My greatest goal in life is to win an Oscar for Best Picture. In the mean time, lets take a look at why this year's best picture nods matter.
Atonement - This picture asks, can fiction save one's soul? This is an important question as mass market fiction becomes the elegiac touchstone of our collective lives. Stories have always helped to guide people through the collective fog of human experience, but usually religion has had a monopoly on the truth that lie in telling tells. As Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and philosophers of their ilk gain traction in the public conscience, we risk loosing the power of fiction to explain the human condition. But is fiction really that powerful/necessary or is it a poor substitute for careful scientific observation?
Weighty stuff, but Atonement, based of the Ian McEwen book of the same name, uses a simple story to test fiction's mettle. A young girl, Briony Tallis (Saoirse Ronan in an Oscar Nominated performance), deliberately gives a fictitious account of the assault of another young girl. In so doing she sends an innocent young man, Robbie Turner (James McAvoy), to jail and deprives her older sister, Cecilia (Kira Knightly) of his love. In the ensuing years, these three characters are thrown into the harsh realities of WWII. In the climax of the plot, the little girl has grown up and is confronted by her sister and the man she sent to jail.
Several critics have criticizes the movie for losing focus in the second half. I would suggest that the film makers are merely building their case for the clarity of fiction over the jumble of raw fact. The first half of the movie hums with an electric pace that is propelled forward by crisp dialogue and constant expositional character development. The second half lurches forward at an uneven pace, bogged down by static dialogue, and wild leaps in characterizations. The first half represents the kind of order fiction provides in helping us assign meaning to human actions, while the second half examines how the haphazardness of real life makes meaning difficult to pin down.
Now before you balk at the obtuse metaness of that argument consider the film's closing sequence. The little girl from the being of the story is now an old woman being interviewed about the story we just saw. This kind of narrative stunt suggests that the film makers expect us to take a step back and examine the picture on a higher level. That's why this film matters, and that's why it's best picture nod is well deserved.
Juno - The film explores the ebb and flow of gender roles in today's society. Juno (brilliantly portrayed by Oscar nominee Ellen Page), is an eccentric 16 year-old from Minnesota who unexpectedly gets pregnant and then decides to keep the baby and put it up for adoption. On the surface this seems like a pro-life polemic that says, "See, there's no need to have a choice." Not so fast pro-lifers. She ends up giving the baby to a recently divorced single mother. How's that for woman power? Juno is all set to have an abortion, but when she gets to the clinic she's realize that choice slices both ways. She knows that she doesn't want this baby, but she's empowered enough to take it to term and put it up for adoption where she sees fit. This film is really a celebration of the choice movement.
You can't talk about the choice movement without conjuring up ideas of gender equality. Juno is an autonomous woman who is in charge of her own destiny. Unlike most teen sex comedies, the woman initiates sex and the movie explores how pregnancy affects men. The movie asks a question that pro-choicers need to think about. What role do men in a pregnancy? If woman are self-sufficient automatons, do they need men?
The film makes a strong case for keeping us Y's around for a little while longer. Juno's father raises her when her mom leaves the family. Bleaker (played by Michael Cera) , her baby's bio dad, loves her more than anything in the world. These relationships point to the partnership qualities of male/female relationships that can enrich human experience. And that's why this movie matters.
Michael Clayton - This film examines what happens when people are reduced to a corporate function. In the opening sense, Michael Clayton (Played by George Clooney who gets an Oscar nod for it) explains to a hysterical client that he is not miracle worker, but a janitor. Wow. After $150,000 of law school training, a growling career in public law and several years as an attorney at a major law firm, he feels like an unskilled worker who does his jobs in the shadows, after hours, because the work he does is dirty and shouldn't see the light of day.
Everyone in this picture is doing someone else's dirty work. The plot centers around a class action lawsuit against an Agro-giant who has poisoned an entire community by letting a carcinogenic pesticide sep into the water supply. Tilda Swinton puts in an Oscar nominated performance as Karen Crowder a recently minted General Counsel whose current responsibilities include doing whatever it takes to save the agriculture company she works for from paying out in the suit. The ever brilliant Tom Wilkinson gains a nod for playing Arthur Edens, a corporate attorney who has an apparent breakdown because he realizes that he has logged 30,000 hours defending the corporate greed and corruption that lead to the sickness and death of innocents. But as the movie takes a look at Michael Clayton's life, a recovering gamblholic, in debt to a loan shark (who likes Michael but who has to collect on behalf of his employers) for a botched restaurant deal, prevented from doing the court room work that he loves, and charged with betraying his only friend for the good of his company, you get the sense that Arthur has finally gained his sanity.
The movie's characters are constantly asked to set aside their morality to advance corporate interests. And while to money's nice, the movie suggests that a life exchanged for money and power is not worth living. And that's why this movie matters.
No Country for Old Men - In this film, the classic mano y mano western trope is stretched to its limits as the old west gives way to the new west. The Coen Brothers (Nominated for Director, Adaptation, and Best Picture) present Cormac McCarthey's bleak story about the march of progress. The pivotal character is Anton Chigurh, (played by Javier Bardem in an Oscar nominated performance) a psychopathic hit man sent to retrieve the money from a botched drug deal. Llewelyn Moss (played by Josh Brolin) is out shooting at some food in rural Texas when he comes across the grizzly scene of the botched drug deal. He finds the money and the chase begins.
The simple chase plot is secondary to the greater issue of seismic societal shifts. The story is anchored by the elderly Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (played be Tommy Lee Jones) whose father and father's father served as Sheriff in this rural Texas county. There are a number of scenes in which he is overwhelmed by the pointless violence and mayhem caused by Chigurh. At the end of the ordeal he retires because he feels that he's no longer fit to work in a world that no longer funtions by any rule he can recognize. But the movie makes the point that just because the out comes are unfamiliar, it doesn't mean that the underlying structure of society has changed.
Stephen Hunter of the Washington Post wrote one of the few unfavorable reviews of the movie, pointing out that the ironic ending to the chase plot robbed the viewer of the text book western movie ending that people pay for. He has a point. There isn't the classic high noon show down between good and evil where two men square off and the good guy wins thanks to grit and determination. Instead, as is the case in our day, corporate interest, and a guy behind a desk hundreds of miles away, steps in and exacts a cheaper more effective, yet un-poetic ending. The viewer is rewarded because the corporate tool is dealt with by Chigurh in a twisted "good" vs. "evil" showdown that does remotely align with viewer expectations. This movie shows that although the west has been civilized there is still a barbaric code that thrives out there and in men's hearts. This movie shows that the more things change the easier it is to find the unchangeable building blocks of human nature. And that's why this movie matters.
There Will Be Blood - This movie explores the nightmareish qualities of the American Dream. Daniel Day-Lewis earns another Oscar nod for his portrayal of turn-of-the-20th-century oil man Daniel Plainview. Plainview is an oil prospector who has survived a number of mining accidents, adopted an orphan and who is looking for his big break. That break walks into the door one night in the form of a cleaver young man named Paul who sells him the story of his home town, a place where the ground is actually soaked with oil.
This sets up an interesting look at the power struggle that still has the Republican party at odds with itself till this very day. On the one hand you have Plainview (the great American company) offering widespread prosperity through economic stability and basic infrastructure. Both the stability and the infrastructure come from Plainview’s exclusive right to drill the town's land for oil. This seems like a good deal, except that the enrichment of the community is a secondary goal to the personal wealth and power Plainview seeks.
Luckily, or so it would seem, the soul of the town is being cared for by Eli Sunday (Paul's twin brother, both played exquisitely by an actor to watch Paul Dano) a zealous preacher on a mission to build his church. Like many Christian Evangelical denominations, The Church of the Third Revelation offers eternal salvation in exchange for allegiance to it's doctrine and a weekly tithe. Again we have a mismatch; the enrichment of the soul seems secondary to the personal wealth and power that Eli seeks.
What the film suggests is that the power and wealth grabbing nature of business and religion both rely on people willingly giving themselves up. In this world, and in ours, business and religion team up to make the selling of ones soul and goods seem like a necessity for a successful life. But even as they work together, their greed propels them towards facing off against each other and this showdown is for the possession of everything.
In the heart-stopping last scene of the film Plainview, as the personification of unbridled capitalism, has spiraled into madness brought on by the utter meaninglessness of his life's endeavors, faces Eli, the personification of unbridled religious power, and the film is unambiguous as to which side of this argument will ultimately "win." The movie declares no winners at the end of this film because it believes that the entanglement of business and religion is a poisons relationship that destroys human decency, and bares a poisonous fruit that kills faith. And that's why this movie matters.
