May 12, 2008
There will be gold
This year's top Oscar nominees shine by drawing inspiration from the past
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In the heyday of the major Hollywood studios, moguls set aside huge budgets to produce and promote pictures like Mutiny on the Bounty (1935). They wanted to test the limits of Hollywood technology, showcase big stars in big roles, and prove to the world that Tinseltown could do literary adaptations or social protest - sometimes at the same time - as well as France or Germany or England. Each studio had one or two of them that would dominate the prizes during awards season.
These days, studios fixate on sequels or franchise movies, often based on TV shows or comic books, and leave prestige to their specialty companies. The result is a year like 2007. With the exception of that terrific adult thriller Michael Clayton (Warner Bros.), all the best-picture nominees come from studio-supported "boutiques": Atonement (Focus), No Country For Old Men (Miramax/Paramount Vantage), There Will Be Blood (also Miramax/Paramount Vantage), and this year's "sleeper" hit Juno (Fox Searchlight).
In many ways, the old-time traditions hold. Three out of the four are literary adaptations. And though I found There Will be Blood impossibly inflated and bogus, two of them are stunning - Atonement and No Country For Old Men - and both feature ensemble performances that evoke the living texture of times past even more than the cinematography and production design.
For many, Michael Clayton recalled the conspiracy thrillers of the 1970s, but it was also akin to the best muckraking white-collar melodramas of the 1930s, from Five-Star Final (with Edward G. Robinson) to Counsellor-At-Law (with John Barrymore).
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Every era has had pretentious clunkers such as There Will Be Blood. And if you're going to nominate a lightweight comedy, why not the charming Enchanted instead of the hipper-than-thou Juno?
For that matter, if the best movie of the year is a genre film or studio specialty item, why leave it to specialized categories? Ratatouille earned a satisfying five nominations, including best original script. It should have won a nod for best picture as well as best animated feature.
Still, this year there are at least a trio of worthies in each category - and it looks like many of the best may win. Here are my picks:
Should and Will Win // No Country for Old Men
Javier Bardem as the cold killer with the compressed-air gun and the Prince Valiant haircut isn't the only chilling aspect of this near-contemporary Western, set in Texas and Mexico in 1980. It captures the moment when the whole country's air went fetid with the craziness of the escalating drug trade and the surfeit of bad feeling from Vietnam and Watergate.
Working from Cormac McCarthy's novel, the Coen Brothers turn a chase for money from a drug deal gone bad into a haunting, terrifying paradox: a dynamic portrait of malaise. Tommy Lee Jones matches Bardem as the sheriff on his trail, and Josh Brolin looks and acts like the young Nick Nolte as the man caught between.
The Coen Brothers may flub one of the story's climaxes, but the ending that infuriates some people also has a way of sticking with them: The Coen Brothers say that even a white-hat hero may give up on crusading against evil in a world that's all shades of gray.
Should and Will Win // Ethan and Joel Coen
These talented wiseacres finally find their footing in No Country For Old Men and are scarier and, in a bleak way, funnier, as well as more profound, than they've ever been before.
With cinematographer Roger Deakins, they turn the heroic Western countryside into a landscape of disaster. They conduct a crash course in editing, evoking the glory days of adult action filmmaking, when split-second timing - in this case, nano-second timing - mattered more than special-effects slaughter and choreographed death throes.
They deliver a classic encounter with an attack dog, but some of the most terrifying moments occur off-screen, or after the violence is enacted. Most important, the Coens mold their ensemble into an alternately poignant and bone-rattling group portrait of lost or endangered souls.
Copyright © 2008, The Baltimore Sun
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