaten; he is transferred to a POW camp in Tokyo where he is tormented by this crazy sadist named "the Bird", who has some kind of bizarre (erotic?) fascination with him; he appears on Japanese radio for some reason; he is then transferred to a new prison camp where he hauls coal; he lifts things above his head. (The poster, incidentally, really is iconic. I love it. Even if this movie never addresses anything approximating "redemption", whatever that is supposed to mean in this context.)

But all of that really happened to him, you might protest. Fine. But I am sure lots of other things happened to him, too. Like, I dunno, dancing with a girl for the first time, or learning to make gnocchi, or training to be a bombardier, or carrying his husband's blood around his neck in a vial. My point is that the film (of course it does) gets to choose what it shows us, and it chooses to show us all of the things that beggar belief. Even if they are all true, this compilation of events is not the same as a character study. Hillebrand and Jolie seem to believe that the fact that he made it through all of these events is a study of who the man is.

Garrett Hedlund: an unassuming bright spot in this movie

What it does to me, instead, is make him into a kind of superhuman figure, who represents resilience, unbrokenness (that old masculine preoccupation), triumph, even military victory, rather than being an actual human. We learn very little about Louie Zamperini himself, except that he is strong enough to take a punch.

There is plenty of sentiment here, too, and Unbroken is intended as a weeper: a deeply tearful story that makes us all hug our six children just a little tighter.

And now I imagine Louie getting back to his feet and looking at me with his clear, shallow eyes. See, in truth, this film is not really that much worse than the other big sentimental Oscar-bait movies of the year (The Theory of Everything, The Imitation Game, Rosewater). In fact, I think it's a bit better than them. It's beautifully shot, and much less boring than those movies, and it doesn't have nearly as many cliché phrases as those three films, and if Unbroken focuses, like Theory, Imitation, and Rosewater, on a young man who is assailed by things he simply doesn't deserve and a world in which he feels lost and misunderstood, Unbroken at least does not ask us to pity our protagonist from some position of audience superiority; the other films do that in spades.

Why did the Academy like Theory of Everything and Imitation Game so much more than it liked Rosewater and Unbroken? Honestly, I couldn't tell you. It all feels so arbitrary to me. But it might be this feeling of superiority that we are allowed as we look at Alan Turing and Stephen Hawking in this year's movies about their lives. Imitation Game and Theory of Everything are completely invested in the idea that their protagonists "really" want to be "just like us"; they're designed to make us feel better about ourselves. Unbroken wants us to try to be better, to work harder, to lift that motherfucking piece of wood over our heads. It's a ridiculous film, but in this way, at least, it asks so much more of its audience than its fellow Oscar-bait films this year. Somehow I bet that it will eventually make more money than those other two movies, too. Because when you punch Louie Zamperini, he just gets back up.

The Theory of Everything

It would be silly to try to evaluate The Theory of Everything as an actual film. It is a movie so interested in being an Oscar contender and so obviously filmed with "Oscar" in mind, that it only makes sense to talk about Everything as it pertains to Oscar.

This isn't to say that Everything isn't enjoyable at times. It is. But the first half of the film is a generic English love story, and the second half of the film – although we only know the characters because of the parts they generally play in the love-story genre – is a disability narrative that plays up all of the old tropes of disabilities you'd expect from a Hallmark movie.

Eddie Redmayne hits all of the right notes as Stephen Hawking, and he looks the part, his wiry frame and Jan Sewell's makeup combining to convince us that we are looking at the famous physicist.

Felicity Jones is less convincing as Hawking's wife, mostly because she looks about thirty years old throughout the film's entirety (i.e. her actual age). The transformation of Stephen Hawking over time is so vivid and concretely realized that it looks odd to see his wife looking the same age as when he met her at Cambridge when they were both kids. All of this is odd because Everything is ostensibly her story, based on the memoir of Jane Hawking herself. And although the film can't help but be about her more than it is about him, it appears that the filmmakers resisted that as much as they could, attempting to make this the Stephen Hawking story. It is a strange marriage that feels like a struggle throughout.

Mr. Lloyd

For me the standout performance in the movie was by a guy named Harry Lloyd. He plays Hawking's friend at graduate school, and he is the first person to be told that Hawking has two years to live. His work in this sequence is perfect. One sees everything in his face. It is a gorgeously honest performance.

In the film's second act, Charlie Cox is introduced and Everything gets a little queer. It was here where my companions and I perked up at the possibilities of the movie. Maybe, we thought, we are in for something a little different. But the movie can't really manage its own queerness. Uncomfortable in its non-generic territory, it returns us to genre by picking a new genre: this time the overcoming-disability-supercrip narrative so often described by critical disability studies.

But the script, I wager, has some legs for an Oscar nomination, and once audiences see Everything their heartstrings (as it were) are going to be tugged. The score could get an Oscar nomination, as well. I would also expect the two leads to snag nominations. I'm betting four nominations, no wins. And if you don't care about  the Oscars, go ahead and skip this one altogether.