If I Were an Academy Member...
By Edwin Davies
March 1, 2014
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Not a film so much as a collection of hairstyles in search of a story, the critical acclaim for American Hustle has been nothing short of baffling to me. It's a perfectly fine, energetic comedy that's carried by a hugely appealing cast, but beyond that, it's hard to say what the film is actually about, or why anyone would ever bother to tell this story (or why they would tell it this sloppily). It's as false a creation as Christian Bale's hairpiece, and a disappointing empty film from David O. Russell, who increasingly seems intent on making film that have nothing to say, but say it very loudly. In five years, people will look back on the way everyone went gaga for American Hustle the same way we now wonder why anyone cared about The English Patient.
8) Dallas Buyers Club
Like Captain Phillips, Dallas Buyers Club is a film that is raised up by the quality of its performances, rather than its own intrinsic quality. With some films, you could imagine other people being swapped in for the key actors and the film still being solid, but it's pretty much impossible to imagine this film working without Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto, both of whom give immensely likable and charismatic performances that just about hide the fact that the film doesn't really do much with its premise. For a Best Picture nominee that so prominently features AIDS, it's surprisingly swift and light, playing out as a caper more than a weighty drama, and that's where its success as a story lies for me. Any other performers would have tried to be too angsty or weighed down by the seriousness of the situation, but McConaughey finds a way to play the character as an indomitable shitkicker, and in the process turns a life-or-death struggle into something fun and enjoyable. Not a great film across the board, but the quality of those performances is hard to deny.
7) 12 Years a Slave
Steve McQueen has only directed three feature films, but he's already established himself as one of the world's premier purveyors of punishing, brutal depictions of human ugliness. 12 Years a Slave is both his ugliest film to date - few subjects are as dehumanizing and horrible as slavery - and his most stately and accessible. That obviously paid off in terms of making the film a success, and one that attracted a fairly broad audience, but it also makes it feel more like a history lesson than a great film. The story of Solomon Northup is an undeniably powerful one, and one that fully deserves to be told, but most of the strongest moments are the ones where it illustrates the different forms that slavery took, and how it shaped every interaction in America, rather than the more conventional story of the brutality Solomon endured. It's not the best film nominated for Best Picture this year, but it's probably the most important, and as such deserves the win more than any of the others.
6) Philomena
Even though it's been nominated for Best Picture, I still feel as if Stephen Frears' Philomena is under-rated. It seems like an amiable enough crowd pleaser, an odd-couple comedy about a woman and a journalist going in search of the woman's lost son, but it's a much hardier movie than that. Without losing sight of the heart and humor of Philomena herself, the film manages to ask very angry, pointed questions about the actions the Catholic Church took in separating young children from their unwed mothers, and engages in a genuinely honest debate about faith versus atheism in a way that doesn't demonize or lionize either side. It manages a deft balance of being one of the funniest and angriest films of last year, and has some real shocking, surprising twists and turns that are best enjoyed, rather than revealed. A really strong and compelling piece of work.
5) Captain Phillips
The weirdest thing about Captain Phillips' nomination for Best Picture is that the single strongest element of the film, Tom Hanks' performance, was completely ignored. There's lots to recommend the film apart from Hanks; it's a brutally efficient piece of storytelling, boasts a great performance from newcomer (and deserved Oscar-nominee) Barkhad Abdi, and like the best of Paul Greengrass' films it manages to weave pointed political commentary among its conventional thrills. But Hanks commands the film, and the way he conveys the character’s trauma at the end is probably the best single piece of acting he's done in his entire career. There's a reason why people talk about the film almost solely in terms of its ending, and it's just bizarre that the key factor in what makes the film great was completely left out in the cold.
4) Nebraska
Alexander Payne's film feels like an anomaly, even in such a varied year as this, because it's such a low-key comedy-drama that it's surprising to see it being recognized amongst far more audacious or traditionally Oscar-friendly films. It's completely deserving, though, since it's such a sweet, nuanced portrayal of a father-son relationship, and so beautifully captures a particularly small town form of melancholy that it'd be a shame if it had been completely overlooked. Reminiscent of Paper Moon, it tells a simple, straightforward story of two people going out on a journey together with wit, heart and more than a pinch of heartbreak as the son learns that his father is a more complicated man than he first imagined. Bruce Dern is as great as he ever is, but Will Forte gives as good as he gets, serving as co-lead of a story that is very much about how these two men at very different points in their lives come to relate to each other. June Squibb is also essential as one of the year's most surprisingly hilarious characters.
3) Gravity
Easily the most unforgettable cinematic experience of 2013, for me, was seeing Gravity in 3D (something I'm loath to do since I don't get on with the format) and being blown away by it. I've not revisited the film since on home media, partly because I'm worried that it won't hold up once I know how the story goes, but mainly because it's such a rare example of a purely theatrical experience that it feels almost wrong to consider it in any other context. It feels like a film that had to be seen on as big as screen as possible. Alfonso Cuarón created a blistering technical achievement, but what's really brilliant about it is the way that it melds form and content so viscerally. It's hard to imagine the story of Dr. Ryan Stone coming to terms with her grief being told in any other way and in any other format and having even one tenth of the impact that it does thanks to the exhilarating way Cuarón uses disaster movie tropes, but it's also hard to imagine the film being as exciting if the emotional component wasn't so well handled. A rare example of an effects-driven blockbuster that spends as much effort on the human component as on the damage unfurling around them.
2) The Wolf of Wall Street
For years now, I've said that Martin Scorsese hasn't made a truly essential film since Goodfellas. He's made plenty of good, interesting films in that time, but many of them are either flawed works that flirted with greatness (Bringing Out the Dead, Gangs of New York), pat genre exercises that allowed him some leeway to express himself (The Departed, Shutter Island) or Academy-courting efforts that were a little too dry to be genuinely interesting (The Aviator, Hugo). By returning to the Goodfellas model, but using it to investigate the lives of a different bunch of amoral creeps, Scorsese has finally made another great film. By turns riotously funny and deeply disturbing, Scorsese turns the story of Jordan Belfort into a full-blown, biting satire of corruption and greed, but in the end turns his focus on the audience for secretly (or, in some cases, not so secretly) wanting to be like Belfort, and society for failing to punish people like him who blew up the world economy only a few short years ago. An exhilarating, sadly necessary film.
1) Her
My personal favorite of the nominees, Spike Jonze's film manages a similar trick to Gravity in that it melds its technological innovations to a heartfelt story. The proportions are decidedly different, though, since Her is not a film defined by its technology, but by the messiness of its characters (although one of them is, in fact, a piece of software). None of the other films are as deeply felt and emotional resonant as Her, which not only explores how humans relate to each other through technology, but works as a heartbreaking metaphor for how people grow and change within a relationship, and how that sometimes results in people drifting apart through no fault of either party. It's a credit to Jonze as a writer-director and to Joaquin Phoenix and Scarlett Johansson as his leads that they make the idea of a man falling in love with his phone achingly real.