The Fifties for 2012: Picture and Director

This is the last stop for The Fifties. Thanks to everyone who read and commented, especially after I've been out of commission for so long, and don't be shy if you didn't! Thanks also to Tim Robey and Joe Reid who published their own versions of this feature in recent weeks. I haven't revisited their lists while I was posting my own, so as not to pilfer ideas, but they're great and distinctive run-downs.

Speaking of pilfering, I've decided to nick the Academy's new practice of having a flexible concertina for the number of Best Picture nominees, instilling the cutoff point where I feel it naturally falls, between 5 and 10. And so:



Best Picture
Beasts of the Southern Wild, for plunging into the kind of mythographic storytelling we celebrate in our novels but often deny our movies, and for absolutely nailing it;

Damsels in Distress, for returning from long absence and from diminishing returns of two prior movies with his warmest, most eccentric film, still very much his;

In the Family, for proving that low-budget regional films, the kind that get affirmative-actioned into lots of local festivals, can outrun much bigger dogs;

Magic Mike, for being not quite the movie advertised or expected, and being funnier, more incisive, more ambitious, and more heterogeneous than that one;

Miss Bala, for having the formal and technical wherewithal to tell a story of brute social machines with apt stylistic determinism, and for nailing it;

The Snowtown Murders, for being such a complete package I've cited it in every category, and for earning the immersion in sordidness that gives me qualms about it; and

The Turin Horse, for telling an overtly apocalyptic story, detailing a quotidian existence with uncommon texture, and asking if the latter entails the former.

Honorable mentions are honorable but don't feel mentionable: I graded A Simple Life the same as some of these nominees, but its staying power and degree of difficulty rank slightly below those of the movies I've listed; the same is even truer of Corpo Celeste. The only movie that's truly tempting to sub in here is 21 Jump Street, which only seems more eclectically, amiably, berzerkly accomplished on second viewing, and is such a welcome surprise inside such an empty-looking gift horse. Expect at least a re-grade.




Best Director
Justin Kurzel for The Snowtown Murders, for mastery of craft that still avoids an airless film-school feeling, and ratcheting up confrontational material without going for prurience;

Gerardo Naranjo for Miss Bala, for achieving deep, taut frames even as he plays menacingly with their borders, moves the camera brilliantly, and stays focused on the story;

Steven Soderbergh for Magic Mike, for his great, distinctive strength of immersing us in his characters while also subtly dramatizing his actors' relations to their characters;

Béla Tarr for The Turin Horse, for beating even Haneke at sustaining bleak preoccupations without just parodying himself, treating humanity seriously as a guttering flame; and

Benh Zeitlin for Beasts of the Southern Wild, for having such temerity, working with kids and water and magical realism and a raw nerve of recent cultural memory, and making it all click.

Honorable mentions include Patrick Wang for In the Family, Whit Stillman for Damsels in Distress, Ann Hui for A Simple Life, and Phil Lord and Christopher Miller for 21 Jump Street, for all the reasons listed above. Benoît Jacquot and Tony Gilroy adroitly manage two forms of palace intrigue for two different eras, diffusing unease across memorable characters in Farewell, My Queen and The Bourne Legacy.  And Paul Thomas Anderson (The Master) and Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Once Upon a Time in Anatolia) once again make me excited that they are alive and making tough, inimitable movies, even if I'll be more excited when they don't insert themselves quite so fussily between their images and their spectators.

The Fifties for 2012: Best Supporting Actor

Probably the most off-the-map of my acting lineups, though I'm still more sanguine than some people about the Bongo King's chances to wind up on the big year-end rosters.



Best Supporting Actor
Simon Russell Beale for The Deep Blue Sea, for holding a steady flame under his character's uxorious devotion, but keeping his shame, disdain, and mystification simmering alongside it;

Daniel Henshall for The Snowtown Murders, for finding new variations and a bearish modesty inside the trope of the disarming, fatherly sociopath, slipping him quietly into the movie;

Noé Hernández for Miss Bala, for staying elusive in a film that can feel overdetermined, hinting he is the girl's best ally and worst threat, working some layered agenda;

Matthew McConaughey for Magic Mike, for embracing while expanding his persona, blending camaraderie and self-interest, fears about middle age and voluptuous delight in his body; and

Brian Murray for In the Family, for serving the character and the film by keeping complexity at a minimum, showing us a very savvy lawyer driven by straightforward decency.

Honorable mentions start with Steve Carell for dialing down so self-effacingly in Hope Springs but reading as sincere, intelligent, and interested rather than blank; Dwight Henry for balancing volatility, eccentricity, and adoration in such complicated proportions in Beasts of the Southern Wild; and Bruce Willis for tacitly and tenderly putting across the fully dimensional adult character that Moonrise Kingdom sorely needs, without signaling immediately that the character is headed that way. Philip Seymour Hoffman has galvanizing moments in The Master, several of them nicely underplayed, though the performance also comes outfitted with scenes and flourishes that don't fully cohere (though that's partly due to the script). Seth Rogen manages his anti-typecasting well in Take This Waltz, yet he too suffers for some of his writer-director's miscalculations, as in his indulgent montage of post-breakup grief.  And no, I didn't forget Michael Fassbender in Prometheus; I just wasn't that taken with him, or surprised by anything in his perfectly skillful performance.

Cannes 1986: Still in the Fortnight

I have four more films left to see in the docket of the Directors' Fortnight before I do some more reporting on the main Competition films. I was weak and let a little bit slip about one of my favorite Palme contenders so far, not yet reviewed, during my 1986-themed podcast with Nathaniel, but you'll have to listen to us gab about Aliens, Fool for Love, Kathleen Turner, A Room with a View, and Francophilia at the movies if you want to get the scoop.

Meanwhile, the last two movies I sampled in this sidebar both straddle the B/B– boundary, albeit in different ways. Cactus, where a young Isabelle Huppert plays a newly blinded French woman falling tentatively in love in the Australian bush is what the older relatives at your family reunion might call a "nice movie." I suspect the director, Paul Cox, might bridle at bit at that since the most interesting stuff in Cactus are the temperature-cooling long shots, the unusually high mixing of natural sound, the hilarious and totally lifelike group scenes at a public meeting and a private party, and some abstract montages that burrow into the characters' fears and memories. The jury is out whether he wanted to make a "nice movie," and sometimes he seems to actively avoid doing that, even at the expense of his own plot. But it is nice, in a refreshing range of ways, and if Huppert is your hook, you won't be disappointed. Check her reaction to bad news from her doctor. Meanwhile, my review is here.

Amos Gitai's Esther has no ambitions of being nice, staging the Old Testament tale in a series of painterly, flatly played tableaus with a Where's Waldo?-type narrator speaking directly to the audience. The effects are a little too weird for the suburban arthouse though not truly challenging, and they evoke urgency in the story without really drumming up much drama. Still, if Cox feels somewhat ambivalent about the vehicle and the genre he is working with, Gitai seems dogged and ecstatic about making exactly this movie, using these formal gambits, and registering these political convictions. The ending is a frame-breaking sleight-of-hand all its own, which may or may not "work" or shed new light on what you've just seen, but at least it makes a real impression, however ambivalent, and for that I give Gitai credit.

Friday Reviews: Animal Kingdom

Will wonders never cease? A review on the same day a movie opens in my local market, and in several others. I have a plant in the Hollywood ecosystem to thank for my rare access to a pre-release screening, and Glenn Dunks to thank for beating the drum so long and loud for this title. In every other respect, I have David Michôd to thank for making such an entertaining and aesthetically ingratiating movie. I can't easily think of anyone to whom I wouldn't recommend Animal Kingdom, an engaging yarn told with formal finesse. My full review is here.

And actually, since I already reviewed Cairo Time last week, that's two debuts in the Chicago market on which I've officially gone on record. And they're both good! Somebody pinch me.

Actress Files: Deborah Kerr

Deborah Kerr, The Sundowners
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
(lost the 1960 Best Actress Oscar to Elizabeth Taylor for BUtterfield 8)

Why I Waited: Somehow I'd accumulated the impression that I'd be watching Deborah Kerr farming, no doubt nobly, across two hours of postcard photography.

The Performance: Zinnemann's done it again! After so recently turning me around in my view of both his own work and the hidden potentials in his leading lady, The Sundowners has warmed me, with no intended pun, on yet another actress whom Oscar loves to nominate, for reasons I often find flummoxing. In this case, we're talking about six-time loser but belated (and very moving) Lifetime Achievement Award recipient Deborah Kerr, earning the last of her competitive nominations in this tale of two married itinerant laborers in rural Australia in the 1920s. One of them, Kerr's Ida Carmody, is nearing the end of her patience with nomadic movements and eternally deferred security, whereas her husband, Robert Mitchum's Paddy Carmody, not only prefers this way of living but palpably believes that his soul is staked in rooflessness and roads. They have a young son, Sean (Michael Anderson, Jr.), whose incipient cravings for a home and a stable community have only exacerbated Ida's weariness of their routine. Violating the usual law of Hollywood parents as exaggerated opposites, Paddy is not immune to his boy's pleas, even if he finds it hard to relent to them, especially in the long term. Adding even further to the scenario's welcome complexity, Ida and Paddy are clearly as besotted with each other as they've ever been, and though Ida as an individual, a protector, and a mother espouses stabler living and practical planning, she really does hate—as wife, lover, and friend—to see the wick burning down inside of Paddy whenever the family stops moving. As Kerr plays her, she sometimes looks saddest, if only for a moment, at the moments he volunteers to gratify their wishes, because she knows these concessions come at a real price to him.

I should admit to harboring a weakness for family stories that establish an orienting empathy with children, the ones in the movie and the ones who might be watching, but that simultaneously manage to characterize the parents with subtlety, candor, and a freestanding emotional life, far surpassing their roles as fathers and mothers. No wonder I felt fond toward The Yearling a couple weeks ago and fell hook, line, and sinker for A Tree Grows in Brooklyn back in the winter. Martin Ritt's Sounder marks a somewhat later gold standard in this regard, and Jim Sheridan's In America, whatever its dubious flourishes, presents a strong recent example of a film that did impressively well by all four family members, evoking their points of view and navigating key shifts between juvenile and adult vantage points while preserving an overall, rounded consistency. The Sundowners belongs in this tradition, for which I'm sure you can supply your own exemplars; there's even a Sundowners scene where Dad recklessly bets the family's entire nest-egg on a seemingly arbitrary object, which lays groundwork for In America's carnival-booth sequence. If the boy in The Sundowners has, among the three protagonists, palpably exerted the weakest hold on the way Zinnemann and his collaborators have devised and shaped the material, that's only a comparative assessment. When he's onscreen, there's nothing distracted or incomplete in his depiction, and I can imagine watching The Sundowners at somewhere near to Sean's own age and feeling more or less that the film was intended for me.

Regardless, the glory of the film lies in the bond between the senior Carmodys, one that deepens powerfully even when its fragilities are most overtly exposed. And even as far as that goes, Robert Mitchum, a consummately generous actor whom I'm appreciating more all the time, seems only too happy to cede the spotlight to Kerr. For their previous outing, in John Huston's two-character island adventure Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison, Mitchum's potent physicality, his stalwart but liguor-breathed decency, and his complicated blend of respect, attraction, and strained toleration with regard to Kerr's habit-wearing nun felt to me like the core of the drama. It says more about the Academy's taste in performance styles than it does about their respective achievements in the two films that Kerr was nominated for both and Mitchum for neither. But The Sundowners, for all its sympathetic inquiry into so many characters, feels like a gift to Kerr, and nowhere more than in the early sequence when Ida and Paddy repair into their tent for a lamplit toilette and bedtime chat. Paddy's too tired to wash, but Kerr, suntanned, loose-locked, and luminously blonde, is bathing and rinsing herself from a pan of warm water. The intimate, sunset-colored close-up on her face extending to just a bit of bare shoulder. Mitchum lounges in their campbed, uxoriously admiring: "You know something, Ida, you're built the way a woman ought to be built." "You just find it out?" Ida sasses back, in her playfully tart way. "Glad to know you appreciate me," she allows at the end of this short dialogue, a little more openly pleased. "Come on over here," Mitchum offers in a low deadpan, "and I'll appreciate you."

Kerr has more sexual draw here than I've ever seen her have, partially because so many of her roles that invite any eroticism at all do so in an explicitly hysterical vein: the nun in Black Narcissus, the aroused and stifling governess in The Innocents, the mother-smothered neurotic in Separate Tables, for whom the tiniest twinge of attraction to David Niven, even just a soupçon of compassion or pity, is enough to freak out the character and harass the actress into an excruciating pitch of overacting. I recently returned to Kerr's chronic adulteress in From Here to Eternity, which I'd long imagined was one of my favorite of her performances, only to find myself wondering what I ever saw in it; Donna Reed gets a lot of guff for being the world's most unconvincingly censored prostitute in that movie, but if anything her transcoded, slow-burning libido resonates more than Kerr's shrill, flat rendition of more openly sexual appetites. In The Sundowners, by contrast, she and Mitchum wear their bodies with loose, rangy strength, enjoying their own and sneaking sly, relishing looks at each other's. The larger point here is that Ida and Paddy have bodies instead of homes; they are their hearths, their working tools, their links to the living earth, and, in many scenes, their primary means of expressing themselves, in advance or even in place of spoken confessions.

Mitchum, of course, rooted several of his performances in that substantial, top-heavy physique of his, but for Kerr this disposition feels more unusual and, in my view, it's freeing of the whole performance. The Sundowners shares a director with From Here to Eternity, and when Ida asks Paddy if he's only just noticing her eased, off-handed gorgeousness, she might as well be asking Zinnemann. Take away that famous roll in the Eternity surf and the huge hoop dresses in The King and I and I tend to think of Kerr as a close-up actress. I don't know if directors and cinematographers were accommodating her preferred style or if, conversely, their own camera choices prompted her to give so many performances that seem grounded in vocal mannerisms and fraught facial expressions, at the price of such stiff embodiment. Certainly The Sundowners asks a lot of her physical performance, whether she's riding horses or steering a wagon or determinedly stirring up a stewpot of dinner for a whole ranch's worth of hungry joes. (Hey, you try it.) But what I really remember about the performance and why I'm dwelling so long on this point is the way Kerr's Ida just seems limber and responsive to space, simultaneously relaxed and ready to spring into spry, confident action. She enjoys the odd dance, leans against fenceposts with the wiry familiarity of the range-rider, and offers a whole silent palette of postures to register comfort and discomfort. She allows her body to brace or pause when Paddy is about to wheedle or pout, or to resist or seduce or disappoint her, rather than consigning her face to carry the full weight of communicating reactions. Often her body and her face send totally different messages, evoking the familiar, moment-to-moment ambivalences of being partnered to someone who frustrates and delights you, and she does this without looking as though she's theatrically over-thinking her gestures. In fact, very unusually for her in my experience, she doesn't seem to be self-conscious at all about giving a performance, as though Ida's tongue-in-groove relation to her work—even as she dreams of an adjusted way of life—has inspired her interpreter to an unprecedentedly relaxed approach to her work.

There's more to say in praise of Kerr's performance, even if The Sundowners sometimes goads her into presenting an archetypal mom instead of a fine-grained character, and not all of Kerr's retinue of brittle hallmarks have been rubbed away: the ramrod backbone of her suffering, the harsh vowels and flaring eyes of her righteous annoyance. And yet, even these identifying marks feel in character for Ida, not just for Kerr, and she's capable of throwing curveballs. During a key passage near the end of The Sundowners when you're expecting a big bout of stern and tearful reprimand, utter catnip to the Kerr of Eternity or Tables, Ida bespeaks a more winded version of anger: curt and wounded, but more baffled than inflamed after an intimate, sudden assault on her dearest dream. She shows a similar, welcome bent toward understatement in a showy moment that could easily tip into mawkish short-cuts, when she spies a vision of a lavender-clad lady floating by in a passenger train, while Ida herself stands on the platform, sweat-stained in the Outback dust. She doesn't play the obvious note of envy, and she manages not to imply that all women, including Ida, wish for themselves this pampered, cosmetic existence. The script does force her into a melodramatic tear a few shots later, but the steady hold of her stare in the moment just distills how little Ida sees of this moneyed, metropolitan world, how thin her capacities for any form of response. Clearly Kerr benefits from a script that quietly but nimbly flouts our expectations for the Carmodys, but the actress breathes additional life and spirit into those moments. In my favorite among them, Sean comes whingeing to her about Paddy's intractable wanderlust, which repeatedly aggrieves both mother and child. It isn't long, though, before Ida is telling the kid where to park it, not because she's a submissive wife but because she's a dogged equal and defensive best friend to her husband. "Don’t ever ask me to choose between you and your Dad," she counters with fiery flint, "'cause I’ll choose him every time."

Ida's occasional rigidity, which is usually what I want to erode a little in Kerr's performances, gets nicely incorporated in The Sundowners as, among other things, a formidable tease, a role she plays for her husband which, yes, is an avowed coping mechanism but also serves as a kind of game by which they taunt, recognize, and enjoy each other. She pretends to be put out (and she is, a little) with her husband's restlessness, his optimism, his randiness, and his adolescent whims, but there's often a smile just underneath Ida's firm exterior, waiting to be cracked. When Mitchum does crack it, Kerr smiles with real, crinkly pleasure, in a way that feels close to a rediscovery of this actress. For all the many notes she offers in this performance, and for all that she seems to welcome the companionship of a large, ever-shifting ensemble, she finds a fundamental warmth in Ida that's quite an impressive contrast with her usual chill. In a movie where the likes of Peter Ustinov and Glynis Johns circle the skies, eager to steal scenes the way falcons swoop down to swipe rabbits and fish, it's a feat just to hold one's own on the screen, but Kerr does more than that. Especially when they're together, she and Mitchum are the unmistakable soul of a movie that could easily have been made for the coffee-table or the homily book. He's very, very good when he's alone, as well, but she—she's lustrous.

The Best Actress Project: 1 More Down, 24 to Go

CIFF 09: Mary and Max

I alluded yesterday to tremendous enthusiasm for one CIFF screening that I hadn't even copped to screening yet, and today the one-eyed cat is out of the bag: I'm talking about Mary and Max, the feature debut by Oscar-winning Harvie Krumpet animator Adam Elliot, which opened this year's Sundance Film Festival but hasn't built the Stateside critical or cult followings that I would have predicted if I'd seen it in January. It's currently playing On Demand on the Sundance channel but will be eligible, apparently, for this year's hotly competitive Best Animated Feature Oscar. Good luck squeezing past all those airborne houses and fantastic foxes and tasty precipitations, but for my money, Mary and Max is the best of a high-caliber bunch. I'm so glad that Glenn Dunks, in this guest entry for Nathaniel last month, made a point of urging us all to keep track of all the recent phenoms from the Australian film market that have inexplicably had a hell of a time crossing over to American distributions, or even American film-blogger buzz. Big thanks to Glenn, to whom the full review is dedicated—and that was before I knew that today was his birthday, so obviously something is Mary and Max-ishly right with our transoceanic connection.

Note, by the way, that even as I've hit my seventh straight day of consecutive full reviews for festival titles, I've decided to be less coy about telling you what I've caught so far, especially if it spurs any Chicagoans to check in on titles like Raging Sun, Raging Sky or About Elly while they're still in the CIFF rotation... or to avoid fatuous wastes of time like the empty, static, self-monumentalizing Vincere, though that one has obviously amassed its loyal fans since Cannes. Keep returning for more on the titles I haven't yet reviewed. It's an insane season at my job to be denying myself these extra hours of sleep, which is the only way to make time for all this writing, but I'm hopeful of posting a review every day through the 22nd, and I'm really enjoying myself.

Mary and Max will play the Festival on Sunday 10/18 and Tuesday 10/20. Stay tuned for whether its projected candidacy for an Oscar nomination prompts a theatrical run somewhere in your city.

Nashville Film Festival 2009: Live Action Shorts, Part 3

Moving up the ladder of quality, here's the middle of my more-or-less "Top Ten List" among the live-action shorts booked in Nashville. I keep seeing more of them every day, incidentally, and nothing's come close to challenging these:

#7: Walnut
(11 min., Australia; IMDB)
Rest assured, the conspicuous, capital-letters "Thank You" to Jane Campion did not in and of itself assure this film of our Grand Jury Prize in the student filmmaking category. Of course it didn't hurt, but it's a bit of a double-edged sword: you can see how Campion's example and a larger tradition at the Australian Film, Television, and Radio School might well have nourished writer-director Amy Gebhardt's unembarrassed embrace of bright color, her unusual blocking and visual angles, and her fluency at blending stifled or restless characters with images that are simultaneously expressive and beatifically soothing. She doesn't need all of her shots, and sometimes, as when a young woman's bare feet pad over the carpet surrounding a bed, they exist mostly to telegraph that Walnut has a fondness for unexpected impressions, whether or not they deepen the movie profoundly. And yet, many of these eccentric shots do deepen the movie and endow it with detail. It ain't Peel, but Gebhardt sidesteps so many of the sentimental pitfalls that a dying-dog movie inherently invites that you can't help noticing and admiring how she does it. And whether my fellow jurors thought I was kidding or not, I think the dog playing Walnut may have given the single best performance in any of the live-action shorts we screened—possibly best since the piggie(s) who played Babe. Look at that soul-searching gaze, and how pitifully, and yet with what dignity, he eases himself down during his last field trot! What are they feeding these Antipodean animals? How are they trained? The human actors aren't slouches, either: the lead actor gets enough out of a spontaneous but slightly embarrassed shrug when his mother reaches out to comfort him that we've got most of what we need to know about this relationship right off the bat. Doubtless some viewers will find the emotional pitch of the extreme close-ups on the animal's snuffling nose and the younger brother's lonely sorrow and the girlfriend's pleading, affectionate incomprehension. But Walnut got me, and I feel I was honestly gotten.

#6: Jerrycan - preview
(14 min., Australia; IMDB)
Another Australian triumph, and this one a prizewinner at Cannes, Berlin, Sundance, and the Australian Film Institute awards. With that track record, I doubt writer-director Julius Avery is bemoaning his prizeless tour through Nashville; does this make us laudable free-thinkers or comically out of synch with the world's experts? I really liked Jerrycan, obviously, and had I not felt even more strongly about another handful of films, I would have pushed harder to keep it in the jury conversation. Avery employs lots of the same basic techniques that we saw in lots of films: rack focusing, desaturated colors, significant foreground-background separation, inexorable build-ups to climactic crises. The scraped visual texture, detailed sound design, and prematurely solemn child's-eye view reminded me more of Scottish cinema than Australian work; Jerrycan could play side by side with Lynne Ramsay's shorts on the Ratcatcher DVD and there'd be few dead giveaways. Even if the climactic payoff is predictable entire minutes in advance, the film isn't as determined to be bleak as it would seem, and the shoving dynamics of rivalry and agitation among this gaggle of down-and-out schoolboys assumes more and more nuance right through the final moments. Almost every cut, framing, and audio accent makes the movie richer, going a long, long way toward revitalizing the earnest but non-distinctive core material.

I adore the top five live-action shorts that I've seen here, so rather than hop up one more rung, I'm ditching the rankings and saving them all for a final post. Stay tuned, but don't stay mum—talk to me, folks!