Friday, December 6, 2013

Judging Oscar: 1994

I have recently watched or re-watched all the films nominated for Best Picture and Best Director from 1994.  I have placed a value judgment on what I saw cinematically.  I may one day have breakdowns for every year of the Oscars, but I have not gotten very far into this journey yet.  You can follow up on the years I have completed so far: 1973, 1975, 1980 and 1996.



BEST PICTURE

WINNER: Forrest Gump (Robert Zemeckis, 1994)
If you grew up during the 90’s, you could not escape Forrest Gump.  It was inevitable.  In my world, it was universally loved and I confess I have been systematically predisposed to like this movie ever since I saw it in the theater at age 11.  Maybe it is the desire to “get to my roots” through popular cinema (boomer parents, small southern hometown), maybe its because the soundtrack was on repeat for years in my room, maybe its because I related to Gump in a way I related to few other movie characters.  Whatever the case, I have loved this film since childhood and when I watch it today, I find I still love it and that it only deepens as I examine the movie closer.  Whatever the major effect the film had on American culture at large, I see in the film a unique skewering of American exceptionalism through the narrative of a guileless individual who is shamelessly exploited by a variety of individuals and social institutions yet maintains a loyalty to the handful of people who have ever shown him interest, in spite of his low IQ and naïveté.  The character of Forrest Gump is essentially a blank slate that viewers project their own feelings and nostalgia upon.  To me, it is a glorious picaresque that succeeds thanks to the charismatic humanism of Tom Hanks and the over-arching relatability of Zemeckis’ cinematic techniques.  Forrest is not without agency but he is without cynicism.  It is his guileless loyalty and lack of cynicism that has made the film seem sentimentalized when it fairly earns its emotional climaxes; likewise, Gump’s accidental wealth and fame countered by Jenny’s failed endeavors have made liberal critics spurn the movie for not being an ode to the 60’s counterculture.  It seems people are still projecting their own objectives upon the life of Forrest Gump and the fact that the film lets you do so is testament to its endearing greatness.


Four Weddings and a Funeral (Mike Newell, 1994)
A fun romantic comedy built around a clever structuring device, Four Weddings and a Funeral builds its narrative thrust without ever resorting to tired batches of exposition while genuinely relishing in the games it can play with lingering questions and ellipses.  It tells you in the title exactly what will happen.  None of this is built around a great conceptual purpose, but it is still entertaining and shows enough smarts to raise it a head or two above the crowd of generic romantic comedies.  Hugh Grant builds a whole career from the charming awkwardness and humorous self-deprecation of this leading role, while supporting players fill in the background with eccentricities and countering points of interest (James Fleet and Simon Callow being the most noteworthy).  The biggest complaint is Andie McDowell.  Her average girl look and clumsy charm is not quite enough to alleviate the love-at-first-sight skepticism, but Grant is charming enough and the gap in her teeth makes her close enough to British to cover the bet. What is most interesting about the movie is the way it uses these public events as touchstones, proving both how little we know the people we consider close friends and how easily we can still observe the basic reality of individuals in overly formal environments.    

Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994)
Cinematic post-modernism: illustrated.  Pulp Fiction is a histrionic collection of incidents and motifs that cover a generous swath of genres all adding up to a self-referential conglomeration of cinematic interests.  In other words, it is a movie nerd movie, founded upon a superficial enjoyment of cinema and built to deliver, in a heightened form, that same basic enjoyment to its audience.  In that way, it is highly successful.  It is a fun, entertaining, memorable and cool ride that ultimately doesn’t have any greater purpose than to be a fun, entertaining, memorable and cool ride.  But it is the phony appropriation of artistic self-examination via the French New Wave that made it a darling of critics, clouding the waters of reasonable discourse because it isn’t actually an examination of anything at all.  Tarantino has basically taken some Band of Outsiders signifiers (pulpy genre subjects, comic misdirection, a dance scene), filtered them through a crime/exploitation sub-genre lens and combined it to good actors and a steady, unobtrusive visual design.  It is set in an amoral universe of pop culture references, violence and drug use, a world where there are no police, where “nigger” just rolls off the tongue of everyone and where the only God is the one who wrote all the witty banter and shuffled the chronology just to prove he is almighty.  It is a love it and hate it movie, in many ways, because it has all the marks of serious, careful artistry that are fully in the service of serious, careful self-aggrandizement.  I won’t deny that it is entertaining; I won’t deny that it is lastingly influential, but I also won’t call it great art.  And maybe that’s the joke, defined at the beginning: “A soft, moist, shapeless mass of matter.”

Quiz Show (Robert Redford, 1994)
Classical Hollywood filmmaking that aspires to great heights thanks to some smart writing, Quiz Show deals with the way mass entertainment lightly exploits the social problems of the culture at large and the way the machine of corporatism diffuses its culpability through a broad net of fall guys, job offers and signed statements.  Redford has an embarrassment of riches before him, but can’t commit himself to explore any of them very thoroughly.  He often confuses class divisions for ethnic divisions (Connecticut vs. Queens) and finds himself conflicted by the Van Doren/Stemple dichotomy (he allows Stemple to bring up allegations of anti-semitism but tries to keep it -- as long as he can -- within the ambiguous realm of Stemple’s instability, only to highlight it later as an apparent truth but gives it no weight of implication, thereby leaving it as an interesting side note in a story already stuffed full of them).  The movie begins startlingly in a car showroom where a salesman is giving a spiel for the Chrysler 300.  The themes of showmanship, consumerism and the need of new thrills are all played in this wonderful scene, but inexplicably, Redford misses his chance to express greater thematic implications by giving us the lawyer Goodwin in this scene rather than the more thematically potent Charles Van Doren.  It shows Redford’s limited imagination: he sees this scene pragmatically as a chance to introduce the audience to a major character that will play later in the story instead of giving the audience a clearer expression of the themes and an early chance to connect with the most dramatically compelling character and consequently, the one hardest for the audience to love.  John Turturro turns in one of his best performances as the frenetic and surprisingly charismatic Herb Stemple, while Rob Morrow finds the inner struggle of Goodwin’s own prejudices, giving a performance that narrowly avoids being a completely one-note expression of the supposedly objective truth-searcher.  In the end, Quiz Show’s aspirations are bigger than its implications, and the fact that Redford tries to tie up the whole thing as some sort of collective loss of innocence is the most glaring misapplication of all that came before.

The Shawshank Redemption (Frank Darabont, 1994)
In isolated pieces this is nothing spectacular but if taken as a whole, the cumulative effect of its grueling setting, New England dreariness, grandiose score, compelling story, relatable themes and wonderfully rich central performances brings the whole thing to a level that 90’s Hollywood often aspired to but rarely reached.  Capital T themes of Love, Triumph, the Human Spirit, Imprisonment are treated honestly enough to be truly effecting.  Old-fashioned in many respects yet full of little things we would never see in a Hayes Code era picture, Darabont keeps things paced and well-ordered, shifting attention slightly to build tension but keeping a consistent point-of-view with his two main characters.  Morgan Freeman got the nomination but Tim Robbins is right there beside him and it is their chemistry that really makes the story work: Robbins has just enough idealism in his eyes and Freeman just enough pragmatism in his brow to keep the dueling themes of institutionalization and the freedom of the human spirit alive.  Despite an inherent simplicity, it is the grizzled commitment of the actors and the unobtrusiveness of Darabont that keep this from falling into the world of feel-good idiocy that became Darabont's stock-in-trade after this.

MY PICK: Forrest Gump
When I was younger and Pulp Fiction was my ideal, 1994 was one of the strongest of years.  Now, on re-assessing Tarantino's film, I find it a bit weaker overall.  As boring as it sounds, I have to claim Forrest Gump succeeds in accomplishing everything it set out to do and it is a movie I can easily return to.  Seeing how old-fashioned the other four nominees are, no wonder Pulp Fiction stood out to people.  I'm sure it would still win in a critics poll today, though general audiences would likely choose Shawshank as the timeless classic, perfectly fitting their ideal of both.  I suppose we all have Ted Turner to thank for that.


BEST DIRECTOR

WINNER: Robert Zemeckis (Forrest Gump)
One of Zemeckis’ most notable strengths is the ability to seamlessly merge cutting edge digital effects within his narrative environments.  This is clearly on display in Forrest Gump, with the digital removal of Gary Sinise’s legs, the floating feather and the implanting of Hanks within archival footage.  But what is often missed with Zemeckis is how accomplished he is as a narrativist, using shot design to reinforce emotional connection with character, maintaining point-of-view and building dramatic tension.  Because the story is told from Gump’s point-of-view, the other characters are generally underwritten yet Zemeckis has cast well and gives his actors enough room to build lived-in performances, even if what we might see of them on paper appears limited.  The film does hinge on Hanks’ performance, and he never disappoints.  Though the film is humorous in many ways, it never devolves into open comedy or pointed satire, mostly because Zemeckis has too much love and admiration for Forrest while Hanks’ portrayal keeps the whole effort balanced.  The conceptual playfulness of Zemeckis is one thing I particularly admire.  Here, he uses themes of chance, destiny, loyalty, and simplicity to explore the response of America to the changing times.  In the end, I find Zemeckis has not so much crafted a troubling revisionist history of the boomer era (as many critics claim), but found some of the roots of the discontentment of the 90’s, while at the same time questioning the misplaced hope in the abstract political ideals of Americana.



 Woody Allen (Bullets Over Broadway)
Woody Allen’s too-cute-for-its-own-good film is easily his most overrated work and I’m surprised the Academy passed it over for Best Picture with the Weinstein’s backing it.  Still, Woody gets recognized here for some pretty pedestrian work, dealing with his age old themes of High Art vs. pop culture and gets to throw some stabs at the film industry along the way (oh so thinly veiled as Broadway producers).  It is full of broad, funny-on-paper/flat-on-screen observations and doesn’t even give us the gallery of great characters common to Allen’s films.   Allen doesn’t even seem to like these characters all that much, with Chazz Palminteri being the major exception.  The best joke in the film, besides Palminteri’s character, is Dianne Weist being significantly outshined by Jennifer Tilly in every way.  Even John Cusack is clueless as Allen’s cinematic doppelganger and Allen seems to get bored the further along he gets into the story and what begins as a tight narrative unwinds significantly in the last act.  Muddled and unfunny while trumpeting its ostentatious cleverness, for me, Bullets Over Broadway is one of Woody Allen’s worst films.

Krzysztof Kieslowski (Three Colors: Red)
Kieslowski’s favorite themes of coincidence and fate are brought to bear on a story that appears so slight yet is so full of texture, life and beautiful observation it's a shame his hand overturns it in the end.  Kieslowski is a master of depicting isolation and loneliness, finding some of the most devastating images to capture those ideas, whether they be closeups or wide shots.  He explores the daily routines of people easily connected by the technological advances of the day yet who are left without intimacy, seeking connection yet always failing somehow.  The central relationship of the film comes into existence by accident, yet the intriguing dueling characteristics of the determined judge and quietly observant Valentine drive the narrative.  Kieslowski has the perfect measures of patience and confidence as he allows his story to unfold, not rushing things while also unafraid of the ellipses that not only enable the viewer to engage with the film but also provide the means for understanding it.  In the end, Kieslowski’s exploration of technological isolation and the triumph of human contact is at several points close to being the most interesting treatise on Western life in the 90’s.  Too bad he punctures the film's impact in the last scene with his particular brand of fatalism.

Robert Redford (Quiz Show)
A great script in hand and a cast of wonderful character actors beside him, Redford does his best but proves once again his indifference to intellectualism is a detriment to the final impact of his film.  It is this shallow “its just such a great story” approach that keeps Quiz Show from reaching the heights it sets out to soar above.  Redford approaches the technical proficiency of Spielberg or Zemeckis in some of his scene building, but fails to utilize his techniques (here his most expressive yet) in service of anything other than the pragmatic needs of narrative tension/release.  His biggest misstep is in miscasting Ralph Fiennes as Charles Van Doren, exposing Fiennes’ limitations as an actor by refusing to give any life behind Van Doren’s television façade besides the surface tensions of keeping up a lie or being found out.  In the end, when the film turns, becoming a song for the individuals churned up in the wake of corporatism and the loss of innocence by the public at large, the audience is left to feel abstractly sad for Van Doren but never connected with him deep enough to care that his life and image are destroyed.  Redford can be quite good at building individual scenes (such as the Van Doren vs. Stemple quiz show sequence) and getting dynamic performances out of smaller roles (John Scofield, Hank Azaria, David Paymer), but putting multiple scenes together with a greater thematic bent seems lacking.  Though this is easily Redford’s best directorial effort, he doesn’t explore the implications of the material as thoroughly as he should and in an attempt to create the “great American movie,” essentially acts as his own quiz show producer fixing the results.

Quentin Tarantino (Pulp Fiction)
Though Pulp Fiction proved to be extremely influential, it was primarily the writing that was copied while Tarantino’s restrained direction went mostly unnoticed and uncopied (unfortunately).  He had a clear cinematic vision that was expressed in a good sense of visual design and a solid layout of cinematic space, a consistent rhythm and overall unity.  The highlight is the imaginative Jack Rabbit Slim’s set piece, an expensive 50’s themed diner that gave him the chance to incorporate dozens of other cultural references that had no home elsewhere in the midst of a pseudo-90’s underworld L.A.  Considering that most of the movie is a conversation between two or three people, it is perhaps even more impressive that he kept himself from adding a plethora of extra visual flourishes, camera movements and reflexive edits, keeping the film squarely centered on his characters, as far from real human beings as they may be.  No speaking role is wasted as every part is filled with actors chewing up their dialogue, even if they are only there for a single scene.  I suppose this adds to what he created, considering Pulp Fiction is his cinematic compendium of everything he loves about movies.  When Christopher Walken steps in to give a monologue, it is wonderful because Christopher Walken is charismatic and interesting and cool, but it seems to live simply on some meta-level of cinematic discourse, where the actors are themselves and the embodiment of their past roles, saying cool things because its fun to hear cool people say cool things.  Samuel L. Jackson and Bruce Willis fair the best beyond this meta-level, taking the meatiest roles in the script and filling them out while still embracing the bombast (Jackson) or the physicality (Willis) expected of them. Ultimately, it is impossible to completely separate Tarantino the writer from Tarantino the film director (and he likes it that way), so the same problems that are inherent in the writing are also inherent in the direction.  Everything is slick and polished, but to what end?

MY PICK: Krzysztof Kieslowski
A particularly difficult choice, though I'll give Kieslowski the slight edge.  Even though he overturns much of what I love about Three Colors: Red in the final scene, I am so taken by all that comes before it ends up feeling like a minor quibble.  Zemeckis would be my next choice who, despite winning the Oscar, remains one of the most consistently overlooked major Hollywood film directors, always lurking as the lesser in shadowed comparisons with Spielberg.  It would have been nice to see Frank Darabont nominated for his astonishing feature film debut, though I think I would still choose Zemeckis.


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