Now that Twitter has quieted down, the Academy has reset its aim for the center: a neurotic, organic, heartfelt pastiche that is funny, familiar, and feel good. Begrudging the success—representational, popular, financial, critical—of Everything Everywhere All At Once is like squashing a kitten. One may pine for the Moonlight days, but not for CODA in quarantine.
Promoting artistic talent, while encouraging it to make lots of money, is a thankless task, and one that is rarely made this easy. But the ugly truth of the matter is that the Academy’s remit is the film industry’s survival.
If the pandemic shadowed the Oscars for the last few years, the specter now is A.I. Someday soon, there will be a Doctor Strangelove remake about this mutually assured destruction pact; A.I. will no doubt direct the project and play itself. Someday sooner, it will write the next M.C.U. sequel.
I am not particularly bullish about A.I.’s creative potential, but nor do I think Disney executives are primarily concerned with promoting artistic talent. Holding a space for art that an algorithm cannot—for the moment—replicate, that expresses a sensibility informed by embodied experience, should galvanize the Academy. It is not just a question of employment; downsizing human creativity puts everyone, everywhere all at risk.
I still need to see The Banshees of Inisherin and Top Gun: Maverick, so no comment on those. But the nominees for Best Picture of 2022 were…
Of the nine movies nominated for Best Picture, I have seen and written about eight, and, of those, not a one lacks some extraordinary measure of insight or ambition. We have had a few bumper crops in recent years, but absent—in this selection—is either the extremely well-made conventional film (like Selma or Spotlight) or a Weinsteinian Oscar grab like The King’s Speech or The Imitation Game. His grabbing days are thankfully over.
The one I missed, Ford v. Ferrari with Matt Damon and Christian Bale, is the one that might fall most neatly into those categories, but it is also the least talked-about of the contenders, which is itself a remarkable change: being talked about as an Oscar movie nowadays means being complained about as a straight-white-dude movie, which is to say a movie about what is naively considered to be a dying breed. Quentin Tarantino, by attacking that naivete head-on—though, in a weird way, also affirming it—perhaps deserves credit for drawing the fire that Green Book just stumbled into.
Alas, I feel like a trophy winner at the moment the play-off music begins to chide them offstage. (The key difference is that my orchestra is an oven timer; there are hors d’oeuvres to be made.) But an observation I would like to make now—and hopefully develop later—is that these nominees are, in the sense of ideas and worldviews, a model of pluralism—but the ways in which their ideas and worldviews both enhance and rebut one another is also a testament to how difficult pluralism is to achieve—much less to sustain. The ongoing Democratic primary season bears this out too.
In theory, I love Knives Out. Where lesser directors exploit conventions for cheap laughs, or pander to audience nostalgia, Rian Johnson builds genres up instead of tearing them down. They expand past their limits to scale to his moral complexity; they ping every which way—like his Rube Goldberg camera. But he never overshoots human feeling. His movies are grounded in self-deprecating comedians who only moonlight as tragic heroes.
In Knives Out, Johnson takes up the whodunit-murder mystery, solves it, and then switches gears to a Hitchcockian mistaken-identity thriller. Like his other films (except for Star Wars: The Last Jedi), this script is based on no existing franchise or intellectual property; it also has an ensemble cast and is a sleeper hit. But, this time around, Johnson’s faithfulness to genre overpowered his voice. Maybe he didn’t—or didn’t want to—blow off the cobwebs: Agatha Christie’s drawing rooms are supposed to be dusty.
Actually, Harlan Thrombey’s New England manse is cluttered but clean: Tidied up, perhaps, for the mystery writer’s 85th birthday party, which his family has assembled for, only to find his throat slit the next morning. As detectives interview them, it’s abundantly clear that these brats are each a different shade of spoiled: Jamie Lee Curtis is a realtor robot in jewel-tone shoulder pads; Toni Collette an overage New Age influencer; Chris Evans a playboy; and Michael Shannon a shut-in. But the couth sleuth Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) thinks that Harlan’s humble nurse Marta (Ana de Armas) is the missing piece. She’s a human lie detector who barfs at prevarication.
Almost immediately, a ridiculous story in a realistic setting depreciates in value as a topical statement. But it can still play tricks on our intuition and be a lot of fun, to boot. In retrospect, Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite was a shoo-in for Palme d’Or: it borrows filial scam artistry from Shoplifters and overlays that with incoherent moralism from The Square. The setup is straight out of a Coen brothers bungled-crime caper, but instead of shaking his fist at the heavens, Boon crosses his arms and stares wrathfully at the rich.
The director already demonstrated in Snowpiercer that it’s possible to be a genius with visuals and ungainly with political allegory, and Boon proves that anew in Parasite. This time, he applies his craft more sneakily: Alfred Hitchcock’s likeness appears—almost subliminally, at the edge of a frame; and there are shades of Polanski in the way camera movements construct dread. But I think Boon plays with our sympathies in a way that seemed to me much less assured. Underprivileged Ki-woo (Choi Woo-shik) is selected to tutor the upper-crust Da-hye (Jung Ji-so) because he isn’t a frat boy who would take advantage of her. But we are disabused of his integrity early on; he has an affair with his pupil and hatches a plot to systematically replace Da-hye’s family’s domestic staff with his own hungry kin.
The Kim family revels in their cartoon schemes to hoodwink the dopily prestigious Park family; it’s an amusingly elaborate scam that seems to account for everything except for the fact that Ki-woo’s wealthier friend, who referred him to the Parks, would easily be able to out them upon his return from studying abroad. But Boon apparently did not take that into account either—thus things go south for other reasons. The kitchen-sink comedy turns into a paranoid thriller, and, somewhere along that bend, Boon decides that the Parks are not bubble-wrapped buffoons but passive predators. The Kims, therefore, emerge as righteous victims. When their modest apartment floods in a tempest that nary dampens the Parks, the crapper spouts off like a rectal geyser. This is a visual corollary to shit hitting the fan—and an illustration of Boon’s tonal breakdown.
A train that chugs around the world with nowhere to go is an astute metaphor for Snowpiercer. In Bong Joon-ho’s fever dream of the near future, a countermeasure against global warming has made Siberia blanket the earth; the remnants of humanity, crammed into several dozen cars on a self-sustaining train, makes a yearly circuit around the globe. The train, which is called the Snowpiercer, was the brainchild of a crackpot billionaire named Wilford. It isn’t clear whether he had intended it to be a Noah’s ark all along or whether its construction just happened to coincide with the apocalypse, but the result is a case study in apartheid: the haves live near the engine and the have-nots bring up the rear. But what was it that the haves had? Were the groups segregated on a first-come-first-serve basis? Skin color isn’t a factor. Save for the imperious Wilford—who has claimed the engine as his throne room—an individual’s on-board status doesn’t appear to correlate with his former income level or earthly station: the first-class manifest includes Tilda Swinton as a yokel with an oik accent and false teeth, and a onetime violinist for the Boston Symphony is mixed in with the rabble. Money wouldn’t have much currency at the end of the world, but the hedonistic first-class passengers don’t seem to have paid their way in practical skills. If the film’s sympathies with Occupy Wall Street are to be taken seriously, this isn’t a small bone to pick; the invocation of the One Percent seems the result of fuzzy math, as those languishing in steerage appear to be the minority. Even Marx wouldn’t have given the plot-launching insurrection by the lower orders his imprimatur: with one grotesque exception, the train doesn’t run on the back of labor. Just about every review of this movie cautions you to take its political allegory with a grain of salt. I would suggest a quarry.
At the risk of sounding obvious, Boon has a vision, but it is strictly visual. Along with his co-writer Kelly Masterson—with whom he has adapted a French graphic novel—the director has some intriguing ideas that, in the conservative world of the entertainment industry, might pass for edgy; but he has little talent for integrating them. All of the foreshadowing, which imbues the whimsical design with an oracular tone, just ends up making the movie bottom-heavy; revelations sputter out like mad ravings, but, as in Oldboy, the absurdity and paranoia are justified by an overblown Christopher Nolan-like windup. Chris Evans, who is impressive as the rebel leader, gives a wallop of a monologue toward the end that might have been more effective earlier, when it would have clarified the goings on and given substance to the rebel cause. Bong and Masterson pick off big names and major characters with the ease of George R. R. Martin, but not the facility; some of the goners hadn’t enough opportunities to earn much grief for their loss, so the effect is just a jab at convention. Still, there are moments in which Boon proves himself as a top-notch visual storyteller. He takes advantage of the narrow-gauge width of these characters’ world; the whole movie has the effect of being shot with a fish-eye lens, but without the peripheral distortion. You have to take a cold shower to shrug it off. At one point, Evans and his sidekick Jamie Bell lie in two separate bunks but look squished like sardines. There’s an expressively distended sequence which sums up Evans’s choice between The Cause and its collateral in a simple but wrenching way—and it’s parodied moments later by Swinton. There are also excellently staged action-movie flourishes, like a witty shootout when the Snowpiercer is rounding a bend or a hide-and-seek sequence in a car full of saunas that may as well be trees in a wood. But these are effective set pieces, nothing more. Moments like Evans’s flicker of decision have a human gravity that Boon clearly wants to express, but he fails to inform his more idiosyncratic elements with pathos. The intended effect is 12 Monkeys, but the result is a cockeyed spoof like The Fifth Element.
Sure, I’d take this bizarro blockbuster over most Hollywood sequels; it’s something of a miracle that Harvey Weinstein bet on this pipe dream being a box-office success: a bona fide Bong hit. Snowpiercer isn’t mellow—doesn’t go down smoothly like the fine-tooled Edge of Tomorrow—but I think it’s a more interesting diversion rather than a superior work of art. The film is a masterpiece by proxy: Alison Pill is a Lynchian schoolteacher with a smile that seems detached from her face; Swinton goes haywire like the whorebot in Metropolis; John Hurt plays a beard-to-knees seer called Gilliam, in homage to the director of 12 Monkeys and Brazil; and music from the hotel band in The Shining gets piped in at one point like the anodyne tunes at Disneyworld. But the Kubrick reference—a signifier of the dryness of the upper crust—stuck in my craw because it diagnosed what’s wrong with this movie: Its “politics” aren’t rooted in the real world or history, but in second-hand notions spawned from pop culture that doesn’t really have anything to do politics. Even Brazil is only political in the sense that The Trial is, and Kafka had his politics assigned to him by a society that was reeling from totalitarian states that didn’t come about until after his death. Gilliam—the filmmaker—has an Ignatius J. Reilly side: He protests just about everything that’s happened since the Middle Ages. His ideal reality is just what that term implies—an oxymoron. Quixotic though this may be, it gives his work a temperament that Boon can only approximate, possibly because Gilliam’s fantasies aren’t as moored to specific current events as Boon’s appear to be. Boon’s flashes of brilliance get interrupted; life stutters by like it does for someone in a video game who can’t make it to the next level. The tart ominousness in Snowpiercer may prime you for a mystical revelation, but any insight it has just goes off the rails.
Movie Monster 