OSCAR
SYMPOSIUM
with
your host Nathaniel
and six very special guests
February 2008
Our Seven Participants
day one / day two / day three
previous page
TIM: Morning all. Blame a whole lot of red wine, and I know we're meant to be done with this, but I think I came on a bit strong with the TWBB defence -- I'll drop it, but I'd just like to add as a sort of coda to my thoughts (a) that "comeuppance" isn't my idea or really anyone's of where that ending wants to go, and I meant something like "big slaps in the face" instead (b) that said finale IS a little overblown, sure, but not the Achilles heel in the film's construction I keep being told it is and (c) that it's surely possible to read the movie as neither historically realist NOR abstractly allegorical, but an exercise in archetype and giganticism with its own very PTA, punch-drunk logic, and since he abandons Sinclair on about page 20 (or so I've heard) he's pretty much off-piste for most of this, sailing confidently past the Scylla of dour naturalism and the Charybdis of ponderous parable, and I love him for it, and want him to win the Best Director Oscar, and you Just Never Know.
There -- I didn't mention Daniel Day-Lewis once. Since my date with everyone's current favourite wise-cracking pregnant teen is still a few hours away, I'll pick up on Sasha and Nick's thread instead and ask: fascinating year though this was for the movies, where did the real people go? If I hold out any hope for Juno it's that it fills a human-shaped gap in the Best Picture line-up precisely as you say, though Kim's whole set of problems with it ring awfully true to someone who saw the trailer and already feels squeamish. Otherwise, I'm looking at Laura Linney, the best bits of Hal Holbrook, and Tommy Lee Jones, and noting that none of the films they're nominated for are the big-hitters. Much as I admire a lot of the technique in No Country For Old Men, I still think the Coen brothers are pushing their usual parody of "realness" -- ie lots of salt-of-the-earth sass, not much deep-root feeling -- in a lot of the ensemble characterisations. Kelly MacDonald's lovely but her loveliness can't really win the whole shift from tick-tock suspense to elegiac lament, can it? Those back-to-back scenes at the end meant I'd kind of had my fill of Old Men Monologuing, and I do wish that Barry Corbin bit had come a whole lot earlier -- a simple fix that would really have laid the groundwork for the tonal transition the movie's making. But then it would have interrupted all the excitement with Llewelyn and Anton, right? That film is one thing then another thing, and there's a whole lot of excellent stuff there, for sure, but a serious lack of connective tissue or sensible organisation, for me.
Talking of which, could Atonement have BEEN any more bitty and frustrating? I like a lot of the first hour even when it's pushing that clackety-clack score on us, rewriting itself as antically as Nicolas Cage in Adaptation, and generally overselling all the novel's showiest ideas about authorship and responsibility. The problem is: Keira and James aren't real people, and Saoirse Ronan is a third of a real person, and I'm not even sure that's the same person we get the other two-thirds of as the movie enters its really dodgy phases. I'm undecided on whether it's really my least favourite Best Picture nominee -- honestly, Michael Clayton, despite Tilda and Sydney and (maybe) George has a whole lot to answer for, too -- but Atonement still makes a big enough hash of things to cast an ugly reflection back on McEwan's book, which I suspect I'd find meretriciously clever on a re-read. Plus, what was up with that Dunkerque tracking shot? The Academy's best decision so far in this race may have been not nominating Joe Wright, right?
NATHANIEL: Sisters squabbling in Margot at the Wedding. Shiva the God of Death. Atonement's half people. Juno IS Dennis Miller. No Country's connective tissues and organizational skeleton (excuse me Friendo, is that a bone sticking out of your arm?) I... I...to quote my favorite coke-addled movie character:
"too many things... too many things."
- Amber Waves. (Still my favorite PTA creation -- Sorry Plainview)I do have to jump back to Boyd and say that I lurve the image of Tilda Swinton finding female empowerment through credit cards and unplanned pregnancies. It's so... wrong! Of course such a movie cannot exist. For one thing Tilda would never say something like "SmuhSchmortion" --she couldn't really be part of the grand denial that Hollywood was going through in 2007. And when it comes to pregnancy isn't it weird how these memes happen and then they end up encompassing things as far afield as Romanian period dramas by way of the snubbing of 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days? What a world. But my point... Tilda is such a brainy actress that I'm convinced she could sell any conceptual idea that's also a movie or any allegory that's also a person so maybe she's the only actor here that could have also played Plainview OR Briony in Atonement ...all the thirds of her.
Oh, Briony. Maybe she's the perfect allegorical character for 2007, what with its drainage of sexuality or its distorted and plainly unrealistic ideas about couplings. Sex. She sees it everywhere. I know we don't have Atonement fans in the house but that scene late in the film when she finally confronts the lovers kills me. She can't help looking at the bed! She might be the most sexual creature the movies offered us this year (give or take rutting spies from other shores) even if, like No Country For Old Men, she too "is one thing then another thing, and there's a whole lot of excellent stuff there, for sure, but a serious lack of connective tissue or sensible organisation"
I'm totally distorting what Tim just said for my own purposes. But then, I'm playing the role of Briony at this very moment because I want to talk more about the actresses, supporting and otherwise.
NICK: Briony is a cipher to me in Atonement, a movie that keeps reminding me that Somebody Wrote This but somehow never gets around to characterizing that Somebody in more than the most conceptual, writer's-logic kind of way. Nathaniel, I loved that tawdry shot of the bed, too, and whatever the film could do (and Garai, for me, did some of this) to flesh Briony out a little bit, I was grateful for. But, for McEwan as for Wright & Hampton, I think there's a Same Time, Next Year problem of hanging out with Briony only at big moments, never getting acquainted with her as a character or allowing inside her head. And neither the McAvoy nor the Knightley performances did anything more to "open up" their characters than the script does. Boxes in boxes and boxes, but who made them, and who is opening them, and why?
Because Atonement flags from its title that it's supposed to be about Briony learning and feeling something, I'm more bothered by having so little sense of what she learns and feels beyond the biggest, broadest strokes than I am about whether or not Juno "learns anything" in her film, although I'm not sure how we mean that. I can't defend those opening sequences, which are flat-footed and pretty desperate, in exposition and in style. But once we've caught up to Juno's confession to her parents and the first scenes with the Lorings, and then everything that follows, you'd have a hard time convincing me that the verbal patterns don't change, that the characters are stock figures, that it's all Juno, rimshot, Juno, rimshot, or that she's even "lovable" all the time, whether or not "America" now loves her. Her arrogant and also insecure way of seducing Paulie (which I found sad and affecting as well as off-putting) and her surly and impulsive way of sidling up to Mark only to realize she doesn't want to: Juno is no angel and seems complicated enough (is that like Hillary being "likeable enough"?), certainly in proportion to at least some of the counter examples Kim cited. And I put out any Juno/Mark scene, the Vanessa/Mark scenes, and especially the two Juno/Paulie scenes in the high school hallways and their magnificent scene in his bedroom as counter-evidence that the movie doesn't care about any of its other characters, or that it all boils down to two cubes of Quirk Bouillon.
DENNIS: Nick, I’m one of those people who do not see an accurate reflection of the teenagers (girls or boys) I know in the gallery of wise-acres that populate the fifth wheel in the Best Picture race. (Here I admit that I have not yet seen Atonement, though I hope to before this forum is finished, but calling Juno the fourth wheel just didn’t work in my snark scheme, and hey, what’s good for Diablo Cody…)These are not college kids who have had a few more years to refine their self-image, their self-confidence and their exposure to aspects of culture that are not largely dictated to them by their immediate peer group.
Juno’s tykes are more in the 15-16 year range. Unlike college students, high school kids-- hell, even elementary school kids-- can be incredibly “focused” about what will at any time be admitted into the General House of Cool, and I think not quite so open to the charms of Soupy Sales, or prone to claim the superiority of the likes of Herschell Gordon Lewis, as Juno would have it. This is where I value the films of someone like Aaron Katz, who in his D.I.Y. feature Dance Party USA dealt with teenagers perhaps only a year or so older than Juno and her pals, and dared to pay attention to way girls and boys behave differently when they’re in their comfort zones, and are far less articulate, though no less intent on achieving articulation, than they’d like to be, or perhaps think they are.
Juno is a sitcom-structured comedy designed to make you “feel good,” populated by a cast of characters who feel plugged in rather than organically conceived (and yet even that, to hear some tell it, is supposed to be a virtue- it’s a way of looking at the world, I guess). It’s so busy patting itself on the back over its own cleverness that it barely takes time to breathe life into what is, for a lot of people, a situation that should be and has been approached a lot less blithely. I have corresponded with a lot of people since I panned Juno on my blog who have described to me how moving the movie was and how it reminded them so much of their own experiences. But as they relate their own experiences, they do so with so much more emotion and genuine humor and intelligence than Juno displays; their experiences reflect those of our tart little heroine in superficial ways only. If only the movie had told me so much about the difficulties of going through a teen pregnancy, or the trials of being a good parent while your daughter goes through one.
That’s one of the main problems I have with Juno, apart from my total disbelief in the way the movie stacks its pop culture cards, as if prepping a whole new generation of Juno clones— it never takes seriously the reality of what a 16-year-old girl might feel like carrying a baby. Juno’s pregnancy is a fashion accessory, one more prop with which she tells the world what a cool outsider she really is—she complains about people giving her disapproving looks, but she actually relishes them. One reader accused me of not liking the movie because it wasn’t “grueling” enough on this count, as if what I really wanted to see was Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days set in an American high school and scored to Kimya Dawson and a bunch of other sincerely annoying artists that the self-proclaimed punk-loving Juno would logically not give a damn about. No, what I wanted from Juno was just a nod in the direction of some sort of reality, a touch more Jennifer Jason Leigh in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, a sense that Ellen Page was carrying a baby, not a fat belly attachment. And by the end Juno is no more changed or affected by having had the experience of carrying and giving up a child than she would have had she been carrying around a 20-pound sack of flour for two weeks in a high school lifestyle experiment. Juno is technically well-acted, but I can’t take any joy from the performances (perhaps a smidgen from Jennifer Garner, who as least isn’t required to be a full-on cold yuppie bitch) because they’re so relentlessly programmed to tickle, and hey do so in a vacuum. I’m with Kim, Boyd and the rest of the heartless misogynists on this one. If Juno does sneak in and take advantage of an indecisive Academy to win Best Picture, it will one grim night that can’t be undid, home skillet.
Particularly, thanks, Kim, for the great examples of how women characters in films can be rich without being politically correct. You’re just about the only critic I can think of who has seriously gone to bat for Black Snake Moan, which is about as saucy and brilliant and subversive an exploitation picture as I’ve seen come out of American movies since Angie Dickinson was so big and bad. And Ghost World treads the same territory as Juno but with actual feeling, feeling that includes the pain at the root of all those precious barbs being thrown around all over the place. And Boyd, I must send a transcontinental “amen” to your observation about Tilda Swinton’s girl power. The movie isn’t trying to make points about her being a cutthroat female—she’s a shark because that’s the pool she swims in, and a fundamentally insecure shark at that. Which reminds me, Sasha, I thought your observations about the lack of sex in Michael Clayton especially were very apt, and it’s strange that the absence of p-p-p-passion in that movie never occurred to me.
NEXT PAGE
Sasha on p-p-p-passion for particular movies and how it's so good at hiding flaws, and Briony and Juno -- such precocious young women -- continue to hog the conversation.
