Harris Dickinson Double Feature

Halina Reijn's Babygirl is thrilling from start to finish and completely sexy. It’s also incredibly, bracingly smart about sex, consent, eroticism, pleasure, and power. 

What a genius screenplay! There’s this brilliant sequence near the end of act three in which the protagonist’s assistant, Esme, gives this corporatized speech about acceptance, radical honesty, trust, and truly listening to one another “as women” or showing our true selves to one another or something like that. This character really believes it too. But Babygirl’s director places it at just a spot where all of its high moral tones are shown to be completely false. This is done in a subtle, extraordinary way in the screenplay, and it’s these kinds of small touches that make Babygirl an extraordinary event. 

I haven’t yet mentioned Nicole Kidman but… she tears into this role. This is as brave as she’s ever been and she’s done some powerfully brave work in her career. She is just outstanding.

This is supposed to be a Harris Dickinson double-feature post, so I would be remiss in not mentioning him. He's just great in Babygirl. In a movie that is truly the Nicole Kidman show, he still managed to stand out, and his work in this film is mysterious and troubling, and he's just great.

I also caught Steve McQueen's Blitz (this is on AppleTV+). Dickinson has a small role in this—considering what a star he is, I was genuinely surprised to see him in such a small supporting part. Blitz is good. It’s a kind of old-school, classic London-in-wartime picture where a parent and child are trying to find one another and getting into an odyssey of adventures that flesh out a compelling portrait of London and its residents during the blitz, when the Germans bombed civilian London. 

The difference with this version of that story is that it really focuses on Black London and Black-and-white London in a way I’ve never seen before in a movie about this period. This aspect of Blitz really sets it apart and makes it special. In most other ways, though, McQueen's movie just feels quite conventional, and I had trouble shaking the feeling—whether correct or not—that I’ve seen this all before.

The scores for both Babygirl and Blitz are both excellent. And I've been listening to both of them since I saw these movies. They're also both finalists for the Original Score Oscar, but I can't say I expect either of them to emerge with nominations next Thursday.

McQueen's First Bad Film

End of the year awards are being given by critics groups and I'm behind. I feel more behind than usual.

One film that isn't on any end-of-the-year lists yet, though, is Widows. No one has mentioned it so far, although perhaps that is about to change as the Golden Globes drop their nominees on Thursday.

Why so serious, Ms. Davis?

But Widows totally didn't work for me, and I guess I understand why it isn't standing out for critics. Steve McQueen's new movie is his least interesting film to date. It was a labor of love for him, he says, since he fell in love with the miniseries on which it is based in the 1980s when he was a kid, but Widows is really nothing more than a genre picture, and it doesn't quite do its genre very well. It's filled with solid twists and reversals (the script is by Gillian Flynn), but for me it never really took off.

I think the reason for this is that almost all of the main characters in Widows are miscast. Colin Farrell, Cynthia Erivo, and Elizabeth Debicki work well, and all three are good in the movie (Debicki, in fact, is best in show). But Viola Davis, Liam Neeson, Michelle Rodriguez, and especially Daniel Kaluuya are all miscast to my mind.

Ms. Rodriguez and Ms. Debicki

It's odd because I thought the supporting actors were almost uniformly great. I loved Lukas Haas and Carrie Coon and Jon Michael Hill and Garrett Dillahunt (love seeing him) and Jacki Weaver and Brian Tyree Henry and (of course) Jon Bernthal. There's never enough Jon Bernthal. In anything.

But the main cast... Viola Davis is too serious. Way too serious. She never lets us see her let loose. She's tightly wound the whole movie... so much so that it seems impossible – and I never for a moment believed – that she could or would try the crime she tries in the film. Michelle Rodriguez is great. I love her. But did I believe that she ran a dress shop and gave all her money to her husband for years and years? Did I believe that she could easily be cowed by a bitchy mother in law? I did not. Do I believe Liam Neeson could play a criminal? Of course. He's made a career on revenging father movies. But in Widows, Neeson's acting just can't quite manage what McQueen asks of him.

Mr. Kaluuya and Mr. Henry

And then there's Daniel Kaluuya, who plays the film's very scary hitman, a man who terrifies character after character with simple verbal threats, a man who stabs numerous people just for fun, who kills some scared kids who are just rapping by themselves in a back room. Trouble is, Kaluuya isn't the least bit terrifying. He's shorter than every character he tries to intimidate in Widows, and he dances around and spends so much time posturing, that I found his entire portrayal utterly without credibility. He's almost friendly. It doesn't work even a little.

There are several bright spots. The much-vaunted shot of Chicago from the hood of Colin Farrell's car is pretty great (and I love McQueen's technique of not allowing the audience in on a conversation so that we pay attention to something else – he used this in Hunger, too). I also liked the film's interest in corrupt Chicago politics. And I didn't understand Cynthia Erivo's character at all, but she has a few great scenes. Elizabeth Debicki gets all the best scenes, and she turns her character out beautifully. But none of these bright spots outweighs the sheer length of Widows, which never really picks up steam and hits a stride. It just seems to go on and on without building tension, without speeding up at all, and without articulating any real stakes. It's a Gillian Flynn machine, in other words, that runs on cruise control and never kicks into high gear. I was, quite frankly, bored.

Oscar Nominees 2014: Page 1 of 14

Every year in the weeks leading up the Academy Awards ceremony, I post my thoughts on all of the nominees, although I exempt myself from the documentaries because I don't really like documentaries all that much. For me that means 48 films this year (5 more than last year). 2013 was a really strange Oscar year, what with Argo's director missing a nomination and then winning Best Picture, but 2014 appears so far to be even stranger. Some of the frontrunners for nominations were completely passed over, and Best Picture appears still to be up in the air. Because my favorite thing about all of this movie hubbub is the surprises, I am once again loving Oscar season.

Most of the films in my top ten for the year were passed over (Blue Is the Warmest Color, Fruitvale Station, The Kings of Summer, In the House, The Past), but some scored a nomination or two (The Great Beauty, Before Midnight) and two were nominated for Best Picture (Gravity, Her). In any case, I am excited for what is going to happen.

Oh, and if you're thinking why does he even care about this? I don't blame you. But I have an elaborate set of reasons for still loving the Oscars that I've explained here.

If the nominee has been nominated for Oscars previously, he or she will be listed next to his/her name in parentheses).

This year's nominees:

Gravity

10 Nominations

• Picture
• Director: Alfonso Cuarón
• Actress: Sandra Bullock (The Blind Side)
• Cinematography: Emmanuel Lubezki (Children of Men, The New World, Sleepy Hollow, A Little Princess)
• Film Editing: Alfonso Cuarón (Children of Men) & Mark Sanger
• Original Score: Steven Price
• Production Design: Rosie Goodwin, Andy Nicholson, & Joanne Woollard (Hope and Glory)
• Sound Mixing
• Sound Editing
• Visual Effects

Director: Cuarón

Cast: Bullock, George Clooney, Ed Harris

Gravity is my favorite of the films nominated for Best Picture. It deserves every one of its nominations. I was overwhelmed by it as I often am with Cuarón's work. It is beautiful, heartstoppingly intense, deeply troubling, and insistently philosophical. (I felt similarly about his 2006 film Children of Men.) Since I fell in love with Gravity, though, I've heard a lot of folks talk about the film's use of symbols. I'm not gonna deny they're there: if an audience member wants to place symbolic value on an image in a movie, that's what images are there for. All I can say about that is that for me the film didn't function on that register – I found the movie to be an intense action movie that also spent a lot of time allowing me to think about being alone, my own desire to keep going while facing impossible odds, and the total vastness of the universe. (I have said before on this blog that I really love the feeling of being completely insignificant and tiny that I get when I stare at the stars.) As for winning Oscars, I don't think this movie is going home with the big man. But Gravity will win nearly all of the below-the-line stuff (except for Production Design).

Will Win: Cinematography, Film Editing, Score, Sound Mixing, Sound Editing, Visual Effects

Could Win: Picture, Director

My Rating: #3 out of 72

American Hustle

10 Nominations

• Picture
• Director: David O. Russell (Silver Linings Playbook)
• Actor: Christian Bale (The Fighter)
• Actress: Amy Adams (The Master, The Fighter, Doubt, Junebug) 
• Original Screenplay: David O. Russell (Silver Linings Playbook) & Eric Warren Singer
• Supporting Actor: Bradley Cooper (Silver Linings Playbook)
• Supporting Actress: Jennifer Lawrence (Silver Linings Playbook, Winter's Bone) 
• Film Editing: Alan Baumgarten, Jay Cassidy (Silver Linings Playbook, Into the Wild) & Crispin Struthers (Silver Linings Playbook)
• Production Design: Judy Becker & Heather Loeffler
• Costume Design: Michael Wilkinson 

Director: Russell

Cast: Bale, Adams, Cooper, Jeremy Renner, Lawrence, Elisabeth Röhm, Robert De Niro, Louis C.K., Jack Huston, Michael Peña, Shea Whigham, Colleen Camp

I really liked this. It's a sleeper in a lot of ways: a good hustler movie with not much going for it except a stellar cast and a director who (all of a sudden) everyone seems to really love. The film's luster fades on reflection, which is why I'm betting on it not taking anything home on March 2. Call me crazy, but I just don't see it happening. I think the closest shot this has at gold is the original screenplay ("wasn't it all improv?" you may ask, to which I would say "And isn't that a screenplay?") There's also the possibility of Amy Adams winning, but the Academy hasn't awarded her for anything yet, so it would seem that while they love to nominate her, they don't actually think she's ready to win one. But, look, I could be way off base and everyone might love this film way more than I do and just give it everything: Screenplay, Director and Best Picture. This is also a distinct possibility.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: Picture, Director, Actress, Original Screenplay, Supporting Actress, Production Design, Costume Design

My Rating: #25 out of 72

12 Years a Slave

9 Nominations

• Picture
• Director: Steve McQueen
• Actor: Chiwetel Ejiofor
• Adapted Screenplay: John Ridley
• Supporting Actor: Michael Fassbender
• Supporting Actress: Lupita Nyong'o
• Film Editing: Joe Walker
• Production Design: Alice Baker & Adam Stockhausen
• Costume Design: Patricia Norris (Sunset, 2010, Victor/Victoria, The Elephant Man, Days of Heaven)

Director: McQueen

Cast: Ejiofor, Fassbender, Nyong'o, Sarah Paulson, Adepero Oduye, Benedict Cumberbatch, Garret Dillahunt, Brad Pitt, Paul Dano, Paul Giamatti, Alfre Woodard, Michael K. Williams, Dwight Henry, Quvenzhané Wallis, Topsy Chapman, Liza J. Bennett

You can see simply by glancing above that most of the folks nominated for 12 Years a Slave have never been nominated for anything before, and this goes for all of the below-the-line folks (except Ms. Norris). This always makes me want to root for a film, especially when I love everyone involved as much as I do. I wasn't totally in love with this film, but I haven't anything negative to say about it: I just didn't like it as much as I loved McQueen's first two pictures. As for Oscar, 12 Years has seemed to be on a slow decline lately, but my bet – and this is not the most obvious choice – is that when push comes to shove, the Academy goes for this film in the end. I expect it to win Picture and Director. I ought also to say, frankly, that it seems a little nuts to me that anyone is voting for Jared Leto over Michael Fassbender in their category, but apparently Fassbender is not the favorite and Leto is. It's a weird world.

Will Win: Picture, Director, Adapted Screenplay, Supporting Actress, Production Design

Could Win: Actor, Supporting Actor

My Rating: #15 out of 72

12 Years a Slave

Steve McQueen's latest is just as smart as his last two films, although 12 Years a Slave is very different from both Hunger and Shame.

Mr. Ejiofor

Some great things right off of the bat. The acting is superb. McQueen has cast Chiwetel Ejiofor as the lead Solomon Northup, and the film also boasts not only usual McQueen-muse Michael Fassbender but also superb supporting performances from Lupita Nyong'o, Adepero Oduye, Alfre Woodard, and Sarah Paulson. And that's before we talk about the much smaller roles that are beautifully performed by excellent actors (Brad Pitt, Benedict Cumberbatch, Paul Giamatti, Dwight Henry, Quvenzhané Wallis, Michael K. Williams, Garret Dillahunt, Paul Dano).

The acting is unbelievable. Expect at least three acting nominations come Oscar morning. Four actually seems more likely.

Ms. Nyong'o and Ms. Woodard

The film is also really smart about the complicity of everyone in the South with slavery. There are no nice white women in this film feeling bad about themselves while their husbands torture and abuse the people they've enslaved. No way. 12 Years a Slave has no time for such narratives. And this means that at times McQueen's film is unbearably violent. Now, I thought that Tarantino's latest was also smart about violence, but McQueen makes the violence in his film ubiquitous and almost banal. Unlike in Django, in 12 Years the violence is never on show. We are not there to watch violence: we are there to watch how it affects people, how it damages lives, how it is used to maintain a criminal system. When I say it is banal, too, I mean that it is a part of what enslaved men and women dealt with on a daily basis. 12 Years makes this point again and again. The film's characters' lives and safety are always under threat. Always. This is life under terror. There is never a moment of peace.

The film also takes its time. It moves poetically in ways similar to McQueen's previous films (although this is less pronounced in 12 Years). More than once the camera lingers on Ejiofor's face for longer than it is comfortable for the audience, and once he looks directly at the audience. These shots are haunting and beautiful. After one of the men dies in the field, his family and friends stand beside the grave and the camera simply stares at Topsy Chapman and waits for her to do something. She eventually starts singing, and the pause before her song is almost as heartbreaking as the song itself.

I had one qualm about 12 Years. There is a way that the film allows us to believe that Solomon Northup doesn't really belong in the South, isn't really a slave, that he deserves to be free because he is actually a freeman from the North. Now, all of this is true. He is a freeman from a Northern state. But none of the people enslaved in Louisiana ought to have been there. Every single one of those people would have been free if justice existed anywhere near those plantations. With the ending of 12 Years (which is a little bit like the ending to The Color Purple), the film allows us to celebrate Solomon's escape to freedom, the justice that he finally received thanks to USAmerican law. After I saw the film with my friend Leah, I told her that what I wanted from McQueen was one last shot of the plantation after Solomon's escape: one final reminder that if the USAmerican justice system finally allowed Solomon his freedom, that same legal system continued to enforce the enslavement, torture, and death of unnumbered others whose names and histories are lost to us.

This qualm is no small criticism, but it is, in truth, only a gripe. 12 Years a Slave is an excellent film by a filmmaker at the height of his abilities. It's poetic, it's powerful, and it's extraordinarily smart. This is must-see stuff.

Plays into Movies So Frequently Signal Disappointment

This isn't always the case, of course, and War Horse may turn out to be a fascinating exception to the rule of 2011, but if The Ides of March and A Dangerous Method set the rule, then the rule is disappointment.

These two films also belong together because they're both made by wonderful directors. But Ides of March is nothing like George Clooney's other two films, and A Dangerous Method seems a wide departure from David Cronenberg's last two films. Both directors have taken on projects this year that are really interesting to them thematically, but which (to my mind) had scripts that basically did not work.

To start, the chief problem with both of these movies is that they depend almost exclusively on talk. The emotional, narrative, and thematic life of these movies is so heavily dependent on dialogue that I actually got tired during both of these films. Shut up!!, I kept thinking. Why must they continue to talk about everything? Doesn't anyone simply have a feeling without describing it in the dialogue? Ides fares better in this department than does Method, but not much better.

There are some good sex sequences in A Dangerous Method, but even these are very brief, and in a film about masochism and sexual freedom, it seems odd not to tell at least part of the story through the sex sequences (as Steve McQueen's Shame does so brilliantly).

I blame the source material. I saw Christopher Hampton's play The Talking Cure many many years ago and didn't think much of it, and when I saw Beau Willimon's play Farragut North a couple years ago I couldn't figure out why anyone even produced the thing in the first place, much less why big stars were in it and why it was being made into a movie.

The main problem with Ides (and Farragut) is that one can't really care too much about these characters – Ides is a very cynical film about rather idealistic people. The main problem with Method is that even if we may care about these characters (and I did! – if you know me you know that I went into the movie already loving Sigmund Freud) we never really understand why they do the things they do. Method trades on the idea that we know a whole lot about the characters that Cronenberg never actually tells us. I feel like I know a lot about Freud and Jung, but I never really felt like I understood all of what was going on in this movie.

There is more to say, of course. The acting is very good in both films. Ryan Gosling, Max Minghella (I love him), and Marisa Tomei are all great in The Ides of March and Michael Fassbender, Keira Knightley, Vincent Cassel, and especially Viggo Mortensen are all great in A Dangerous Method, but neither film works, and all the acting – and this may be because of the source material as well – feels a little bit like overacting.

Let me say once again that I love David Cronenberg as a director, and I might love George Clooney as a director even more. I think these two men are original, fascinating, important talents. I just think their offerings for 2011 were not very good.

Fish Tank

Last night Drew and I watched Andrea Arnold's Fish Tank from last year's movie season. It's been released on DVD by the Criterion Collection, which is why I first took notice of the film. (It ought simply to be a fact in all of our lives that any movie released by the Criterion Collection automatically deserves our notice; I treat a Criterion release as though a person whose opinion I deeply respect has given a film a stamp of approval.)

But I have to be honest: the real reason I rented this movie was that it contains a performance by Michael Fassbender, who in the last couple of years has become one of my favorite actors to watch. He gave one of my favorite performances of 2009; he is flat-out brilliant in Steve McQueen's Hunger, and I recently enjoyed his work in Jane Eyre and (though I thought the film was fairly asinine) in X-men: First Class, as well.

But never mind Michael Fassbender, because Fish Tank is not about him.

Fish Tank is about poverty and living in a world where there simply aren't a lot of choices. And Fish Tank is about bad – bad, bad, bad – decisions, and how sometimes we can't stop ourselves from making them because we feel powerless and don't know what to do.

My roommate and I watched this film and talked back to it almost throughout its entirety, frustrated with the choices the characters made and wishing we could talk sense into them and knowing that was impossible. Fish Tank is troubling in many ways, and often extremely uncomfortable to sit through. We changed our loyalties to the characters many times throughout the film, and fought among ourselves about responsibility and proper behavior, as well as horror and taste (this girl thinks she is a dancer, but Drew and I agreed she is most definitely not).

Part of the pleasure of the film, it seems to me, is its ability to make its audience squirm in its seats. If this doesn't sound interesting, Fish Tank is definitely not for you. It won't be fun for most people, I'd wager.

But wow. This film is excellent. I absolutely loved it, I enjoyed it entirely, and I've moved it into my top fifteen for last year.