OSCAR
SYMPOSIUM
with
your host Nathaniel
and six very special guests
February 2008
Our Seven Participants
day one / day two / day three
previous page
SASHA: This much I know: Men are sexual beings in all ways. They can't get rid of it because it is millions of years of evolution pumping blood in that hard-on. Gay sex, straight sex, animal sex, doll sex - men need it. Why else become powerful if not to lure the objects of your desire and yet, in TWBB, this fundamental need has been written out of all of the characters, not just Plainview. Doesn't anyone else find that even remotely bizarre? Okay, so it isn't supposed to be realistic but rather metaphoric - still. So no sex, no women. Just raw greed and selfishness. Day Lewis is quite sexual in Unbearable Lightness of Being but that may it. Generally, his characters have no sexuality or else are repressing it to such a degree it drives them to do bad things.
I was quite moved by Frank Langella in Starting out in the Evening, as well as Christian Bale in 3:10 to Yuma. Tommy Lee Jones in In The Valley of Elah was so good but in a quiet way, not a scenery-chewing way. All of that said, I must agree that the Baptism scene in Blood has to be the single most effecting acting moment of the year. It has to be. To watch how the shades of emotions play across his face, from pretending not to care, to anger, to hurt, to panic - it was a beautiful thing to watch. The other scenes I loved in the movie were the ones between he and his fake brother, especially when they went swimming in the ocean. Day Lewis, to me, is so much better in these moments than he is at the end when it all becomes too much and he must unload. It reminded me of Robert De Niro at the end of Cape Fear.
I also would like to touch on Juno, which Kim touched on. Some films can't bear the weight of an Oscar nomination and Juno is one of those. It's all fine and well when it's the little movie that could but when it elbows out films like The Diving Bell and the Butterfly or Into the Wild, or even American Gangster, suddenly it seems like the absolute worst choice for Best Picture. Is it one of the best films of 2007? It is certainly in the top 20, maybe the top 10, maybe.
NICK: Daniel Day Lewis' John Proctor is one of my absolute favorite Day Lewis performances, and would have been an easy "get" for a '96 Best Actor prize, maybe even the actual Oscar, if I were ever in charge of anything. My favorite performance in any Miller production, filmed or live, that I've ever seen. Save for Gordon Pinsent's Willy Loman. (I'm just kidding, and just baiting Tim.) Again, I didn't mean to diminish him by appraising the performance as big, humongous even, and I see that he's operating under several stylistic constraints here - but I do agree with Susan that the last scene is hammy. And I have to hand the same note - "Intriguing, but try again, please" - to unnominated Paul Dano, deservedly nominated PT Anderson, and finally-nominated production designer Jack Fisk in relation to that coda: is this what happens to the protean tyrannosaurs who pillage the land and cast down their families and impoverish their people: they end up in windowless rooms in their own basements, physically contained and cordoned off in a romantic envelope of Madness, the great, self-explanatory Wage of sin? 'Cuz I sorta thought they wound up running the country, or at least the county, right through to when they shoot Faye Dunaway straight through the eye socket.
DENNIS: Exactly, Nick. This is why I have problems with looking at TWBB as an allegory, because it doesn't really play out in terms of the way we know that Plainviews become Noah Crosses (and other real-world correlaries that could be named) end up. It works better for me as a shot at examining the specific life of a character that embodies, for Anderson and others, elements of this type of specifically American character and what might happen to him. Of course that plays against the epic statement that some want the movie to be.
NICK: Sasha, I love that you point to the odd DRAINAGE of sexuality from TWBB. I also thought it oddly absent from Michael Clayton - although this was quite refreshing, for neither Sex or Romance to be the great metonym for everything good or bad about a Hollywood character's life. Where I *really* thought sex was disastrously missing was from Sweeney Todd. As bad as it is that Johnny and Helena can only sort of imply that they are singing, it takes away so much of the lusty libido of the characters (for each other, and for plenty else); that Joanna was too much of a stuffed-bird, too Christina-in-Sleepy-Hollow taxidermic, to be a vessel for anyone's erotic thought; and I for one thought the recasting of Toby as a kid was a disaster, since it gave one of our most sex-terrified directors yet another way to take desire as far as possible out of the equation that's supposed to be adding two characters together (by which I mean Toby's inarticulate, late-breaking paean to Mrs Lovett). The only sexual thing in Sweeney Todd besides Helena Bonham Carter's naughty, head-cocked stare and her yep-she's-pregnant dirtypillows is that absurd codpiece that Borat has stuffed into his pants, and it's just that: it's absurd. One more reason why Sweeney felt so -- of all things! -- inorganic to me, and why I'll be disappointed if Johnny Depp Scent of a Woman's and finally wins for THIS. (I'm not saying he's bad; just -- nyeh.)
DENNIS: Nick, Kim, all, I kind of felt strange even suggesting someone else might be as deserving of the Best Actor Oscar than Day-Lewis, because I didn't want to suggest for a second that I wasn't appreciative of exactly the qualities that Kim describes in his performance. He is Anderson's film, and Anderson's film is big and grand and troubled and dark-- Day-Lewis maps a lot of territory in his characterization that a lot of actors who aren't familiar with the term "modulation" simply could not orchestrate in the same performance. I can think of lots of giant-sized hams who would never find the time to make us understand the twisted circuitry of a man like Plainview, whose ravenous land grabs ("Why don't I own this? Why don't I own this?") must co-exist with his most complex feelings which are reserved for a boy to whom he cannot, like the property he amasses, truthfully lay claim. I have not seen The Ballad of Jack and Rose, but I can remember what Day-Lewis did to my conception of how far an actor could burrow into a character in My Left Foot. His Plainview, for me, breathes the same rarefied air as his Christy Moore. When I think of both performances, I remember the eyes, how Moore's led us into the place where Day-Lewis carved an interior landscape haunted yet alive to the tactile possibilities of the world, and how reading Plainview's lead us to understand the volcano erupting and the reserves of magma left pushing just under the surface.
And yet here's Clooney, a fixer floating through a world that is far more corrupt than he's allowed himself to understand up to this point, a man whose own role in the miasma is clear only to himself. And as he comes to understand that the madness of a colleague masks a core of inescapable truth, Clooney guides us through Michael Clayton's "transformation" (seems too big and dramatic a word, but there it is) from corporate bag man to one whose eyes are just beginning to open to the corruption inhrent in the life he's chosen for himself. He does so not by a series of big speeches-- he's got great dialogue and he's great with it, to be sure, but what grabs me about Clooney on screen here is his generosity. The meat of what I find fascinating about what he does in this movie is in his ability to listen to everyone else-- Tom Wilkinson, Tilda Swinton, Sydney Pollack, Sean Cullen, they all have showy parts than Clooney's. But what's compelling is that in every scene he has with each of these fine actors, Clooney's face, in moments of held tongues and desperation (when he visits the hit-and-run client at the beginning, or when he's full-on engaged with Wilkinson in that alley scene when Michael reconnects with Arthur), Clooney makes you understand the conflict the character feels just by the way his face is processing, struggling with what the other person is saying. Mind, he's got great actors to play off of and it's just as much fun watching them. But I was always looking for his reaction, how Clayton understood the ramifications of each encounter, and sometimes how he doesn't. Day-Lewis takes over There Will Be Blood, and it's his to take over, for sure-- as much as Paul Dano is given to do, it's too generous to suggest he holds his own with Day-Lewis. And maybe the interplay with actors who were more up to the task is what I miss from Anderson's picture. But Clooney draws other people into the beating heart of Michael Clayton and they all elevate each other's game.Maybe it's simply because I was more emotionally engaged by Michael Clayton than I was by There Will Be Blood, a movie I admire if from a distance, but if I were a voting man I'd cast for Clooney. But now there's that little matter of the office pool, where it doesn't pay to go out on too many limbs...
And besides, for me it does come down to, again, a bounty of good choices. I have nothing but admiration for Viggo Mortensen in Eastern Promises, a performance I could see winning in a less stellar year. I really liked Johnny Depp as well, but I might have picked another actor for his spot (see end of paragraph). I have not seen In the Valley of Elah, but TLJ would seem deserving of a nomination based on goodwill from No Country and The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, so count me not in the least bothered that he's there. And I'm with Nick in wondering why there wasn't a bit more love for Gordon Pinsent, who illustrated so beautifully the agony of being left behind...
As for Best Picture, I am heartened by the Producers Guild Award and how No Country for Old Men seems to be building on its momentum toward the big night. But does anyone put any stock in the theory that Oscar voters (so often refrred to as that nebulous and confused "they") might split what Andrew Sarris described as the "elitist" vote, presumably to be divided among NCFOM and TWBB (and perhaps MC), causing a rift that would allow passage of the 800-pound white elephant otherwise known as Juno to sneak in? Let me just say that such an event would be a huge nightmare come true for me personally.
TIM: Well, here I finally am, having committed myself to a Damian-Lewis-in-Keane-like obsessed trek around rainy King's Cross in search of a 24/7 web café. (Haven't yet attempted an all-body wash in a public restroom, but don't count it out.) The point is: my flat is a building site, I have no internet, but I've still spent all night nodding politely at A-list award guests (Tim! Helena! Helena's dirty pillows!) to while the hours away before checking in with you guys. Not that you haven't been doing just fine in my absence, you big Dorothys of the Oscarweb, you.
And what do I find? I'm being baited already. Much as I'd love to wrest this whole conversation swiftly Away From Gordon Pinsent, I'll take the bait: the suggestion that he deserves to be on the same (frankly tremendous) Best Actor list as Daniel, Tommy, Viggo, Johnny – even George, whose performance is a valiant try even when the character makes no sense to me – is pretty crazy. So Pinsent's crabby, right, rather than just the saintly, adoring husband? Big deal. I think it's a fussy, alienating characterisation which neuters a lot of the movie. And it's not like that film needs its emotions all jammed up in the duodenum. I felt like I was given two unknowable people for the price of one, and that everyone behaved exactly like Canadians in a short story are meant to.
Now cast Tommy Lee Jones in that part and you've got some kind of a drama. I share the general qualms about Elah, ie that it's an overdetermined botch with no idea how to go about saying what it wants to say, but this was proper hurt acting: clammy, lacerating hurt. (Not William Hurt, though I'm still not done going on about his big soul-shaking collapse in Into the Wild.) As for Viggo, he made such a huge impression on me in Eastern Promises that I'm dying for it to come out on DVD, so that I can analyse where exactly the film is supposed to go wrong, and why it is that I had pretty much a whale of a time while watching it, and whether this is really all Viggo's doing, which I seriously doubt. Still, can we pause just to say hooray for Academy Award Nominee Viggo Mortensen? I may even like him more here than in History of Violence, and that's saying a lot.
I somehow doubt I'm going to get in the last word on the Daniel Day-Lewis Travelling Spectacular, as some of us still seem determined to dub There Will Be Blood, but here we go again – for half an hour earlier I was batting the ending back and forth with a semi-doubter who wanted more comeuppance, or less, or something. I mischaracterise her arguments shamelessly, but I also question: why must we pin Daniel Plainview down as a linear archetype of capitalist rapaciousness, and insist on a career for him that tallies with our righteous beliefs (or Robert Towne's) about the bloody source of wealth and power in America? If Day-Lewis's monumental and outsize creation has one big fight in him, it's to throw any such crude allegory out of whack, surely, and to let Daniel plough his totally monomaniacal path into a perdition that's demented, undeniably, but utterly his own. I'm with everyone that Plainview owns his ending as much as his film, and if he didn't he'd be all "Why don't I own this?". Plus, I bet Noah Cross wouldn't have been averse to bit of the old ten-pin…
I guess we should get off Best Actor – though I've more to say at some point on why Michael Clayton doesn't work, and why the problem isn't exactly Clooney's but he still can't find a way out of it. Best Actress? Ellen Page in Juno? Seeing it in about twelve hours, and you've done a handy job, Kim and Sasha and Dennis, of shoving my already cool expectations in an ice bath.
on to DAY 2
Atonement's clack clack clack &
Juno's orange tic tacs
