Amour, Argo, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Django Unchained, Les Misérables, Life of Pi, Lincoln, Silver Linings Playbook, and Zero Dark Thirty.
As I have written for several years now, they have changed the rules for Best Picture. Every other category is limited to a maximum of 5 nominees. That’s a maximum. The rules are that each Academy member submits their choices of the best five in their category and the five with the most votes become the nominees. However, each nominee must also have a minimum number of votes in order to qualify for the list. That is why in some years in some categories there are less than five. (And why this year there are just nine for Best Picture.) Several years ago the Academy, under criticism for giving too much attention to little art films that are seen by very few people and too little attention to the big popular studio productions that are seen by the millions, expanded the Best Picture category to ten nominees in order to make room for some of the films that the general public likes. The irony is that since they made this rule change, there are now little art films that are making the list that wouldn’t have before and most of the critically acclaimed films are now the big studio ones.
Once again this year there has been the usual protest from the Oscar haters that certain nominees for Best Picture did not also make the Best Directors list. "What were they thinking? How could they be so stupid? Who do they think made the picture?" these critics cry as if they are so dumbfounded. Are they serious? Are they truly suggesting they don’t know or is crying foul like this every year just a good way to get press? So, as I do every year, once again I will inform everyone why the Academy sometimes nominates a film for Best Picture but not the director.
It is because their rules state (quite appropriately) that only the professionals in a certain category can nominate and vote for the category. Only directors can vote for directors, only actors can vote for actors, and so on for every category. There are only four exceptions: committees are chosen to select the short subject, feature documentary, and foreign film nominees. And the entire Academy membership selects and votes for Best Picture.
There has always been controversy that the documentary category is chosen by a committee of professionals who make their living doing dramatic features, rather than having documentary filmmakers do so. It is argued that this creates a bias towards documentaries that have a dramatic bent, rather than those that take a cinema-verite approach to their subject as great documentaries should. But there is a reason why the Academy cannot recruit actual documentarians to select the documentary nominees. This is an award for theatrical features. In order to keep the selection process pure, there is a hard and fast tradition that only films made for theaters are eligible for Oscar consideration. The rule is that a film must first be shown in theaters in order to qualify and that they must be shown for at least two weeks in a theater in either New York City or Los Angeles prior to December 31st in order to apply for Oscar consideration.
A film cannot be premiered on television or cable and receive an Academy nomination. That’s what the Emmys and Golden Globes are for. The short subject category is the only one for which they suspend the theatrical distribution requirement since shorts are no longer shown in theaters. But the documentary category is not exempt from this. A documentary must be made for theaters and must be shown first in theaters in order to be considered. This is extraordinarily rare as almost all documentaries receive their funding from either PBS or one of the cable networks and therefore are premiered on television. Thus the Academy membership has a limited number of documentarians on the roster. These filmmakers do sit on these committees but, due to their limited numbers, so do a number of dramatic filmmakers as well.
About fifteen years ago, they also changed the rules for foreign films opening the gates and allowing them to be considered in any category besides Foreign Language Film. So in recent years we have seen a number of foreign films being nominated in other major categories. This year it has happened again with "Amour" being nominated for Best Picture, Director, Actress and Screenplay.
But the bottom line is that a totally different crowd votes for Best Picture than votes for Best Director. Thus, it is entirely possible for a film to be nominated in one category but not the other. Trust me, the critics very well know this so when they mount their usual protests every year, as they are doing this year for both Argo and Zero Dark Thirty, you can believe they’re just doing it for press. And there are always the other protests that a favorite performance is not nominated. They always call it a snub. It’s not. Again, the rules are clear. There is only room for five. You hear all the protests about the actors who are left out but never any suggestions as to which of the five shouldn’t have made it. You can’t say your favorite actor has been snubbed unless you feel one or more of the other five are not deserving. Never has anyone been so bold as to say that any of the others were not deserving.
The one good thing about the change to ten nominees in the Best Picture category is that the ten films now represent 95% of all the major films out there. That makes writing this annual essay much easier. So with these preliminaries out of the way, here is my take on the nine films from 2012 that made the list and which ones I think will make the cut:
1. "Amour" **1/2
This is yet another foreign language entry that has benefited from the rule change of being allowed for consideration in any category. This French drama has made a little history for not only being declared the #1 film of the year by any number of critics and international competitions but also the distinction of nominating its 85 year old star as Best Actress making Emmanuelle Riva the oldest actress ever nominated. (Beasts of the Southern Wild has made similar headlines in nominating a ten year old, making its lead the youngest Best Actress contender in history.)
The performances were stellar, especially Ms. Riva who looks such a youthful 85 that my guess is that she played the flashback scenes without makeup and wore old age makeup for the rest of the film. Her incredible acting is another reason I believe the flashbacks were the real her and the old-age scenes were acting. Only an actor who is mentally alert can play a character who is mentally deficient.
But great performances do not a whole film make. This intensely painful drama about a devoted elderly husband nursing his wife through a torturous journey with dementia is so remarkably deficient in both its screenplay and its direction that I am flabbergasted that it has won the accolades it has, and even moreso that it got this nomination. It would not have if the old rules were still in place.
There is virtually no story here, just two excruciating hours of watching this poor couple slowly waste away. And then they die. This is not a spoiler. The opening scene shows the police breaking into the apartment and discovering the bodies, which have been there so long that the overpowering stench has prompted the neighbors to call in the authorities. In the first ten minutes, it is obvious that theirs is a hopeless case. So it’s just two very long hours of watching these two people deteriorate, knowing that it’s going to end badly. The director I have read has a strong reputation for making these gut-wrenching slice of life dramas. But there is no drama here. Drama requires conflict, rising and falling action, and a climax. This is more of an Andy Warhol movie watching someone die. I certainly have nothing against slice-of-life stories but being slice-of-life is not a pass for skipping the drama. That’s what happened here. Apparently director Michael Haneke felt that the subject itself was drama enough. The proof that this is not true is that the performances alone are what carried the film. With two actors of lesser skill, "Amour" would have been nothing and would have gone nowhere.
I will freely admit that I have a bias and perhaps that has colored my judgment. I spent the last fifteen years of my life caring for my late elderly parents and watched them both, particularly my mother, deteriorate over the years. It was painful and this film brought back many of those memories. "Amour" may have been much too close to home for me. "Amour" in French means "love" and the theme of this film was the intense love and devotion these two had for each other, particularly the husband in his capacity as sole caregiver to the wife. The few scenes that did have drama – the powerful vignettes where the husband must fight with healthcare professionals and family members who believe they know better than he does even though he’s the one doing all the work. I was so proud of him for standing up to them, and appreciated the script at these junctures for showing how these problems make caregiving so difficult, instead of so many more maudlin films that would show everyone pulling together, which so rarely happens in real life cases of terminal illness.
Still, it is possible to portray pain in dramatic ways as films like "Lorenzo’s Oil" did so brilliantly. "Amour" is no Lorenzo’s Oil and, though it may never have been intended to be, it certainly needed to be more like that than not.
2. "Argo" ****
This ranks as my favorite film of 2012. It is Ben Affleck’s third outing as director and he has proven for the third time that he is a great director and now well on his way to being one of our top directors. This incredibly nail-biting suspenser is the true story of how the CIA carried out a remarkable covert operation to rescue the American hostages in Iran using the outrageous cover of pretending to make a low budget science fiction film in Tehran. Affleck also stars as real-life CIA agent Tony Mendez who cooks up the plot, sells his superiors on the reality that, as far-fetched as it is, it’s their best shot at a successful rescue, and then goes to Tehran to spearhead it. Time is of the essence since the seven hostages in question have escaped, are being hidden in the Canadian embassy and, with each passing hour, the Iranian rebels who have captured the American embassy are closing in on them. That Mendez is able to pull this whole thing together in such a short time and even corral Hollywood’s cooperation in the deception, makes it all the more suspenseful. And the Hollywood politics that they must deal with also lends an unexpected note of humor to the proceedings.
The film is extraordinarily effective as a drama and the complaints that it has played loose with the real history are not really relevant. How many great historical epics, this year’s Lincoln included, have not played loose with the real history? Films are about telling great stories, not great history lessons. The lessons are the realm of the documentary, and even most of those play loose with the facts.
Argo takes the point of view that this was almost wholly a CIA operation and the Canadians merely generously lent their name to the plot in order to protect the Americans, all of whom were masquerading as Canadians. Canada has objected ever since the film’s premiere in Toronto, claiming that in fact it was almost entirely a Canadian operation and the CIA merely "helped out." Not that it matters. I really could care less that an American director making an American film would use an American point of view. That’s what happened with the great film "U-571," in which in the real history it was a British submarine that captured the German codes. The American film naturally changed it to an American submarine.
But to set the record straight, a little bit of research on reliable news web sites revealed the truth. There were in fact two rescue operations in Tehran at the time of the hostage crisis. One was spearheaded by the Canadians with CIA assistance, the other by the CIA with Canadian assistance. "Argo" is about the CIA rescue. So the Canadians are correct in their claim about being more than passive participants but wrong about which rescue they participated in.
By the way, the so-called "fake" screenplay entitled "Argo" that the CIA used as their cover in making the fake film is not fake at all. As stated in the dialogue, it was a real sci-fi screenplay that the CIA purchased to use as the cover, and the script is now available on the Internet.
This is the one must-see film of 2012. My bet is that the prize will either go to this one or Zero Dark Thirty.
3. "Beasts of the Southern Wild" **
This 85 minute tale of a ten year old struggling in desperate poverty for survival in the bayous of southern Louisiana suffers from exactly the same deficiencies as "Amour": marvelous performances bogged down by an almost non-existent script and tepid direction. And like "Amour," it has found its way on practically every 10 Best List for 2012 and won enormous accolades. A product of the Sundance Institute’s Feature Filmmaking Project, first-time New York director Ben Zeitlin has made a fable based on a one-act play about a young girl whose family lives in the most dire imaginable poverty, witnessing the universe coming apart at the seams due to global warming and how the melting of the South Pole has resurrected mythological monsters called "auroches" (resembling mammoth-sized wild boar) and how these monsters are now wreaking havoc on her world. As I said, it’s a first film, and quite respectable for a first film, but hardly Oscar material and hardly in the same arena as other genuinely great first films like Citizen Kane, Marty, 12 Angry Men, Double Indemnity, and Slingblade.
Zeitlin tries very hard to make this look like a documentary, and succeeds too well. An hour and a half of shaky hand-held camera really becomes an unintentionally unpleasant experience after a while, which makes the 85 minute length of the film seem much longer. The fact that it has almost no story and serves mostly as a portrait of a family trapped in awful poverty that only progressively gets worse (as I said, almost identical to "Amour") only makes the length problem seem even worse.
The monsters looked shockingly real and I have to believe they used real boars and a great deal of CGI to make them seem as huge as they were. Again the performances were outstanding, particularly ten year old Quvenzhane Willis who is now the youngest ever nominee in the Best Actress category, and Dwight Henry as the father, whom many critics felt got snubbed by not being nominated for Best Actor. But the attempt to emulate a documentary feel did not come off very well and the relentless barrage of the horrible images of poverty were quite difficult to watch for 85 minutes. The young Willis’ dialogue also had a maturity considerably beyond her years; it was obvious that the adult who had written her lines really did not understand how young children speak.
But the film’s biggest defect was that it was way too heavy on message and way too light on genuine drama. And I say this even though I agree with the message. But the director’s choice to bang us over the head with a 2x4 basically just resulted in the film preaching to the choir. The film will persuade no one who is not already on board. Subtle this story was not and for that reason alone it should not have made the list.
4. "Django Unchained" ***1/2
What can I say? You either love Quentin Tarantino or you hate him. I happen to think he’s one of the most genuinely talented directors of our generation. And though the title makes it sound like some sort of cheap ripoff of 1970s blaxploitation flicks, it is yet another masterpiece from a filmmaker who has given us nothing but masterpieces. In this case, that’s sort of the point. Django strives to be a tribute not so much to the blaxploitation genre but to another category of film that became hugely popular in the 1960s – the spaghetti western.
For those of you not familiar with this term, there was a period during the 1960s when westerns had fallen out of favor in Hollywood or, more specifically, with audiences. It took Italian filmmaker Sergio Leone drafting a not terribly well known American TV actor named Clint Eastwood to revive the genre making extraordinarily stylistic and ultra violent (for that era) low budget American style westerns in Italy. He made a bunch of them and they were hugely successful, made Leone an internationally acclaimed filmmaker and catapulted the "Rawhide" actor into a superstar, a position Eastwood has held ever since. The many great American westerns that followed like Butch Cassidy and The Wild Bunch owe their existence to these "spaghetti" ripoffs.
"Django Unchained" is an homage to these spaghetti westerns in much the same way that "Star Wars" was a tribute to the very popular 1940s and 50s Buck Rogers serials. And like Star Wars that spent millions to emulate films that were originally made for thousands, Django is a huge budget epic recreating the spirit of low budget films. Like Leone and of Tarantino’s prior works, Django is stylistic in the extreme and also pushes the envelope on violence, perhaps moreso than any other American director.
Tarantino is also a great screenwriter and Django is a terrific script. By far his greatest strength is his superb dialogue. His films tend to be very long and, at almost three hours, Django is no exception. They are long because they are one extraordinary scene after another, many of which go on for 10 or 15 minutes since the focus of the scene is a very, very long monologue. Tarantino is not only one of the best dialogue writers in the business but is the master of the monologue making it possible to sustain audience interest in scenes running four or five times longer than the longest scenes in other films. He’s also a master at casting and always finds actors with the talent to pull off these incredible monologues. Spielberg is the only other director that comes to mind who can do this, as he did in Schindler’s List. But even Spielberg is famous for avoiding long scenes and keeping his films snappy.
Django, played magnificently by Jamie Foxx, is a slave on the eve of the Civil War who, in scene 1 is unexpectedly freed by bounty hunter King Schultz (the great Christoph Waltz in yet another Oscar nominated performance) as he has been given information that Django can identify three notorious killers he is hunting down. So Django, in exchange for his freedom and enough money to start his own farm and a new life, joins the crusade to help the German-born lawman track his prey. The terms of the contract are "dead or alive" and since in this lawless environment it is much too dangerous to even try to capture these thugs, their mission is simply to find them and kill them on sight. They make a good team and Schultz soon makes Django a full partner in the enterprise and since the bounties are quite generous, they both soon become very rich.
But Django has another agenda of which he informs Schultz right out the gate. His wife was taken from him years ago and he is not resting until he finds and rescues her. Also since the law gives them full rights to stop anyone who gets in their way - after a reasonable attempt at negotiation of course - you might guess that practically every white man they come across resents the hell out of this ex-slave who wears fancy duds, is an expert shot, and (gasps!) even rides a horse, something forbidden to blacks in the South; Django and Schultz find many opportunities to stop white men who get in their way. But this is not exploitative revenge killing, even though there’s no doubt Django does see some of it that way. Schultz is actually a superb negotiator and is successful in talking many of their opponents into cooperating rather than having a shoot-out. Here again is where Tarantino’s long fascinating monologues make the film such a supreme entertainment as we watch Schultz and Django again and again talking their way out of desperate situations. Of course, when talk doesn’t work and these demented slave owners are determined to have their trophies, then a shoot-out ensues with the duo’s expert marksmanship winning every time.
When Django and Schultz finally catch up with Leonardo DiCaprio, the totally evil plantation owner who has the wife and who honestly believes that his slaves are nothing but pieces of property he can do with as he pleases, there is a shoot-out to end all shoot-outs. Django rescues his wife and triumphs in the end, not only annihilating the army that DiCaprio sends against him, but also dynamiting the plantation to kingdom-come in the film’s riproaring finale. This finale has generated a lot of controversy, yet how is it different than Spielberg’s decision to end "Amistad" by pulverizing the African slave fort with cannon fire as its riproaring finale?
Like all Tarantino’s films, Django has been subject to controversy, perhaps moreso than any of his others. What’s surprising is that much of the controversy is coming from the African-American community, championed by director Spike Lee, who believes that no white director had any business making this film and even going so far as to claim the violence depicted against slaves in Django was too over the top for even this subject. This strikes me as being awfully self-serving as we know from our history that many slaves were treated with abject cruelty and the cruelty portrayed in Django cannot even come close to the real barbarism to which slaves were subjected, only goes so far as any film can dare to go without becoming unwatchable. That much Django does. It goes as far as it can dare, which is perhaps farther than any other film ever made. But for people like Spike Lee to claim that Django trivializes slavery by showing it worse than it really was is not only to ignore a history with which they are very well familiar but also betrays a hypocrisy that is even more difficult to swallow than this film’s violence.
I have always been on the record that I do not object to violence in films when it serves the drama. In Django it not only serves the drama but doubly serves it not only by showing it realistically, which is the only way to truly honor the subject, but also by being faithful to the genre it is imitating. There is more than sufficient dramatic justification for the raw graphic realism in this film. But more importantly, I have seen any number of films about the horrors of slavery but not until Django was I truly impressed by how cruel a whipping can be and how truly awful slavery was as a culturally ingrained institution, an institution that could only be stopped by the bloodiest war in history.
The only fault in Django, and why I don’t give it four stars, is that it sort of falls apart a little in the last 20 minutes. In this final act, Schultz does something that I feel is completely out of character and very much jeopardizes their objective of getting the three of them away from the plantation safely. It of course provides the impetus for the final shoot-out, but from a dramatic point of view and based on everything that went before it, this finale was not necessary, or at least should have been handled differently. Was Schultz not thinking that his actions would very likely get both Django and his wife killed, destroying everything they had fought for the last three hours? Or was it Tarantino who wasn’t thinking, except that he wanted a riproaring finale and this was the only way he could think of to do it? He should have hired me. I could have thought of a better way.
Still, Django is an important film. If you can take its hard-hitting dramatics, it is a must-see film. Tarantino has always been controversial, so much so that he will never take home the Best Picture prize. Still, the Academy recognizes his genius since he gets nominated practically every time out to bat. He won’t win this time either, but he surely deserved the nominations.
5. "Les Miserables" **
I won’t say much about this one, freely admitting my bias against musicals. I love a good musical but they are so rare. It seems that people in musical theater prefer to go real heavy on the music and real light on the theater. But without the story and the performances, musical theater doesn’t work for me. Chicago - great music, lousy story. Mamma Mia - great music, no story. There have been some great musicals that have had great stories – Singin’ In the Rain, West Side Story, Cabaret, and A Star Is Born, to name a few. But in the vast universe of musicals, those that also have great theater are the exception. The audiences seem to prefer it that way. I know many fans of musicals and whenever we’re discussing a particular production, if I dare bring up a flaw in the story structure, the reaction is always the same. "Who cares? I just liked the music." I’m afraid that’s not good enough for me. So I have a bias against musicals.
Les Miserables was particularly hard to like because I thought it was based on the novel and soon realized that it was instead based on the Broadway musical that was only very loosely based on the novel. That’s what I get for going out of my way to know as little about a film as possible before I see it so that it hits me completely fresh. Then I noted a number of character and story changes that completely changed the whole tone of Victor Hugo’s tragedy. The entire premise of the novel and what made it work as a dramatic story was the reason for which Valjean was imprisoned in the first place, the total injustice that lay at the foundation, all of which was reduced in this production to a single line of dialogue near the end, so that there was never any dramatic tension over Valjean’s motives. The dimensionality of Javert was reduced to a cardboard bureaucrat solely focused on the cold letter of the law for its own sake. We never got nearly a full sense of why Valjean and Javert were at war with each other for so much of their lives. Without that central conflict, all that was left was the music with no real drama attached. And that’s just the beginning of my objections to how they altered Victor Hugo’s classic story.
The musical numbers were wonderful. Anne Hathaway certainly proved that she has quite a set of pipes and she and Hugh Jackman deserve all the accolades they can get. The production design was fantastic and I heard many in the audience proclaiming how great they thought the film is. It has already been universally hailed as THE definitive production of Les Miz. If fans of musical theater don’t care about the theater part and are very happy just to be treated to great music, singing and dancing, I guess that makes it a lot easier for the people who make them. But I want more. Les Miz didn’t have it. And that’s pretty typical.
6. "Life of Pi" ****
Pi Patel, now a middle-aged man living in Canada, is being interviewed by a reporter about an ordeal he went through at the age of 16 when he was shipwrecked in the Indian Ocean and spent nearly seven months lost at sea. What makes his story so highly unusual is that he is stranded on board a makeshift raft in the company of a very hungry man-eating Bengal tiger. For seven long months, night and day, minute by minute, he must deal with the issues of raw survival against nature’s very unforgiving posturings. But that’s hardly the worst of it. He must also deal with his perilously close proximity to this huge ferocious animal that is spending all its time plotting a way to get at and eat the boy while the boy spends every waking minute of his time plotting a way to prevent that.
To say this is suspenseful is the understatement of the century. The only thing that provides relief is the fact that we know this is a flashback. Since he is telling the story, we know he survived. Somehow knowing it turns out okay isn’t much help. Hardly an hour goes by when Pi doesn’t have a close scrape. When you’re least suspecting, the tiger appears suddenly out of nowhere and we jump out of our seats certain Pi has had it. But the boy is very resourceful and finds a way to escape every time. Meanwhile, the tiger makes meals of every other animal that’s been shipwrecked with them, often in very nauseating ways, but certainly in ways that underscore his enormous might. Pi cannot take advantage of the animals himself for to do so would spell certain doom.
The methods Pi invents to insulate himself against the tiger and also find protection against the elements as well as a food and water supply for himself are quite fascinating. But it is one of the most frightening and violent films I’ve ever seen as we are reminded every minute of how cruel nature is, how harsh the sea is, and how insignficant we are against it. Alfred Hitchock’s "The Birds" was an allegory about how we humans wouldn’t stand a chance if even the smallest most innocent part of nature were to turn on us. This film is much more directly to the point, illustrating just how completely helpless we become when taken out of civilization.
The horrors of nature and raw survival are as graphically presented here as I’ve ever seen. The kind of violence in films like Django doesn’t really bother me because I know it’s all fake. But this was all too real. The ocean, the tiger, all too frighteningly real. Knowing that at any moment that tiger could pounce was all too frighteningly real. Knowing that at any moment a squall could come up, or some ocean creature could emerge from the water and put a sudden end to everything was all too frighteningly real.
It was also all breathtakingly beautiful. The scenery is out of this world. It’s like the gorgeous poisonous foliage that is so prevalent in jungles, very pretty to look at, but deadly to touch. And this went on hour after hour for nearly seven months before he makes landfall and comes ashore somewhere in Central America. You wonder how he did it without going insane.
This is a great film executed with marvelous artistic flair by ace director Ang Lee. This is the third must-see of the year. The violence is natural but still every bit as nail-biting and intense as any shoot-em-up action film. It certainly does leaves you with a vast appreciation for the importance of respecting nature.
7. "Lincoln" ***
What can I say? It’s Spielberg. It’s Daniel Day-Lewis. It’s Sally Field. And it’s Abraham Lincoln! What’s not to like? This beautifully done biopic about five weeks during the final months of Lincoln’s presidency is a dramatically stirring history lesson about the 16th President’s determination to pass the constitutional amendment banning slavery before the defeat of the Confederacy, which is impending.
Lincoln’s advisers are convinced that they can force the Confederates to surrender and bring about a quick end to the war if they can only make the abolition of slavery the law of the land. They have a rare opportunity to pass a constitutional amendment since only the northern states are in the Union at the time. So the heat is on and we are treated to a 2-1/2 hour drama showing statesman Lincoln at the height of his powers as he sweet talks and persuades, threatens and cajoles his staff and his Congress to push this amendment through. We are given a wonderful history as well as a compelling drama about the consummate political skill that would make Lincoln soon go down in history as one of the nation’s greatest chief executives.
Unfortunately, it comes across more like a low budget episode of Masterpiece Theater than as a great $65 million dollar film. I also have to seriously question the historical accuracy. It made no sense to believe that this amendment would end the war. Lincoln had already abolished slavery two years before that with the Emancipation Proclamation so, if there was any validity to this logic, the war should have ended then and there. The South had already been assured the most generous of surrender terms. It was basically just, "give up, rejoin the ranks, become Americans again, all will be forgiven and forgotten." There is even a scene early in the film where the Union negotiators offer just such a deal to the Confederate leaders, which is rejected. I would have to refresh my memory on the history but, based solely on the way it’s presented here, it’s not very believable. There is but one character in the film who briefly questions this logic. By the end, we realize he was the only one who was right.
Sally Field’s Mary Todd is portrayed as a woman pushing the amendment out of strict self-interest. Robert Lincoln has just joined the Union army, very much against both his parents’ wishes, and she puts the squeeze on her husband to make this amendment happen so the war is over before Robert gets hurt. This is not at all the Mary Todd that is in the history books and is quite a slap in the face. If she really believed this, why did she not push for it long ago? Why did it take her son being in harm’s way before she starts pushing for an end to the conflict?
These are just a few of the things that don’t gel in Lincoln. Perhaps my biggest objection is the thoroughly romanticized portrayal of Lincoln that Spielberg presented, the giant of a man, the super president. In other words, like virtually every other film that has been made about Abraham Lincoln, not even a hint about his considerable dark side, his bouts of melancholia, his manic-depressive personality, and other character deficiencies that are so well known to all students of Civil War history. And neither is there much of a hint of his great talents as a manager, how he corraled the greatest minds in the republic to preserve the Union, about the enormous struggles he had finding generals who would fight for him and to win the respect of his fellow politicians and his own staff, something he was burdened with all the way until his reelection. Since this entire story takes place in the months following the reelection when he had finally won the total respect of his fellow statesmen and was at the height of his talents and powers, I presume Spielberg decided that Lincoln’s dark side was not part of the story he wanted to tell.
As I’ve said many times, historical films have no obligation to be historically accurate and they usually are not. My objections really have nothing to do with whether "Lincoln" works as a film, which it most certainly does. I can just think of so many other chapters in Lincoln’s career that would make much more interesting fodder. Still, the praise has been universal with particular attention to its focus on accuracy. This is what mystifies me. Have the people who are writing about this film actually read the real history? Oh well, such is Hollywood. I still loved the film, even if I would have made a different one.
8. "Silver Linings Playbook" ***1/2
This little low budget gem is a real romantic charmer. A very headstrong Bradley Cooper is newly released from a mental hospital after problems with drugs and goes home to live with dad Robert DeNiro. He soon meets Jennifer Lawrence, a recent widow having a tough time with her grief and exhibiting more than a little mental illness herself. She’s a tough bird who needs someone to love and he’s a thoroughly obnoxious mental defective who needs a very serious dose of tough love. She has the solution. As an amateur dancer, she’s going to try to cure her grief by entering a dance contest that is way out of her league. She blackmails him into being her dance partner and, as the fairy tale goes, if love doesn’t fix everything, the dance surely will.
This is a thoroughly sweet and entertaining tale of two opposites who aren’t really so opposite at all and who definitely attract. Watching their journey together is a real joy and the happiness they make us feel when they finally realize what they have found in each other is very satisfying. Director David O. Russell who hasn’t had a miss yet, once again hits all the right notes, both literally and figuratively. Bradley Cooper proves without a doubt that he can act, and hold himself up quite handsomely against the likes of Robert DeNiro. And Jennifer Lawrence? What can I say? This 22 year old national treasure does not seem capable of making a wrong move. Last year, she wowed us with her Oscar winning performance in the intensely dramatic "Winter’s Bone." This year she has emerged as one of the most endearing action heroes in film history with the enormous success of "The Hunger Games." And now she has proven she can handle romantic comedy as deftly as anything else. I would say that she is well on her way to becoming the star of her generation. But I think she may already be there.
This film has been nominated for eight major Oscars and has already won a trophy case full of awards. I don’t know whether it deserves Best Picture. The competition is pretty stiff. But it was certainly one of the most entertaining and satisfying films of the year and one which I cannot wait to add to my DVD collection.
9. "Zero Dark Thirty" ****
If I may be so bold, this is hands-down the Best Picture of 2012. The only reason it probably won’t make it is because its director, Kathryn Bigelow, won Best Picture in 2008 for "Hurt Locker" and the Academy usually does not give out two Best Pictures in such close proximity, besides which Bigelow was one of the directors that did not make the director’s list this year. But this story of the ten year crusade to get Bin Laden and the lone lady CIA agent who spearheaded the operation is superb in every respect.
Like Jennifer Lawrence, Jessica Chastain has been in a slew of wonderful roles in the past several years and does not seem capable of doing anything wrong. She will likely be the Best Actress winner this year for her portrayal of the pacifist turned warrior whose ingenious techniques finally accomplish what all the world’s great spy agencies could not. She finds a way to locate Bin Laden and then masterminds the plan for his demise.
Her character arc is fascinating to watch. As Maya, a CIA officer not too long out of college who joins the agency in the immediate wake of 9/11, because of her extensive background in psychology she is almost immediately assigned to a black ops group that interrogates terror suspects and is on the team right out the gate that is assigned to find Bin Laden. At first she has extreme qualms about the morality of torturing the suspects though her superior Dan, who received a Ph.D. for developing his interrogation techniques, is absolutely certain of its morality. She stands hesitantly on the sidelines for quite some time observing how he extracts information bit by bit, seemingly meaningless at first but it all eventually comes together like a big jigsaw puzzle that exposes the next terror plot.
The turning point is when she is the victim of a terror attack herself while at dinner with a friend at a restaurant that is bombed. As she watches her friend die, she becomes convinced and goes directly to the interrogation room and tortures the suspect herself until he gives up the next plot, thereby saving hundreds of lives. Now she is a full convert. If torturing a few souls is what it takes to uncover these plots and save thousands of lives, she now believes that’s a small price to pay. For the next ten years, she stays on the same assignment continuing to collect intelligence until she figures out where Bin Laden is hiding out. The drama is not only in the fascinating procedurals that lead her to the answers, but in the political battles she must fight with her superiors to convince them that she is not only on the right track, but she is the only one who is on the right track.
Eventually her arguments win out. She draws up the exact plan of attack for the SEALs team that will invade Pakistan and land in his compound. This is a "dead or alive" mission, meaning that if a clear opportunity to take him alive presents itself, they are to do that; otherwise it’s kill on sight. Since Bin Laden is clearly on record that he will not be taken alive, they know it’s highly unlikely they can capture him and, if they try, they will almost certainly be killed themselves. The mission is approved and, at zero dark thirty on May 2, 2011, the Navy stealth helicopters take off to make history.
The greatness of this film is that it does not attempt to judge the morality of the methods used to rid the world of one of history’s most dangerous men. It simply presents what happens and lets the viewer decide. We can each decide whether Maya is right or wrong but it is a dramatically powerful journey to watch her go through her experiences and reach the conclusions she does, ultimately without regrets or apologies. A further testament to the film’s artistry is that it could have been made by either a conservative or liberal director. Kathryn Bigelow is herself liberal, yet some might argue she takes a decidedly conservative point of view in this film. It’s also quite interesting that the conservatives themselves object to this film, saying torture was never used to get the intelligence to find Bin Laden. But this was proven to be completely incorrect a few weeks ago when the CIA released a report confirming that torture was used.
Then, on the other hand, Republican leaders have accused both Bigelow of appropriating classified material and the Obama White House of leaking it as the film’s details are allegedly so on target that they suspect criminal activity. An investigation against Bigelow has been ordered and the authorities stand ready to charge her with national security violations if anything turns up. The same thing happened to Stanley Kubrick when "Dr. Strangelove" was released, as the details of nuclear protocols were so accurate that the FBI investigated the director. Of course, Kubrick was able to prove that every bit of detail portrayed in the film was taken from public sources and he was let off the hook. Bigelow also insists that everything in her film came from FOIA and that she can prove it. So on the one hand the film’s critics insist that certain details in the film never happened, but on the other that the story is so accurate that they are pursuing a criminal inquiry. It’s a further testament to just how accurate - and balanced - the film is.
The role of great filmmaking is to give us a different view of the world. There can be no doubt that is exactly what "Zero Dark Thirty" has done. It is a great film and is the #2 must-see film of the year if you can tolerate the graphic portrayal of the war on terror. If for no other reason, the film must be seen just to get the answer to the riddle of how the CIA buying a Lamborghini for a diplomat proved to be the key to finding Bin Laden. (Or you can just read about it on Wikipedia. But c’mon, it’ll be so much more satisfying to see the film.)
Honorable Mentions:
"The Hunger Games" ****
This one did not get nominated for anything but, until November, it was hands-down my favorite film of the year. This wonderful intensely horrifying fable demonstrates just how easy it is for a society to fall prey to tyranny but also offers the ray of sunshine that the courage of just two people who are willing to say no can make such a big difference. This is the first of a trilogy, and ended with the two young people having, for the moment, outwitted the tyrant. Part II is in the works right now. We can see that the tyrant will be plotting some payback and very likely the kids fomenting the beginnings of a rebellion. Can’t wait.
"Skyfall" ****
Nominated for best music, cinematography, editing and sound, after 50 years of James Bond, this one is the best yet having completely redefined the franchise into a grittier more realistic portrayal of spy games, in other words the way Ian Fleming originally wrote them. And with Ralph Fiennes now stepping in to replace M, we can be assured of 50 more years of Bond.
The Master **
Nominated for Best Actor, Supporting Actor, and Supporting Actress and a slew of other awards, this fictional biopic from director Paul Thomas Anderson about a 1950s cult leader is a very thinly veiled slam at L. Ron Hubbard and Scientology and not a very good slam at that. You don’t have to be a devotee of Scientology to dislike this film. It is vulgar. Worse than that, it is dull. 138 minutes of both vulgar and dull is a bit much to take.
Phillip Seymour Hoffman as the Hubbard lookalike preaches that he can cure any disease and teach any individual to achieve the perfection that nature intended for them, as planted deep within them trillions (not billions) of years ago by the aliens who initially seeded our planet. It is easy to understand how such promises would appeal to some people. It is equally difficult to understand how anyone with any intelligence could fall for this. Because this particular issue is so blatantly obvious, the vitriol that oozes from every frame of Anderson’s attack is completely unnecessary and makes this little more than another message film being delivered with a 2x4. I have liked Anderson’s other films and have always loved the three nominees - Joaquim Phoenix, Hoffman, and Amy Adams. But they have all done much better work.
The Impossible ***
This true story about a vacationing Spanish family’s struggle for survival after the historic tsunami that struck Thailand in December 2004 is yet another intensely dramatic testament to the overwhelming power of nature and humankind’s puniness in its face. Naomi Watts is the mom with newcomer Tom Holland playing Lucas, her tween son, as they are both separated from civilization by the tidal wave and must spend a number of harrowing days surviving in the now toxic wasteland while making their way back to help. Mom has a life threatening injury so it is up to the courageous young Lucas to very quickly become the man in the family and save the day. The special effects are magnificent with an incredibly realistic recreation of the natural disaster. Naomi Watts is nominated for Best Actress but the real kudos should have gone to Holland. It is really his story and the fantastic performance of this young actor that holds the film together. There’s much more to this film than its lone nomination would indicate. It is very well worth seeing.
Flight ****
Denzel Washington and director Robert Zemeckis have done it again with this masterpiece about an airliner that very nearly crashes and is saved only by the superb aviation skills of its pilot. That alone would have made a great movie but this one takes a quantum leap forward in dramatic storytelling when Washington, as the ace pilot, finds himself suddenly accused of manslaughter when the investigation reveals suspicions that he was on drugs and intoxicated while flying the plane. This is a fascinating study on the shades of grey in ethics that often confound complex issues. Just as it is clear that he should not be flying if he has these problems, it is equally clear that drugs and alcohol almost certainly gave him the mental edge he needed to solve the crisis and that the plane would have crashed without it. Because his actions saved so many lives, as an audience we are forced to question the justice of holding him responsible for the few souls that were lost just because he broke some rules that are known to be commonly broken. It is one of the most superb dramas of the year. While watching, it is difficult to imagine how they can come up with a satisfying ending. On the one hand, he’s a hero and we want to pin a medal on him. On the other hand, he’s a menace and we don’t want him getting back on another plane. I’ll only say that they do resolve the story beautifully. Washington is nominated along with the screenplay. They both deserve it.
Moonrise Kingdom ***
Director Wes Anderson scores another bulls-eye in this total charmer about young love. Sam and Suzy, two 12 year olds from wounded families, experience their first romance during summer camp. This one is nominated for best screenplay and also for a whole boatload of other awards, including Best Picture at both the Golden Globes and the Cannes Film Festival. That says it all. The joy in this film is in the experience and no plot summary can do it justice. It is one of the most delightful films of 2012.
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Other honorable mentions include "The Big Miracle," a wonderful true story with Drew Barrymore trying to save whales trapped in the ice in Antarctica, "The Avengers 3D," one of the best action-adventure films of the year, "Salmon Fishing In the Yemen," another charmer about a Brit bringing fly fishing to the Yemen desert (sound ludicrous so you have to see it to understand why it makes perfect sense), "The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel," a delightful comedy about a group of expatriates adapting to a nightmarish first year of retirement in India, and "Hitchcock," the riveting behind-the-scenes nightmare about how the great director almost destroyed his career trying to make "Psycho."
And finally, "Pitch Perfect," with the incomparable Anna Kendrick not only proving once again that she’s a terrific actress but now also a wonderful singer as well. I have complained about musicals because they so often lack good stories. This one has a great story and is told beautifully. And, of course, the musical numbers are fabulous. This one should have been nominated in place of "Les Miz."
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