From the Ledge

The film awards season is already in full swing, with the Golden Globe Awards, the playoffs to the cinematic Super Bowl that is the Oscars, already scheduled to rock the world (sometimes not in a good way) of us avid Oscar prognosticators this Sunday evening.  The divine Ms. Jennifer M, who my blog readers know from our collaborative Oscar predictions and recap blogposts last year, has already de-camped to the far flung spaces of Orange County in order to be closer to the action, but she and I had a very giddy conference call this morning to discuss plans for this year’s Oscar notes collaborations (which shall all be fabulously novel, since we’ll have more tricks up our couture sleeves than Penn and Teller, so stay tuned!).  I’ve been on the ball with my movie-watching of possible Oscar nominees and winners, to head off a repeat of snide criticisms from various blog readers (you know who you are!) on my predictions (ok, so I saw Ruby Dee’s nominated blink-and-you’ll-miss-it performance on a YouTube compilation video, but you know what, whether it’s seven minutes on YouTube or it’s American Gangster’s full-length two hours and thirty seven minutes running time, her performance was still insubstantial and undeserving of a best supporting actress nomination!).  Here, then, are my thoughts on three of the films being buzzed-about as potential Oscar contenders.

Slumdog Millionaire – It seems like every time Slumdog Millionaire comes up, most people, from various BFFs to the Divine Ms. Jennifer M to Meredith Vieira on the Today show to the hairstylists at the salon I go to, break out in epileptic seizures of ecstasy, eternally grateful that a cosmic force has sent them this manna from heaven to uplift and inspire them.  Huh?  I don’t get what the hoopla is about (it just won the Broadcast Critics’ Best Film last night).  So it’s a feel-good fairy tale of a movie awash in colorful ethnic photography and ethereally back-lit night scenes, sort of like Amelie but with crummy police stations and people doing their laundry in a dirty creek.  So it brings an unfamiliar part of the world and a different culture to the consciousness of American mainstream moviegoers, and has the audacity to put up subtitles for its Hindi-speaking scenes.  So it stars actors whose names cannot be conjugated ala Brangelina (just because you’ll run out of consonants).  So it celebrates the underdog and gives the audience hope that good always will ultimately triumph over evil, and that true love is just a cup of chai tea away.  But is it really the best film of 2008?  Although I laud director Danny Boyle’s efforts to bring a different kind of film to mass audiences (and he seems to be succeeding because of the enthusiastic reception his movie has received), I think Slumdog Millionaire is totally unbelievable, contrivance-laden, and really low on the intelligent discourse-meter.  The story is just plain unrealistic – how probable is it that all of Who Wants to be a Millionaire’s questions relate to incidents in a person’s life?  Uhmmm, as probable as me getting a date with Enrique Iglesias!  Which is like impossible!  I’ve been to Mumbai, and this film’s glamorized look at it’s filth, poverty, and chaos-filled lifestyle isn’t painting the true picture of an unbelievably, staggeringly poor city (I remember being stunned as an emaciated old beggar basically inserted her body through a half-opened window in the taxicab I was riding in, and the taxi driver very nonchalantly attempting to drive away, yeah, her body in his lap and all!).  And I grew up in the Third World, so I hate to break it to all the romantics out there, but in developing countries, when you fall into a fecal dumpster, or get hung upside down in a police station, or get knifed in the face by gangsters, you don’t gleefully sashay into a Bollywood-style dance number afterwards!  Geez! 

Revolutionary Road – I thought Richard Yates’ early-1960s book about the deterioration of a marriage, the frustration of unfulfilled aspirations, and the painful realization that the choices you’ve made in your life were the wrong ones, was one of the most emotionally brutal, searing, but utterly memorable books I read last year.  Despite a really terrific acting ensemble though, I don’t think the movie version of Revolutionary Road does sufficient justice to the novel.  I think it’s partly because the film medium will never be adequately able to capture the nuances and shadings of language, the evocations and intellectual text-image relationships that a reader conjures up, that are inherent in literature as an art form.  For another, I’m not too sold on director Sam Mendes’ artistic choices.  I don’t think the film captures the subtle claustrophobia and the quiet, helpless desperation it creates that the novel very clearly describes.  First of all, I think the scenes are expansively photographed- they’re beautiful and poetic, like the scene of men in identical suits and hats coming off the train in Grand Central Station, but they don’t close you in, which I think is one important effect of the novel on the reader.  Secondly, I think the movie is very histrionic – there’s a huge dramatic fight between Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet five minutes into the movie, which leave you breathless but scratching your head.  In the book, this fight comes in the early chapters too, but there is more of a build up of emotions.   The film is almost operatic in its excessive drama, whereas the book, in my opinion, is more melancholy etude superficially masking a fiery, seething, bubbling, concierto.  I think DiCaprio, and especially Winslet, though, give career-best performances.  DiCaprio’s Frank is weak-willed, thin-skinned, conceited, insecure, emotionally immature, and he balances all these traits beautifully and honestly.  Winslet’s April (who is painted more strikingly in the film as potentially being psychologically disturbed) is moody, emotional, idealistic, suffocated, in some scenes, furtive, helpless, angry, like an emasculated and caged cougar – she is the one performance in my view who accurately, definitively nails Yates’ themes.

Frost/Nixon – I missed out on seeing Frost/Nixon on Broadway a couple of years ago, despite a plea from DC-based BFF Teresa to take an extra ticket off her hands, so I’m glad that Frank Langella and Michael Sheen were able to recreate their acclaimed stage performances on screen.  I don’t think there’s a lot to see in Frost/Nixon other than these two performances (I, mean, it’s not like the backstage prep for the interviews was anything like the daily occurrences in The View), so the dramatic interest in the narrative is pretty low-key.  Ron Howard’s direction is also very workman-like, steady, unobtrusive.  I think Langella’s Nixon is larger-than-life, meticulously-constructed, riveting, and brilliantly shaded.  It also comes off a little show-offy.  I think it’s a terrific performance, but I’m much more impressed (as I have been with his performance in The Queen) with Michael Sheen’s Frost.  Sheen is always compelling to watch on screen because he makes it all look easy.  He marvelously and intricately paints a picture of someone who knows he is in over his head and unfavorably-matched, but whose desire for fame, for reputation, for legitimacy, for respect, ultimately becomes the driver for diving off the deep end without a life saver. 

Tags: Frost/Nixon, Revolutionary Road, Slumdog Millionaire