Popcorn Kernels: Best Picture Contenders, Vol. 1

In which I once again attempt to sit through all the nominees for Best Picture, knowing full well that the presence of Darkest Hour shall surely prevent me from accomplishing this goal. Here are two of those efforts.

The Post

Year: 2017
Director: Steven Spielberg
Cast: Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks, Bob Odenkirk
Run Time: 1 hour 56 minutes
MPAA Rating: PG-13

When the Washington Post gets ahold of the Pentagon Papers, which expose a decade of government secrets, they must decide whether or not to publish them, which could potentially shut down the paper and send them to jail.

Look, I admitted that Spotlight was good, even though it's preposterous that it won Best Picture. And I dislike the state of the country as much as any reasonable American. But as timely as The Post is, it will never feel like anything other than Spotlight 2 (and in fact, it was co-written by one of the co-writers of Spotlight, if it wasn't already watered down enough for you). And as much as director Steven Spielberg has proven time and again he's a genius, we all have our bad days. The Post is such a huge waste of everyone's time and effort that it's not even funny.

Not that it was meant to be funny. The film finds Spielberg in intensely sober-minded Oscarbait mode, with only one scene (the best scene in the movie, involving a little girl selling lemonade) providing a moment of levity in this grandiose, self-important, completely arid awards season trifle.

The Post has a cruelly inflated sense of its own relevance, tying the problems of the past to current affairs in the most blunt, obvious way possible. Look, I'm all for arguments in favor of the free press, but they don't have to be couched in a series of artless, implacable zooms while characters monologue about how important the themes of the movie are. It hardly pretends to be dialogue, it's just one long essay mummifying an admittedly important historical event.

It's honestly rather clumsy, constantly framing Meryl Streep in drifts of men to pointedly remind you that she's not in a woman's space, all while the dialogue revolves around her being a woman in a man's space. It's very pointedly a message movie, and while shots like that can work - I'm thinking of Clarice Starling in the elevator at Quantico in Silence of the Lambs - it's forced down your throat so hard you start gagging before the fifteen minute mark.

It's just kind of a generally lousy movie, bookended by its worst scenes (a shoehorned-in Saving Private Ryan moment in Vietnam and a hilariously terrible Marvel-esque coda involving the world's worst Richard Nixon impersonator frantically waving his arms like a caffeinated mime and not even attempting to time his movements to the actual Nixon recording posing as dialogue) and endlessly unspooling trite, uninspired dialogue in between ("That picture makes me sad," exclaims Sarah Paulson, hopelessly drowning in a nothing role).

There's just no feeling involved here, it's all lecturing. And considering that The Post contains two of the world's most charismatic movie stars, it's astonishing how this could have even been accomplished. Meryl Streep is fine, as always, but she's snoozing through a role she could play with both hands and feet tied behind her back. And Tom Hanks is acting SO. HARD. But no matter how much he rakishly props his leg up on desks or undoes his sleeves, he's straining through an inexplicable old timey radio host accent that just drips with insincerity.

The Post was never going to be a great movie. It could only have ever been a acceptably Important prestige picture. But the way it fails its actors and the audience so substantially is frankly shocking. The music (John Williams, again visibly bored) seems to actively rebel against the tone of the film, the script is begging for attention yet barely there, and the coterie of strong performers (including, randomly, a handful of comic actors like Zach Woods and David Cross) is given nothing to do but be conduits for a firehose stream of flop sweat. One to miss.

Rating: 4/10

Dunkirk

Year: 2017

Director: Christopher Nolan

Cast: Fionn Whitehead, Tom Hardy, Mark Rylance

Run Time: 1 hour 46 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

We follow a fighter pilot, a civilian ship, and some ground troops through the effort to rescue the British military from the beach at Dunkirk during World War II.

Dunkirk is about as boldly experimental as a big budget blockbuster can get. But the thing is, experimentation leads to failure about half the time. Not that Dunkirk is a failure; what it gets right outweighs what it gets wrong, but its open risk-taking comes with some very odd choices that don't quite work.

For one thing, take the peculiar dilation of time that occurs over the course of the film. One story elapses over a week, one over a day, and one over an hour. The film cuts between these stories simultaneously, and they overlap at certain key moments. But the way they are presented doesn't really allow for any more insight or intrigue than if they had just been shown chronologically. And the landing of a fighter plane is dragged out over the course of what feels like half an hour of excruciatingly long screen time, milked for all it's worth in the film's biggest patch of jingoistic militarism.

Luckily, that doesn't seem to be the prevailing sentiment over the rest of the film. Dunkirk is a film that is above all else about the terror and constant, oppressive violence of war (despite the conspicuously pulled punches of its PG-13 rating), doled out by an omnipresent enemy that is literally never shown, except in the form of bomber planes that whistle by periodically. It eschews character arcs and even dialogue at times (especially in the sequences on the beach, it plays out more like a silent film, which fortunately prevents Harry Styles from screwing anything up) in favor of this all-important, nerve-rattling atmosphere.

And there is absolutely no denying that this is an utterly gorgeous motion picture. Between what are probably some of the best airplane action sequences ever filmed, Nolan provides us bleakly stunning, expansive vistas that blast your corneas with the sheer wideness of devastation and desolation on this beach. The single distracting thing about the visuals is that - at least on the home video release, I can't speak to the theatrical - it has been decided that the aspect ratios switch between the footage shot on 70mm and 65mm. The black bars constantly blotting out the huge screen-filling vistas are hugely distracting and an entirely odd choice.

Much more thoroughly satisfying is the soundscape, which is as harsh and alarming as you would expect any good war picture to be, slashed through with Hans Zimmer's droning, atonal, staccato score that ratchets up the tension to an unbearable degree.

It's a good thing that Dunkirk is so visually and aurally stunning and goes all in on those elements, because most of the dialogue sequences are the worst parts of the movie. Whether its generals dumping piles of exposition on the top of your head or Mark Rylance spouting nothing but affectless patriotic quotes for the better part of an hour, these scenes are generally worth much less of your time than the tense beach sequences - especially a scene where bullets begin to blast through the hull of a ship where stowaway soldiers are waiting for high tide.

I'm not usually a fan of war movies, and I wouldn't say I'd ever want to watch this again, but I'm glad I saw it in the first place. If you've already seen Lady Bird, Get Out, and The Shape of Water, this should certainly be next on your Oscars checklist.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 1306

The Summer Of Our Discontent

Year: 2013

Director: John Wells

Cast: Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts, Ewan McGregor

Run Time: 2 hours 1 minute

MPAA Rating: R

Typically, when adapting a play for the silver screen, a director will take advantage of the action not being required by theatrical necessity to take place in mainly just one room by either expanding the setting or utilizing filmic tricks to expand the narrative universe. 

In the 1986 musical adaptation Little Shop of Horrors, Frank Oz keeps the location consistent but uses various imaginative flourishes like fantasy sequences to keep the film alive and makes great use of inherently cinematic close-ups to show details of the story a theatrical audience wouldn't be able to get.

On film, Noises Off... becomes a cross-country journey of madcap proportions and Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead explores every intimate corner of Hamlet's universe.

In August: Osage County, based on the play of the same name by Tracy Letts, director John Wells makes the executive decision to do absolutely nothing. One gets the sense that what we see onscreen is the play as directly transcribed by a particularly dutiful screenwriter (who upon closer inspection turns out to be Tracy Letts himself, so maybe not so dutiful). 

As a man whose directorial credits up til now have only included 9 episodes of ER and one feature film three years ago, perhaps it was wise not to tool around with the script too much and to let the actors speak for themselves. With a powerhouse cast like this, this isn't a sin but the film itself feels as musty and dim as the house it takes place in.

But Meryl Streep.

This meandering family drama isn't so much a narrative as it is a showcase for today's brightest Hollywood talent. Everybody gets a chance to let their gray hair show and strip themselves of their star personas to bare their souls onscreen. This is the primary gift of August: Osage County, and it's not one to spit upon.

Meryl Streep stars as Violet Westin, the pill-popping cancer-ridden matriarch of a royally screwed up family. When her husband, the alcoholic poet Beverly (Sam Shepard), commits suicide, the extended family gathers for the funeral.

The visitors include Violet's sister Mattie Fae Aiken (Margo Martindale), her irritable husband Charlie (Chris Cooper), and their son Little Charles (Benedict Cumberbatch). Little Charles has a secret (something not uncommon to this family) - he's in love with the beautiful Ivy (Julianne Nicholson). Their relationship gives him a great deal of happiness, but the only problem is that she happens to be his cousin.

As Ivy tries to hide her incestuous tryst, so does her sister Barbara (Julia Roberts) try to hide her crumbling marriage with her unfaithful husband Bill (Ewan McGregor). And Barbara's daughter Jean (Abigail Breslin) tries to hide the fact that all she really wants to do is smoke pot with her Aunt Karen (Juliette Lewis)'s new boyfriend Steve (Dermot Mulroney), a sketchy gentleman at the best of times.

Basically the kissing' cousins have the most stable relationship in the entire film.

The cast does a uniformly terrific job bringing their characters to life (Cumberbatch, Nicholson, and Margo Martindale especially, although Meryl Streep's performance is of course unmatched), and in fact most if not all problems with August: Osage County are at the script level, if only because everything else resolutely refuses to get up to anything remotely interesting.

In fact, the few occasions where the other filmic elements peek up their tender heads, they seem to be actively conspiring against the performances. A key emotional point that is central to Meryl Streep's drug-addled breakdown is overtaken by shrieking sound design, an element that hadn't come into play before and wouldn't again, as if being punished for interjecting.

As the Westin family grapples with their manifold personal issues, tensions bubble and rise to a boil at a massive dinner table scene that probably lasted for an entire act in the original play. It is a monumental achievement in extended scene editing and provides a fantastic stopping off point, bringing all the interpersonal conflicts to a climax and exploding in a firework display-worthy exhibition of film performance.

Unfortunately the story has the tenacity to continue for a good 30 minutes beyond this point. The plot meanders, tossed like a beach ball between minor characters, of which there are too many too keep track of and fully flesh out. The film overextends itself in trying to showcase as many actors as possible and results in the sidelining of even the most important characters (Meryl Streep - duh - and Julia Roberts) for up to ten minutes at a time.

Pictured here deep in discussion about topics that really should have had more screentime than Abigail Breslin getting high.

It can't really juggle everything adequately and as such loses anything like a "theme" or a "conclusion," both of which are privileges reserved for more coherent stories. The story doesn't end so much as it peters out, but at least the final act has one solid scene - a confrontation between Violet, Barbara, and Ivy where the three women duke it out in a rampage of acting that culminates in my favorite line ever: "EAT THE FISH, BITCH!"

So the film definitely isn't a waste of time, but all the dramatics fade to vapor when the script turns up the heat and finds that it never really had anything to say in the first place. Definitely one to catch if you're in the mood to watch underused older Hollywood women eat it up, but it is a decidedly uneven piece of narrative cinema.

TL;DR: August: Osage County is a powder keg of great performers, but falls beneath the weight of a clunky script.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 963