By Dan Cohen, NewsLanc’s Santa Monica Reporter
2014 was a lousy year for narrative features. Then, suddenly, at years’ end, it wasn’t. Starting around Thanksgiving distributors offered up a handful of quality features that were aimed at adults. Just at the point where it seemed like there was nothing worthy of cocktail chatter, other than a handful of documentaries that only played indie cinemas, there was too much to see in the short, busy period between black Friday and New Year’s.
None of these titles were big winners at the box office, not like the final chapter of “The Hobbit,” or the latest installment of “The Hunger Games,” but they were movies that mattered to critics and people who listen to them, and by extension the voters who nominate films for everything from the Golden Globes to the guild awards to the Oscars.
Back in the spring and summer, only “Boyhood” and “The Grand Budapest Hotel” –the latter a triumph of shrewd marketing if ever there was one– had garnered the kind of critical acclaim to set them apart from the mass of large scale entertainments that ruled in 2014. But as of late November, when “Gone Girl” became a bigger hit than Hollywood pundits expected, and “Birdman,” “Wild,” “Whiplash,” “The Imitation Game,” “Foxcatcher,” and “The Theory of Everything” went into limited release, the landscape became a lot more interesting. Yet to come were “Selma,” “Into the Woods,” “Unbroken,” and a Clint Eastwood film that had very little buzz and was not scheduled for limited release until the very end of December.
Critics generally applauded all of the late arrivals, although there wasn’t much awards enthusiasm for “Gone Girl,” a well-crafted potboiler by the skillful David Fincher, who piloted “The Social Network” to critical and financial success before his unexciting remake of “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.” But as 2014 ended none of the main awards contenders had proved very popular with the general audience, certainly not on the scale of blockbusters like “Guardians of the Universe.” In fact, the one prestige item among the big budget entries, Christopher Nolan’s highly anticipated “Interstellar” received mixed reviews from better critics and performed only modestly, a sure sign that it would be forgotten shortly after its theatrical release.
While “Whiplash” with a production cost of 3 million and a box office of 10: “Boyhood” with a price tag of only 4 million and a return of 25; and “Birdman” with a cost of 18 million and a gross that neared 25, all looked profitable, none were known outside of the major urban centers. Then, “Into the Woods” and “Unbroken” surprised the business with strong numbers during the holidays. But neither film earned the kind of respect that leads to major award nominations, which in the case of the Sondheim adaptation, pointed to a general bias against musicals.
As a result, prognosticators, and there are many in the movie industry, predicted that the masses who usually watch the Academy’s annual celebration of itself, would fail to tune in. There was nothing to excite the general public because it hadn’t seen any of the contenders. On top of that none of them, other than “Boyhood,” and “Selma,” created much of a stir in the mass media. And neither of those films brought out the masses.
Then, the dark horse that was “American Sniper,” which packed select theaters in a handful of big city venues late in December, exploded in wide release just after New Year’s. By February it had brought in close to 300 million, the kind of number that only the biggest super hero franchises, like “X-men” achieve. Suddenly the 2014 Oscar competition became the kind of horse race that the industry loves. Strong, and to some extent, predictable opinions began to appear on editorial pages and on talk shows For weeks audiences continued to turn out, in cities big and small. Somehow, 84 year old Clint Eastwood managed to divide the country and bring it together at the same time, an achievement that money can’t buy. Even people who hadn’t seen the movie, and had no intention to, were talking about it.
“American Sniper” is brilliantly executed. Eastwood expresses his ambivalence to war and warriors in a way that has galvanized viewers in very different ways, with great skill and little sentimentality. In the process of organizing difficult material he’s managed to score a direct hit on a nerve that runs deep in the body politic. And yet I don’t see “American Sniper” as a big award winner. The movie and the story around it, are simply too volatile and too disturbing. The material poses too many painful questions, and offers no easy answers. Beyond that, Eastwood’s political profile irritates too many of the people who populate the guilds. No doubt he is regarded by most of his peers as a great American director, but that doesn’t mean that they like him. Still, his movie has energized the entire awards process, and made it possible for the media to participate in what really is more about public relations than high end film making.
“The Imitation Game,” an exquisitely contrived drama about the trade-offs we make in the prosecution of war, is another project that’s run into problems. Two astute harangues in the New York Review of Books have tarnished the solid dramatics that make the film such a satisfying and challenging movie going experience. It may be true that the screenplay exaggerates Alan Turing’s neuroses, and that the development of the machinery that broke the Nazi’s code was more of a group effort, as the author of the articles insists, but movies don’t work by strict adherence to the truth: they are at best, tangential to truth. Nevertheless the criticism has left an odor around the film. In spite of the slow burn that’s resulted in strong box office, and two standout performances by the underrated Keira Knightly and Benedict Cumberbatch, “The Imitation Game is unlikely to take home major awards on Sunday.
In the best actor category, Eddie Redmayne’s sturdy work in “The Theory of Everything” may prevail over the triumphant return of Michael Keaton in “Birdman.” The reliable and restrained movie bio based on a memoir by Stephen Hawking’s first wife has steered clear of the kind of controversy that’s compromised the Turing bio-pic. At the same time “Birdman,” my personal favorite, has irritated as many viewers as it has delighted, which is just too idiosyncratic and open ended for mainstream viewers. Fine, it is what it is. “Theory of Everything” is respectable work all around.
While Ava DuVernay’s “Selma” is also likely to become an also ran in the major categories it’s deserved better than its modest returns at the box office. Most people have categorized this rich drama as a routine history lesson, it’s really far more dynamic and thought provoking in its depiction of the whirlwind of personal and political energy that attended Martin Luther King’s march on Selma. In retrospect its producers probably regret that the depiction of President Lyndon Johnson failed to whip up greater controversy in the press.
Although almost no one has seen “Still Alice,” Julianne Moore seems the likely winner in the best actress category. Chalk this up to the fact that Moore has been ignored so many times for her past work.
The coveted best director award will probably go to Richard Linklater, who has finally broken out of the indie ghetto, to almost universal acclaim. The other likely contender, Alejandro Innarritu has made his mark with critics groups that are more friendly to the risky bets he made in every aspect of creating “Birdman.” So it goes.
