Oscar 2021

I haven't seen "The Father" but the précis suggests it's a film with quiet intensity, starring two Brits that Hollywood (and a lot of the rest of America) loves -- Anthony Hopkins and Olivia Colman. But it also feels, too me, rather modest for a Best Picture win, and the story of the onset of dementia feels so familiar by now.

I also haven't seen "Minari" but feel that "Parasite" opened up a lot of Oscar-contender doors for Korean films. The buzz around "Minari" and Steven Yeun ("Walking Dead") is pretty amazing and no doubt deserved. I'll see both "The Father" and "Minari" before the gold is given out but neither will win Best Picture, I don't feel. Too familiar and too soon.

"Judas and the Black Messiah" was charged with social and political relevance and powerhouse performances from Daniel Kaluuya and LaKeith Stanfield. Slotting them both as Supporting Actor nominees reminded me of the machinations with Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer for "The Help" 10 years ago. Davis was nominated as Best Actress and Spencer as Supporting Actress for the film, which was smart because they would have cancelled each other out in the Supporting Actress slot, just like Kaluuya and Stanfield will do this year, even though Davis's role was indeed supporting. In the case of Kaluuya and Stanfield, it's the opposite because they're both leads. It's even in the film's title.

"Mank" is a tremendous picture made for people who love tremendous pictures about making pictures -- which is the Academy but not most of America, I don't think. The movie's got great writing and a bravura performance from Gary Oldman, who's been acting steadily for 40 years, and all that movie magic stuff that David Fincher likes to put in his pictures, and it's in arty black and white. What's not to love? Fincher has been nominated for Best Director twice before and has never won. I don't think this will break his streak.

"Nomadland" is so elegant and wistful and loving that I think anyone with patience and a heart will find joy in every frame. Frances McDormand is such a genius at understatement that when she does explode in a picture (what passes for an explosion for a woman of her temperament), it is stunning. She probably showed more emotional volatility in Three Billboards than in all of her previous motion pictures combined. Director Chloé Zhao has a romantic heart and passion for America and Americans that is so welcome these days. Her pictures are expansive and respectful. I hope she and her film win.

"Promising Young Woman" strikes some folks as a mean-spirited revenge flick, which it sort of is, but I think it's also quite like Taxi Driver and Joker, without their poetics. Carey Mulligan is marvelous as a mirror reflecting meanness and manipulation back at society's entitled takers. That she is mad is quite obvious. But she comes to it honestly, and we root for her until the bitter end. Like "Judas," "Promising" might cut too deep to win a prize.

"Sound of Metal" is an audacious film that is being honored for its audacity, I think. Not unlike "Mank," it's a film that moviemakers are studying for its design components while the unschooled among us are clawing at our seats over a story that is so cringe-inducing in its portrayal of pain and self-delusion that we forget that we're watching a heavy metal drummer (Riz Ahmed) go deaf in the realest of terms. The last three minutes of this sober and exhausting film are a cathartic release.

"The Trial of the Chicago 7″ is Aaron Sorkin doing what he does best -- dazzle audiences with his wit and sagacity. Sorkin isn't as pompous as Oliver Stone was in his motion picture heyday but he's just as political and that delights some folks and pisses off some folks -- like Stone did. That Sorkin's words are solid gold and that he has a mind built for juggling complex narratives make his films engrossing -- and maybe important -- but not necessarily Oscar worthy.

Nobody

 

The ultra-violent avenger thrillers' defining franchise is the John Wick series that stars Keanu Reeves. It appeals to a certain movie-goer sensibility -- those who care less about a sensible narrative but insist on endless combat because they know all of the blood and breaking bones is high-end Hollywood fakery and delight in the excessiveness. Bruce Willis's Die Hard series, which began in 1988, may have been the forerunner of the subgenre, and Ilya Naishuller's Nobody is the latest entry. Star Bob Odenkirk plays former spy agency asset named Hutch Mansell, who gets pulled out of retirement by a botched home invasion. Odenkirk's persona as lawyer Saul Goodman of the Breaking Bad spin-off Better Call Saul is inescapable, so "bits-of-Saul" are sprinkled in amongst the outlandish body count, wise-crackery and guerilla weaponry and the excruciating close-order battles. Odenkirk is fit and in fine fighting form as he chases down a ridiculous Russian mobster (Aleksey Serebryakov whose line readings are nearly unintelligible) with the aid of his adopted brother (a mostly off-screen performance by rapper RZA) and his loopy retired G-man father, played by Christopher Lloyd. Rounding out the leads in this entertaining raw-meat meal is Connie Nielsen as Hutch's oddly withholding wife. Yes, the narrative is a little thin on connective tissue but that just leaves more room for evisceration and dismemberment. Yay!

The United States vs. Billie Holiday

 

I bailed on Lee Daniels' The United States vs. Billie Holiday five minutes in as I've developed so little tolerance for Daniels' peculiar cartoonish indulgences. Seeing Leslie Jordan, whom I ordinarily find delightful, in a fright wig as fictitious celebrity interviewer Reginald Lord Devine asking Billie Holiday "What is it like to be a colored woman?" was all I needed to know that Daniels would be aiming low -- again.

Andra Day, a wonderfully evocative singer; the film's human subject, legendary jazz vocalist Billie Holliday; and the song at the center of the trial, Strange Fruit, deserve so much better from a man who appears to marshal considerable clout and resources. Such a pity.

The Courier (2020)

 

That Dominic Cooke's The Courier feels a tad stagey makes sense considering Cooke is a decorated British theatre director at the helm of only his second feature film. Benedict Cumberbatch plays the title character, an Englishman in 1960 who facilitates business partnerships. He is contacted by MI6 and the CIA to serve as an undercover liaison between a Soviet informant (the tremendous Georgian actor Merab Ninidze) and British and American intelligence, played by Angus Wright and Rachel Brosnahan, respectively. Cumberbatch is an actor of impressive versatility and presence; his five minutes near the end of the powerful WWI film 1917 crystallized the film's message of misery that comes from hubris. He delivers the same commanding performance in this crisp story of a man, who never pictured himself as courageous or sacrificial, answering the call, not of Mother England but of compassion and loyalty.

Chaos Walking

 

Director Doug Liman's futuristic Chaos Walking, based on a series of young adult sci-fi novels, is set light years from Earth in a world where the thoughts of men are manifested in light and images called Noise. Women are not so gifted (or cursed).

A "thoughtful" young man named Todd (the ever-winning Tom Holland) is being reared by two men (Demián Bichir and Kurt Sutter) who are farming land purposefully set apart from the rest of a settlement run by the scar-faced / fur-coated Mayor (the ever-intriguing Mads Mikkelsen), when a young woman named Viola (Daisy Riley of the Star Wars reboot) crashes from the sky into the womanless settlement and evinces for the Mayor and a mad preacher played by David Oyelowo that trouble is coming.

The film, which is more entertaining than not, introduces lots of notions and prompts tons of questions -- the reason for the colonization, the origins of the Noise, why it is attached to male DNA, what of the marauding humanoids called Spackle. These were quite likely fleshed out in the books but they kept the movie from developing into a fully coherent narrative for me.

Another Round

Four Danish friends, teachers in the same high school who feel mired in banality, test a theory that staying in a state between inebriation and sobriety is the road to better personal and professional performance. This is the premise of Thomas Vinterberg's Another Round, nominated in Best International Feature Film and Best Director Oscar categories.

The wonderful quartet of middle-aged men is led by Martin (Mads Mikkelsen), the history tutor who has retreated into diffidence and distractedness to such a degree that his students challenge his laxness and his family ignores him. As the film begins, he speaks with quiet hesitation when he should be commanding attention. He's lost interest in his job, his students and his family and seldom sees his friends (played by Thomas Bo Larsen, Magnus Millang and Lars Ranthe).

All of that changes when they begin the experiment with inebriation and productivity, journaling their findings. Soon they each are turning corners and are breathing life into their students, awakening dormant minds and rediscovering passion. But, as these stories go, matters get out of hand and the drinking -- which increases in regularity, duration and potency -- leads to disaster.

Vinterberg has directed a marvelous film that is beautifully acted by the four principal players and several key featured players, especially Maria Bonnevie as Martin's dispirited wife, Anika.

The Mauritanian

 

Documentarian Kevin McDonald has directed a handful of feature films. Forest Whitaker won an Oscar and Golden Globe for portraying Ugandan dictator Idi Amin in McDonald's The Last King of Scotland (2006). Jodie Foster just won a Globe for playing attorney Nancy Hollander in The Mauritanian, McDonald's adaptation of Mohamedou Ould Slahi's memoir Guantanamo Diary, which recounts his torture while a detainee suspected of orchestrating the 9/11 attacks and Hollander's efforts with assistant Teri Duncan (Shaileen Woodley) to uncover the truth and secure Slahi's release.

While Foster is steely and efficient as a woman guided more by protection than affection, French actor Tahar Rahim pours so much heart and anguish into his portrayal of Slahi that the film seems almost pointless when he's not on-screen.

Some of that is also due to the wispiness of the legal aspects here. What is known now about extradition and torture was not known when Slahi was captured in 2002, and needed to be discovered, revealed by the players. The circumstances surrounding Slahi's capture and detention, the nature of the evidence gathered about him, the testimony of others supposedly involved in the attacks, the motives of his interrogators are touched on but mainly left to inference, which feels to me as if they are beside the point. I think doing so misses the point of Slahi's memoir.

It is becoming clearer and clearer to me that major motion pictures released in theaters are at a disadvantage to streaming services that can devote 5x the number of minutes to developing the complexities of these narratives. For all of its winning qualities -- Foster, Rahim and Benedict Cumberbatch as the Pentagon's lead prosecutor -- the film has the feel of a warm embrace of Slahi and those others wrongfully treated by the United States and not an exposition of how the country got it so wrong.

Nomadland

In Chloé Zhao's inspired and inspiring Nomadland, Frances McDormand plays Fern, a member of the tribe of "houseless" Americans who crisscross the country's expansive middle section chasing piece work and peace. Midway through the film, Fern sells the last of the possessions that will not fit in her life, that is, in her van. Fern, who followed, married, nursed and then buried a dreamy manchild in the middle of Nevada and never found her footing -- and perhaps herself -- again, meets fellow nomads in an RV park and chooses them, and they her, as family.

Zhao, using actual nomads in this film just as she cast damaged but determined bronc busters in The Rider in 2017, has an amazingly discerning eye for one not born in the U.S. (she's Chinese and schooled in England). She knows telling details and displays incredible patience with the film's pacing and its nuances. She balances breathtaking openness with remarkable passages of introspection, many of the most riveting are delivered by McDormand, who, once again, shows audiences why she is one of the most engaging and reflective actresses on the screen.

Nomadland's narrative sparsity and the impecuniousness of the characters stand in stark contrast to Middle American greed and waste. The storage unit industry generates $40 billion each year renting out the 2 billion square feet of storage space across the country.

The World to Come

The two women at the center of Mona Fastvold's beautiful and tragic story, The World to Come, are farm wives in Upstate New York in 1856. They are trapped in miserable marriages, beset by drudgery and isolation, but find in each other, first, kindred spirits then soul mates and then lovers.

Told through hauntingly poetic journal entries by Abigail (Katherine Waterston), the film unfolds languidly. Abigail's attraction to the amorous Tallie (a smoky and spectacular Vanessa Kirby) begins as an ember but eventually consumes her and pushes her to the brink of insanity.

Abigail, who is still mourning the loss of her young daughter to diphtheria, is unequally yoked to the honorable but forlorn Dyer (Casey Affleck), whose name is a homophone descriptive of the couple's precarious existence. Tallie is married to Finney (Christopher Albert), a scornful martinet, who resents the world, his wife and her resistance to bearing him children.

The exchanges between the women are seductive and warm, those with their husbands, coarse and cold. The women's exchanges with one another are entrancing. Their exchanges with their husbands, terse and epigrammatic, more proverbial than heartfelt.

Fastvold's direction is elegant, her attention to period detail extraordinary, and her love for these four unfortunate characters is in every frame of the picture.