’Tis the season of Oscar bait as studios race to release serious, arty, socially relevant films in time to qualify for this year’s many awards competitions. However, the movie business being a business, it’s also the time when crowds head to the multiplex seeking amusement and thrills, a profitable yen studios are anxious to feed. The result is a traffic jam.
Needless to say, commerce trumps art — this is America — so late December screens still be welcoming the usual fare. Enter “Aquaman,” “Spiderman,” “Bumblebee” (a transformer, according to my kid informants), “Mortal Engines,” and vehicles starring the usual suspects — Clint, Sly, Will Farrell, JLo. That means many of the “quality” pictures vying for statuettes will open in a few cities to qualify but won’t show up in Podunk until January or even February.
Those include a tearjerking Julia Roberts vehicle, Adam McKay’s black comedy about Dick Cheney, “Vice,” Steve Carrell with PTSD, a Ruth Bader Ginsberg biopic, a dramatization of a James Baldwin novel, Mary Queen of Scots underestimating Elizabeth once again, and so forth.
But not all the possible awards contenders are queuing up. Some have dodged the end of year gridlock by opening in advance of the Christmas rush. Here’s a few I have recently enjoyed.
“Can You Ever Forgive Me,” starring Melissa McCarthy in a serious role, concerns an author of biographies of obscure celebrities which nobody wants to read. To make ends meet she starts forging letters of the famous, aided and abetted by a gay, British fellow barfly, the wonderful Richard E. Grant. It’s a surprisingly bittersweet take on two lonely people adrift.
“The Wife,” adapted from a Meg Wolitzer novel, follows an unspeakably vain Nobel Prize winner to Stockholm to pick up his award for literature. He is accompanied by his devoted, dutiful, possibly disaffected wife, but there is more to their relationship than meets the eye. Jonathan Pryce is his usual sterling self as the winner, and Christian Slater has a nice turn as a too inquisitive biographer, but the show belongs to the wife — Glenn Close. She is being discussed as a shoo-in for Best Actress, in part because she has been nominated six times in the past without a win.
“First Reformed” is a bleak meditation on faith and its pitfalls by Paul Schrader. It is probably too small and gloomy to win more than respect from the Academy, but might attract an Indie award. Ethan Hawke gives a fine performance as a lonely New England pastor whose congregation has dwindled to almost nothing. When a troubled man confesses he is contemplating a terrorist act of protest against the pollution of the earth, difficult moral quandaries arise.
“The Sisters Brothers” is the story of siblings abused by a brutal father on the Oregon frontier who grow up to be enforcers for a tyrannical Mr. Big, the Commodore, — a set-up familiar from “Shane,” “The Big Country,” “Last Train from Gun Hill,” “Open Range,” and a zillion more.
The twist in this case is that the bad guys, the brothers named Sisters, are just working stiffs who happen to kill people for a living. They are puckishly played by John C. Reilly as a man weary of the job and annoyed at his brother Joaquin Phoenix, who is a little too fond of the work and of the bottle.
This time, their assignment is to kill an inventor and bring back an invention that promises to bring the Commodore untold wealth. Riz Ahmed is the idealistic inventor. Jake Gyllenhaal, another minion of the Commodore’s, has tracked the inventor down and is supposed to wait for the brothers to arrive and deliver the coup de grace. But he has decided to betray the boss and partner with the inventor. It is an All-American tale of lawlessness and frontier disorder, ambition, greed, unfettered capitalism, and, as it happens, — family ties. Beautifully shot and well-acted by the ensemble.
Finally, an irresistibly touching triumph, “The Green Book,” based on the true story of the black piano virtuoso Don Shirley. He quixotically undertook a tour of the segregated South in 1962, in part to offer a personal object lesson on the injustice and stupidity of racial prejudice. He is prevailed upon to hire a driver and, if need be, bodyguard. Tony Lip, a bouncer at the Copa, comes highly recommended, is temporarily laid off, and needs the paycheck since Christmas is coming.
Off they go though the Midwest, then down the Mississippi, using the “Negro Motorist Green Book” to avoid potential trouble. Academy Award winner Mahershala Ali (for the pusher in “Moonlight”) is elegantly alone as the highly educated, sophisticated Shirley, a man between two worlds. A bulked up Viggo Mortensen is delightful as Tony, complete with “dese” and “dose” accent.
Lip is a minimally educated, Italian-American who has rarely left the borough of his birth and comes equipped with all the prejudices of the era. The journey opens his eyes to the cost of his casual racism. Shirley’s own disdain for his inferiors also drops away, as he begins ghost writing Lip’s letters home to his wife. This is two actors at the top of their form in a moving, surprising, funny, heartfelt film. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll want someone to give each of them an award.