This part of the year is always replete with Oscar bait and would-be's in disproportionate numbers. Awards Season 2005 has definitively started with a smash-bang group of films, but how much is too much? My concern is that too many big films happen at once, and as a result, too many get ignored.
If there's one good thing that came out of Gladiator winning Best Picture was changing the perception that an early-year film could be eligible for top prizes. The Big Fade, as described so long ago by Jeff Wells in this site's main column, is in full effect, not simply because DVDs and TV are luring people away, but because all the good movies of 2005 have been held for the last two months of the year.
Below are some capsule reviews (some more in-depth than others) from the past few weeks. I've been MIA for a couple weeks dealing with the paying part of my occupational life and coming off a run acting in a Stephen Sondheim musical, so things have been far from normal. Regularity returns this week.
Capote
Phillip Seymour Hoffman electrifies and stings as the famous writer, thereby making this the tortured soul movie people will be talking about for years. In an early scene, Capote entertains a room of party guests and that room extended into the 1/4-packed house (a rarity in Tallahassee's Miracle 5) I sat in last week.
Hoffman's Capote had everyone in the palm of his hand for the entire runtime. At first, the audience fell victim to his compulsive lies, not wanting to believe he so blatantly deceived and hurt so many close to him. Toward the end, knowing chuckles and chortles peppered the audience just as Truman's series of lies were sprinkled all along the path to the completion of In Cold Blood
Capote is as much a cautionary tale as a biopic. To relate the story of Truman Capote's greatest success and failure in the style of a favorite children's story would be to say "the boy cried wolf and got eaten whole". Capote not only ups the ante for 2005 as a high quality film year, but it stands as one of the best films of this decade thus far.
The movie is sharp without being hard-edged, elegiac without making you want to slit your wrists like The Weather Man. Capote reminds us of the dire consequences of balancing how much we alternately invest and feed off of those we make the subject of our work.
Bennett Miller and Dan Futterman (best known to many as Val, the son of the Genie from Aladdin and stepson of Max Bialystock version 2.0 in The Birdcage) have made a fantastic debut as a team, and I hope they keep the good work up after their first phenomenal success.
Good Night, and Good Luck.
George Clooney knocks it out of the park, choosing not to toss around his editorial weight and wedge himself in as the star role of the film, instead making way for the most substantial work we've gotten to see out of David Strathairn. For a couple decades, Starthairn has been a go-to supporting actor who never fails to impress with his effortless, organic acting style.
Strathairn disappears into the part, as has been said previously, but the different perspective I offer is that people in my demographic (18-24) see Strathairn's Murrow as that generation's version of what Jon Stewart of the Daily Show is for us. He shot straight and wasn't afraid to make people in power look bad through clever wordplay. The difference between Murrow and Stewart is, of course, their tone. Murrow held fast to the officious and businesslike side of responsible journalism, whereas Stewart's seemingly frivolous or cheeky approach trivializes his "fake news" broadcast to the elder folks who wagged their "you don't know anything about this" fingers at me after overhearing me comment how accurate the film was.
It's a touch lonely to be so far detached from two different generations in this way, knowing more about the earlier 20th Century than my peers, but rebuked as a "know nothing" by my elders since I wasn't there to witness it all. I promise to carry on the tradition and hang that over the heads of the twentysomethings who are around when I'm in my fifties.
Good Night dramatizes the Red Scare in the most digestible, easily-absorbed way I've yet seen to communicate the dangers of fanaticism to my peers. While other critics may say the film will be remembered as "good but not great," this is the movie that will change the way formative adult and young adult minds perceive this New Cold War world we've lived in for a few years now. The citizens who experienced the War on Drugs, the War on Terror, and the War on Communism all stand to learn something from each other, and this is the only movie on the radar that could provoke that conversation into existence.
Separate Lies
Occasionally, the local arthouse will fall prey to Grammar Gremlins, by which I mean to say the title spelled/punctuated on their marquee does not correspond to an actual movie playing.
After purchasing my ticket to Separate Lives, I asked the girl in the box office if she realized the marquee was misspelled, and she said "that's what the computer says" which naturally means computers now rule the world of cinema. I can't wait to see Harry Pooter and the Giblet of Fires.
Similar to my experience seeing Shopgirl the second time (the first was a packed advance screening), Proof, and countless other movies at the Miracle 5, I was surrounded by around ten retirees. In a rare occurance, however, a girl my age sat just behind me. This can easily be fodder for all manner of entertainment, depending on how chatty the girl in question is and how wrong the movie is for her sensibilities.
She was exceptionally captivated, as was everyone there. Separate Lies is the feature directorial debut of Julian Fellowes, the brilliant screenwriter of Gosford Park. All these new directors this year have restored my faith that studios are in fact looking for new talent and not just stumbling across it by accident.
At the heart of the movie, appropriately enough, lay a hopelessly tangled series of lies that keep misleading you to think the movie will lead you somewhere you expect to be led. Thankfully, Fellowes' especial talent for the written word as applied to dramatic device shines here, and though a couple expected turns take place, he keeps you guessing until it ends.
The script flows like an exquisitely-structured english play, but with the added advantage and dimension the cinema provides. Separate Lies could just as easily have been a hit West End drama, but I'm dearly glad I could watch Tom Wilkinson, Emily Watson, and Rupert Everett up-close and not imagine what it would've been like had I the money for a plane ticket and a ticket in a West End playhouse.
Not to be outshined by the above-the-bill players, Linda Bassett turns in an inspired performance as housekeeper Maggie. Best known in Britain for her stage career, Bassett has also appeared in Calendar Girls and The Hours. In all her screen appearances, she manages the task of neither fading into the background nor presenting too obtrusive a presence each time.
Bassett respresents one part of a masterfully assembled supporting cast, including John Neville (the West End's original Alfie), David Harewood (the humorous Prince of Morocco in Radford's Merchant of Venice, as well as Hermione Norris and John Warnaby (both understated and effective as Wilkinson's coworkers).
The story itself presents a lesson many people my age won't learn until they get to be in their 30's or 40's: it isn't enough to simply say that you're happy. Wilkinson ought to be under consideration come award time, provided enough Academy members see this movie.