Oscars rehash: ’99, Year of Queens, Wars
Shakespeare in Love: To watch again or not to watch again?Steven Spielberg has an unfortunate habit. I admit that I might be the only person who holds this opinion. My wife and old pal Cookie have humored me when I make this argument, but I presume it is merely because I seem like a deranged lunatic when expressing just how angry the final two minutes of Saving Private Ryan made me.
Spielberg handles the fictional dream like few artists in any discipline. Writing guru John Gardner defined it in terms for the written word, describing it as a state of inspiration that allows a writer to not so much create things for characters to do but create characters who naturally do things. When executed well, stories flow easily from writer to reader and seem more real. This holds true in film, as well, and Spielberg is one of the very few artists who is so adept with a camera that any story he tells is engrossing at the time of its telling even if afterward, it seems less substantial -- Hook, Minority Report and The Terminal are good examples of this sort of letdown after the fact. When Spielberg is at his best -- Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Raiders of the Lost Ark, among others -- his stories acquire such a permanence and natural flow that they would exist as nearly as well without the John Williams score for emotional cues. Executed well, the fictional dream removes the teller from the story. Only the quality of the story itself matters, not how it is told. The how simple dissolves.
While this habit of his surfaces to varying degrees in several of his movies, it first really pissed me off with Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan, notably two of his grittier if not grittiest movies (grit in this case being, of course, relative to Spielberg's own work). When Schindler's List came out, I was at an age where I was just beginning to sort the popcorn movies from the arthouse work. Really, I was just learning that the arthouse existed. I liked the popcorn version of Spielberg, but I wasn't sure he belonged in that other world. Certainly E.T. didn't. I resisted Schindler's for a long time, then when I saw it, I was drawn in totally by a movie so unforgivingly like anything else he had ever done, at times so brutal I was cursing him for ever having wasted time with trifles like Hook. Then, in the last minutes, Oskar Schindler's lament -- "I could have gotten one more person . . . and I didn't! And I . . . I didn't!" -- still hovering, the movie suddenly changed. Not a happy ending by any means, but the black and white had given away to color and the survivors -- perhaps trying to confirm Itzhak Stern right when, trying to comfort Schindler, he said, "Whoever saves one life, saves the world entire" -- begin placing stones on Schindler's grave, one after the other, reinforcing again and again and again, that even as a failure he had succeeded. It went on and on, I began thinking, this is so . . . different, not happy, not sad, but such a bold choice by Spielberg, such a . . .
But, like that, poof, the fictional dream (in this case, the non-fictional dream) was gone and I was thinking about the scene, how it was shot, who was behind the camera. Was Spielberg there? A first assistant director? Was someone there telling the people where to put the stones? And if there was a cameraman (obviously, there was) and someone directing the parade of people (almost certainly), did that mean that somewhere off camera there was a craft services truck? It spoiled the moment for me. Instead of weighing Schindler's failure against his successes, as he was at the end of the movie, I was wondering how the movie was made.
Still, I let it pass. It was such a powerful movie, it was such a risk for Spielberg. I let it pass and nearly forgot about it until Saving Private Ryan came around. Again, Spielberg drew me into a movie I wasn't quite expecting. It was violent and loud in the beginning then sank into a long slog of despair and confusion and questionable decisions, a movie that stood as a decent analogy for the war as a whole. The conceit of the movie, loosely based on the real story of a brother who was returned to U.S. during World War II after the presumed death of his brothers, sets up the exploration of a fundamental question of war: how is one life valued over another? It is an impossible question to answer, yet Spielberg creates an engrossing exploration of that question that ends (or, unfortunately, only nearly ends) with Tom Hanks' Capt. Miller instructing Private Ryan to "earn it." That's the question right there, put bluntly, almost too bluntly: Is Private Ryan's life worth Capt. Miller's death? A question that cannot be answered.
Except Spielberg tried to answer it. If he had just left it there, or with Gen. Marhsall's letter to Ryan's mother announcing that he was alive and on his way home. Or even with the image of young Ryan fading to old Ryan at the grave of Capt. Miller. If he had just left it there, that final question would have lingered, just as Schindler's final lament should have. Instead, Spielberg tried to answer it. In two minutes. We see Ryan's children and grandchildren in the background. We see his wife, who tries to comfort him. We hear his apology. But you cannot judge one man's life over another, you cannot judge the worthiness of a life lived, you cannot answer that question with some visual shorthand. Instead of being left haunted by the end of this movie, I left the theater insulted.
So here is Spielberg's unfortunate habit, which probably only really bothers me: Too often, he does not trust his audience with complex ideas despite his gift for bringing people to the point where perhaps these ideas are most easily understood.
What should have won: Back then, my irritation over Saving Private Ryan's ending was so strong, that I rooted for Shakespeare in Love. I saw it, I enjoyed the hell out of it, spent most of the movie thinking fondly of my playwriting classes in college and the pieces by Tom Stoppard we had read back then, left the movie convinced it was the annual small movie I would want to win Best Picture only to be denied, cheered when it won then never watched it again. I have seen it only once and never found myself wanting to see it again, so maybe that suggests I backed the wrong horse that year.
Despite the grudge I continue to hold against Saving Private Ryan, I look on it more favorably now, in large part because of HBO's Band of Brothers, Spielberg's and Hanks' more nuanced look at World War II. But, Ryan doesn't get to win because its mistakes were fixed later by another project.
The Thin Red Line did with World War II what Ryan wouldn't, which is complicate the issue. For that alone, Terrence Malick deserves some sort of award, just not this one.
Now, I prefer the other Elizabethan drama with Geoffrey Rush and Joseph Fiennes. How Cate Blanchett did not win an Oscar for playing Queen Elizabeth but Judi Dench did -- playing her almost as comic relief -- remains a mystery. I didn't see Elizabeth until several years after its release, but if I was going to buy only one of the nominated films on DVD, it would be that. Not sure if that's a good definition for what should have won or not, but it will have to do.
Life is Beautiful was just happy to be nominated.
Better movies that got screwed: Out of Sight. George Clooney finally clicked on the big screen in the beginning of a beautiful friendship with Steven Soderbergh that resulted -- with its twisted family tree of directors, writers and actors that included Scott Frank, Tony Gilroy, Stephen Gaghan, Grant Heslov, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon and, surprise of surprises, Julia Roberts -- in some of the best movies of the next 10 years and turned Clooney into a super-ultra-mega-movie star and reincarnation of Cary Grant. Two scenes: the trunk scene and the bar scene are stunning examples of an old style of onscreen flirting, where the suggestions of sex are far more entertaining the more common, overwrought love scene, usually "acted" by body doubles. The whole movie was kind of a trial run for Ocean's Eleven, with only Clooney and Don Cheadle cool enough to make the cut. Rushmore and The Big Lebowski belong here, too. It was also a great year for movies that, while not exactly Oscar material were completely enjoyable and made on relatively small budgets (or in the case of couple, minuscule budgets) like Rounders, A Bug's Life, Zero Effect, Primary Colors, Pi, Smoke Signals and The Opposite of Sex. And yet Life is Beautiful scored a nomination.
Worst award: Roberto Benigni for Best Actor in Life is Beautiful, hands down, no contest, one of the worst in the history of bad decisions. Granted this was not the best year for actor nominees: Ed Norton in American History X is a really hard performance to embrace because the movie itself is so discomforting; Nick Nolte in Affliction had no chance so soon after from Nicholas Cage's win in Leaving Las Vegas, which is unfortunate; and almost no one saw Ian McKellen in Gods and Monsters. The shame is that Tom Hanks was better in Saving Private Ryan than he was in Forrest Gump, but winning three Oscars in six years is a tough order. An even bigger shame is that Jeff Bridges was not even nominated for The Big Lebowski. You could throw Shakespeare in Love's two acting wins -- Gwyneth Paltrow for Actress and Judi Dench for Supporting Actress -- in here as well. Paltrow was fine, but not even in the same vicinity of the same league as Blanchett or even Emily Watson in Hilary and Jackie. As for Dench, she just wasn't in the movie long enough to earn her award.
