Films

As our readers know from our extensive Oscars coverage, we love movies. We want to see the film industry thrive and grow and remain a vital art form into the next century, especially when such thriving and growth gives us pictures such as 12 Years a Slave and Gravity. But increasingly Hollywood seems to be operating on an uncomfortable formula. To wit, big-budget high-concept action spectacles with aliens, superheroes, and other visual wonders get released from May to August, the end of the year gives us Oscar contenders made with a bit more intelligence, such as those films mentioned above, and the rest of the time, middling movies, bad movies, movies targeted to ultra-specific demographics, and movies the studios just don’t know what to do with get shot out of the cannon in hopes of clicking. What I dislike about this pattern is that it can obscure some of the possibilities there are for innovation in the Hollywood system. The giant movies can have as much depth and intelligence as Oscar bait, the smaller movies don’t have to be works of high art to be really good, and there are a lot of potentially great films to be made that the powers that be in Los Angeles are wary of taking a chance on, but which audiences would really love to see. To illustrate these possibilities, I examined the canon of an actress who is increasingly becoming a household name.

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After the first woman he ever loved broke his heart, Jep Gambardella wrote a novel called The Human Apparatus. It won major literary prizes and everyone alive in Italy seemed to have read it and been inspired by it. Jep then moved to Rome, became a journalist and an even bigger celebrity, and never wrote another word of fiction. Now he’s just turned 65. His two best friends are a playwright lusting after a college girl and the foul-mouthed dwarf woman who edits his newspaper. He interviews performance artists who shave their pubic hair into Communist symbols and run headfirst into aqueducts. His upstairs neighbor in their apartment complex across the street from the Colosseum intrigues him. He’s unexpectedly connecting with a 42 year-old stripper. And everyone around him is starting to die. Not in a supernatural or murder mystery sense, but simply from aging, decaying, leaving only traces behind.

Paolo Sorrentino’s magnificent The Great Beauty is a film full of dichotomies, and here is the key one…

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I.

Miss Williams and I agreed this scene is one of the diamonds of the film. Not saying anything more…

It may surprise you that Philomena has outgrossed both Dallas Buyers Club and her at the American box office. It should not surprise you that Philomena is an excellent movie. Like Gravity and Twelve Years a Slave, it is perfectly executed in that it fully works out its theme, never wastes a minute of its running time without feeling too short or too long, and has a marvelously constructed screenplay by Steve Coogan (who also produced and starred) and Jeff Pope. It’s the sort of script where the setups and payoffs are both logical and emotionally earned. There is one scene near the end, for instance, where the action takes a turn I initially thought was far too abrupt; by the end of that scene, however, I understood why the characters were acting the way they did at the beginning and what made them change. And the overall effect of these setups and payoffs was enough for it to be the first Best Picture nominee this year to make me cry. (I saw this with fellow Addisonian Meryl and she basically concurs on these opinions.)

(Editor’s Note: As someone who sat next to Andrew during 12 Years a Slave, this is definitely not the first Picture nominee of 2013 to make him cry. – Alex)

(Editor’s Note 2: As someone who sat down aisle of Andrew during 12 Years a Slave, I decidedly have to agree. Although he wasn’t alone in the crying. No sir. – Travis)

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