THE SLIFR-TLRHB OSCAR CLUB: Depart This!

I'm sorry. I was getting tired of pictures of that damned statue, and I just couldn't resist... Besides, Jack Black should have been nominated!

TLRHB,

I think your suspicions are absolutely correct. Ten weeks after the Oscar ceremony, it will give me genuine pause trying to recollect the name of the movie that does win Best Picture, or the name of the actor who wins Best Supporting Actor. And 10 years from now, I feel as certain as you that the movies people will consider important, the movies that will have already begun coalescing into classics of varying stature will be some of the ones you mentioned, like Pan’s Labyrinth; or A Prairie Home Companion; surely Inland Empire; quite possibly Miami Vice; most certainly Borat…, which had people still doubled over with laughter on their way out of the auditorium and over to the box office to buy another ticket and see it again; or the new horror masterpiece The Descent, which boasted the one quality almost every other horror movie in 2006, good or bad, could not—it was original-- or Iraq in Fragments, which introduced whole new perspectives for American audiences bludgeoned by processed information (and misinformation) about our current international nightmare; or even movies seemingly as feather-light as Charlotte’s Web and Nacho Libre, both of which can make kids (and some adults) deliriously happy in two completely different ways.

But it’s hard to see an Academy whose history includes the honoring of road show spectaculars and other white elephants ranging from The Greatest Show on Earth (1952), Around the World in 80 Days (1956), My Fair Lady (1964) and The Sound of Music (1965), to Ordinary People (1980), Gandhi (1982), Out of Africa (1985), Forrest Gump (1994) and Braveheart (1995) changing their tune anytime soon. In this regard, Babel seems like the movie to beat.

However, though I sympathize with your argument regarding The Departed (see, I’m getting there) as being the kind to which the Academy should be paying more attention, I also see more than just lip service to worthy genre entertainments scattered all over the Best Picture winners roster. I think the case could be made that movies as varied as The Bridge on the River Kwai, Gigi, Lawrence of Arabia, In the Heat of the Night, Patton, The French Connection, The Godfather, The Sting, The Godfather Part II, Rocky, Unforgiven, Braveheart, Shakespeare in Love and certainly The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, are all, on some level, genre pictures—some aspired to depths (or, if you will, pretensions) beyond the pale of their baser origins, some even succeeded at achieving them, and all, I think, fit the model to which you ascribe The Departed. It seems to me that at least the more recent history of the Academy is fairly evenly divided between the “good-for-you” picture and the what, for lack of a better term, I’ll call the “inflated genre” picture, so it’s hard for me, on precedent alone, to guess that The Departed has less of a chance than Babel based on that fact that it’s a popular entertainment. Actually, aside from all this “little movie that could” talk about Little Miss Sunshine, I think the Scorsese and the Inarritu movies are the only two real contenders for Best Picture, and I think the odds are just about as even as they could be as to which is more likely to win.

Which brings me around to Martin Scorsese. Just so I could be as fresh on The Departed as possible, I saw it again on DVD last night, and I will say right now that if Martin Scorsese wins the Best Director prize, as everyone (yourself included) is predicting he will this coming Sunday, I will not be unhappy. In fact, I came away from this second viewing with a greater appreciation for the balls Scorsese keeps in the air in this movie and how lively it is as a whole-- except, I’m afraid, for the Vera Farmiga subplot which, however much its tricked up with snappy dialogue and wonderful bits of acting (I love the glance she gives that ridiculous dessert tower leaning precariously on the table between herself and Damon) seems musty and obvious and burdened with serving as the oasis of reflection to which the characters occasionally recede when the movie needs to take a break from the fun stuff. Truth be told, of all the recent movies in the Poor Marty saga, only Gangs of New York comes off to me like anything resembling pretentious hackwork, the director’s grand-scale stab at grafting Visconti and Bertolucci onto his own all-too-familiar frameworks. (Gangs could have been called Muddy Streets.) Had not it been in competition with Million Dollar Baby, I would have been more than fine with a Scorsese win for The Aviator, a brilliant, haunted movie, even if it coincided with his most desperate and unpleasant Weinstein-induced groveling at Oscar’s feet.

In my mind, Di Caprio is as close to just right as I think I’ve ever seen him in The Departed—I think about how miscast he seemed in Gangs, and how he often struggled too mightily to fill the unfillable shoes of Howard Hughes. He struggles in The Departed too-- the scene in the bar when Costigan must twist and turn around the question of whether he is or is not the rat in Costello’s organization is effective, but it doesn’t have the pall of the horror of discovery about it that it should. Di Caprio’s own acting seems a bit too desperate in this scene—too much of the character’s desperation is allowed to come through, too much to escape Costello’s immediate notice, anyway, and the rings of logic he spins to save his own ass don’t seem convincing. But throughout the rest of the movie he pitches his desperation and improvisatory cunning much more expertly; he demands our attention, and he deserves it.

I think Nicholson does more to undermine that bar scene than Di Caprio does, and it’s emblematic of Nicholson’s inability to rein in the court jester that plagues the performance as a whole (it’s what’s at the heart, I think, of your observation that he looks less like a Boston hard-case than a Hollywood bum). By the time Nicholson gets around to his Hannibal Lecter-Jack Torrance bit, rolling his eyes, staring gape-mouthed at Di Caprio, and then imitating the squeaking of a rat, all the intimidation had drained out of the characterization for me. At least Nicholson whipping out the dildo had some context—he is meeting Damon in a porno theater, after all. When the actor gets up to leave a fazed Di Caprio in the bar booth and is suddenly replaced, in the seeming blink of an eye, by Ray Winstone’s Francis, that ball-bearing-in-the-gut feeling came speeding back unexpectedly, the intimidation factor shot immediately back to 11. This second viewing of The Departed made me long for a version where Nicholson’s role could have been played by Winstone, all dead-eyed stares and completely believable I-will-kill-your-fucking-family comportment. Winstone could have done the inappropriate humor to keep the troops off balance without turning it into a clown show. In contrast, Nicholson’s performance shoots tiny little holes in the movie that don’t sink it, but constantly distract you with all the Jack-style antics he probably felt assured would get him the Oscar nomination that never came.

All that said, The Departed has a beyond-sharp script that, as you say, cruises between comedy and pressurized suspense with ease—my favorite line comes early, Damon to a uniformed academy recruit: “You got any suits at home, or do you like coming to work dressed like you’re gonna invade Poland?” Nicholson excepted, the ensemble cast assembled by the director, from Damon and Winstone to Alec Baldwin, Mark Wahlberg, right on down to David Patrick O’Hara as the slurry Irish pug Fitzgibbons, is peerless. And Scorsese, despite the cheapening effect of that increasingly infamous last shot, certainly deserves to win Best Director over Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, and even Stephen Frears and Paul Greengrass. The Departed is a much better movie than I first thought, much better in the Scorsese canon than the overrated GoodFellas (and I’m not just saying that because we just finished up Contrarian Weekend over at Jim Emerson’s place).


But I really do think Letters from Iwo Jima is better. And I’m really looking forward to seeing it in tandem with Flags of Our Fathers-- I can’t imagine how together they won’t add up to one of the strongest war movies in American cinema—because even though they do tell separate and fascinating stories, I’m very excited to see how the two dovetail together, having one fresh in the mind while seeing the other. (It’s for this reason that I avoided picking up the Flags DVD this week—you know that Warner Brothers is going to package the two at some point, probably with all the fascinating, as well as the state-the-obvious and redundant, extras they left off of this initial package.)

Eastwood’s style as a director couldn’t be more different than Scorsese’s, and for some that translates as, Scorsese has the mastery of filmmaking juice, while Clint’s visual sense and grasp of pacing tend toward stale TV-like setups and slack, unmodulated rhythms. A friend of mine echoed your sentiments exactly about Iwo Jima in an e-mail to me last week—the humanizing of the Japanese was obvious, the movie’s flashbacks felt canned and visually uninspired, and the movie was just too damn long. To me, Eastwood’s boldness in taking on the Japanese side of the story of this battle goes far beyond a simple humanizing of the enemy for our edification. ("Those poor savages had homes and families too, you know!") Eastwood, whose films already display the kind of patience and observational style that are anathema to the sensibilities of Leone and Siegel, from whence he sprang, takes his stylistic confidence to another plane by adopting a sensibility suited to a Japanese filmmaker in order to tell this Japanese story. Those long takes and the movie’s steady, unhurried pacing were anything but boring to me—they allowed me to soak in a sense of the impending doom by which these characters were trapped, and allowed Eastwood as a director to focus on elements that allowed him to separate this film from the tradition of post-Saving Private Ryan war films, to which even Flags belongs to a certain degree (even though it too resists the temptation to use optimized cinematic technology to churn the audience’s emotions to specious ends—there are no battles in Flags or Iwo Jima that carry the cinematic excitement of the ones in Ryan.)

I’m not saying that the director has suddenly morphed into Yasujiro Ozu—hardly. But I am saying that his level of empathy in Letters to Iwo Jima is such that he’s able to comport a more classically quiet, somber stylistic view, one which makes room for the contemplative sadness of these soldiers hiding in man-made tunnels waiting to die. There is room for the horror, the cacophony, the confusion of battle, but there is also room for flashbacks that bring us toward a clearer understanding not just that Japanese were human too—only a thundering meathead could fail to notice this—but that they embodied or were an inseparable, often oppressed part of a culture shot through with militaristic values and codes of honor that went aside from, and often well beyond, the orchestrated American support of the war effort. I’m sure Eastwood would pooh-pooh the comparison, but I think there are moments in Letters from Iwo Jima where the influences of John Ford meet up with moments and emotions and filmmaking style comparable to those of Kenji Mizoguchi (Genroku Chushingura--The Loyal 47 Ronin) and even the cultural criticism of Nagisa Oshima (Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence).

So the Marty vs. Clint battle could be pitched as a battle of styles—though both are, as you say, crime and war movies unmistakably made by old men. One feels cinematically vital and energized through camera movement, editing, sound design—all the tools Scorsese, a master stylist, has at his fingertips—and the other is suffused with the patience and mourning of a master filmmaker unafraid to hold his images, his effects, yet never push his points or his approach—a truly classical style of which Eastwood may be the last genuine practitioner. A modern movie star born of impatience and disaffection with old models and molds of genre films, Eastwood has turned into a great ambassador of old school Hollywood craft grafted onto a more contemplative, introspective method that still finds ways, as in Iwo Jima and especially Flags, to challenge some old, calcified societal assumptions. It’s enough to make me hope for a Katharine Hepburn-Barbra Streisand-style event-- a tie. But that wouldn’t really satisfy you or me, would it, my friend? In my heart of hearts, I’m still pulling for Clint. And you’re absolutely right—Ken Watanabe was unquestionably, unaccountably screwed out of a Best Actor nomination. To make room for Will Smith?

Okay, I promise to try to reign in my logorrhea for the rest of the week—I blame it on my never having given myself a chance to write about either The Departed or Letters from Iwo Jima to any great extent. But this is already so much fun for me, and I suspect you (and, I hope, the readers) that I can’t wait to get your return response.

Here are a couple of thoughts: Do you think the price of gas this past summer had anything to do with the slightly cooler reception given by some critics to Cars? Is this year’s crop of Best Cinematographer nominees the best, most wide-ranging ever, or is it just exciting to see a list that drifts so far away from the nominees that dominated the rest of the awards? And what about Morricone? His best? His worst? (That Arena Concerto DVD is on its way from Netflix.)

All the best,
Dennis