Blinded by 2020

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.

Parasite

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.