Fashionably Late to the Oscar Party: 2015

Only two weeks out, the Oscars are already trivia. Fairy dust in the wind. Who wore what, said what, won what don't particularly matter; that is true. Haranguing the host for having done a tepid job is as perfunctory as any chore; vanilla ice cream is wont to melt. But even if the institution sets a dubious agenda, and even if all its pageantry is a relic of some less jaded era that we hate on almost as hard as we try to rekindle it, I want to thank the Academy for setting any agenda that occasions talk about film, and, better yet, films worth talking about.

With the envelopes now opened, the "urgency" of my observations has escaped. So, lest fuller pieces never come to fruition, I'd like to commit a few final notes to the heap before they're as stale as N.P.H.'s jokes . . .

Foxcatcher

Steve Carell gives a captivating performance in Foxcatcher. I doubt whether any actor has worn a false nose so well since Robert De Niro's got pummeled into cauliflower in Raging Bull. That this beak caps off a man who counted ornithology among his interests is a fringe benefit; that the real John E. du Pont also resembled a bird of prey has a downright sinister serendipity. Moreover, John was a scion—with blood as blue as melancholy—and a wrestling coach; and this led him to bring Mark Schultz, a 27-year-old world champion, into his fold.

The film begins in 1987—three years after Mark (Channing Tatum) was awarded his gold medal in Los Angeles. Wherever he is now, it certainly could use that California sun; he grunts out an inspirational speech for a gray assemblage of elementary-school kids who look too tired to yawn. He trains with his brother Dave (Mark Ruffalo), a fellow Olympic gold medalist who is also a wrestling coach at a university. Between the wife, kids, job, and receding hairline, one wouldn't guess that, in real life, Dave was only a year older than Mark. There's the suggestion that Mark, affectless and laconic, is developmentally disabled—and that's off-putting because it plays into stereotypes about wrestlers, and because Mark wrote the book this movie is based on. 

Birdman

To paraphrase John Cage, Birdman is too insecure to know what to say, but it is saying it. Screeching it from Manhattan rooftops. The movie doesn't eat crow; it regurgitates it. And yet, like Whiplash, it's full of infectious energy—false energy to be sure, but enough voltage to power up a smile, and maybe a few seizures. The problem is that it's at Michael Keaton's expense. In affect, the film is the opposite of Wes Andersonia—it's more like a backstage musical that breaks out in fights rather than songs—but, as a work of art, it's made impotent by its irony. It flatters the audience by playing off popular preconceptions of what showbiz people are like; shits on Middle Americans (like a multi-chinned family that wants its picture taken with Keaton's movie-star character); and then shits on artists because having aspirations only means jerking off your ego. Right in the middle of the ensemble is Keaton, playing a washed-up Hollywood actor who's writing, starring in, and directing an adaptation of a Raymond Carver story that's about to premiere on Broadway. He's like Marcello Mastroianni in 8 1/2: everything happens to him. Except, potentially, for a devious act in the beginning and a last-straw gambit at the end, he's devoid of volition. 

 

Twenty years after turning down the fourth installment of a superhero franchise, Riggan Thomson is pressing bleakly past middle age, having sold out, then cashed out; he's gone from being typecast to not being cast, and suffers from the lingering apprehension that he hasn't—in the film's mushy terms—lived up to his potential. What a coincidence that he's played by Keaton! Whether or not the particulars of Riggan's career are true to Keaton's own—and my educated guess is that they're not—they are corroborated by our pop-psych, tabloid know-how of the former Batman's "fall from grace," and this completely shapes the way one perceives Keaton's performance. Batman shadows Birdman just as Birdman shadows Riggan. That his performance is excellent, and that, so far as it goes, Keaton chose to play this role, doesn't contradict the fact that he is being exploited in much the same way that Riggan is accused of exploiting his celebrity to mount his return to relevance.

Whiplash

In Whiplash, the golden light of the Schaffer Conservatory brazens its students; they merge with their instruments between those cigar-box walls. Under the tutelage of Terrence Fletcher (J. K. Simmons), the most demanding instructor at the world's most prestigious music school, these students aren't using tools to make art; they are tools for making art. Greatness doesn't mean interpreting music; it means playing the notes flawlessly. By using this definition, the film means to excuse its substitution of jazz for what we've come to associate, in movies, with sports: Whiplash is a crowd-pleaser, from high brow to low, because it takes the drive to win the championship game and moves the competition inward, into the consciousness of an artist whose form is as refined and esoteric as opera or ballet. Talent equals craft plus spite: a formulation that is as false as it is irresistible.

 

Damien Chazelle, the writer-director, probably couldn't have sold this notion so resonantly if Miles Teller's Andrew wasn't as convincingly an artist and asshole as Oscar Isaac's Llewyn Davis. A 19-year-old aspiring drummer, whose hero is Buddy Rich, Andrew whams on his instrument till the sticks shred his flesh; he takes five to submerge his hands in ice water, and watch the water turn red, before going back to whacking that elusive mole. When he's recruited into Fletcher's band, he becomes the star pupil—which means he receives the most abuse. A lagging tempo can make a chair go airborne; Fletcher isn't a teacher, he's a rabid drill sergeant who'll strike you, call you a fag, or threaten to fuck you like a pig. He beats perfection out of his students, and if you're a perfectionist like Andrew, he gets inside your head like an axe.

The Imitation Game

How do you play The Imitation Game? First, you mimic The King's Speech, by taking the high moral certainties and elegant, aristocratic reserve of mid-century England. Next, you roll the dice on a social message that will give you a safe return on your investment; no need to go full-on 12 Years A Slave, but no harm in cribbing a little from the superiority complex we moderns hold against our ancestors. Add a few Britons from prestige TV, and the Old Hollywood tortured and/or misunderstood genius routine that's so hoary that even the World War II-era characters know it to be a shtick. And finally, be named Harvey Weinstein. If you win, you can pick up your trophy in February.

The game is rigged, of course. And these costume dramas about iconoclasts always back up against their own variation of the quandary that Y-A movies run into: Everything that set Alan Turing, the father of modern computing, apart is reduced to the same old autistic damn-fool that we always get as "the price one pays for genius." [S.M.H.] To be fair, his downfall was that of a tragic hero: His code-breaking machine helped defeat Hitler and save the world. The insult of being prosecuted for indecency only a few years later, when the law against homosexual acts was still on the books, must have been compounded by the irony that all who knew he was a hero couldn't speak out. Everything that he contributed to the war effort was a state secret for 50 years. He was undergoing chemical castration when he died, possibly of suicide, at 41. His was the case that breaks the cliché; he was ahead of his time.

Wild

Wild is about a trial by fire for someone who plays with matches. That someone is Cheryl Strayed, who, in 1995, hiked the thousand-plus miles of the Pacific Crest Trail with very tender feet. She wasn't a precocious searcher, like Christopher McCandless, or an experienced mountaineer like Aron Ralston; she was recovering from loss, addiction, and divorce, and this challenge was her cleanse. I haven't read her memoir—which wasn't published until 2012—but it would appear that its adapters have distilled from her complicated life a few boilerplate gobbets of optimism and self-determination. In the final scene, Sheryl physically crosses her metaphorical bridge, but Reese Witherspoon cuts a fine figure of what it's like to be at a crossroads.

There are times, though, when the script (by Nick Hornby) and the direction (by Jean-Marc Vallée) seems too inchoate, or too insensitive in its treatment of Sheryl. Perhaps the strangest miscalculation comes at the very beginning—which has the virtue of making it easy to forget by film's end. We open on a black screen and coital-sounding noises which are revealed to be agonized huffs. This bump in Sheryl's road is both graphic and upsetting—she rips off a toenail and loses a boot—but weighs very lightly on the plot overall. In another scene, Sheryl finds herself hitchhiking. The driver who stops doesn't pick her up but claims to be a reporter from The Hobo Times. It's a pleasurably inexplicable moment—he snaps her picture and logs a quote into the notepad stored in his shirt pocket—but Sheryl reacts like a stolid nitwit, and there's something hollow and stoogey about Witherspoon's delivery. Sheryl's feminism—which is folded into her naïveté—is the butt of the joke.