• Joel Coen shows up at an east coast screening of “Somewhere” to conduct a Q&A with Sofia Coppola. [Inside Movies]
• Tom O’Neill reports that the HFPA has classified “Country Strong” as a drama. [Gold Derby]
• Our own Guy Lodge reacts to the recently released (and apparently unauthorized) “Winnie” trailer. [The Guardian]
• Rachel Shields on the misogyny of Oscar. [The Independent]
• Gregory Ellwood reports from Friday’s Britannia Awards. [Awards Campaign]
• “The King’s Speech,” Colin Firth and Annette Bening top the new weekly Gurus o’ Gold survey. [Movie City News]
Welcome to Oscar Talk.
In case you’re new to the site and/or the podcast, Oscar Talk is a weekly kudocast, your one-stop awards chat shop between yours truly and Anne Thompson of Thompson on Hollywood. The podcast is weekly, every Friday throughout the season, charting the ups and downs of contenders along the way. Plenty of things change en route to Oscar’s stage and we’re here to address it all as it unfolds.
You can feel the season rumbling to life with Halloween just around the corner. It’s been a lively enough week as contenders began to hit the circuit and more films were unveiled for eager press. Let’s see what’s on the docket today…
I went into last night’s screening of Edward Zwick’s “Love & Other Drugs” wanting to love it. I really did. There was an opportunity here to delicately balance comedy and drama, tell the story of a man’s journey to maturity against the backdrop of a very serious socio-political issue — the pharmaceutical industry — and tie together themes of responsibility and compassion. At the risk of being reductive, it could have been this year’s “Up in the Air.”
Unfortunately, the film just never finds that balance. There are too many ingredients in the soup, many of them tasty. But they clash in the mixture. Take Josh Gad’s portly, foul-mouthed brother to Jake Gyllenhaal’s suave corporate pill pusher. I laughed at this guy a lot, but it never felt organic to the film. It was arbitrary comic relief lacking any real commentary on the narrative.
Meanwhile, Anne Hathaway — a talented actress who will no doubt win an Oscar one day — does well by the material but she’s asked to play a one-trick, woe is me character who never finds a genuine end to her arc. And that could have been intriguingly the point, but it feels more like a concept stretched thin rather than one filled in with nuance.
When I took an initial stab at forecasting the Oscar season back in March, I hung my hat on the prospect of Edward Zwick, a perennial also-ran in Oscar’s years of five, and a promising true-story comedy “Love & Other Drugs.” I’ve been steadily pulling back on that punch, though, and while 20th Century Fox has little else in the hunt this season, it’s starting to look like Golden Globe territory more than anything else. Which is hardly a bad thing, mind you.
Then again, in a first look recently revealed by Entertainment Tonight (courtesy of The Playlist), the chemistry between stars Jake Gyllenhaal and Anne Hathaway (reunited five years after “Brokeback Mountain”) is sharp and electric, while their performances separately seem to have a confidence and precision that might get them places in the season.
Based on the book “Hard Sell: The Evolution of a Viagra Salesman,” the film stars Gyllenhaal as the Jerry Maguire of the pharmaceutical business who meets Hathaway’s Parkinson’s suffering free spirit on a drug call. Cue romantic comedy stylings. Check out the ET first look (which likely foreshadows a trailer debut any day now) after the jump.
We’ve taken concentrated looks at the lead actress and supporting actress categories in recent weeks. Now let’s turn our attention over to the fellas.
Behind the Best Picture race, of course, the lead actor competition is perhaps the most hotly anticipated award of a given Oscar telecast. Movie stars are born, Hollywood staples are rewarded and careers leap to the next level. It makes for an intriguing annual state of the union as it pertains the the film industry’s talent roster.
This year, one of Hollywood’s brightest stars finds himself right at the front of the conversation. George Clooney is likely to end up with his third acting Oscar nomination, for Jason Reitman’s “Up in the Air,” and he’ll owe much of that to Reitman’s powerful work on the page.
Clooney doesn’t give his best performance to date in the film. But the material is so cleverly built around his persona that one can’t blame the actor for saddling up to a role that fits like a glove. And there is something to be said for the bravery of taking one’s image on like that.
Colin Firth, meanwhile, has caused a critical stir with his leading performance in Tom Ford’s “A Single Man.” He has already won the Venice Film Festival’s acting honor and has been tapped for another at February’s Santa Barbara Film Festival. He is pitch-perfect in the film, giving a refined performance of nuance and gesture.
It is the true mark of artistry that guides a hand away from the simplistic and into the complex.
“Brokeback Mountain” is and has been poised to merely be considered “the gay cowboy movie,” a label I’ve defended it against ever since I first read E. Annie Proulx’s short story (which originally appeared in The New Yorker).
In the final analysis, however, director Ang Lee strikes so many right chords in the film, which took eight years to find its way to the screen, that one comes to forgive moments of melodrama that creep into an otherwise emotionally raw narrative.
The story revolves around two ranch hands, Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal), who come to form a close bond while sheepherding for extra income over the summer of 1963.
A chance moment of absolute comfort overtakes the two men one night, and that bond becomes a sexual one, but more appropriately, a sensual one. Their lives soon part ways, and years go by before they reunite for the first of a number of getaways to the mountains of Wyoming, both with wife and child at their respective homesteads.
The story would be a tightrope walk for any seasoned filmmaker. Indeed, as Del Mar notes of the forbidden passion he and Twist share, “there ain’t no reins on this one.” It is an applicable statement to the tale itself, and like Twist’s rodeo cowboy, Lee takes the thunderous implications and bucking ferocity of the story in stride, riding the beast the full eight seconds. In so doing he elevates the chronicle above the physicality which can unfairly precede it.
What struck this viewer most is that Lee reveals the thin line between love and hate with absolute expertise. Pain is a natural byproduct of intense passion. When Ennis punches the wooden walls of a façade –- after what he presumes to be the last time he’ll ever see Jack –- the reaction is both to the pain of loss and the anger he feels toward something clutching his heart so authoritatively. Let alone any thoughts that he may feel disgust for the act he has committed, surely the last thing he’d expect to have happened. This is quite apparently the first time Ennis Del Mar has ever fallen in love.
The performances largely represent the correct emotional cachet across the board. Ledger’s seedy, love-struck cowboy is the standout. He lurks between his own surface, a character inside an entirely different persona. At once guarded and intense, this has to be seen as the actor’s finest work to date.
The moment he claims “I’m nothing, I’m nowhere,” it becomes one of the truest depictions of the trappings of desire and ardency we’ve seen on screen.
Much credit is due to a well-assembled and emotionally investigated screenplay from Diana Ossana and Larry McMurtry, but Ledger’s task was a challenging one regardless of the words provided.
Suitably boring is Ennis’ wife Alma, played rather succinctly by Ledger’s real-life sweetheart Michelle Williams. The performance gives us another level of understanding when Ennis flees away to the mountains with Jack, as his “real” life becomes a slow, uneventful process lacking any real passion or excitement. Alma’s distress and shock at the knowledge of her predicament plays well through pained eyes. The difficulty, however, lies on the other side of things.
Jake Gyllenhaal slips over the top a bit too often as Jack Twist, both in times of joviality and in times of sincerity. He really hits his stride, however, once the character begins to age over the course of the narrative’s 15 or 20 years, as we see the toll longing and idolatry have taken on him.
It has to at least be said that Gyllenhaal has come into his own this year, both through this performance as well as through his controlled portrayal of an equally emotionally secluded young man in the underwhelming “Jarhead.”
Anne Hathaway has a presence as Twist’s wife, Lureen, which overrides the function of the character. Her face is so bold and her performance so over-baked that it really clashes with the intent of the role.
The relationship between Jack and Lureen just isn’t as thematically potent as the relationship between Ennis and Alma, due largely to this, and if there is a weak link in the case, I’d consider Hathaway as such.
Regardless of imperfection, what we have in Brokeback Mountain is a brutal account of tragic love. It’s one of the oldest stories in the book, but Lee’s conviction and dedication to the core of Proulx’s wonderful story, in every waking aspect of the film’s creation, is what assists it in vaulting quite capably beyond simple-minded nonsense.
Such a perception could easily have been detrimental to understanding the affecting symphony being composed here.
Sam Mendes’s “Jarhead” makes no immediate attempt to connect you to its central character. It makes no attempt to pump emotion and empathy into the veins of the audience. It falls in line with Mendes’ penchant for colder, more removed depictions, and it’s potentially the material that most suits this penchant that the director has come across to date.
I don’t blame the film for any of this. In fact, I rather champion it for it. The thematics come across, even if Mendes doesn’t follow through when he could have REALLY hit it out of the park, but the overall sense one gets from the film is a mish-mash of the offerings we’ve seen from other war film directors.
Following a protagonist reminiscent of Albert Camus’ central focus in “The Stranger,” Bill Broyles’s screenplay (based on the novel by Anthony Swofford) gets to the point abruptly and hammers it home for the remainder.
In the eyes of a “jarhead,” as envisioned by Swofford, life is a meaningless existence. The journey of a soldier is less about defending a nation than it is about defining himself (or herself). In the middle of the desert, miles away from anything that matters in their world, no matter what they’re told by those in positions of power, the lives of freedom fighters are worthless in the eyes of those who live them.