Tag: Revolutionary Road

Academy Double Dip. | My Trouble with Oscar.

“‘After more than six decades, the Academy is returning to some of its earlier roots, when a wider field competed for the top award of the year,’ said academy President Sid Ganis. ‘The final outcome, of course, will be the same – one Best Picture winner – but the race to the finish line will feature 10, not just five, great movies from 2009.’” Most likely realizing that a nod for The Dark Knight last year would’ve doubled their television ratings, the Academy Awards pads out to ten Best Picture nominees.

Ten, really? I know I pick 20 movies for my review round-up every year, but still: most years it’s hard to come up with five or six worthy nominees, much less ten. It’d be better if they went to a system where “up to” ten movies were chosen, but not necessarily that many if the pickings were slim that year. In any case, maybe Hollywood needed an “Oscar Stimulus Package,” but given that it’s still the same people voting for the winners, I tend to think the Academy will probably continue to get it wrong most years regardless. Just looking at the past decade:

1999: American Beauty wins. Not a particularly poor choice by Academy standards, I guess, but the other nominees include a sop to the box office (The Sixth Sense) and by-the-numbers drek like The Cider House Rules and The Green Mile. (Only other worthy nominee: The Insider.) Meanwhile, many of the best and most groundbreaking films of the year — Three Kings, Being John Malkovich, Fight Club, The Matrix — are all overlooked.

2000: Gladiator. Terrible choice. The worthy nominees are Traffic, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and *possibly* Erin Brockovich. Chocolat makes the cut thanks to the Miramax machine. Left unnominated: Requiem for a Dream, Wonder Boys, O Brother Where Art Thou, and High Fidelity.

2001: A Beautiful Mind. A stunningly bad choice, and easily the worst of the five films nominated. The Oscar should probably have gone to In the Bedroom or Fellowship of the Ring, although Gosford Park and (tho’ I didn’t like it much) Moulin Rouge! are respectable picks. Left off the wheel: Mulholland Drive, Memento, The Royal Tenenbaums, Ghost World, Amelie, and Sexy Beast.

2002: Chicago — I never saw it, but not a particularly good year for film anyway. Gangs of New York, The Two Towers, and The Pianist all make sense as contenders. The Hours (another Miramax film)…not so much. Possible adds: The 25th Hour, Y Tu Mama Tambien, Far from Heaven, About a Boy.

2003: Return of the King runs away with everything, which is deserving but also feels somewhat dutiful after the previous two years. (FotR is easily the best film of the three, imho.) Most of the other nominees are well-chosen — Lost in Translation,
Master and Commander, Mystic River — with the possible exception of Seabiscuit. Other possibles include The Quiet American, Finding Nemo, Dirty Pretty Things, House of Sand and Fog, Monster, City of God, and L’Auberge Espagnole…but it’s probably more likely that extra nods would’ve gone to the heaps of middling Oscar bait that year, like Cold Mountain, The Last Samurai, or 21 Grams.

2004: Million Dollar Baby. A certifiable stinker, and arguably Clint Eastwood’s least-deserving movie of the decade. (Mystic River or Letters from Iwo Jima are closer to caliber.) It beats out The Aviator and Sideways, as well as Finding Neverland (Miramax) and Ray (never saw it). Off the board: Hotel Rwanda, Before Sunset, Garden State, Kinsey, The Assassination of Richard Nixon, Spiderman 2, In Good Company, The Incredibles, and — most egregiously — Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. If I had to guess, Closer and Kill Bill Vol. 2 (Miramax) might’ve snagged undeserving nods in a field of ten.

2005: Crash. Another woeful pick, it won over a respectable field of contenders (Brokeback Mountain, Capote, Good Night, and Good Luck, Munich.) That being said, Syriana and the best film of 2005, The New World, weren’t even nominated. Neither were Layer Cake, Ballets Russes, A History of Violence, The Squid and the Whale, Cache, Match Point, The Constant Gardener, Grizzly Man, Batman Begins, or The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada. All these — and many others — were better than Crash.

2006: Scorsese wins a charity Oscar with The Departed, beating out worthwhiles Letters from Iwo Jima (the best choice of the 5) and The Queen, as well as more dubious picks Little Miss Sunshine and Babel. The best film of the year, United 93, isn’t nominated. Nor is Children of Men, The Lives of Others, The Prestige, The Fountain, Pan’s Labyrinth, or Inside Man. It’s reasonable to suspect that additional Oscar nods might’ve gone to the likes of The Last King of Scotland, Little Children, Notes from a Scandal, and The Pursuit of Happyness.

2007: No Country for Old Men — A fine choice. I’d say this year Oscar almost got it right…but the other nominees are still somewhat suspect. Michael Clayton, ok, There Will Be Blood, sure. But Atonement and Juno? I’d rather have seen The Diving Bell & the Butterfly, Zodiac, The Savages, Charlie Wilson’s War, In the Valley of Elah, The Assassination of Jesse James, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, 4 Months, 3 Weeks, & 2 Days, or my favorite film of the year, I’m Not There, get their due.

2008: Slumdog Millionaire (ugh) beats out Milk, Benjamin Button, Frost/Nixon and The Reader. Of those, Milk and F/N are solid, and ideally would’ve been paired with The Dark Knight, The Wrestler, Let the Right One In, and/or WALL-E. Other possibles include Man on Wire, Snow Angels, Waltz with Bashir, Vicky Christina Barcelona, Iron Man, and The Visitor…although it seems more likely Oscar would’ve gone with Gran Torino, A Christmas Tale, Doubt, Revolutionary Road, or Valkyrie.

So, to review, in only one of the past ten years (2003) did Oscar pick the movie i’d argue was actually the best that year, although even that one feels a bit de rigueur. (Admittedly, they came close in 2007 as well.) In six of those ten years (1999, 2004-2008), my best film of the year wasn’t even nominated. In four of those ten years (’01, ’04, ’05, ’08), a — to my mind, of course — certifiably lousy film won Best Picture. And in three other years — ’99, ’00, and ’06 — an at best middling movie won the top prize. Not exactly what you’d call a record of distinction.

After the Thrill is Gone.

And you thought the iceberg was cold. After watching Kate Winslet and Leonardo di Caprio flail about and suffocate in the suburban purgatory of Sam Mendes’ Revolutionary Road, you get the sense that Leo might’ve actually caught a lucky break by going down with the ship. In any event, blessed with award-caliber performances, sober purpose, and stately production values, Road is unfortunately a dry and somewhat lifeless film in the end, one that probably works best as an extended meta-comment on the sadly untenable Titanic vision of romance. If it wins Winslet that long-deserved Oscar, so be it, but otherwise Revolutionary Road is pretty missable.

If you haven’t seen the trailer, the setup is thus: Slumming-it longshoreman Frank (di Caprio) and aspiring actress April (Winslet) meet at a party, fall in love, and get married. So far, so good. (The movie covers this very quickly, since it correctly presumes we all saw Titanic.) But when, following the rules of the game, Frank takes a sales job at his father’s place of work, the Wheelers buy a house in the Connecticut suburbs from the unsinkable Molly Brown (Kathy Bates), and the two have a few (exceedingly well-behaved, given how much grief they cause) kids, the unmistakable whiff of decay starts to set in.

Weren’t these two meant to travel the world and stay forever enthralled with each other? I mean, the suburbs are great and all for “average” people (say, Shep and Millie, the couple next door), but the Wheelers? And now the only throes of passion these two indulge in are screaming matches about relatively innocuous subjects, like April’s stab at community theater. (Suffice to say, Frank, who starts sleeping with at least one of his secretaries out of boredom, doesn’t much feel like King of the World anymore.) So when April comes up with a plan for the family to move to Paris and start over, they both lunge for it like a liferaft, one last-ditch chance to escape their desperate circumstances. But is venturing across the pond — this time, with no iceberg along the way, presumably — really a feasible plan, and will it change anything anyway? After all, wherever you go, there you are…and that same old spouse is sitting right next to you.

Part of the problem with Revolutionary Road is that, although Richard Yates’ 1961 novel was ahead of its time (no less than Kurt Vonnegut called it his generation’s Gatsby), by now we’ve seen all this before. We saw director Sam Mendes lambast the oh-so-stifling confines of suburbia in 2000’s overripe American Beauty. We saw Kate Winslet wither on the suburban vine in Todd Field’s Little Children. And we can watch beautiful, self-medicating people grapple with suburban ennui, marital boredom, outdated gender roles, and the postwar workplace every week on Mad Men. So, at this point, Road no longer feels all that revolutionary.

The other main problem is Mendes. While word is the man is an excellent stage director, I can’t say I’ve much cared for any of his movies (American Beauty, Road to Perdition, Jarhead.) And, here, Mendes’ stagy reserve helps undo the film. For whatever reason, Revolutionary Road often feels as cold, sterile, and clinical towards its characters as a boy pinning down butterflies. (This is particularly surprising given that Winslet is Mendes’ real-life wife.) When Leo frets and sulks in his fifties suits, and the tendrils of smoke from his cigarette dance to some mournful period tune or another, it’s impossible not to think of Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love or 2046, heartfelt movies that almost burst at the seams with melancholy and ache. But here, everything feels distant and removed, like a reverie on, well, an iceberg. And, when you don’t feel particularly involved with the characters, it’s hard not to notice how slack the film goes in its final third, as we all wait patiently for one of the Wheelers to follow through on the decision they clearly made half an hour before. (And when it finally happens, as Stephanie Zacharek and others have noted, the moment is over-stylized to the point of becoming ludicrous anyway.)

Still, there are small things to admire about Revolutionary Road despite its many flaws. The last two scenes in the movie (one between Shep and Millie, the other involving Kathy Bates and her husband) help to drive home a point which makes the movie considerably more interesting. Namely, that it’s not really the drabness of the suburbs driving the Whee(d)lers bonkers, but their own innate character flaws and inability to comprehend how adult, lifelong relationships often work. Winslet’s self-absorbed April can’t ever get over the fact that she didn’t turn out to be a unique and beautiful snowflake — welcome to the real world, Mrs. Wheeler — and di Caprio’s anxiety-ridden, constantly needy Frank just can’t stop poking at the sleeping dogs in his midst. (Like R.E.M.’s The Apologist, he’s at his most monstrous when he’s just trying “to work things out.”)

And then there’s Michael Shannon’s character, who shows up in the middle going as a dinner-guest who’s been through some electroshock therapy, and the guy so crazy he must be sane. The part is a cliche through and through, and (like most truth-tellers, I guess) Shannon overstays his welcome. (I preferred his random “howdy, chico” turn in Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead.) But, at least for a few moments, he breaks through the pall of stultifying stateliness otherwise cast over this dark corner of the suburbs.

The Gold Night.

The nominees for the 2008 Golden Globes are announced, with David Fincher’s Benjamin Button, John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt, and Ron Howard’s Frost/Nixon leading the pack with five nods each. I’ve been feeling way behind on my moviegoing all year, so I’m glad to see that all of the best drama nominees (Button, Revolutionary Road, Slumdog Millionaire, Frost/Nixon, The Reader), as well as some of the closer also-rans (Milk, Doubt, The Wrestler) are films that aren’t out yet here. So, since i can’t as yet speak knowledgably about any of the contenders, i’ll hold off on my picks until closer to the big night.

Going into the awards stretch, my favorite film of the year is probably still The Dark Knight (with WALL-E running at 2nd), so I was also glad to see Heath Ledger get his due today. Would that he were around to see it.

Once (or Twice) in a Lifetime.

“A man only gets a couple of chances in life. It won’t be long before he’s sitting around wondering how he got to be second-rate.” Lots of choice stuff in today’s trailer bin: First up, President Josh Brolin braves pretzels, Poppa Bush, and enough JD to kill a small horse in this fun extended trailer for Oliver Stone’s W. (I can’t wait.) Elsewhere, Frank Miller borrows from Robert Rodriguez, who, of course, borrowed from him, to mine Will Eisner’s back-catalog in this short new teaser for The Spirit. (I’m still not sold.)

Also up recently, Kate Winslet and Leonardo di Caprio forsake the Titanic to suffocate in the suburbs in the first trailer for Sam Mendes’ Revolutionary Road. (Ok, altho’ it looks Little Children-ish.) Tom Cruise leads an all-star team of character actors in a plot to kill Hitler in the second trailer for Bryan Singer’s Valkyrie. And Brad Pitt moves from age to wisdom in the second trailer for David Fincher’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. (Not as haunting as the teaser, but close.) I gotta say, it’s good to finally hit the Oscar stretch for 2008 — I haven’t seen nearly enough movies this year.

Update: One more, via LMG: Philip Seymour Hoffman puts on a play — and gets stuck waiting in the wings — in the trailer for Charlie Kaufman’s much-anticipated Synecdoche, New York, also starring Hope Davis, Catherine Keener, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Dianne Wiest, Emily Watson, and Michelle Williams.

Update 2: Ok, what with Marky Mark, Ludacris, Bridges the Lesser, the lousy whiteboy angst-metal, and the highly Matrix-derivative gun-fu and explosions throughout, the recent trailer for John Moore’s Max Payne looks Skinemax bad. But, then again, it does have The Wire‘s Jamie Hector (Marlo) briefly playing Exposition Guy with an island accent, so that’s enough for a link. Hey, I’m easily amused.

The Ballad of Jack and Rose.

Raise the Titanic! The doomed ship’s power couple, Kate Winslet and Leonardo di Caprio, reunite for Sam Mendes’ forthcoming Revolutionary Road. “The DreamWorks project, based on the 1961 novel by Richard Yates, revolves around a suburban couple caught between their hopes for a life of art, culture and sophistication and the everyday drudgery of boring jobs and domesticity.” (And, speaking of Titanic, I saw some of it again on TNT a few weeks ago and, while I knew Theoden King (Bernard Hill) was also the ship captain, I hadn’t realized until then that Mr. Fantastic/Horatio Hornblower, Ioan Gruffudd, played Officer Lowe.) Add that to your Kevin Bacon list.