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 Screenplays

The writing categories almost always seem weakest to me at the 50 mark, and this year's no real exception.  Don't get me wrong: lots of really good work here. But maybe not enough great work.  Bring it on, fall season!



Best Original Screenplay
Whit Stillman for Damsels in Distress, for wit, for giving arcs to the few characters who need them without short-sheeting others, and for making every scene equally major or minor;

Patrick Wang for In the Family, for supplying backstory in deliberate steps, intriguing but just shy of coy, and for scripting big drama at modest volume, at Southern speed;

Reid Carolin for Magic Mike, for flexibility, spryness, and tone, putting solid muscle on the bones of that old cliché, "It's messy and multi-sided, just like real life";

Wes Anderson and Roman Coppola for Moonrise Kingdom, for setting up two molecules, one with kids who seem eager to be adults, one with adults who seem like kids, and figuring out how to bond them; and

Ercan Kesal, Ebru Ceylan, and Nuri Bilge Ceylan for Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, for a patient structure that slips inside many heads, working as a tense procedural and a study of the motives and mechanics of storytelling.

Honorable mentions to Alice Rohrwacher for the unusual and incisive coming-of-age in Corpo Celeste; and to Seth MacFarlane for the potty-mouth of a million funny colors in Ted, but also for a take on perpetual male adolescence that really works.  Honorable mentions to the honorable mentions include Athina Rachel Tsangari for trusting her odd instincts and generating unforeseen payoffs in Attenberg; Paul Thomas Anderson for his bold experimenting with unfilled mosaic in The Master, Jennifer Westfeldt for conceiving a great premise and good lines in Friends with Kids, even if her sense of an ending is still pretty off; and Vanessa Taylor for the bracing honesty of the best scenes in Hope Springs, shining through a directing job that I suspect flatters and short-sells her script in different ways.




Best Adapted Screenplay
Michael Bacall and Jonah Hill for 21 Jump Street, for its almost unnerving ability to clear four hurdles that fell almost everyone: Action-Comedy, High School, Dubious Remake, Bro-y Dick Jokes;

Lucy Alibar and Benh Zeitlin for Beasts of the Southern Wild, for vast, oracular ambition that still feels rooted in a six-year-old's mindset, and for avoiding the arc into disaster we've come to expect;

Benoît Jacquot and Gilles Taurand for Farewell, My Queen, for all the trigonometry of who's obsessed with what or with whom, for keeping the queen at bay, and for apt semi-veiling of palace protocol;

Joachim Trier and Eskil Vogt for Oslo, August 31st, for its most detailed and most even-handed scenes, like the addict's confession of suicidal thoughts and his meeting with his sister's partner; and

Shaun Grant and Justin Kurzel for The Snowtown Murders, for handling half-hour arcs in mere minutes, snaring us in the winch of missing what's happening, and in the trap of thinking we could escape.

Honorable mentions in this division are limited to Tracy Letts's adroit refitting of his own play Killer Joe, which just passes the smell test of is-this-art-or-is-this-sleaze, and keeps adding layers literally till the last edit; and Nick Cave's script for The Blandest Title in the World, which tries too hard with some characters (Pearce) and too little with others (Wasikowska, Chastain), but even in its substantially re-edited form works as a good evening yarn.

Loss in Space

Even if the characters in the two film versions of Solaris were good at making choices or at telling things apart, I wouldn't be, and I certainly wouldn't be able to opt for Tarkovsky's philosophical epic or Soderbergh's shimmering headspace romance. Or, for that matter, Stanislaw Lem's bizarre and beautiful novel. I want all three. But if it's any consolation to all of you who have had trouble putting up with my Libra indecisiveness thus far in the countdown, this is the last joint entry. Stay tuned next time for some adventures in real estate, metaphor, and moral relativism.