Why Oscar Got It Right
SHARGEL, RAPHAEL
On Screen Why Oscar Got It Right By Raphael Shargel Finally, the Academy Awards got most things right. For the first time since Best Picture wentto Annie Hallin 1977, the winner in that...
...The Aviator is set during Hughes' heyday, between 1927 and 1947...
...Eastwood's David toppling Scorsese's Goliath proved again that less can be more...
...Cedric the Entertainer once againbelies his stage name as an officious hoodlum...
...Because Hughes' real life persona is not familiar to audiences, DiCaprio isn't required to imitate someone recognizable...
...The Aviator was made by Martin Scorsese, who has never won an Oscar, though he is universally hailed as one of our finest living directors...
...And what about the climax of Unforgiven, where Eastwood, enraged at the killing of Freeman, walks into a saloon and slaughters the town sheriff and all his deputies...
...Its 170 minutes is padded with repeated descriptions of Hughes' compulsive behavior...
...In the light of what has been hitting screens lately, their importance cannot be overstressed...
...Meanwhile, Robert Pastorelli carries poor table manners to an unpleasant extreme...
...It tells the story of singer Ray Charles, who died shortly before the film opened...
...Still, I cannot help wondering what Scorsese might have done if he were forced to work with a tighter budget and a shorter running time...
...In The Aviator, the protagonist's inner beast is the subject, and the film sometimes plays like a hairing effort to expand that bit from Casino to feature length...
...While intriguing, the scene is hardly a revelation...
...A fourth statuette went to Morgan Freeman for his wonderful turn as a wise and loyal has-been, a role similar to his part in Eastwood's previous Oscar triumph, Unforgiven (1992...
...In the context of the director's full body of work, the hoopla surrounding Million Dollar Baby is amusing...
...While not every movie dazzles, seeing them in order of their release has been a revelation...
...But even there he focuses on showcasing the recluse's bizarre idiosyncrasies rather than the fantasies that drive him...
...Scorsese, born in 1942, tries to capture the atmosphere of Hollywood movies from the period...
...Gray strains for an irreverent mood but never gathers satirical steam...
...Be Cool is clearly besotted with Hollywood and the music industry...
...Million Dollar Baby also garnered well deserved nods for Clint Eastwood's direction and Hilary Swank's brilliant performance as an ambitious female boxer...
...With the exception of the underrated White Hunter Black Heart (1990), a thinly fictionalized yarn about the making of The African Queen (1951), Eastwood has worked exclusively within established genres, but always proffering novel twists...
...Gray gets a kick out of casting the tough guy as a homosexual, but the stereotyping is painful to watch...
...The aerial photography seems largely a digital copy of the much more daring live work in Hughes' fìlm Hell's Angels (1930...
...Eastwood has long courted controversy, asking audiences to ponder the troubling moral decisions that punctuate his films...
...its producers ought to have considered waiving the cost of admission...
...When it was over, I wondered why the filmmakers bothered to coordinate these busy actors' schedules, only to give them so little to do...
...Also on hand is the Rock, serving as Vaughn's bodyguard...
...The exchange is a small touch that tells us a great deal about the protagonist's paranoia, and after establishing De Niro's manias, Scorsese incorporates them into the larger plot...
...Blanchett's monotonie posturing is just as insulting to the memory of a major star as Foxx...
...In interviews, Scorsese has spoken rapturously about a crucial moment when Hughes finds himself unable to leave a public rest room because, fearing contamination, he can't bring himself to touch the doorknob...
...Comparing Scorsese's andEastwood's methods is perhaps unfair...
...But Scorsese himself did not merit the prize this year...
...The maverick filmmaker has never won an Oscar, despite directing some of the most powerful pictures of the last half century...
...I wonder, too, how many of those outraged by Million Dollar Baby remember Sudden Impact (1983), the fourth Dirty Harry picture...
...Hughes displays far more eccentric behavior at other times and proves inexplicably capable of snapping back to full competence, rushing off to design a new plane or thwart the bids of corrupt Senator Ralph Owen Brewster (Alan Alda) to destroy his business...
...With the exception of Jude Law's entertaining Errol Flynn, who appears in only one brief scene, none of Scorsese's attempts to recreate period celebrities succeed...
...At age 80 he has just wrapped a new film...
...MUCH WAS MADE of the fact that African Americans swept the male acting categories for the first time in Oscar history...
...What emerges is visually impressive but hermetic—an imitation of an imitation...
...Since serious films will be in hibernation until fall outside the art houses, this sequel to Get Shorty (1995)—also based on a novel by Elmore Leonard, who coproduced—seemed a potentially appealing light diversion...
...With a cast featuring John Travolta, Uma Thurman, Danny DeVito, Harvey Keitel, and the charming newcomer Christina Milian, Be Cool generates a good will even before the lights dim in the theater...
...Eastwood, who is 74, quipped that Lumet's energy made him feel like an infant in the field...
...For fans hoping this would be his year, signs during the first half of Oscar night were encouraging when The Aviator's deserving crew, including cinematographer Robert Richardson, production designer Dante Ferretti and Scorsese's longtime editor Thelma Schoonmaker, picked up awards...
...But he has grown tired of the movie business and, eager to enter the music industry, hooks up with Thurman, a widow running a studio...
...Take, for example, Be Cool...
...Although Eastwood could always rely on his grizzled, fire-eyed persona for box office success in Westerns and crime stories, he frequently challenged himself as an actor, playing the fast-talking promoter of a Wild West show in Bronco Billy (1980), a pottymouthed gunnery sergeant in Heartbreak Ridge(1986), and doing a marvelous impersonation of John Huston in White Hunter Black Heart...
...The three become entangled with shady promoter Keitel, a group of Russian mobsters, and an entourage of pistol-packing record producers who cruise around LA in a fleet of black Hummers...
...Million Dollar Baby deserves the place in cinema history secured by its Oscar precisely because it refrains from preaching and leaves its wounds open...
...It neglects storytelling and trades on smug puerility—an ethos, as Kevin Smith and Quentin Tarantino have shown, that lures a sizable chunk of the viewing public...
...In a wonderful scene in Scorsese's Casino (1995), Robert De Niro yells at a baker...
...Her rival Virginia Madsen, as Paul Giamatti's lonesome love interest in Sideways, is—like Eastwood—too textured, too subtly integrated into the fabric of the film to sway Academy voters...
...James Woods shows up in the first scene only to get killed, and DeVito pops in just long enough to remind us of his big part in Get Shorty...
...Eastwood, believe it or not, is one of the few American filmmakers whose entire oeuvre is available on video...
...Successful satire reveals genuine absurdities in its targets...
...Eastwood's portrayal of a gruff boxing coach with the soul of a poet was another successful experiment against type, but the Best Actor award went to Jamie Foxx for his role in Ray, one of several high profile biopics last year...
...Gwen Stefani and Kate Beckinsale fail to impress as Jean Harlow and Ava Gardner, while their thin bodies and wan faces remind us how the American ideal of beauty has narrowed since Hollywood's Golden Age...
...Director F. Gary Gray places his leads on the sides of the frame, where they gape at the irritating antics of minor characters...
...The film's 11thhour meditation on the right to die has caused an uproar in the press...
...Foxx meticulously mimics his blind subject'stics—the swaying head, the wide open mouth—but like many comedians, he manages to capture nothing deeper than the exterior of the man he impersonates...
...To boot, it contains more product placement than any film in recent memory, with nods to the cigar market, Staples, Honda, and Hummer...
...For the first time since Best Picture wentto Annie Hallin 1977, the winner in that category was not only a terrific film but the strongest of the nominees...
...In the same spirit, it was a pleasure to see Sidney Lumet receive an honorary award...
...A furious De Niro demands that the hapless chef count the number of blueberries that go into each pastry to ensure that all are exactly uniform...
...The same holds true for Leonardo DiCaprio, who plays Howard Hughes, the title character in The Aviator, and was nominated with Foxx and Eastwood for Best Actor...
...He must, however, sell us Hughes' obsessive personality, his fanaticism about building airplanes, financing big-budget movies and seducing starlets, as well as the hypochondria and paranoia that swelled as he aged...
...The ceremony's montage did not do him justice, and Al Pacino's tribute seemed perfunctory, but his Oscar for lifetime achievement was one more tribute to filmmaking in service of character and plot...
...Be Cool is full of self-referential jabs, like Travolta's confession in the first scene that he hates sequels...
...His Neanderthal hit man talks constantly while shoveling food into his mouth, even as he strolls through bars and parking lots...
...Together they discover Milian and try to make her a star...
...Less noted was that Foxx and Best Supporting Actress winner Cate Blanchett both won for portraying famous historical figures...
...Ultimately, the narrative is more wearying than compelling...
...The mobster has opened two blueberry muffins and found one overladen with fruit and the other mostly cake...
...He is indifferent to the protest that he is involving himself in matters customers do not care about...
...In the mid-'90s, when he abandoned the crime-ridden streets of the modern city for the old world elegance of The Age of Innocence and the Tibetan mystique of Kundun, the change was exhilarating...
...Two of the Academy's most woeful mistakes in recent decades were its failures to reward his best movies: Raging Bull lost to Ordinary People in 1981, and—in an especially asinine ruling—GoodFellas was passed over in favor of Dances with Wolves in 1991...
...With The Pawnbroker (1964), Serpico (1973), Dog Day Afternoon (1975), and Prince of the City (1981), he realized the look and feel of New York City streets better than anyone, including the dreamier and more impressionistic Scorsese...
...As Katharine Hepburn in The Aviator, Blanchett gives her first misguided performance, another sign that Oscar too often rewards flamboyance over professionalism...
...the larter's struggle to raise a modest S30 million to finance Million Dollar Baby is already Hollywood lore...
...In each instance the audience—Hughes' uncomprehending entourage—gains little insight into his character...
...he behaves like a patrician wasp when surrounded by his wealthy white neighbors, but in the presence of his foes waves a gun and parodies the black gangster obligatory in mob films...
...Like many fine directors, he has held on to the same crew from movie to movie, and with phenomenal results: Even his weaker pieces are stunning to watch...
...She exaggerates Hepburn's long strides, playing up her New England horsiness while missing the girlish mischievousness inside that shell...
...But after she explains she has been targeting the men who raped her and her sister some years earlier, he lets her go and pins the murders on someone else...
...Yet in 2003 pundits barely peeped about the grieving father in Mystic River experiencing something close to redemption after shooting the old friend he wrongly suspected of murdering his daughter...
...The movie feels like a two-hour commercial...
...These include Vince Vaughn at his least restrained as one of Keitel's underlings, a white man trying to act black...
...The efforts Blanchett makes to embody this difficult character are fatally obvious, and it becomes impossible for the viewer to suspend disbelief...
...Scorsese does better with intimate scenes exploring Hughes' neuroses...
...Toward the end, our hero discovers the serial killer he has been chasing is the icy blonde who has been sharing his bed...
...A former child star who still comes across as boyish on screen, DiCaprio strains even more visibly than his costar and proves too small to play someone larger than life...
...Million Dollar Baby so impressed me (see "On Screen," NL, January/February) that I was moved to review its director's career...
...His more recent attempts to combine the psychological complexities of film noir with Sam Peckinpah's style of violence and the epic sweep of David Lean have generated hollow experiences like Gangs of New York (2002) and the current release...
...Travolta reprises his role as Chili Palmer, the criminal turned Hollywood producer...
...The spectacle aspect of The Aviator is the best thing about it...
...His laudable impulse to stretch his talent into new territory has of late yielded middling results...
...His performance misses the warmth and ease central to Charles charisma and registers as caricature, a feeble tribute to a legend...
...Had Scorsese abandoned razzledazzle and cast hungry actors, though, instead of stars like DiCaprio (who, alas, is slated to play the lead in his next project), he might have dealt more intensively with a briefer period of his subject's life...
...The former's big ambitions and weightier name allow him carte blanche to make any film he pleases...
...Grand sequences in bars and clubs are noisy and energetic to the point of seeming cartoonish...
Vol. 88 • March 2005 • No. 2
