Judging Oscar: 1996

I have watched or re-watched all the nominees for Best Picture and Best Director, giving my assessments below.  Check out previous Judging Oscar assessments from 1973 and 1980.

BEST PICTURE

WINNER: The English Patient (Anthony Minghella, 1996)

A pretty typical historical epic of love and loss made more interesting by some decent performances and wonderful production elements yet is hindered by some lapses in story and character.  Minghella succeeds in crafting many wonderful scenes yet overall, the film can’t add up to more than the sum of its parts.  The central character of the Count is a bit murky and though Fiennes is committed, it is a character that should not seem as uncertain as he does.  Where the film shines is in the details of the scenes, the details given by Minghella in the image.  There is beauty and grandeur in the desert, in the war, in the cave, in the apartment, but it is all taken simply as beauty.  Caravaggio gets onto Hana for romanticizing the Count, but it is his stories that appear to us as romanticized.  Is this because of his description or her reception?  It isn’t clear but they play more as definitive reality than stylized remembrance.  Additionally, there are some portions of his flashbacks that he could not possibly know about (scenes with Katherine and her husband) which strike me as lapses in film logic.  Overall, the film feels very romantic toward the doomed relationship of the Count and Katherine, but the relationship I found most compelling was the one between Hana and Kip.  Hana and Kip’s relationship is based on genuinely expressed affection that comes out in unforced sacrifice and the paradoxical frustration of their allegiances to their particular occupations in the war.  Juliette Binoche and Naveen Andrews are wonderful.  The Count and Katherine’s relationship feels less grounded yet it is presented as the central relationship of the movie.  Perhaps the whole point of his character is that he sacrifices too late, but I found his sacrifice circumstantial, and his whole passivity toward death afterwards to be unjustified.  If he doesn’t care about dying, why try and make Caravaggio’s desire to kill him a potential threat?  The film touches lightly on a few interesting sub-themes including a post-nationalist commentary on war in general and WWII in particular, but it never explores these themes thoroughly.  Overall: a very ho-hum affair with sweeping imagery.

1900 (1976)

1900 (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1976)
History is inevitable.  It may not be predictable, but it is inevitable.
Families, struggles, problems, politics will continue on.  
None of this happens in a void.

If there is one truth about history it is that everything related to human beings is not beyond the influence of the human beings who came before them.  If there is one lie it is that we all start at zero.  Some start well above zero, some start well below it.  Most political debate lives within the realm of trying to quantify how close to zero most people can or should be able to start.  Is it even possible to make a difference?  

The struggles of Italy are seen in two families.  This is allegory on a grand scale, but it is so much deeper than allegory.  These are people and people make weird decisions that shock us, decisions that don't support our theory of the world.  Sometimes they make decisions that don't mean much, sometimes they make decisions that have lingering consequences.
Paradoxes, contradictions, indecisions.  This is where humanity lives.

Bertolucci is not deterministic and he has made a film that breathes differently than many other similar epics.  And it is all more complicated than it seems; more complicated than a simple affirmation of one political ideology over another.  These are people.  These are lives.

The struggle is not communism and fascism: the struggle is reality and ideal.  The trick is that each person sees one as the reality and the other as the ideal.  They must then fight to make the ideal a reality.  
That's how wars get started.

But it is also personal.  People wish they were different.  Stronger, smarter, richer, healthier.  Everyone feels a struggle between reality and ideal.  For some, it is seen on their face, felt in their responses.  For others, it is seen after the fact, in regret, or before the fact in an over-compensating arrogance. 

"The padrone lives."  Or does he?  
Bertolucci wonders.  Has he ever lived?  
Has he ever done anything beyond follow the lines set out for him?  
Has he ever done what he wanted? 
Has he ever been free?

"The war is over," the man says after he is shot on Liberation Day, before stumbling across a pasture of sheep holding his wounds.  
That's how it goes, sometimes.  
Not everyone knows.  Not everyone cares.  
What is peacetime for one may be the beginning of a war for another.  

The hostility will continue, regardless because everyone feels entitled to get what they think they deserve.  
It was up to those before you to say which side of victory you fall on.
Who knows?  Maybe you'll get lucky.
Or maybe you'll get all the way to the end before you realize there is no such thing as progress.

film journal entry: 05.17.2013

Stealing Beauty (1996)

Stealing Beauty (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1996)
Every time I sit down to write about Stealing Beauty I can’t form what I want to say about it.  On a basic level: I like it.  I found it moving and intriguing.  That has as much to do with appreciating Bernardo Bertolucci as anything else, I suppose.  His presence is felt: Stealing Beauty definitely feels like a Bertolucci film.  What I mean is, watching it in the moment is a conflicted experience for me, where my expectations are constantly challenged and I don’t know how I feel about it.  But I can’t shake the things I’ve seen and felt afterward.  Even when it feels at the time to be slight and uninteresting and unchallenging, later I find significance, interest and am challenged by it.  He leaves me with questions and feelings more than answers and definitive statements.  I know this is good.  I like it, as I said.  I just find it hard to write about.

Get on the Bus (1996)

Get on the Bus (Spike Lee, 1996)
Get on the Bus is a film wrongly described as being about the Million Man March.  It's not.  It's about why black men from all over America would take off work, leave their families or whatever life situations they come from for several days and travel distances of up to several thousand miles to stand in the midst of a huge crowd and listen to speeches in Washington D.C.    

Lee doesn't shy away from presenting both caricatures and complexities, dilemmas and contradictions as he conveys the fractured nature of collective identity.  What might read in a synopsis as broadstroke politicized allegory doesn't work out that way on the screen.  This is ensemble drama that is fed by unique and precise observation.  Each person on board this bus, though representative in some way of an idea or type within Black America, is not a symbolic cypher.  Lee has cast the film so carefully and given each character enough moments that there is life and complexity in every one of the men on-screen.  

Spike Lee is a political filmmaker.  He can't help it.  He thinks that way; it fascinates him.  What separates Lee's film from some grand polemic about the Million Man March is his focus on individuals.  But that is the heart of Lee's political solutions as well.  Collective change is made up of small changes, small choices in the lives of individuals who make up a collective group.  Events are nice, sometimes helpful and important.  But they aren't magic cure-alls.  They can articulate what has been unexpressed or give camaraderie when needed.  But the change he seeks is beyond a once-a-lifetime event high.  

What Spike Lee does so well is force a viewer to confront their own prejudices through the way he initially presents his characters and then subverts our expectations of them.  It isn't so much about black/white, rich/poor, but the tiny assumptions we make about people based on the tiny sliver of what we can see.  There is something universal about prejudice and misunderstanding.  Lee sees that.  No one on this bus is free from prejudice.  Some of them want to be, but how can anyone be completely free of something so universally human?

film journal entry: 05.04.2013

Lone Star (1996)

Lone Star (John Sayles, 1996)
History lingers.  Unearthed in deserts, garages, drive-ins, restaurants, memories.
History lingers.  A stain coloring everything we've done.
Can we move beyond it?
Should we?

A PTA group argues history in south Texas -- how should it be presented to their children?  
Winners and losers.  Majorities and minorities.  Power and tradition.  
It is always political even when it isn't.

Sam Deeds stumbles upon a question he didn't know he needed to answer.  No one cares. He isn't sure he cares at first.  
But it lingers.  He must know, if only for himself.

He lives in the shadow of his father Buddy, former sheriff in the same small town.  Large, looming, revered: a legend, so they say.  Sam doesn't believe the hype; he lived with the man.
And Sam's mother?  A saint, though no one cares to say why.
They put up a plaque for Buddy down at the courthouse.  Everyone says the nicest things.
At least he was better than the guy before him.

Col. Payne has his own daddy issues.  He never had one.  Now the one he never had lives right down the road.  
His son knows, sneaking out to solve his own personal mystery, his own skeleton in the desert.

Can anyone move beyond their own history?
What good is history unremembered, like the mayor who knows more than he'll say?
We have to know it before we forget it.
We have to read what it says before we have the freedom to throw out the book.
Political or personal, it's all the same.

Everyone believes in clean slates but no one has ever had one.  Ever.
Even the illegals sneaking across the river now wade into their own conundrums and hang-ups.  Even language is history.
The land remembers.  Sam studies it just as carefully as the other clues.

There is always a continuing story.  There always will be.

"Forget the Alamo."

film journal entry: 05.01.2013