Movies |
The Academy Awards: The White-out, ’45 Years’ and ‘Carol’
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Published: Jan 16, 2016
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In Theaters Now
Since the Academy Award nominations were announced, there’s been a lot of talk about the absence of African American nominees. The Times headline says it all: Another Oscar Year, Another All-White Ballot. And that reminded me… a few years ago, I interviewed Denzel Washington for Reader’s Digest.
Denzel isn’t known as a fun interview, but I had spent some time with Michael Jordan a decade earlier, and because I didn’t waste time kissing his ass, he was much more candid than he might have. So I went right at Denzel.
Jesse: There’s a photo of you in an overcoat and a cap sitting alone in the stands before President Barack Obama’s inauguration. Why did you arrive two hours early?
Denzel: Not two hours — earlier than that. If my son’s ball game is at 7 p.m., my wife has us there at 5 p.m. The inauguration was scheduled for 11:30 a.m. She had us there at 7 a.m.
Jesse: What were you thinking?
Denzel: How cold I was.
Jesse: Just that?
Denzel: That was it.
Jesse: May the white Jewish guy from New York suggest what you might have been thinking….
Long silence.
Denzel: What?
Jesse: You played Malcolm X. You played Steven Biko. You won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for “Glory.” And now you’re witnessing the inauguration of the first black President.
Denzel: What I might have been thinking is that no black man won the Academy Award for Best Actor for 40 years — and then, since 2000, two of us have. [He’s right: Here’s the list.]
And here’s what ran in Reader’s Digest: just the first few lines. Because what Hollywood — and a lot of the media — likes is cheerful, amusing news. Whitewashed news.
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“45 YEARS”
I’ve now seen “45 Years” twice. I needed to watch the final few minutes again, I needed to see how Charlotte Rampling feels the full force of what has happened to her and realizes that she needs to do something about it. If you are young and new to love or only in the first few decades of a long-playing romance, this might not be the movie for you. (Go see “Spotlight,” “The Big Short,” “Brooklyn.” Avoid “Carol.”) But if you have achieved a certain age, if you have learned that intimacy is everything in a marriage and that there can be a very high cost to keeping your secrets secret, “45 Years” could be the movie of your year. Slow? Yes, like an Ingmar Bergman film is slow. But 95 minutes of Charlotte Rampling, looking every bit her age, fighting for understanding and balance? My God, I could watch that for days.
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CONSUMER WARNING: “CAROL”
These comments come from a Facebook conversation. I started it:
“Carol” got a standing ovation at Cannes. It has 5 Golden Globe nominations. The New York Film Critics named it the year’s best film. And yet…. I saw it right after the rave review in the Times. Most, if not all, of the audience at the Plaza Theater had read it. And so it was fascinating to watch the faces as the audience filed out. These smart, sophisticated New Yorkers didn’t like the film. But they weren’t saying that. Or anything. What they were doing is what I’ve seen too often in New York — they were invalidating what they thought and recalibrating their reaction so it fell within the boundaries of official opinion. [Other critical successes that have produced similar responses: “The Goldfinch” and “All the Light We Cannot See.”]
Michael Lindsay-Hogg, a legendary film and video director, and author of a memoir, Luck and Circumstance: A Coming of Age in Hollywood, New York, and Points Beyond, responded.
Whose idea was it for Cate Blanchett to channel Joan Crawford? If I was a same sex attracted girl working at Bloomingdale’s, I’d have run a mile from someone as obviously deranged as CB, especially since she seemed to be ‘voiced’ by Caitlyn Jenner. And why did all the egregiously stupid straight men wear their hats at such stupid angles? Was it a sign of some sort of particular doltishness, like their straightness? In 1955, when waiters delivered Eggs Benedict, they didn’t say ‘Enjoy,’ nor as CG did a moment later, ‘Bon appétit.’ The cars were super good and got the period right. And the obscurantist photography meant what — to indicate what was hidden or not to be fully seen I think they’d have been better off spending a little more time on lighting CB so she didn’t look like a prize fighter who’d taken too many shots to the right cheek. The Patricia Highsmith novel was seductive, pulling you in, pulling you in, with a powerful sense of erotic possibility and danger, impossible to deny. Very worth reading. And, perhaps, comparing.
I followed up:
“Carol” is The Emperor’s New Movie, the most over-praised film in years. The writer discarded the dialogue in the book so thoroughly that the most eloquent “conversation” is a longing look across a table — like that ever happens in Real Life. There’s a huge difference between great art direction and a great movie, but in this case, the art direction seems to be enough.
Angela Stimson polished the film off:
I felt that I have been a voice in the wildness about how much I loathed this movie on every level. The character of Carol was so predatory and the young girl was a complete milk sop. It was almost as if the director set all of this period mise-en-scène and then had these wooden actors floating about in it. Because it was Patricia Highsmith I kept waiting for the sinister intrigue — but that didn’t happen. In fact the only intrigue is how I managed to sit through the whole bloody thing.
