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.