“Deep Vote,” an Oscar winning screenwriter and a member of the Academy, will write this column — exclusively for ScottFeinberg.com — every week until the Academy Awards. He will help to peel back the curtain on the Oscar voting process by sharing his thoughts about the films he sees and, ultimately, his nomination and final ballots, as well. His identity must be protected in order to spare him from repercussions for disclosing the aforementioned information.
Thus far, he has shared his thoughts in column one about his general preferences; column two about “Winter’s Bone” (Roadside Attractions, 6/11, R, trailer) and “Solitary Man” (Anchor Bay Films, 5/21, R, trailer); column three about “Alice in Wonderland” (Disney, 3/5, PG, trailer), “Toy Story 3” (Disney, 6/18, G, trailer), and “Mother and Child” (Sony Pictures Classics, 5/7, R, trailer); column four about “Get Low” (Sony Pictures Classics, 7/30, PG-13, trailer), “The Kids Are All Right” (Focus Features, 7/9, R, trailer), and “The Social Network” (Columbia, 10/1, PG-13, trailer); column five about “127 Hours” (Fox Searchlight, 11/5, R, trailer), “Biutiful” (Roadside Attractions, 12/17, R, trailer), and “Shutter Island” (Paramount, 2/19, R, trailer); column six about “Inception” (Warner Brothers, 7/16, PG-13, trailer), “Made in Dagenham” (Sony Pictures Classics, 11/19, R, trailer), and “Somewhere” (Focus Features, 12/22, R, trailer); and column seven about “Another Year” (Sony Pictures Classics, 12/29, PG-13, trailer), “Fair Game” (Summit, 11/5, PG-13, trailer), and “Rabbit Hole” (Lionsgate, 12/17, PG-13, trailer).
This week, he assesses three more awards hopefuls: “Blue Valentine” (The Weinstein Company, 12/29, R, trailer), “The Fighter” (Paramount, 12/10, R, trailer), and “True Grit” (Paramount, 12/22, PG-13, trailer)…
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The trouble that the two lovers in “Blue Valentine” go through remains with me. I know I cannot entirely pin it down, and there are parts of it that are unclear to me, but what I saw was brilliantly realized, and I hope the reader will subject herself or himself to this same trouble. It is a trouble that should not be missed.
Even from the opening passages, I thought, here is small and personal movie with no talking heads, no explaining voice-over, which tells a movie story the way it should be told, through scenes and visualization and inspired, believable, transcendent dialogue, with two young fascinating and complicated actors and the story of their meeting, their growing love, and the aftermath, the failure of that love.
Making a movie like this is hard, intensive work, and involved an unusual partnership between the two stars and the director, which extended into the way the scenes took shape, so that most of them, covering key moments over a period of six years, seem natural and expressive of where each character is, emotionally, through some exciting and soon enough, trying events. Each scene has a freshness to it, a surprise, an edge of challenge for the characters that cannot be anticipated, and leaves one wondering what’s coming next, and more, what’s happening, and how they will respond to it. One likes them when they meet; one has hope for them and their ingenuity, their freedom and independence — and yet fear that they don’t quite, can’t quite see… as who can?
The viewer cannot see what’s coming either, despite the advantage of flash-forwards and flash-backs. The scenes hang together and tell a story, but that story does not explain itself. It is not complete until the viewer puts it together in his/her own mind, in that sense like other love stories in life as we know it, except that in this story, we have the advantage of seeing the most intimate moments when love is born.
Here I must admit that, the first time through, I was wrong about some key parts of what I was seeing. I am usually against films that have to be seen twice, but when I saw “Blue Valentine” the second time it was worth seeing in a different way, the way it means to be seen. And also I could see the large ways in which I made wrong assumptions, and the small omissions and confusions which led me to make some of them.
Part of the trouble lies in the excessive use of flashbacks and flashforwards. I can’t deny I was kept alert, but it seemed excessive, and too often I was thinking about where I was in the film, and not being sure. One problem is that Michelle Williams goes from 17 to 23 (?) without changing much in her willowy, shy, youthful beauty — she has the kind of ageless face that will avoid the viewer, then break into a stunning smile, yet all the same, show inner doubts and amusements — but Ryan Gosling changes drastically. In his first scenes, as a wandering musician and furniture mover, he has blondish, thinning hair, a young man’s beard (mostly stubble), and a sly, hopeful face. Soon enough, at the end of his courtship, his beard is pointed and formal, his face more manly and set. Then, five years later, his hair is much receded and a shade darker, his beard different and darker, his skin darker, his mustache clipped, his mouth sour, and his whole manner of speaking changed from light and clever to aggrieved, haranguing, provoking. Meanwhile, Williams shows only the smallest trifle of what one day will be jowls. What happened in between to crush this man’s spirit, to make him, as we soon learn, an alcoholic? This is the film’s great omission. One could think of it as a mystery; it’s not unlike other mysteries which change people in marriage. But his wit, grace and humor are totally gone.
There is some slip-up between the film editor and the set designer, of whom much is asked. Obviously costuming is important — it is the key to how old Williams is — but sometimes at conflict with where she is. One learns that she is finishing high school (with dreams to go away to medical school), but the atmosphere of her school and her older classmates are not high-schoolish at all; they seem more like a community college where she might be going part-time after or before marriage, especially since we are flashing back from scenes near the end. I had similar trouble with the boyfriend who impregnates her. He appears first in a brief chance encounter at a liquor store, years after she has had the child he doesn’t know about, while her husband waits outside and later interrogates her. Then we see him briefly as a wrestler, and trying to get sexual with her as she tries to keep her assignment to remain a paraplegic all day in a wheelchair (not usual for a high school). We get a glimpse of him in class, then having intercourse with her from behind, after which she becomes upset and terminates the relationship because he does not pull out. But the director, Derek Cianfrance, is expert in his use of close angles and does not give us more direct looks at his face, and this, too, leads to confusion as the story jumps back and forth.
A key scene occurs on a near-empty bus, where Gosling spots Williams. He’s been brooding ever since he first saw her at an old folks’ home where we’ve seen scenes of her tenderly caring for her grandmother (not without her face breaking into amusement while reading aloud an overheated falling-in-sex scene from a romance novel), and where Gosling happened to be setting up a room for an old man he moved in across the hall. (Both are kind people, we see.) He asks if he can sit next to her, since there’s nowhere else to sit (a joke), and she nods acquiescence with no smile (she is a girl too used to acquiescing). There begins a remarkable conversation.
He reminds her where they met, and learns that the old has since died. Why not, Williams says, he was very old. What choice was there? No, Gosling says, he is not getting old; the old man was “a sucker” for dying. “Are you gonna die?” he asks her, not unaware of what he’s asking. “Definitely,” she replies, showing a certain realism that is a precursor of their fate together. Not me, he says, I’m just not gonna get older — though he does, quickly and spectacularly.
“In my experience,” he says, “the prettier a girl is, the nuttier she is, which would make you insane!” He is referring to the great problem of her life, the attention from men and their demands of her, but his example is that she will not know if she’s funny when she tells a joke. “That’s a compliment and an insult at the same time,” she says, but goes along with testing out his theory. She tells a story she thinks is funny about a child molester, half-supressing her amusement to find herself telling it. It’s not funny at all — it’s appalling — and perhaps one clue that she’s a high school girl, not in college. Gosling responds with offhand virtuosity, making it clear he’s laughing at the unfunniness of the joke, not its funniness, and each of them has revealed a part of their youthful naivete. He later remarks, “Girls who look like you don’t go to medical school,” and, in the context of her confusion over men and her small town family, he’s absolutely right — but that does not mean he has a sense of larger realities.
In a subsequent scene, we see them wandering downtown, him playing his ukelele and singing, in what has to be, he explains, a fake quavery voice, “You always hurt the one you love,” while she half-dances for him in the doorway of a closed downtown store. This scene stands in memory like a Christmas: they are already in love, but nothing has happened yet.
What happens is that she discovers she’s pregnant — by the shadowy boyfriend she has jilted after the pulling-out — and she is in despair. He threatens to throw himself off the Manhattan Bridge (why they are there, no one knows) unless she tells him what’s bothering her; she does, and he then, at her wish, he accompanies and waits for her at an abortion clinic. Mid-abortion, she decides she cannot go through with it, and reunites with him in the waiting room. As they take the bus home he holds her and says, “Let’s be a family,” leading to a scene of supremely innocent love, saved for almost the end of the picture.
The movie begins, however, at the end, where Gosling and Williams live in a old country house with a lively little girl constantly being incited by her father against her mother. She works as an assistant to a doctor. He works as a freelance house painter, who feels “privileged” to get drunk before eight in the morning, and who says he lives for his wife and his child. He didn’t seek that, he says, but it turned out that way and he loves them. Now why doesn’t she love him? Hard to say, but he is on her case constantly, and she does her duty but has no smiles for him.
Their dog has been run over. “How many times have I told you,” he tells her, “not to leave the gate open,” though he could have fixed up a spring gate if he cared so much for the dog, as his prolonged grief now proclaims. He insists that the little girl be left with her grandfather and they go away for the night — to a flashy “sex motel” three hours from where she must drive to begin her workday early the following morning. He is mysteriously not the sensitive guy we once knew, but we don’t know it yet.
The motel turns out to be tacky beyond description, and they need the gallon of cheap wine plus the joints he has brought to survive the night there, but they don’t anyway. What happens here is the prolonged sex/denial of sex scene that nearly lost the movie its rating but is certainly not done for the sake of titillation.
The flashbacks have begun. And in the morning, while he is still asleep, she takes the car and leaves him a note to take a bus home. Still drunk, he follows her and causes a shameful, devastating scene at the doctor’s office. And the movie has begun, soon to introduce a much younger, wittier and happier man making brilliant advances on a bus.
No wonder I was confused. No wonder I was rewarded… as I hope you will be too, dear reader. And yes, I’d nominate both stars and the semi-improvised script for awards, and the picture for best picture. Not quite the director, since I have to hold someone responsible for the confusion in structure and location which made the film just a little harder to get at. But worth it, believe me, worth it all the same… and bothering me still.
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A funny thing happened while I was watching “The Fighter.” Just as I was getting involved in the characters and caring about whose cause won, the whole scene changed into something else.
We are introduced to the brothers Micky Ward and Dicky Eklund as they are walking through Lowell, Massachusetts, a run-down working-class town abandoned by the mill industry in another century. They are strutting — well, mostly the wild and crazy older brother Dicky (Christian Bale) is strutting — for cameras which are recording Dicky’s story as a tragedy of crack addiction, only Dicky sees it as publicity for his “comeback” as a fighter. He was once a promising light welterweight, locally famous for once having knocked down Sugar Ray Leonard, but his best days are long behind him and he now helps train his younger brother, Micky (Mark Wahlberg), who is the only one with a career going, and he has lost his last four fights.. There is a painful scene later where Dicky runs into Leonard, and though it’s not clear Leonard recognizes him, Dicky is undaunted by this or anything! He is operating so entirely within a blown mind all his own that its not clear whether his boxing instruction is genius or crack; he truly floats like a butterfly and hits like a hummingbird — and never stops talking. In fact, never lets the slower and semi-confused Micky get in a word.
Dickey is supposed to be training Micky for his next fight, but he can’t manage to leave the crack house where he lives before noon. Micky’s manager, alas, is, as always, his tough mother Alice (Melissa Leo, who’s never played a role like this before, pulling out sentimentality full-stop in the service of total control and manipulation), with her seven grown, unmarried daughters trailing her everywhere. Her sons’ boxing careers are her life, but it’s not clear she knows anything about boxers or how to manage them. And the cameras are catching the whole parade.
When he gets to the fight, Micky finds his opponent is ill, but he can get the purse if he will fight a substitute who is twenty pounds heavier but supposedly out-of-shape. He hesitates, but his avaricious mother and stoned brother seem to think it’s no problem, so he goes in — and takes a pounding. Afterwards, Micky gets an offer from another manager to sign with him and train in Las Vegas, away from his toxic family, but Mickey, though past 25 and angry that he’s been betrayed, can’t pull the string on his family. He’d rather retire.
It’s a problem for the movie that Mickey never moves beyond this passivity in relation to his family. The most active thing he does on his own is to woo Charlene (Amy Adams, the great revelation of the movie), a tough, sexy bargirl who’s kicked around a bit too long but is tough as nails, and even then she has to bang on his door after he fails to call her for a promised date because he is embarassed about his beating.
Bale, camping and jiving on a full load of crack, tries in his perpetual bravado to raise the money for his brother’s training by robbing tricks with the aid of streetwalkers he knows. Inevitably, he’s salted away in the state pen, leading to a great scene where the documentary is shown. Dicky sits up front, the better to lead the prisoners in cheers for his boxing, but then causes a commotion when he tries to switch off the set after it becomes apparent that the movie is really about crack.
Dicky’s imprisonment gives Charlene a chance to defy the mother and sisters and re-start Micky with a legitimate trainer and manager. He wins a string of fights and earns a title bout — but then Dicky comes out of prison, expecting to step right back in. This conflict really should come near the end of the movie, as it seems like Micky’s chance to claim his own manhood from his dysfunctional family. But Micky feels he can’t fight without strategy from Dicky in his corner, and, lo and behold, after a short standoff, the air is let out of the fight between Dicky and Charlene, and they all go to London for the bout, and a new movie begins.
Micky does not become any more independent, and the strategy by which he wins — via Dicky, truly enough — is so far-out that I doubt old boxing footage would fully substantiate it. Call it a version of rope-a-dope, without Muhammad Ali’s dangerous and unpredictable flurries. Anyway, the ending is now shifted to something more along the lines of family soap-opera, which is how the print-over tells us it really worked out, with Micky marrying Charlene and retiring on his boxing winnings in Lowell, in the midst of his family, now presumably the toast of the town.
Yes, I know, it will be said that “Rocky” is just as corny, and it is. But “Rocky” had a stand-up figure at the center, and a clearly-defined rooting interest, and a more dramatic fight, even though — or perhaps because — it was fictional, with a man’s soul on the line the whole way through.
The only Oscar I could support would be for Adams, whom one feels constantly screwing herself to fighting pitch to take on forces larger than she is. Bale will probably be pushed hard for an award, but he seems too deliberately calculating in his craziness, and so his performance does not transcend his role. When he enters the scene, one isn’t glad to see him. Nor is one glad to see the hero of the piece: Wahlberg is all too neutral, like a referee, when what this picture cries for is a hero.
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For reasons both mysterious and obvious, the Coen brothers have re-made “True Grit,” a movie which won John Wayne his Oscar for the Rooster Cogburn role in 1969. Mysterious, because the 1969 version was a fine and popular movie, directed by Henry Hathaway, with many good lines from the off-beat Western novel of the year before by Charles Portis. Obvious, because the story, that of a hard boiled 14-year-old girl who is able to bargain with adults, hold her own, and track down the murderer of her father, is a parable of vengeance in the Old West, and one which does not in all respects follow the usual triumph-of-virtue of the American Western, a Coen interest in more than one film.
The classic “True Grit” is familiar to many Americans via TV, so there is a tendency to compare performance. Wayne went out of character as a nasty middle-aged one-eyed fat man and boarding-house drunk, yet the meanest bounty-hunter in Arkansas, and obviously had a ball, breaking his ill-temper at just the right moments to defend the young lady and show dramatic courage in the end, charging rival gunmen from pride and fury yet with a steady hand, with just a little wink at his young comrade who, though distrusted at first, shows the same “True Grit” at he does himself.
His role is without the wink in the Coen Brothers version, where everything is done with meticulous attention to the original novel and its dialogue, and no romantic frippery. The superb Jeff Bridges manages to give us a Rooster Cogburn who is even meaner, scabbier and more sour, but comes through in the clutch all the same. The difference lies in a plethora of subtleties and a refusal to take the path of charming quaintness — but movies being movies, and this one is still a romance when all is said and done (and not in the tradition of realism like “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky”), Wayne’s little bit of extra charm was more fun.
Likewise the young lady, Hailee Steinfeld, is truly the age she is acting, and carries off the job with aplomb. I found her face a bit fleshy and expressionless, but it could also be regarded as perfect for the character, and is certainly no distraction.
In the original film version, she is played by the older Kim Darby, and there is a hint of a romance with the hapless Texas Ranger who wants to bring the killer back to Texas for the reward, which Our Girl in this version will hear none of. In any case, Rooster shows up the silly Texas Ranger without half trying, and the adequate performance by Matt Damon is mostly forgettable. In fact, most of the second half of the movie is forgettable, because the rivalry between Rooster and the Ranger is a foregone conclusion, and so is getting their man.
To me, the Coens overrate the importance of their big idea that murder is mostly an arbitrary event out on the big, empty plane of the American west — but this idea suits well with this particular novel, and there are a number of choice moments to bring it in, which they do more naturally than, say, they do with the psychopathic killer in “No Country for Old Men,” for whose sake the movie abandons the fates of its more sympathetic characters, and places some importance on his choosing to kill on the flipping of a coin, a moment that was hair-raisingly done but dramatically unsatisfying, (though the movie was hyped as “original” and its abandoned plot as a technical advance, and so it got a number of undeserved Oscars).
I think this year’s “True Grit” is a better picture than “No Country for Old Men” — and, for perspective, I think “Fargo,” with the always-magnetic Frances McDormand, is the Coens’ best — but this is a case where the better picture fails to move me. Perhaps it’s the feeling that the Coens’ are carefully redoing a novel that has been done before. It does not often escape into spontaneity, for all its competence.
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Photo: Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams in “Blue Valentine.” Credit: The Weinstein Company.