They Shoot Oscar Prognosticators, Don't They?
New York Film Festival, Part 1
By J. Don Birnam
September 30, 2015
BoxOfficeProphets.com
No Best Picture Shift from New York
The Best Picture race this year feels uncertain. Last year, everyone was raving and excited about Boyhood. Although it eventually lost, there was a purported favorite at this point in time. Two years ago, it was clear that 12 Years a Slave was going to be a formidable force, even though it hit a speed bump named Gravity along the way.
This year, by contrast, I do not sense that heightened sense of inevitability. Sure, Spotlight is considered a frontrunner, and Room got a TIFF boost. But there seems to be space for a new quantity to alter the race.
Enter New York. In the past few years, world premieres like Lincoln, Hugo, Life of Pi, The Social Network, and Captain Phillips have all made splashes at the Alice Tully Hall. None of these movies won it all, but some came close. This year, the three notable movies opening in New York are Robert Zemeckis’s The Walk, Steven Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies, and Don Cheadle’s Miles Away.
Only the first of these three has opened so far, and it is not, in my view, a serious Best Picture candidate. The film is a beautiful epopee to the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, and to the city of New York itself. To those familiar with the documentary Man on Wire, it tells the story of real-life trapeze artist Phillip Petit, who accomplished the daredevil feat of walking across the empty void of the two buildings in the days before their completion. Fans of the documentary will rejoice in the revisit of the story in the artful way that Robert Zemeckis reliably did, and those who were not enamored by the self-involved lead in the doc will nonetheless find solace in the much more lighthearted portrayal by an effective Joseph Gordon Levitt.
Good on the selection committee for NYFF to pick this movie, which they surely knew would not make an awards splash like some of their past picks, to open their festival. The movie takes the viewer back to a better time when the towers stood and the world felt more innocent. It had to open in New York. And it is a pretty darn good movie - the effects are wowing and have a decent shot of giving Mad Max a run for its money, and the last third of the film is simply gripping and entrancing. I was clutching my seat and gasping repeatedly, as you’d expect. Overall, it’s a beautiful film with some below the line chances, but not much else.
Other Strong Movies Not In the Race
One of the fun things about the NYFF is that the programmers truly love their quirky artists. They like to discover them without regard for awards conversation. TIFF may be the people’s festival (but they still have a winner at the end of the day), but NYFF has always been about the appreciation of film in other ways.
Two movies that were passed over for their respective countries’ submission into the Oscar race screened early in the festival. China’s Mountains May Depart and Italy’s Mia Madre but portrayed insightful inquiries into the lives of complex women. Along the way, they explored their respective cultures in familiar yet creative ways, while analyzing the purposes of existence and the things that truly make us happy. In Mountains, a young woman mistakenly believes that money is happiness and grows to regret the life choices she makes because of those beliefs - only to grow into peace with them older in life. The filmmaker, then, subtly but obviously alludes to his views of China and its own relationship with money, growth, and technology.
Meanwhile, in Mia Madre, a delightfully hilarious John Turturro plays a supporting role in the story of a woman dealing with the death of her mother while she is trying to direct a movie about loss of sustenance. The lead is somewhat incisive and even cold, acting at times in wholly unsympathetic ways. But you can’t help feel some empathy for her, as she is clearly only struggling to improve her own existence in the face of obstacles. There’s a nostalgia and a lethargy to her, but also an unending desire to progress.
Finally, I attended a screening of The Lobster, directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, the Greek filmmaker who helmed the Academy Award nominated Dogtooth a few years back. In the movie, Colin Farrell plays a man who lives in a dystopian future where single people are taken to a compound that allows them 45 days to find a partner, or else they are turned into animals. Along the way, Farrell encounters a lovable and hilarious Rachel Weisz and a penetratingly evil Lea Seydoux (Blue is the Warmest Color). The movie insightfully analyses our modern culture’s obsession with relationship status - not just the obsession with being in a couple, but also the fixation of some with rebelliously being single. Along the way, it drops many a hysterical morsel of wisdom about these neurosis, even if the movie falters at times with its exaggeratedly dark or graphic tones (which at time seem gratuitous). The sardonic humor struggles at times to keep a sense of realism in a movie that is otherwise trying hard to seem possible. Overall, however, it is a mostly entertaining analysis of how we interact with each other romantically in some instances.
None of these movies are awards players, they are simply a welcome respite from the endless cacophony of the perpetual guessing game that the fall festival season has become.
A Look Ahead
The film festival gets more real this coming weekend when Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies opens. Many say that they haven’t seen a Spielberg movie they’ve liked in years, but say what you will, his last three movies (Munich, War Horse, and Lincoln) have received Best Picture nominations. The movie does seem a bit Spielberg-formulaic (like The Walk was Zemeckis formulaic) and it is clear that the Academy has moved well beyond those 1990s styled films (which I happen to love).
So, it may fall on The Revenant, which just released a new trailer, David O. Russell’s Joy, or Tarantino’s Hateful Eight, to shake things up. It’s been over a decade since a movie released that late won it all, but if there is any year in which it could happen, it is certainly this one.