November 15, 2004

Beware the Ides of November…

It's been a very, very long week of the Oscar season. The Phantom of the Opera, Closer and The Aviator all joined the battle in earnest, the final entrant of the group being The Aviator, which screened in Los Angeles for the first time for a card-carrying audience on Sunday at the DGA.

In the last two weeks, the awards season for Miramax has been particularly in play. The studio's December release and French candidate for the Oscar, Les Choristes, has been screening and had its official west coast premiere at AFI on Saturday night. The film has already been a major hit in France, the 11th highest grosser of all time in the country.

Les Choristes is the first film from 40-year-old director Christophe Barratier, whose name might be familiar as a co-producer of the French doc smash, Winged Migration. He's the kind of guy that Harvey Weinstein would traditionally tie up for his next three or four films, to be used both as a director and as a business chit in deals with other studios who want his time. He's not the stylist of the western world, but he knows how to bring music and image together and he gets a remarkable intimacy from his actors, whether veterans or children just learning a new skill.

The screening at AFI was an unmitigated success. The audience was taken away with this film and thrilled as the young star of the on-screen choir joined the Pasadena Boy's Chorus for a live performance right after the film. And if it were not for the elephant sitting in the foreign language category, The Sea Inside, Les Choristes would be a favorite to not only get nominated, but to win the award.

It's the story of a school for troubled children in 1949. A new "supervisor" for the kids, an aging, balding man with more wits that resume arrives and in time, brings his personal love of music to the boys. It's To Sir With Love meets Stalag 17 or The School of Jacques, if you like.

We've been here before, but Barratier and co-scenarist Philippe Lopes-Cerval swing close to the expected without ever falling into the trough of cliché. This is a really wonderful movie… not a big showy thing, but a true delight.

Barratier should quickly become a flavor of the month here in town. He's still modest, despite his success. In conversation, you quickly see his passion for the arts. And in a busy room of Hollywood busybodies, his youthful good looks turns heads. Anyone who works in the smaller budget range and the need for a director of real taste should be lining up to meet this guy.

Meanwhile, Team Miramax is still heatedly chasing Oscar gold for Fahrenheit 9/11, now pushing for a protest vote to overcome Bush's re-election two weeks ago. And MCN's Len Klady has Finding Neverland opening on just 8 screens to a slightly lower per-screen and slightly higher gross than Kinsey… green light, go!

But the big question for Big Harv is just how he wants to expend his political capital this year. With both Fahrenheit 9/11 and Finding Neverland, a Best Picture nomination is a challenge. My take is that F9/11 will require not only a hard core effort from Weinstein and Lions Gate, but that the absolute key will be finding two or three big name industry leaders who are not already seen as being wildly political or in Harvey's pocket to get behind the F9/11 backlash voting idea… say Michael Douglas, Jack Nicholson and Steven Spielberg. As for Neverland, it may be able to make the cut on its own, though I think the hype until now has been somewhat overstated. Like so many of the good films out there, it is well liked but loved by only a limited number of people. On the other hand, it makes people cry… and that has become a rare commodity this year.

And that is becoming more and more important… especially in light of the surprise that is The Aviator… now clearly a film that is going to take a significant expenditure of capital to get into the big race itself.

The Year Of The Bio-Pic has become a bit of a mess. There are 10 bio-pics looking at the awards season with hungry eyes. There are many ways to categorize and re-categorize the films, but none of them seems to be the one that objectively explains which films work and which ones do not. There seem to be exceptions to any rule. Ray, for instance, is the exception to the rule that most obscure subjects for these films make for the films that have gotten the best reaction and the fewest attacks. Still, The Sea Inside, Kinsey and Hotel Rwanda all seem to have fairly few enemies at this point.

It is emotion that could make Finding Neverland, at this point in the season, an even more popular possibility for a Best Picture slot.

But I'm avoiding the real point…

The Aviator is no disaster. It has a few of the best flying sequences ever put on film. DiCaprio, with his clipped Texas accent and baby face, gives a tremendous performance covering a wide range of emotions. Ian Holm and Alan Alda are good for some laughs. And to see a director of Scorsese's skills working against his natural tendencies behind the camera is fascinating.

On the other hand… the story is dramatically incomplete, in both meanings… much of the movie's focus is on Hughes' descent into madness, which we experience in much the same way over and over and over again… when Hughes overcomes obstacles, he is hard to root for because the movie really doesn't explain how he overcomes them… cameos by Gwen Stefani and Willem Dafoe and an extended cameo by Kate Beckinsale are no less than painful (Dafoe's because it is so brief and odd to see a great actor so disconnected from the rest of the film)… and in the end, the question of the night, as it has been with so many misses this year, is "what is the point?"

I don't want to get into too many details here, lest I spoil the experience for you. (Note to fellow journalists: Miramax did not invite me to see the film yesterday… but guild screenings are accessible and access this one I did.) But the film, after a brief prologue in his childhood, starts with Hughes in the first half of his 20s, directing Hell's Angels over a two year period at a then-mammoth cost of $3.8 million. And while much of this part of this film is compelling - the most compelling segment of the film - it is also indicative of problems that the rest of the film will have. We don't know anything about the company that Hughes owns, how his parents died, how he really feels about their passing, or even, in the end, that Hughes lost $1.5 million of his investment in the film.

One of Scorsese's traditional strengths is that he brings just enough backstory to his characters that we, as an audience, always understand their motives, for better or for worse. Here, we encounter giant hole after giant hole and are left to figure it out - or not - for ourselves. Are we really to believe that everything in Hughes' life, success and psychosis, was generated from one ill-fated bath? Of course not. But that's all we are really given. There has never been a clearer advertisement for anti-OCD meds.

The Katherine Hepburn relationship will be the most controversial among filmgoers, not because of content so much as Cate Blanchett's turn as The Great Kate. She grew on me after time and was at her best in the quiet moments between the two, but it will be interesting to see how people react to what is very, very difficult… bringing to life a beloved and incredibly familiar figure whose most familiar mannerisms came later in her life than the period this film covers.

Ah, if only the film could all be as glorious as the flying in the production of Hell's Angels and our first trip to the Coconut Grove. It is in those sequences that we see the movie that was expected to be nominated across the Oscar board. It is Hollywood, it is a man overcoming the system with smarts and relentlessness, it is often visually spectacular.

I'll get into the Oscar prognostications in the MCN column on Thursday. But this is not Scorsese's best work, if only because the theme of the film does not ever become fully clear. The tragedy of a great mind felled by mental illness often makes for great drama. But here, there is nothing to balance it against. There is not the great love of A Beautiful Mind. There is not the tragedy of destroyed belief and family as in Titus. It is not the fall of pride that we've seen in Scorsese's Raging Bull and Casino and GoodFellas. The disease is not progressive, but it hopscotches around Hughes' life in a way that keeps squeezing all the drama out just as it's building to a crescendo.

I look forward to seeing the film again soon and getting further into this conversation as people start seeing the film in greater numbers, including at the MCN Screening Series screening on December 6. My guess that that by that time, it will be my third or fourth viewing of the film.

In the meantime, the awards season is only a Spanglish and a Million Dollar Baby away from my personal sense on completion. Bring 'em on!

READER OF THE DAY: SON OF DELI MEN writes: "Just wanted to heartily thank you for your obscenely positive, but completely accurate write up of the IMAX version of The Polar Express, a movie I was planning on avoiding all together. I would never have bothered to look into it and would have missed out on a completely terrific and unique film going experience. Alas, it puts me in an odd position, as I now heartily reccomend the film, but not in the format that 90% of the country has access to. To recommend the 2D version is (I'd assume) like recommending seeing Ben Hur in pan and scan on a four inch TV, or seeing the R-rated cut of Peter Jackson's Dead Alive. It's a disservice to the audience, and I am saddened that the film is being brutalized critically because Warner Bros. didn't think to plan IMAX critics screenings (or if they did, they weren't around the country).

They absolutely should have done a month-only IMAX run, perhaps expanding wide on Christmas day into regular theatres. I can only hope that WB is able to format the future DVD release so that home viewers can eventually see this visual marvel the way it was meant to be seen. Mark me up as one who would gladly take friends and family once a year to the nearest IMAX theatre for a holiday viewing, and I'm Jewish! Anyway, enough rambling, but thanks for the advance word.

PS - Just curious, I am confounded by the number of reviewers that seemed to have been creeped out by the animated humans. I didn't find them the least bit disconcerting. Was there something in the 2D version that caused the humans to look awkward or frightening? I am lost on that one."

And the ever-wacky Buffalo Bri writes: "I have lost faith in all directors. First I am told we will see Natalie Portman's thingies in Cold Mountain and then it gets edited out. Now I heard she will show her body in Closer but the director cuts it out. How can Anthony Minghella and Mike Nichols be considered premier directors after this fiasco? I would pursue this all the way until they are kicked out of the Director's Guild. I think Nichols lives in a blue state and Minghella probably would if he came to America. Blue states like their nudity. No wonder we lost the election, even when a hot actress agrees to show something, we arent relentless in carrying it out. We lost an opportunity here for nudity that might not come up again after "they" establish their christian theocracy."

E-ME: Are you good and confused about the Oscar race now?