DVD Review | Stories We Tell

Capturing the Polleys

by Thomas Delapa

For critics and serious filmgoers who’ve given up on the Academy Awards, especially after last year's Seth MacFarlane fatuous hosting fiasco, here’s another reason to shrug and say "I told you so": Despite being one of the best and most talked-about documentaries of 2013, Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell was shockingly shut out of the Oscar nominations.

The Canadian actress/director may take cold comfort in the fact that the Oscars have regularly been on the wrong side of cinema history. Leading the nominations for worst Oscar snubs: Alfred Hitchcock (nil directing awards), Francis Ford Coppola for The Godfather (loser to Cabaret’s Bob Fosse), and the snub of all snubs, Orson Welles’ nonpareil Citizen Kane bested by How Green Was My Valley. Vice versa, does anyone outside of Robert Osborne remember the lachrymose Luise Rainer, winner of back-to-back best actress Oscars in the 1930s? And post Y2K, let’s just fugetabout The Departed, the noxious 2006 best picture winner that should be left to sleep with the fishes.

Almost as myopic in Oscar oversights have been the erratic, often obscure choices over the decades in the Best Foreign Film category. Since the Academy only allows one entry per country each year, voters are forced to dole out the nominations in globally “let’s all share” fashion, not so unlike ribbons handed out to all the kiddies on Field Day. While films from major directors like Jean-Luc Godard, Robert Bresson and Japan's Yasujiro Ozu have never been nominated, most of the nominees—and more than a few winners— have faded out in movie memory. 

Polley can also take some solace in her own award for Best Canadian Film (and the $100,000 prize that went with it), while U.S. audiences can now see her extraordinary narrative recounted on DVD. In our era of one-sided, deceptively manipulated “docu-fictions,” Polley lyrically reconstructs (and deconstructs) an extremely personal story, generously bringing in a kaleidoscope of disparate, sometimes contradictory viewpoints.

In a near oedipal odyssey, Polley documents her search to uncover a maternal secret that lay hidden in her family's closet for 28 years. The main character in the mystery is Polley’s mother Diane, a onetime Toronto casting director and actress. While not literally present to tell her own story, Polley mere nostalgically appears in a series of glowing home movies (some actually recreated). At the other end of the Freudian spectrum is Polley’s dad Michael, a British-born actor who settled in Toronto in the 1950s to marry and raise a family.

A la Charles Foster Kane, the life of Diane Polley is reconstructed, in jigsaw-puzzle fashion, by those who knew her best as well as by those only on the family’s borders. Vivacious and rebellious, Diane was a woman before her time, unhappy with the rigid roles of middle-class marriage and family, yet also, by most accounts, a loving if mercurial wife and mother.

A clever raconteur, Polley reveals key facts of her chronicle in measured doses, never letting us know too much of this remarkable, often touching saga at once. A 3-D puzzle of sorts (without those silly glasses), the film is skillfully glued together with a complex array of stylistic devices, from competing voice-overs (one from a prepared script read by Michael Polley) and disjunctive dubbed dialogue to standard talking-heads interviews, punctuated with lingering close-ups that speak volumes.

Polley is also smart enough to realize that “truth” is often, um, relative, particularly when people have something to gain or hide—Rashomon told us that. But in this meta-home movie that continually examines its own assumptions (sometimes to a fault), Polley unveils not simply the small story of one woman’s family secret, but by extension poignantly leads us to bigger, roomier stories about marriage, motherhood, love and life itself.  

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2/4/14

Film Review | The Iron Lady

Rust Never Streeps

by Thomas Delapa


Don’t stop the presses: “Meryl Streep nominated for Oscar!”

You can look it up. Hollywood’s most famous female impersonator has garnered a record 17 Academy Award acting nominations, bringing home the gold once for Best Actress. The movies’ big-name answer to Rich Little, Streep is again favored to win for her flashy but tin-plated performance as Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady.

The Vassar-educated empress has no new clothes, but don’t tell that to British Film Academy voters, who—hear, hear—bowed down before Streep and crowned her with their own best actress award. The only way to keep Streep from winning another Oscar might be to cast her in the Tower of London.

With all the sterling huzzahs for Streep, you’ll only hear a few murmurs of dissent from the critical backbench. As England’s formidable Tory Prime Minister who reigned from 1979 to 1990, Streep regales us with a prime example of her clinical acting style that stays firmly on the outside of her semi-regal subject. Her Thatcher is a stew of Julia Child and Mrs. Doubtfire, less a recipe for success than a bland biopic plate of bangers and mash.

Given Streep’s queen-bee status, one could hardly expect her frothy Mamma Mia! director, Phyllida Lloyd, to limit the star’s quasi-despotic power to rule. The brittle script, by Abi Morgan, sketches out Thatcher’s life and career from the 1940s to her precipitous mental decline in the last decade, but the focus is clearly on Streep’s mannered magic act, not Maggie’s momentous life as England’s first female prime minister.

For Streep, the eyes have it, unfortunately. Her method is to cock her head, stare sternly ahead (frequently right at the camera) and impeccably deliver her feisty, high-toned lines. That may be good enough for Madam Tussauds wax museum, but on film it drips with chilly artifice. There’s nothing behind those steely eyes, certainly no heart, except for a laser-guided aim for acting trophies.

Yes, audiences will learn about Maggie’s pearl-clad race to the top of the Parliamentary heap, accessorized by her doting husband, Denis Thatcher (Jim Broadbent). While the film presents Thatcher as a strong-willed woman struggling against one of the most entrenched of British male bastions (“I cannot die washing a teacup!”), she also is portrayed as an imperious figure who alienated and humiliated even her most trusted advisors. Lloyd and Morgan make scant attempt to dig into the historical background, except to drop in chintzy newsreel footage of the era, from labor riots to the short-lived 1982 Falklands War that was to Thatcher what the picayune Grenada invasion was to her conservative White House counterpart, Ronald Reagan.

Had, say, Judi Dench or Helen Mirren been elected for this plum part (if only), I doubt the press and the public would have acted like such peons as they’ve done for Meryl the Great. In The Queen, Mirren submerged herself in the role of Elizabeth II; Streep steadfastly clings to the surface for dear life, risking nothing, fabricating her performance with a cabinet of tics and mannerisms. Attention getting, to be sure, but a near-royal bore.

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2/17/12

Oscars on Second Thought: Back to Five Best-Pictures Nominees

By Steven Rosen
(From Cincinnati CityBeat 3-10-2010)

Here’s an early prediction on the Best Pictures nominees for next year’s Academy Awards: There will only be five.

The great experiment in “widening the playing field” — expanding the number of nominees to 10 this year — turned out to be a complete dud. It dragged down the three-plus-hour telecast. At times, when clips of the nominated films were introduced, it felt like a surreal intrusion on the plain hard truths of Oscars.

For instance, I liked District 9, a visceral science-fiction film/political parable about extraterrestrials confined by force to a South African slum. But the clip shown of monsters kicking earthling butt (and vice versa) made it clear this isn't the kind of film the Oscars are about. Not unless James Cameron directed it, and there was already one of his films in the running. It was embarrassing to watch everyone in attendance pretend to take the nomination seriously.

By the same token, the introduction of hopeless Best Picture nominee Up came after it had already won an Oscar for Best Animated Feature. Everyone knew that was as good as it was going to get for the Pixar film. The pretension of it being a bona fide Best Picture nominee was anticlimactic. And boring.

For the record, the 10 nominees were: winner The Hurt Locker, Avatar, Up in the Air, Precious: Based on a the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire, Inglourious Basterds, The Blind Side, An Education, Up, District 9 and A Serious Man.

But anyone interested enough in the Oscars to get as far as Sunday knew there were only five legitimate nominees — the Final Five, the ones that had also been nominated for Best Director — the first five in the paragraph above. Those two categories correlate so highly that expanding the nominees in one but not the other was doomed to be perceived as insincere. And the Academy’s director members, who nominate the Best Director candidates, would never have stood for their very important award to be watered down with 10 nominees.

Really, the Academy was fighting the Information Age in pretending it could sell the American public on the 10-nominee Best Picture category. Back when the Academy last had 10 nominees, from 1936 through 1943, the category was still in its formative years — the Oscars only started in 1927-28.

In this era of cable television and the Internet, the Oscars have been thoroughly demystified. We're all insiders. Nobody views them as High Artistic Pronouncements anymore.

Instead they're the result of a political-like campaigning process that we can watch evolve and develop. They are more like Congress than the Supreme Court.

Cable networks show important precursors like the Screen Actors Guild awards; the Internet lets us know on an hourly basis which nominees are gaining or losing traction. It’s hard enough for the Academy to maintain public interest in five serious nominees these days, so well informed is the public on the frontrunners by the time Oscar night comes around.

So rather than increasing Oscar-night excitement, having to sit through a telecast that treats films like An Education or A Serious Man as legitimate Best Picture nominees decreases it. Everyone knows these are films that, for whatever reason, weren’t able to make the real cut.

So why did the Academy do this? I like the term that Los Angeles Times television critic Mary McNamara used in criticizing the telecast: a “crisis in confidence.” Broadcast television has been fretting about the loss of a mass audience in this age of new media sources. In particular, it’s worried young people don’t have the reverence that Boomers had for the big awards shows — they’d rather text message or whatever.

Not helping things is that Academy voters have become more sophisticated in their tastes in nominated films, choosing auteurist indie productions with dark, troubling themes that aren’t really meant to be $100 million-plus blockbusters. The 2008 telecast, when the Best Picture competition primarily was between two such dark films, No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood, drew an all-time low of 32 million viewers, according to Variety. (The 1998 one, riding high on Cameron’s Titanic, drew 55 million.)

The idea of 10 Best Picture nominees, then, was a way to get some of the better popcorn movies — including an animated film and a feel-good populist hit or two — into the running. I’m sure the Academy also wished films like Star Trek or The Hangover would get in there. (It can’t control the actual nominations, which are voted on by its membership.)

The greatest irony, ultimately, is the Academy didn’t even need to embarrass itself. The balance issue took care of itself in the Top Five this year.

Cameron’s Avatar, his first feature since Titanic, became the biggest film of all time, revitalizing the 3-D process. Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds was also a sizeable hit, a fantastical war movie with enough violence to satisfy action fans as well as art-house-level dialogue. The Final Five’s three other titles all had some degree of contemporary relevancy both on and off screen — winner The Hurt Locker, also a pretty riveting war film, had a female director, Kathryn Bigalow, aiming to become the first woman ever to direct a Best Picture.

Early indications are the Oscars attracted an audience of 41 million, according to Reuters the biggest audience in five years. It’s safe to say the balance and appeal of the real nominees were the reason. People watched despite the time taken up with the Bogus Five.