Hollywood's Biggest Night, Again

10 Movies. Only one comes out alive.

Another day, another dollar. Another year another Oscars ceremony. Anyway, you all know the drill by now. It’s been a year (a good movie year), and here are some ramblings regarding the ten films up for Hollywood glory this evening.

American Fiction

There’s something sketchy and half-formed about Cord Jefferson’s directorial debut. It’s an easygoing movie with a few good ideas and performances that never really coheres into anything particularly interesting. It’s content to just float along on a cloud of nebulously dramedic vibes. The literary satire provides the funniest bits, though it basically cribs the same central idea as Spike Lee’s Bamboozled, a comparison which does not flatter Jefferson’s film. But I was desperate for that half-baked satire to resume during every second the movie spends on its boilerplate family drama, which is more than half of it. Jeffrey Wright tries his best as the grumpy writer Monk to hide the fact that he’s not really a character–he’s completely passive and blandly good, his maneuvers around his career never make sense, and his indignation about the state of the publishing industry never rises beyond petty griping. 

The movie has a legitimate point to make about the prevalence of black art geared towards white consumers, but the problem is that Jefferson doesn’t seem to want to do anything other than lightly poke fun at such art–he’s not interested in drawing blood (as opposed to, again, Bamboozled). He seems much more preoccupied with the family story, which is never specific enough to be interesting. He introduces Tracee Ellis Ross as Monk’s sister, then kills her off in the first half hour, then essentially replaces her with an underwritten love interest. I spent the entire movie missing the chemistry that Ross and Wright have in their early scenes together. And, in depicting the intergenerational story of a wealthy, intellectual black family, Jefferson leaves thorny, potentially interesting questions of class on the table, never interrogating the relationship between Monk’s snobbery and his family’s social position. It’s a shame, because that might have been a way to make it feel as though the lit-world stuff and the family stuff were connected, when in fact they feel like two completely different movies. 

The ending, which people seem to be excited about, is a heavy-handed mess. Jefferson wants to undermine the dramatic momentum of the literary deception plot, which is basically the only thing the movie has going for it. It feels like he’s scolding the audience for being even lightly invested in the story he’s cooked up. It’s a have-it-both-ways turn that I guess feels completely appropriate for this have-it-both-ways movie.

Anatomy of a Fall

I make no claims to science, but it truly seemed as though this year every single person in my rough demographic with whom I discussed favorite movies quickly and decisively cited Anatomy of a Fall as number one with a bullet. I don’t know what it is about this quite good but fundamentally sort of normal movie that has caught on with people in such a way. I guess that there is something irresistible about the way Justine Triet ties her courtroom drama to an exploration of a bad marriage; there’s a juicy enjoyment here that’s tabloid-y and true crime-y. But I think it might be that very normal-ness that people love; this is the type of satisfying three-course bistro meal that is typically dragged out into a bloated farm-to-table share-plate miniseries in America. 

Triet and Arthur Harari set up a glitteringly precise narrative architecture wherein every new revelation is carefully calibrated to swing the needle of doubt vs. belief to exactly the place on the dial that the filmmakers want. She says one thing to the court, we think she’s innocent. She wrote something in her novel and we think she did it (for the record, I do not think she did it, and I think it’s actually ludicrous to believe otherwise). All of these moves hinge on that fight scene, which Triet positions as a Rosetta Stone both for the marriage and the court case, which are basically the same thing. It’s a beautiful piece of writing and performance, which could be said about much of the film. Sandra Huller’s performance is an all-timer; it’s important that we think her a cold cypher, which we do, but somehow, by the end, we feel we understand her, which is due to the sheer force and specificity of Huller’s gestures at personhood. It’s a prismatic performance that one can examine from many different angles and still be dazzled. 

At the Oscars, this gets to play the part of big foreign crossover hit–it’s this year’s Parasite, Triangle of Sadness, what-have-you. But unlike those movies, there’s no real interest in social message here at all, let alone one about class. This one’s pleasures are obvious and culturally durable–everyone’s got a legal system. The most French thing about this is its courtroom rules, which seem fundamentally wet and wild, and which give the movie a freedom and juice where other trial movies can get cloistered and stodgy. It’s this mix of rigor and fun that gives the movie its kick, and which I have now talked myself into thinking is the reason everyone seems to love it to a degree that I don’t quite understand. We tend to disagree about a lot of things these days but there’s one thing we can all agree on: we would all kill ourselves if the we listened to the steel drum cover of “P.I.M.P.” for long enough. 

Barbie

Greta Gerwig is very good at a lot of things as a writer/director, and she displays many of those talents here. Watching this movie is sort of an exercise in trying to just enjoy those things while attempting to forget all of the bits of this that are indescribably stupid and stave off the cognitive dissonance of the third-wave feminism corporate psyop of it all. In a lot of ways, this movie shows her ascending to a new level as a director; the design of the Barbie world is, in fact, beautiful and startling. The Ken fight is wildly funny and inventive. The Matchbox 20 drop is even funnier than the Dave Matthews drop in Lady Bird. All of her movies have a fantastic rhythm and pace to their dialogue, genuinely recalling some of the great screwball writers of the 30s and 40s, and this is no exception. Michael Cera and Will Ferrell eat. A lot of it is good, and to enjoy it all you have to do is just ignore stuff like Margot Robbie staring at an old lady and calling her the most beautiful person in the world or whatever. 

I actually like to think that, culture war bullshit aside, a principal reason that this movie really resonates with people is that, despite its corporate nature, it seems like the fulsome expression of an artist’s actual vision. This is the Richard Brody argument, and while I think his praise of the movie and defense of Gerwig’s general project is deeply hyperbolic, I do think he is on to something with that idea. This is unmistakably a Greta Gerwig Picture; it’s an independent filmmaker stepping up to a huge budget level for the first time and making something recognizably their own, which is something that one almost never experiences in this day and age. That’s not nothing. It’s a kitchen-sink type movie that, for my money, has more good ideas than bad ones. But the bad ones are conspicuous; one’s mileage may vary on the degree to which they sink the whole thing. 

The Holdovers

Few performances were more purely pleasurable to watch this year than Paul Giamatti’s. He’s an actor who can tip over very easily into shtick; the light touch that is on display in all facets of this feel-bad-feel-good movie keeps him upright and hilarious throughout. There are many elements here that skirt the maudlin, the formulaic, or the prosaic, but Payne and his cast’s ability to consistently evoke movingly recognizable human behavior keeps the wheels greased for a blissfully pleasant viewing experience. I will confess to being basically in heaven while I watched this for the first time, and not just because it’s shot in Western Mass. 

The pleasures to be found here are both due to novelty (one hardly ever sees this type of modest character dramedy calibrated so well these days) and familiarity; it’s a relief to have Alexander Payne back after his Downsizing-imposed exile (which is a good movie, by the way). This one might be the best of his latter-day vintage, where he’s become more comfortable with sweet sadness that borders on sentimentality than in his more jaundiced early satires. The performances by the central trio are beautiful (it’s a shame Dominic Sessa never seemed to get any awards momentum); we enjoy these characters because we know people like them, maybe we see ourselves in them, and there’s an old-fashioned happiness to be found in seeing these different types slowly come to care about one-another. If it sounds a little hokey maybe it is, and I’m not sure that the movie really needs any of the excessive plotting that kicks into gear in its final act. But I didn’t care by then because the movie had generated so much goodwill. 

Because while there is some sentimentality here, there’s enough hardness and humor to make it go down easy. The film takes a matter-of-fact view of grief and alcoholism; it doesn’t preach. It’s filled with memorable setpieces that I still think about often; the Christmas party, the chase that ends in Sessa’s injury, the scene at the liquor store in Boston where Giamatti reveals his backstory. The film unfolds these people’s lives and personalities in front of us and we want to learn more. It’s a deceptively simple film, one that could only come from a true master of character and tone. It may not be the best film on this list, but I suspect it’s the one I’ll watch the most over the coming years; an honorable title to say the least. 

Killers of the Flower Moon

Martin Scorsese has always chronicled the relationship between small-scale human weakness, venality, and cruelty and the larger violence of the American project. As he draws closer to the end of a career in American cinema that does not really have any analogues, he seems to be honing even further in on the rot at the heart of the nation whose culture he has helped define. His last two films, this and The Irishman, are long, elegiac, magisterial late-career assertions that all of this has always been bad, and there’s no end in sight.

It’s instructive that, in focusing his gaze on this fundamentally brutal subject material, Scorsese has turned it away from the FBI and any redemption they might offer. In the 90s, discussing why he didn’t end up directing The Silence of the Lambs, he said “the way I work is, I show things.” In Killers, he shows us these horrible things–a race of people being systematically killed for their money–in agonizing slow-motion detail. Early on we’re delivered, apropos of seemingly nothing, the shock of a woman shot on her front lawn in front of her baby; that’s just the beginning of the horrors we’ll be shown, all of that badness accumulating with an inexorable historical force that suggests a tremendous powerlessness in the face of this country’s animating greed.

All of this detailed evil emanates from the love triangle at the film’s center–Lily Gladstone’s goodness and Robert DeNiro’s rapaciousness flanking Leonardo DiCaprio’s dunderheadedness, the latter unable or unwilling to choose between the former two. The dance of these relationships is a delicate balance that Scorsese orchestrates beautifully. We have to believe that Molly, an intelligent woman, would not suspect her that her husband is her tormentor. We have to believe in Ernest’s self-deception, that his belief in his own love for his wife is great enough to convince her that he’s trustworthy, despite all evidence to the contrary. That all of this works is a credit to the actors, who are all spectacular. Best of the three is DeNiro, activated and riveting as he conveys pure one-track malice with more life and vigor than he’s shown in decades. 

As Scorsese ages, I become even more grateful for his pure style and craft, which despite all the imitators is still unparalleled. There’s an immense amount of joy to be experienced in the way he orchestrates frames crowded with painterly detail, the precision of his tracking shots, the poetic phrasing of his images, the musical force of Thelma Schoonmaker’s cutting. That such pleasures are to be found in such an unflinching, basically punishing work of art is one of the many tensions animating this remarkable film, one that pulses with anger and love as it gazes bleakly into the void of the past. 

Maestro

For the first half hour or so of Maestro, I thought there might be something here. It was stupid, to be sure, but it had a little zip, a little visual juice courtesy of the great Matthew Libatique, and Bradley Cooper’s terrible, nasal-oriented performance seemed like it might be funny enough to sustain things. But unfortunately the director-slash-star-slash-dingdong manages to turn it into one of the bigger slogs of the year. Cooper’s whole shtick here, from the movie itself to the insane marketing push thereof, evokes the titular maestro not of his film but of the Seinfeld episode in which Elaine dates a vain, low-level conductor who insists that she refer to him by that title at all times. Cooper’s clearly a hack, but he’s working so hard to look like a genius that, at various points during the movie, I wanted to throw him an Oscar already just to shut him up. 

Leonard Bernstein was, it goes without saying, an incredibly interesting person, and Cooper does backflips to make him seem deeply boring. He seems far more interested in Bernstein’s sexuality than his musicality, which is largely ignored. We don’t get any particular insight into his character or his work that one couldn’t get from a quick google search. Instead Cooper trains his focus on Bernstein’s marriage, and shows no convincing evidence that said marriage was interesting enough for him to have done so.

It doesn’t help matters that Carey Mulligan as Lenny’s wife Felicia gives a performance of towering unwatchability. In a year with a bunch of terrible performances (everyone from this and Poor Things) nominated at the expense of a bunch of really good ones (everyone from Ferrari and May December), hers is the worse such example. In fact, I can’t think of a prestige biopic of recent vintage (not that I’m an expert on the form) that contains two worse lead performances than these two. Bravissima!

The movie spends about a half hour watching sainted Felicia die of cancer, which feels, by that point, like an act of calculated punishment to the audience; we’re being promised the sweet relief of not having to watch Carey Mulligan anymore, but she just keeps hanging on. There’s a lot of deeply embarrassing stuff here, more of which than you would want involving Judaism. After Felicia dies, there’s a scene in which Bernstein goes clubbing with some of his young Tanglewood students (did they go out in Pittsfield? North Adams?). Cooper gifts us a low-angle shot of himself in old-age makeup, grinning and gyrating to the pulsating beats of whatever Westen Mass DJ happened to be spinning that imaginary evening, sweating and backlit in red neon, as though he has finally, unburdened by his puritanically heterosexual wife, descended into Hell itself where he always belonged. 

Oppenheimer

In 2020, Christopher Nolan released a movie called Tenet, which much like Oppenheimer, is preoccupied with the possibility of earth’s destruction via nuclear weapon, even referencing J. Robert himself during one of its slightly more lucid bits of dialogue. It was fascinating to watch Tenet (recently re-released in theaters) after a year in which I saw Oppenheimer twice, because the contrast between the two highlighted something that I’ve always felt about Nolan, which is that he is a director of extremely clear strengths and extremely clear weaknesses, many of which are often on display right beside each other. Tenet, for example, is a triumph of texture and composition that is undergirded by a plot made up of resolutely stupid gibberish. Interstellar is my favorite Nolan film; it is deeply moving and beautiful, visually astonishing, emotionally draining and satisfying, a journey of a film that no one else could have conceived. It also contains an inane thesis about love being an element that can cross dimensions, a weird high-handed preachiness about the fundamental human importance of space travel, Michael Caine reciting Dylan Thomas multiple times, and Jessica Chastain. You generally have to take the good with the bad. 

What’s remarkable about Oppenheimer is the degree to which it minimizes his weaknesses, and in doing so also minimizes the weaknesses of the historical biopic genre in general. I think that it’s all in the movie’s pacing, which is absolutely breakneck, and in the fact that Nolan the writer is not required to think up any stupid concepts; it all really happened! Nolan takes his yen for convoluted story structure and applies it judiciously–we have the typical “narrating his life in a hearing and flashing back to events as described” thing, cut with the initially mysterious Robert Downey Jr. POV. We wonder what the endgame is with all this, but the movie doesn’t give us time to dwell on the question. It just keeps throwing stuff at us–movie stars, sex scenes, communism talk, Tree of Life-esque interstitials, epic New Mexico vistas, Benny Safdie’s accent. Nolan’s not afraid of a little good old fashioned audience confusion, and in this context it really suits him; somehow, it’s all followable. And then, in the back third, the movie actually gains momentum as we figure out what was going on with all the Downey gamesmanship. It’s a good trick–these great-man movies almost always slow to a dirge in the final act, as the hero descends into regret or pines over his dead wife or whatever (see Maestro), but Oppenheimer doesn’t let up until its brutal final scene. Nolan’s refusal to just tell a story straight pays off when applied to the straightest genre out there. 

As the movie develops, it takes on real moral weight. We feel Oppy’s discomfort with his creation because, well, how could we not? This is not Twin Peaks: The Return, but it is a giant mainstream movie earnestly trying to reckon with the foundational American evil of the 20th century. That Nolan successfully lands that part of things is the biggest surprise here–it’s a far cry from the rah-rah nationalism of Dunkirk. Thanks are due in no small part to Cillian Murphy, whose face says it all in those later scenes–for once, Nolan lets exposition take a backseat to expressiveness. Put it all together, and you have Nolan’s cleanest movie, the one with the fewest problems, since Memento. That he was finally able to apply that movie’s aesthetic and conceptual purity to something as large-scale as this feels like the capture of a dragon he’s been chasing his entire career.

Past Lives

I saw this movie on opening weekend when it was surfing on a wave of critical praise, and I had no idea what movie those critics were watching. I just wanted it to end. When I tried thereafter to talk to people who liked it, it felt like we were speaking a different language. I was accused of not connecting to it because I’ve never been in a long-distance relationship (I have). This movie clearly moves people, and I could not be at more of a loss to understand why. There’s just…nothing here. The characters are half-formed and uninteresting and they behave in ways that don’t make sense–it’s difficult to buy that the two leads have a deep connection with each other because their interactions are so stilted. I was immediately out during the interminable early Skype montage, whose sheer length and inanity made me feel like I was watching a David Wain parody of a boring independent film. It’s a film of grainy Brooklyn texture and slow lateral pans and a Grizzly Bear soundtrack and cute little pretend emotions substituted for real ones. It’s 2008 Pitchfork-core.

The film is built around a heavy-handed metaphor of nostalgia displaced as love; it equates cultural and emotional space. It’s the kind of thing that may have seemed interesting on the page but that feels utterly flat in execution. I will confess to being completely ignorant regarding Celine Song’s playwriting career, but here she shows no ear for dialogue and no gift for characterization, instead producing a flat, affectless movie that feels engineered from the constituent parts of different A24ish indie hits but with no life or perspective of its own. I understand that the story is somewhat autobiographical, which makes its lack of specificity even weirder, and makes me feel bad for her husband. The character based on said husband, a novelist who wrote a book called Boner played by John Magaro, is at one point seen staying up waiting for his wife to come home from an interminable conversation with her childhood crush. He’s playing videogames with headphones on and sipping a La Croix, and I thought, along with the rest of America, representation matters. 

The success of movies like Past Lives make me feel as dejected about the state of American independent cinema as I am by the state of mainstream filmmaking. A24 also released the virtuosic comedy of neurosis Beau is Afraid and the gloriously humanist Showing Up in the first half of this year. The former was marginalized and decried as a flop, the latter given a cursory run and then forgotten about, while this New York Times profile of a movie is praised to the skies and nominated for awards. It’s not that I think Beau or Showing Up should have been nominated for awards (neither is that kind of movie, and who cares), but that it seems as though the distributors and consumers of independent cinema are more interested in the types of movies that win awards than they are filmmakers of actual voice. This is depressing, and it indicates that the problem is not just with the major studios who shovel us slop all the time. They might just be getting better at giving us what we want.

Poor Things

This might seem hyperbolic, and also highly subjective, even by the already inherently subjective standards of “film criticism,” but I think Poor Things might be the most comprehensively unfunny movie ever made. I guess this all comes down to a matter of taste: a large number of people seem to think it’s hilarious to watch Emma Stone, with the taut jaw of a neurodivergent person and a dreadful accent delivering phraseology like “I have adventured it and found nothing but sugar and violence” and “your sad face makes me discover angry feelings for you,” which read, charitably, like Pete Wentz lyrics recited from memory by a British toddler. I however, do not think it’s funny. Why you ask? Where do I even begin. 

Like all of Yorgos Lanthimos’s movies, Poor Things has an inflated sense of its improprieties. We’re meant to see a man braying like a goat and be unable to contain ourselves in the face of such outrageousness. Much like his slightly more talented spiritual cousin Ruben Ostlund, one has always gotten the sense that Lanthimos views his characters as weak little ants in a maze of his own devious devising. What’s new here is the note of inspirationality, and it does not suit him. He wants us to think that Stone’s protagonist is somehow, I don’t know, beautiful for the journey that she goes through, which involves (spoiler alert) having a bunch of sex (which she calls “furious jumping,” which again I think its supposed to be funny) with Mark Ruffalo while she has the brain of a pre-schooler, then discovering human suffering and becoming sad, then becoming a sex worker for a while (a period during which her brothel madam says “a woman plotting her course to freedom, how delightful,” which, I think, is how Lanthimos wants us to feel), before winding up back where she started, enlightened and happy. Every single note of this rings false, most of all the human suffering business, which I watched with mouth agape at the baldfaced stupidity. Much like Barbie, Lanthimos’s strategy for explicating feminism is to take a protagonist who does not, for some elaborate reason, know that the patriarchy exists, and then have her discover it and go “this is crazy!” The difference is that he has zero interest in probing for further insight and, as discussed, is one of the least funny people to ever direct a film. So we are meant to be content with as many scenes of Emma Stone having sex as he can possibly fit in.

Much has been made about the look of this film. It is indeed a movie that looks conspicuously as though a lot of time and money and thought was expended on its design elements. I think we can all agree the less said about the fisheye lenses the better, but again this might be just a matter of taste, because in my humble critical opinion it looks like AI steampunk art. Its major accomplishment is that it fully cements Lanthimos as the very worst currently working director masquerading as an auteur. It’s good to have clarity I suppose.

The Zone of Interest

The Zone of Interest was a particularly rigorous shoot, we’ve been told over and over again, as if the amount of time taken somehow justifies Jonathan Glazer’s art-school-provocateur approach to the film’s skin-crawling material. We’ve also learned, via the movie’s press tour, that there was an unconventional shooting process during the film’s many domestic scenes; the actors were “under surveillance,” simply going about their immersive, semi-improvised acting business within the confines of the house, supervised by hidden cameras, completely unaware if anything they happened to be doing was captured on camera. It’s an interesting idea, but one that does not at all bear fruit in the finished project; one never feels the presence of a “surveillance” aesthetic, despite various critical reports to the contrary, and the performances do not seem in any particular way naturalistic or unmannered. One wonders why Glazer went through any of it at all.

Glazer’s Sexy Beast is a wild, florid, unhinged little movie, filled with vivid characterization and storytelling. His movies since then have gotten progressively more mannered and self-serious, a trend that reaches its logical terminus in a movie that tells us, again and again, in the exact same manner, that the people who ran Auschwitz were fucked up. To his credit, Glazer’s style, in particular his sound design, does conjure a truly visceral sense of discomfort. The movie really does provoke a reaction, so I don’t mean the “provocateur” label entirely disparagingly. It’s just that The Zone of Interest doesn’t, I think, use that reaction to teach us about anything beyond how rigorously it was conceived and constructed, and how banal these evil men and women were.

Compare this, if you will, to Killers of the Flower Moon, a movie that takes a similarly monstrous historical injustice as its subject matter, one that, compared to The Holocaust, has barely been addressed at all by the cinematic canon. Both productions meticulously recreate a lost time and place and use that particular kind of immersive cinematic artifice to evoke a genuinely sickened feeling in the viewer. Both, at the end, self-consciously acknowledge and even undercut that artifice. But the devil is in the details; Scorcese guilds his film with us a range of devastatingly complicated and real-feeling human behavior, while Glazer is content with his sculptural compositions and his one big design idea. The difference could hardly be more stark.