Movie Box Review

This year's Academy Awards have so far engendered the kind of enthusiasm and excitement usually associated with a suburban DMV office on a Tuesday afternoon.  People seem to be sullenly resigned to the inevitability of THE ARTIST's victory, even though it would be unlikely to get anything like a majority of the Academy's estimated 5000 votes--but with the Best Picture vote split 9 ways, it doesn't need to come anywhere near that (the winning movie could theoretically take the award with only around 556 votes).  In any case, no unified opposition has formed in favor of any particular competing film, and the same apathy exists in almost every other major category.  At this rate, we might as well be talking about presidential politics.  

Are the Oscars really doomed to be this dull?  (ABC certainly hopes not, or this could be the lowest-rated ceremony in history.)  Is there no possibility for any unexpected moments of shock or even mild surprise?  Let's take a look.

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY:  As Mitch Metcalf noted in his survey of Oscar wagering odds, this is one category where The Artist is at a disadvantage (odds of 2:1), probably because as a silent movie, its intertitles don't provide much in the way of sparkling dialogue.  There are many who would like to see Woody Allen get some recognition for his late-career renaissance with MIDNIGHT IN PARIS, and that's currently the 2:5 favorite.  The other nominees MARGIN CALL, A SEPARATION and BRIDESMAIDS are all likely of the "be happy you're nominated" variety, although lovers of longshots might want to consider a wager on Bridesmaids at 23:1--it's by far the biggest hit of the group, and somewhat trendy after its critics' awards.  CHOICE:  Margin Call.  PREDICTION:  Midnight In Paris.

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY:  No one particularly cares about this category this year, but it's one of the very few to be fairly wide open.  THE DESCENDANTS is the favorite at 2:5 because of its perceived stature in the Best Picture race, and because with its polished dialogue it feels "written," but strictly as a work of adaptation, MONEYBALL, at 4:1, probably deserves to win, and its script is by the all-star team of Aaron Sorkin and Steven Zaillian.  There's also increasing sentiment pointing to HUGO at 5:1, another tough adaptation from a children's picture book.  TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY, which deserves its place, and THE IDES OF MARCH, which doesn't (it's actually weaker than its source material), are probably just along for the ride.  CHOICE AND PREDICTION:  Moneyball.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS:  Here's where things get easy, and thus somewhat tedious.  Octavia Spencer is an overwhelming 1:20 favorite for THE HELP, and no other nominee seems to have a prayer of catching her.  Those who believe the Academy will utterly genuflect to The Artist may want to take a chance on 2d choice Berenice Bejo at 9:1, but 2011 It Girl Jessica Chastain will be back again to win in some future year, and Melissa McCarthy and Janet McTeer, with 2 of the year's most distinctive performances, will have to be content with their nomination certificates.  CHOICE:  Jessica Chastain.  PREDICTION:  Octavia Spencer.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR:  Did the Academy bother to nominate anyone besides Christopher Plummer?  Oh, they did?  At 1:25, Plummer is the biggest favorite in any major category, and since unlike racehorses, actors can't be disqualified from a race for bumping another nominee or falling down and breaking their leg, he's pretty much unbeatable.  In another year, he and  Max Von Sydow (at 19:1) might have split the lovable old codger vote, but Plummer's accumulated industry goodwill just outweighs Von Sydow.'s  That leaves Kenneth Branagh (9:1) out of luck. Nick Nolte, while no longer young, isn't yet at the old codger stage of his career, and Jonah Hill is just in the promising newcomer stage of his.  CHOICE:  Max Von Sydow.  PREDICTION:  Christopher Plummer.

BEST ACTRESS:  There was a time when this looked like a real race between Meryl Streep and Viola Davis, but Davis has plunged ahead like Secretariat at the Belmont.  The current odds of 5:6 for Davis and 1:1 for Streep are misleadingly close, although one can never count out Harvey Weinstein and his none-too-subtle campaign bellowing the 29 years since Streep last won.  Michelle Williams might as well have gone lame down the stretch, Glenn Close picked the wrong year to seek a lifetime achievement award, and Rooney Mara is this category's Promising Newcomer.  CHOICE:  Michelle Williams.  PREDICTION:  Viola Davis.

BEST ACTOR:  The closest we're going to come to an exciting result this year.  George Clooney (1:2) is, well, George Clooney, as well-loved as anyone in Hollywood and with a solid stack of critics' awards to back him up this year.  Jean Dujardin (6:4) is the star of the probable Best Picture winner, and quite a charmer himself, plus he has the added degree of difficulty of performing silently (if there's one thing the Academy loves, it's degree of difficulty).  The fact that Dujardin shockingly won the SAG award means that either he has this sewn up, or that it was a reality check for Clooney's supporters, who realized they'd better get their votes in or risk blowing it.  Could Brad Pitt sneak in there at 18:1 for a universally-respected performance in a lower-profile film?  Probably not, but if this were a horserace, you'd want to include him on your exacta tickets.  Gary Oldman is a less likely sleeper at 22:1, especially because Tinker Tailor never really took off at the boxoffice.  Demian Bechir, while no newcomer, gets the Hey, We Just Noticed You slot.  CHOICE:  Brad Pitt.  PREDICTION:  George Clooney.

BEST DIRECTOR:  The smart money at 1:6 says that as Best Picture goes, so does Best Director, and that's probably right, clearing the way for Michel Hazanavicius to make his triumphant way to the podium.  If Martin Scorsese hadn't won just 6 years ago, this year would certainly be his, but he did, making his 4:1 odds probably overly optimistic.  Alexander Payne isn't the kind of showy director likely to win if his movie doesn't, so 13:1 sounds about right for him.  Terrence Malick, on the other hand, is both adored and disdained by passionate viewers on each side, and THE TREE OF LIFE wasn't enough of a hit to break him out of his art-house cell.  Those with some spare cash might want to consider Woody Allen, a huge longshot at 35:1 who's coming off the biggest hit of his career.  CHOICE:  Martin Scorsese.  PREDICTION:  Michel Hazanavicius.

BEST PICTURE:  Well, here we are.  Harvey Weinstein has, as is his wont, run an absolutely brilliant campaign for The Artist, successfully obscuring the fact that audiences in general haven't been taken by it, and playing up every conceivable voter-friendly angle.  (My favorites:  the ad emphasizing that Artist was the only Best Picture nominee to be shot in Los Angeles, and the screening hosted by producer Thomas Langmann strictly so Langmann could couple the film with The Two Of Us, the 1967 Best Foreign Film winner directed by Langmann's father Claude Berri, so that The Artist could magically be linked in voter minds with the older film's storyline of a Jewish boy rescued from the Nazis by an elderly gentile--Jews, children, the Holocaust and a lovable old codger, all in one neat package!)  The movie's 1:6 odds are well-earned.  Could anything beat it?  The 2d choice is The Descendants at 6:1, a movie that has gathered no head of steam whatsoever, and after that is the huge money-loser Hugo at 14:1 (remember, Scorsese had his victory lap 6 years ago).  Those looking for something, anything, to take the prize should probably concentrate on The Help at 18:1, the only genuine boxoffice hit of the nominees and winner of the SAG ensemble award (but the fact that the picture couldn't even get nominated for Best Director or Adapted Screenplay shows how tenuous its support probably is).  War Horse, a disappointment in every way, is somewhat puzzlingly next at 26:1.  Then the unlikely Midnight In Paris, Moneyball and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close follow at 55-59:1, and at the rear is the aesthete's dream, The Tree of Life at 73:1.  CHOICE:  Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.  PREDICTION (reluctantly):  The Artist.

Sigh.  Yawn.  We'll look in on the Oscar race again as we get closer to the big night... if we can find the energy.

Michael Lewis' book Moneyball was a marvelous read, but seemed like dim source material for a movie. Credit, then, is due to the creators of the film version--the various producers, screenwriters Steven Zailian and Aaron Sorkin, and director Bennett Miller--for finding a compelling narrative spine in a true-life story about the change in an industry's way of thinking.

Billy Beane (played by Brad Pitt on screen), General Manager of the Oakland A's, had a seemingly insuperable problem: how to operate a baseball team that could compete with the Yankees of this world on roughly a quarter of their budget for team salaries? In solving that dilemma, he and the young economist he discovered (Jonah Hill, playing a character called Peter Brand but actually a fictionalized version of Paul Podesta), changed the way baseball teams are put together. 

Beane and Podesta/Brand pioneered a statistics-laden method for measuring player worth that ignored time-honored criteria like body type in favor of the ability to get on base. (These theories had started before Beane, with statisticians like Bill James, but had never been put into practice.) To the disdain and disbelief of his scouts and coach, Beane built an "island of misfit toys" of a team, and the movie is the story of the first season they played. 

The triumph of statistics in sports is an unlikely subject for an underdog story (the film is almost entirely about the front office--we just get glimpses of the players through the movie), but it works. Largely this is due to Pitt and Hill, who make a dynamite team. Pitt is both dogged and funny, and Hill underplays as he never has before, to excellent effect. (The two share a sequence together gaming the season's trade deadline--straight from Lewis' book--that's thrillingly smart and hilarious.) The rest of the cast fades in comparison, although Philip Seymour Hoffman is of course tasty in a briefer role as doubting coach Art Howe.

With its wordy exposition and near-abstract disputes (not to mention Sorkin as screenwriter), the obvious point of comparison for Moneyball is last year's The Social Network. Moneyball doesn't quite measure up--Beane isn't as fascinating a character as Network's Mark Zuckerberg, and Miller, although grand with actors, doesn't have the visual or pacing skill of David Fincher. Like the Oakland team it describes, Moneyball's triumph is managing to get to the playoffs at all, whether or not it wins the title.

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Terrence Malick's THE TREE OF LIFE is at once the filmmaker's most emotionally grounded and dizzyingly ambitious film, his most relatable and esoteric piece of work.  In a sense it's the definitive Malick film, the one that explores his chosen themes to their seeming extremes, extending both before and after the existence of life itself.  For anyone remotely interested in film as an art form it's essential, although that doesn't mean it's going to please general audiences.  (Good luck to Fox Searchlight:  the per-theatre numbers this weekend in its 4-house run should be sensational--extra midnight shows had to be added on opening night--but it's hard to imagine wide audiences flocking to it.)

Malick has a virtually unique position in contemporary American film as the only creator of essentially non-narrative cinema who can get major studios to distribute (and to an extent finance) his work.  This despite the fact that he's far from a safe commercial bet:  he took a 20-year hiatus between his first two films, Badlands and Days of Heaven, and his current crop that began with The Thin Red Line in 1998 and continued with The New World 7 years later (his recent prolific streak continues, as he's already shot his next film for release whenever he's done with it).  Add the fact that none of his work has been very financially successful--Thin Red Line, his most expensive project, managed $36M domestically, and that was triple the business that New World did--and he takes years to obsessively re-edit and score his films.  (Tree of Life was originally supposed to premiere at Cannes in 2010, and didn't make it there until this past month, where it promptly won the Festival's Grand Prize.)  All these idiosyncracies, combined with the willingness of big stars to appear in his films and his own relusiveness, have given him a sort of brand identity as the industry's official auteur.  

In Tree of Life, he makes full use of his artistic freedom.  His central philosophical concern, as it's been since his career began, is the interplay of man and the universe, which in this film is presented in an overtly religious sense, starting with quotations from the Book of Job (later expanded upon in an extended sermon sequence).  The puny meaninglessness of human actions as compared to the heedless, unknowable--literally inhuman--motives of God is the position Malick wants us to ponder.  As Malick presents it, humanity divides into those who try to control the universe around them and are doomed to fail (he calls this "nature"), and those who accept the world as it is and retain a spiritual purity ("grace"). 

Malick gives us this schism in two ways.  He stops the continuity of the film for about 20 minutes in its first hour to present us with a history of the world from the formation of the planet itself, to the existence of microscopic life, to the appearance of dinosaurs and ultimately man, in imagery that in its abstraction recalls some of the "Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite" section of Kubrick's 2001.  The intent seems to give us a sense of scale, an understanding of how unimportant and pointless a person must be who thinks they can control any aspect of life.

Once that's done, though, the story is told in what is, for Malick, a relatively straightforward accont of the O'Brien family, living in Texas in the 1950s.  (Which is where and when Malick actually grew up.)  They are a father (Brad Pitt), mother (Jessica Chastain) and 3 sons (Hunter McCracken, Laramie Eppler and Tye Sheridan), and they personify the film's theme.  Pitt's character is an ex-soldier who plays classical music and works at a factory while failing to sell his inventions; he tries to control his children, his garden, his professional life, and he becomes increasingly bitter as his attempts fail.  Chastain is a purer spirit, who raises the boys with love and accepts what comes her way.  The children, especially McCracken as the oldest son Jack (played briefly by Sean Penn in modern-day sequences that bracket the film), are torn by the knowledge that there is no divine justice, no logic to good and bad events.  Jack struggles with the meaning of evil in a world where consequences are random and, as with Job, bad things can happen to anyone.

The best portions of Tree of Life are where Malick puts his metaphysical ideas to one side and depicts the family's daily life.  There's an amazing section where we follow Jack's childhood as a record of his sensual intake of the sights and sounds around him; I don't know that any filmmaker has ever captured the way children absorb the world better than Malick does here.  The film, rhapsodically photographed by Emmanuel Lubezki, practically explodes with movement, light and color, and Alexandre Desplat's beautiful score accompanies the images gorgeously.  The quotidian moments of meals, bedtime stories, walks in the street, playing with toys are captured with utter immediacy and heightened reality.

But Malick is Malick, and ultimately he doesn't want to immerse us in the drama of this family as such.  Malick is famously a foe of dialogue in film, and so there is endless, pretentiously whispered narration (much of it addressed to God) while people stare at each other meaningfully or we watch shots of rooms and foliage; it recalls some of Godard's later, less accessible work.  Although Pitt gets a relatively well-rounded character, Chastain is left to play a holy cipher, at best a reboot of the mother in The Great Santini (no knock on the actress, who is beautifully expressive).  Even though Jack is our protagonist, his psychology is limited to reacting to the actions around him and worrying over the nature vs grace heavyweight bout.  Malick doesn't have a cheery bone in his body, and in the 137 minutes of Tree of Life he doesn't take enough pity on us to allow a single laugh or even a smile.  Sometimes even the physical perfection of his filmmaking is wearying; with its fanatically composed shots and the relatively swift editing, there are moments when the whole movie feels like the longest trailer of all time for an even bigger film that's still to come.  And while the film's final minutes will no doubt move some audiences deeply, to me its cosmic pretentions were incomprehensible and not a little hackneyed and simple-minded. 

There is literally no one else in America making movies like Terrence Malick, and Tree of Life, for all its very real imperfections, is and will stand as one of the major films of the year.  In an era where movies just want to collect their money and start scheduling sequels, it's a picture that has the entire meaning of life on its mind.  Even if you don't think you'll love it, don't miss it.

(THE TREE OF LIFE - Fox Searchlight - 137 minutes - PG 13 - Director/Script:  Terrence Malick - Cast:  Brad Pitt, Jessica Chastain, Hunter McCracken, Sean Penn - Limited Release)