The Weekly Gravy #32

As of the Oscar nominations, I had yet to see to see the following films accounting for the following nominations:

• Sound of Metal (Picture, Actor, Supporting Actor, Original Screenplay, Editing, Sound)
• Another Round (Director, International Film)
• Pieces of a Woman (Actress)
• The United States vs. Billie Holiday (Actress)
• Borat Subsequent Moviefilm (Supporting Actress, Adapted Screenplay)
• Mulan (Costume Design, Visual Effects)
• Soul (Original Score, Sound, Animated Feature)
• Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga (Original Song)
• The Life Ahead (Original Song)
• Greyhound (Sound)
• Love and Monsters (Visual Effects)
• The One and Only Ivan (Visual Effects)

And I’m right now an amazing 0/15 on the three major specialty categories (International Film, Animated Feature, and Documentary Feature). So that’s a lot of films to be watched in the next month. But it can be done. And in fact, I started today, with…

Pieces of a Woman (2020) – ***

When I started watching Pieces of a Woman, I didn’t realize that director Kornél Mundruczó was the man behind the canine-driven saga White God. But given that I wasn’t terribly enamored of that film, my lack of enthusiasm for this one makes even more sense. But then, almost every bit of awards attention the film has received has been for Vanessa Kirby’s performance or Ellen Burstyn’s, which along with its vaguely arty title makes Pieces of a Woman feel even more like a homage to those films of the late 60s and 70s which served as vehicles for their leading ladies and earned them (and sometimes their co-stars) Oscar and Globe nominations, but which were and are generally ignored as overall films; I think of films like The Happy Ending, Diary of a Mad Housewife, One is a Lonely Number, and Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams.

Certainly Kirby’s performance is the most award-worthy element of the film, though in my view the film’s weaknesses keep her from giving the best performance possible (I actually think her performance in The World to Come is a bit stronger). The film depicts several months in the life of Martha Weiss (Kirby) who loses her newborn daughter after a difficult home birth, and whose relationships with her partner Sean (Shia LaBeouf) and mother Elizabeth (Burstyn) deteriorate, especially as they argue over the fate of their daughter’s remains and the pending lawsuit against the midwife (Molly Parker), who may or may not actually be responsible for what happened.

The film opts to tell its story in a series of sequences, sometimes several weeks apart (with dates given to show the passage of time), and unfortunately a really cohesive story doesn’t form from the segments; Sean, long sober, falls back into alcoholism (and possibly into other substance abuse), and also starts an affair with Suzanne (Sarah Snook), Martha’s cousin and the prosecutor in the midwife’s trial, while Martha at least considers a fling with co-worker Max (Jimmie Fails, quite wasted). But these elements (especially Sean and Suzanne’s affair) don’t ring especially true, and the characters, even the leads, don’t have the clear emotional through-lines that a story like this really depends on.

We see that Martha is saddened by the sight of children, that she becomes fixated on eating apples – when the reason for this is explained, it’s the kind of detail that was clearly taken directly from life, unsurprising since Mundruczó and Kata Wéber, who wrote the script and the play it was based on, are partners in real life and went through a similar tragedy – that she walls herself off emotionally, brusquely cutting short potentially painful conversations and trying to remove as many reminders of her loss from her life as possible. On paper, everything is there.

But the film never quite catches fire; I can agree that the film’s best element is the famed 24-minute long-take of Martha’s labor and the tragedy which follows, because it feels more alive and real than most of what follows. But even then I can’t say it dazzled me, it was just well-crafted and convincing. The rest of the film is well-crafted, to be sure; it’s got some good direction, it’s handsomely shot, and Howard Shore’s score is, if just a bit melodramatic at times, quite good in its own right. But it doesn’t really capture the same feeling of life. It feels like a film, and a melodramatic one at that, with dramatic speeches, convenient infidelities, and life-changing events that just don’t ring true.

The acting is definitely good. Kirby certainly puts in the work; from showing the physical agony and fleeting joy of the birth scene to showing the detachment and bursts of anger and frustration of the following months to the rediscovered serenity of the final scenes. But something about the performance never quite achieves greatness for me; I never felt Martha’s pain or her attempts to keep her emotional agony at bay the way I wanted to. And a lot of that is rooted in my issues with the writing and direction. But a truly great performance can transcend the shortcomings of the material and context, and Kirby’s falls just short of doing so, at least for me.

LaBeouf is convincing, especially at showing Sean’s volatility; in light of the revelation of his abuse of FKA Twigs, his brutish intensity here is all the more unsettling to watch. Burstyn is likewise effective as the quietly manipulative Elizabeth, her outward frailty concealing a fierce will; she even manages (or comes as close as possible) to sell her big monologue towards the end which is a blatant an Oscar scene as you could imagine. And Snook, Parker, Iliza Shlesinger as Martha’s long-suffering sister, and Benny Safdie as Shlesinger’s nebbishy husband, all do solid enough work. It’s the film that never quite lives up to their efforts; it gives us pieces, but in the end it never really gives us the woman.

Score: 68

Funeral Parade of Roses/Bara no sôretsu (1969) – ****

One could briefly describe Funeral Parade of Roses as being “queer Japanese Oedipus Rex” and not miss the mark too badly. Instead of Oedipus, we have Eddie (Peter), a young drag queen who works at the Club Genet; the club’s owner and Eddie’s lover, Gonda (Yoshio Tsuchiya), is Jocasta; Leda (Osamu Ogasawara), Gonda’s jealous ex-lover and chief hostess at the Genet, is Creon; and the young filmmaker Guevara (Toyosaburo Uchiyama) is the Chorus Leader, his films and other scenes in the film reference the unrest in Japanese society at the time – analogous, perhaps, to the plague ravaging Thebes in the play.

But writer-director Toshio Matsumoto makes numerous changes – for example, Oedipus killed his father Laius having no idea who he was, but Eddie killed the mother (Emiko Azuma) who raised her (after Gonda left the family when Eddie was quite young), in part because she was disgusted by Eddie’s feminine behaviors – and spends as much time exploring the frontiers of style and cinematic technique as he does telling the story.

The opening scene, a dreamily-filmed sexual encounter against a white background which repeatedly evanesces into blankness, sets the stage both for Matsumoto’s visual scheme and the way Toshie Iwasa’ editing refracts it; we have sped-up scenes (and sped-up sound), freeze-frames flash-backs, seemingly abstract motifs (a cigarette burning a hole in a photograph, a vase of flowers – concealing illicit drugs – falling to the floor), flashing captions, comic-book style speech balloons, and video images made to sway as if they were dancing. In a lesser film, this would ultimately feel like self-indulgence. But even if some gimmicks pay off better than others, they reflect a spirit of freedom and imagination that is central to the film.

Take the sequence midway through, where Eddie, Guevara, and their friends get high, play party games (which involve stripping off their clothes), then crank up the tunes and dance until they collapse into an orgiastic pile on the floor. It has something of the cheerful anarchy of a real party. And then take the documentary sequences sprinkled throughout, where real queens, including Peter, are interviewed about their lives and identities, including whether they would ever go back to living as men (none of them would). Given that American society is still wrestling with the subject of gender identity fully 50 years after Roses first appeared, it’s all the more impressive how straightforwardly Matstumoto engages with it.

But the film as a whole is far more comfortable with its queerness than most mainstream American cinema, then or now, has dared to be. The multiple sex scenes (which are sensuous without being lascivious), the loving depiction of Eddie’s routine, the absence of self-loathing among its queer characters (at least for their queerness), and the normalization of proceedings at the Bar Genet all make for a film which, like the artificial flowers Leda so loves, has hardly faded in the years since it opened.

Of course, beyond its thematic resonance, it’s simply a damned good film. It’s full of energy and artistry, it’s beautifully shot in black-and-white (by Tatsuo Suzuki), it has a fascinating electronic score by Joji Yuasa, impressive production design, especially of the Bar Genet and the strange art gallery where Eddie and Guevara meet, and Matsumoto’s script is full of allusions, ponderings, wit, and efficiently defined characters. And the acting is quite good, especially from Peter (best known for the playing the Fool to Tatsuya Nakadai’s Lear in Ran), who brings the sensuality in spades, but also delivers the contrasts in Eddie’s spirit; both the light-hearted sense of freedom and the weight of her dark past.

One question remains for me: what is the film trying to say by adapting Oedipus Rex to the queer underground of 60s Tokyo? Is it suggesting there’s a price for freedom, or at least a risk, especially when that freedom is achieved by violence? Is it nodding towards what comes of homophobia and transphobia, especially since Eddie’s mother seems to display both? Or did Matsumoto really intend a clear answer? Near the very end, we get a glibly cheerful announcer saying “Frightening, isn’t it? The cursed destiny of man. What a mix of cruelty and laughter it is! Let’s look forward to the next program. Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.” Perhaps Matsumoto is trying to say that an individual life is so much more complex than we, from the outside, can hope to appreciate.

Or perhaps we’re just meant to meditate upon it and reach our own conclusions in our own time. The film ends with a rather dark message: “The spirit of an individual reaches its own absolute through incessant negation.” It’s hard to imagine a more absolute negation than what Eddie achieves in the final scene. But has her spirit reached its absolute? I have to wonder.

Score: 90

Another Round/Druk (2020) – ***½

I’ve engaged with Thomas Vinterberg’s work in a rather ass-backward fashion. I’ve still never seen his breakthrough film, The Celebration, or his Oscar-nominated The Hunt, but I’ve seen the film that nearly ended his career (It’s All About Love, which is quite dreadful), the film which followed and did nothing to help it (Dear Wendy, which is really good), and his adaptation of Far From the Madding Crowd (also quite good). So going into Another Round, I had a definite impression of him as a talented but fallible director.

Of course, thanks to this film he’s now an Oscar-nominated director as well, and likely to earn Denmark an Oscar for Best International Film. It’s not hard to see why; Another Round has a universally appreciable premise, develops it with a balance of comedy and tragedy that scarcely sets a foot wrong, and has just enough of that Danish sense of humor to give the (hypothetical) American remake something to sand down. But a remake would be even more pointless than usual; aside from being in Danish, the film plays out much as a Hollywood version of the story would.

It follows four schoolteachers, though it really focuses on history teacher Martin (Mads Mikkelsen), who’s lost his passion for teaching and for living in general, and who worries that he’s begun to bore his wife Anika (Maria Bonnevie). At his birthday dinner, psychology teacher Nikolaj (Magnus Millang) discusses a theory by Norwegian psychiatrist Finn Skårderud, who believes that a blood-alcohol level of 0.05% is optimal at all times. Martin decides to give it a shot, drinking during the day and finding himself reinvigorated in the classroom. Nikolaj proposes a formal experiment, and he, Martin, music teacher Peter (Lars Ranthe) and gym teacher Tommy (Thomas Bo Larsen) begin a program of maintaining a 0.05 BAC during the day and recording its effects on their lives.

Initially, it works like a charm; their teaching becomes more inspired and their lives become more enjoyable. But of course, they push their luck, first going for a 0.1 BAC and then going for the highest possible BAC, and the comedy of the first half turns to drama, as they begin to lose control and it becomes clear that drinking alone won’t solve what was wrong with their lives in the first place.

I considered pushing Another Round into the **** realm. It’s certainly a very good film, very funny at times, quite painful and sobering at others. It makes good use of its premise, thanks to the script by Vinterberg and Tobias Lindholm, and Vinterberg’s direction, while not really outstanding, does a fine job of capturing the spirit of the teachers’ highs and the dreariness of their lows. It has good performances all around, with Mikkelsen (#MadAboutMads) easily the MVP, from the weariness of the opening scenes to the good cheer of his early drinking, from the anger and frustration as things turn sour to that final dance, the only possible ending for the film, a final burst of reckless euphoria. It’s solidly made without self-conscious flourishes of style.

And yet maybe that’s what keeps it just shy of greatness for me. Maybe it all fits together just a bit too smoothly. Maybe it all plays out just a bit too much like Hollywood would have wanted. Maybe that final note of optimism is just a little too much wishful thinking, a little too much pushing for a more upbeat ending. It’s still a very enjoyable film, likely a fine choice for the Oscar, and a worthy tribute to Vinterberg’s late daughter, Ida, who had helped inspire the story and whose school was used for filming. It’s certainly well worth seeing, especially if you haven’t seen enough international cinema.

Score: 86

I went with the French poster, which I find a bit more evocative than the American piece.

Sound of Metal (2019) – ****

I found out at almost the last minute that a metro-area theater was showing this, such that I walked into the theater right as the opening concert sequence was ending and the title appeared on the screen. But I was determined to see it in a theater (and what’s more, hear it in one), and am glad I did; I’ve now seen every nominee for Picture, Actor, Supporting Actor, and Original Screenplay. And since I often review multiple award nominees by going through their nominations, I’ll do so here.

First, of course, is Best Sound – and given that the film tells the story of Ruben Stone (Riz Ahmed), a drummer who begins to lose his hearing, and wants to put us as completely in his position as possible, the sound design is absolutely vital to the film’s success. It brilliantly captures the cacophony of the concerts, the rapid fading of Ruben’s hearing and how the increasingly muffled sounds he hears compare to the actual sounds of the world around him, and later how the cochlear implants he receives provide a distorted approximation of those sounds. The more immersive an aural environment you can experience it in, the better. Then there’s Best Editing, and it’s extremely well edited, giving us a fine sense of the nomadic life Ruben and his bandmate/girlfriend Lou (Olivia Cooke) live, of how time passes as he lives in a deaf community and adapts to a life without sound, and of his trying journey in the final act. It’s not flashy editing, but it’s extremely graceful and shapes Ruben’s arc effectively.

More effectively, perhaps, than the script, nominated for Best Original Screenplay. But is it really original? The film has its roots in Metalhead, an unfinished film by Derek Cianfrance, who gets story credit and is included in the nomination. But the core premise – a musician losing their hearing – has featured in popular culture at least as far back as the 1914 play The Silent Voice, filmed as 1932’s The Man Who Played God and 1955′ infamous Sincerely Yours (Liberace’s only starring vehicle). Everything that’s old is new again.

Originality aside, I find the script the weakest part of the film. It’s not bad, to be fair; it has well-drawn central characters, fairly natural dialogue, and delivers its message about deafness not being a handicap without coyness or hamfistedness. But the story is pretty predictable; Ruben goes from denial to despair to renewal to relapse to serenity just as you’d expect. Aside from the profanity and cultural specifics, a film made 50 or 60 years since might’ve told the story in much the same way. (A more personal nitpick: it’s the kind of film where the characters seem to have as much money as the plot needs them to have.)

However, the next two nominations bring us right back to greatness. First is Best Supporting Actor for Paul Raci, who plays Joe, director of the deaf community/addict-recovery facility Ruben spends most of the film at. Joe, we learn, lost his hearing in Vietnam and became an alcoholic, losing his family in the process, and now helps the deaf and hearing-impaired to live full lives without viewing themselves as lesser-than. Raci makes feel Joe’s warmth and compassion, his hard-won serenity, his gentle humor, his deep religious devotion, and his strength of will; he insists that the adults at his facility cut themselves off from the outside world and learn to live with themselves as they are. Ruben chooses a different path and Joe doesn’t compromise his values…but doesn’t hide how much it pains him to enforce them. The son of deaf parents (though he himself is hearing) and a lifelong spokesman for the deaf and hearing-impaired, Raci is clearly playing from the heart, but never compromises the reality of the character. It’s a fantastic turn.

And of course, Ahmed is up for Best Actor. He’s simply excellent throughout, utterly convincing at every stage of Ruben’s journey, first as the seasoned musician and loving boyfriend (with just a hint of the overgrown adolescent), then at showing his frustration and fear as he loses his hearing at a terrifying rate, then at his stubborn defiance of Joe’s directives (that poor doughnut), then at his gradual acquisition of sign language and his growing bonds with the various members of the community, then at his desperate bargaining when he thinks he has a path back to his old life, and at his climactic realizations and final “moment of stillness,” as Joe describes it.

When Ruben tries to convince Joe that everything is about to go back to “normal” for him, we ourselves are almost swayed. when he embraces the silence at the end, we can embrace it along with him. And he never overplays Ruben’s reactions to losing his hearing. When we get the first real episode of hearing loss, he doesn’t visibly react. When the longer subsequent episodes come, his reactions are natural and unforced. He might be my own choice in the category; it’s really a superbly controlled piece of work.

Nominations the film didn’t receive include Supporting Actress for Cooke (who has limited screen-time but has a great skill for conveying poignant despair), Cinematography (it looks great throughout), and Director for Darius Marder, which is odd to me because his way of bringing the story to life, of balancing the moments of despair and frustration with those of warmth and happiness, is more impressive than the script he co-wrote. I suppose you can’t have everything, but I would certainly rate the film higher than some of the actual nominees in these departments.

Lastly, there’s Best Picture. And I won’t argue too much with that; it’s a **** film and if it doesn’t end up in my top 10 for the year, it’ll be close. It’s a film which achieves greatness through its cinematic craft and performances – an entirely valid path to greatness, but if the script had been willing to, shall we say, march to the beat of its own drum rather than stick to the tried-and-true model it follows, it might have been a masterpiece. But it still very much deserves to be seen – and heard.

Score: 89