Adventures in Oscar-Renting: 2003 Nominees
How the Oscars Work, Version A: Hollywood professionals nominate the five most auspicious achievements of the year within their individual crafts, and all of them as a community produce a roster of the five very best films overall. Clearly, no errors are made, even when they nominate Seabis***t. And then, from these lists of five, the voters further exercise their flawless instincts and award the trophy to the most exceptional nominee in each category. If something seems a little strange, like Renée Zellweger's monotonous hill-country caricature triumphing over Holly Hunter's heroic, movie-saving performance, or Master & Commander winning a Sound Effects prize that Kill Bill and The Triplets of Belleville aren't even contending for...just keep on going, folks, nothing the matter. A-okay.
How the Oscars Work, Version B: Superior actors like Patricia Clarkson and Shohreh Aghdashloo and brave, ambitious movies like City of God and Mystic River snag major nods, even though they often have no chance of winning. Box-office booms for these unlikeliest of hits, and maybe appetites increase for films more nourishing than American Wedding. Crazy people like me—and perhaps like you, if you're reading this—make sure we see every nominee, just to play all the reindeer games of predicting and casting our own phantom votes. Plus, actor's actors like Ben Kingsley and Marcia Gay Harden suddenly become sexy to a wider public, who then get curious about buried treasures and offbeat pictures hidden in their past bodies of work. Or maybe, someone who discovers City of God and likes it decides for the first time in life to look for another Brazilian street epic to see...but where is one to be found?
Here's the point of this annual feature: I celebrate the year's nominees and throw an assist to interested fans and telecast watchers by checking out an underappreciated or lesser-known film by each of the year's acting nominees, as well as an older film that seems reasonably similar to the movies nominated in the Picture and Director categories. This crapshoot doesn't always pan out: not all the movies I've capsule-reviewed below are created equal, as it turns out. But some are real gems, and all of them should be interesting to fans of the individual performers or pictures.
I hope you enjoy this Rental Guide. E-mail me your impressions if you track down any of these titles, or if you have other recommendations!
Many American filmgoers only became cognizant of modern Brazil and its ferocious social disparities with the electric City of God and, if they were really lucky, last year's documentary release, 
Before there was Minas Tirith, there was...Oz.
The day of the Oscar broadcast, I watched Lost in Translation a second time. It remains one of those movies which I appreciate but don't adore, and for some of its more impassioned fans, this is not nearly enough; for many, this movie has stopped being a movie altogether and feels as intimate and deeply known as actual experience. I still wish Scarlett Johansson had a better-defined role, and I wish she was an inspired enough actress to make Charlotte's blankness seem more like a textured characterization than an evident limit in the writer-director's expressive ability.
Maritime dramas ain't easy, especially when the ship doesn't have the good sense to capsize in a huge, mad spasm of adolescent romance (see above). Daily operations on a sailing ship don't necessarily lend themselves to the rhythms and momentums of narrative, so Weir's Master and Commander attempts the unique strategy of dispensing with narrative almost entirely: there's a story, but it begins and ends at almost arbitrary moments, and it plays second fiddle (sometimes literally) to the mundane universe of sailor society.
The mystery in Clint Eastwood's Mystic River is boring. It is predictable without having the grand reverberations of destiny, and the staging of the big revelations saps the movie's force instead of deepening it. The mystery of this film is much more unfathomable, since by any stretch, a murder-mystery with a guessable villain, a mismatched ensemble, a god-awful score, and a maddening insistence on cross-cuts whenever possible should be a slog to sit through. But Mystic River still absorbs.
Seabiscuit himself is a fringe character in David Butler's Kentucky, a Derby drama with good horse sense but very little idea of the temperaments and behaviors of human beings. Even allowing for melodramatic excess, the Hatfield/McCoy clichés of the plot is pure drivel, with saucer-eyed Loretta Young and disobedient scion Richard Greene hoping that love can dissolve the rivalry of their families. The Technicolor photography is a little overdone, though like so many films from the late 30s, this pop-colored Dixieland sudser feels like a sketchy rehearsal for the still-filming Gone with the Wind.
Keisha Castle-Hughes is the first debut performer in years to be nominated for an acting Oscar, which is jolly well for her but tough going in terms of this feature article. Thank goodness she's not the first antipodean adolescent to show a knack for this whole acting thing. Anna Paquin blew the top off the world's head, and brought home an Academy Award, for her intuitive, jealous performance in this, her first screen effort.
The best surprise among all the rentals I did for this feature was Alan Parker's Shoot the Moon, a dark divorce drama that Edward Albee could have been proud to write. Indeed, part of the enormous gratification of watching Shoot the Moon is that the principal artist behind it, director Alan Parker, is usually such a glibly theatrical slickster. His Mississippi Burning was an Academy favorite despite its outrageously superficial grasp of racial crises; meanwhile, the studied, tonally complex, sublimely lived-in Shoot the Moon couldn't score a single nod. Not for Keaton, who proves yet again (as though, after Reds, it still needed proving), that she is a powerhouse of emotional control even when nobody's laughing. Not for Albert Finney, superior as the husband who decides after many years of marriage that he can't even look her in the eye anymore, though he has an infant's grasp of the ramifications to his decisions. The young actresses playing their children, including a very young Tracey Gold and Tina Yothers, are instantly convincing as the restless children of an ailing household, and unlike nearly all films of this type, the most overheated, volcanic scenes are also the best, including Finney's disastrous attempt to bring his estranged oldest daughter an unwanted birthday present. As far as I know, Shoot the Moon isn't available yet on DVD, but digital snobs should concede their standards for a moment: this movie is too good to miss.
Samantha Morton is such a fearless and distinctive actress that I'm amazed the Academy has already noticed her two times in her still-young career. True, the roles which have garnered Oscar's attention are probably the most conventional in her entire repertoire—the patient, admiring kook in a Woody Allen film and a noble, reticent mother. Morton inhabits both parts with the absolute integrity she shows in all her work, but you don't have to dig far into her career to discover another plane entirely of sublime craft; while it's a mistake to infer that Morton's performances are the only virtues of these estimable pictures, it's nonetheless impossible to imagine them existing without her trademark blend of ethereality and steely reserve to anchor them. Under the Skin was Morton's breakthrough to the cineaste crowd, winning her a Best Actress prize from the Boston Society of Film Critics, and the same group's Best New Filmmaker award to writer-director Carine Adler, even though hardly any audiences got to see it. As a young woman dangerously derailed by her mother's death, Morton boozes and fucks and sports mom's chemo wig on her evenings out. Impressively, the performance escapes caricature entirely, until a final act that, depending on your point of view, either compromises or further perverts all that's come before. And it's to Adler's enormous credit that, rather than simply pointing her camera at this volcanic performance, she creates the bold, expressive movie that Morton's work deserves, full of alluring sound, suggestive locations, and Nan Goldin-esque framings.
It's well-known by now that Charlize Theron reinvented not just herself but her entire career with Monster; readers of my long review will already know that I'm staunchly in the camp who believe her turn as Aileen Wuornos is the greatest performance in the past decade of Best Actress Oscar winners, an achievement that would crown any career. Who knows if Theron will ever be as great again. As we wait to find out, I'm at least gratified to discover that her prior portfolio isn't the total boneyard I'd thought. I've long been partial to James Gray's The Yards, as noted 
Does Naomi Watts sleep? Since becoming a star with 
Somehow Depp has emerged as the unofficial mascot of this feature, since he headlines not only his own rental selection but also those I've picked for Charlize Theron (The Astronaut's Wife), Bill Murray (Ed Wood), and Benicio Del Toro (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas). It's sensible of people to wonder if I'm just a Depp freak, seizing any opportunity for more, but I gotta tell ya, it's just a fluke. I realize it's become de rigeur lately to declaim what an unappreciated genius he is, immune to all artistic compromise, but if you'll allow me, anyone who can pop up in 
What a gem this movie is. I must admit, I haven't seen it in years, but every time I do, the unbelievable grace of Max Pomeranc's performance as pre-adolescent chess prodigy Josh Waitzkin warms my heart. The Academy made itself look really good by nominating Conrad L. Hall's superlative but understated photography, but attention could just as easily have been paid to the gorgeous screenplay that Steven Zaillian fashioned out of Fred Waitzkin's memoir of raising a talented kid with ambivalence about his own gifts. Zaillian has also had the intuition to cast the whole film with intelligent, unexpensive actors, so that everyone, from major supporting players to one-scene walk-ons is flavored with the kind of rich humanity that Joan Allen, Joe Mantegna, Laura Linney, Laurence Fishburne, David Paymer, Austin Pendleton, William H. Macy, and Tony Shalhoub know how to impart. And of course there's Kingsley, excellent as usual as the hard-driving chess coach that Josh's father hires for him, even though Josh seems much more comfortable wtih the pure gaming pleasure of the Washington Square fast-clocker played by Fishburne. Searching for Bobby Fischer gives human drama a good name; even if it doesn't sound like your kind of movie, I bet you'll find that it is.
Here's what I'm thinking: Jude Law is so insanely gorgeous, his features so exquisitely exaggerated, that casting directors and filmmakers themselves can't help but be reminded of fantasy, if not outright unreality. So, even apart from Law's recurring appearances as objects of worldly fascination (from the seductive 
The Bill Murray Renaissance continues unabated, with his much-beloved supporting turns for Wes Anderson finally leading to his first Oscar nomination, as a lead, for Sofia Coppola. Both of these directors make interesting if uneven movies. Strangely, in both cases, the Academy has paid the most attention to the writing (a nomination for Anderson's 
I am so grateful that Sean Penn has brought his blazing talent to the movies, and I'm glad for any performer who still maintains that acting is a serious, important, and ethically responsible profession. The only downfall of Penn's evident earnestness about his craft is that he winds up being cast in several films that try to ride the coattails of his own seriousness, aspiring to a profundity that his acting frequently achieves but his pictures less often do. This is true, I think, of Mystic River and even more of 
By virtue of her Oscar nomination and her upcoming television pilot, Shohreh Aghdashloo is, as far as I know, Hollywood's first crossover Iranian actress. But she's long been a hero and mainstay of Iranian and Iranian-American cinema, as evidenced by her honorific special billing at the end of Maryam's credits. Maryam is not an especially well-made movie, and the ending in particular feels too pat, given the circumstances. But the story of an Iranian-American girl's coming into political consciousness during the period of the Shah's overthrow in the 1970s is undoubtedly new material for a lot of potential renters. The trumpeted Iranian imports that have screened in the states are, for obvious reasons of censorship, never quite so overtly political, so Maryam, which is much closer to My So-Called Life than to Taste of Cherry is an enlightening complement. Aghdashloo is very good as Maryam's warm, peacekeeping mother...and casting directors may wish to know that she not only acts, she also catered the whole movie with delicious Persian food! Mmmmmmm.
Patricia Clarkson gave one of the most astounding, memorable supporting performances of the entire 1990s in Lisa Cholodenko's High Art, playing Greta, a former Fassbinder actress whose mermaid beauty and wry wit are still dimly perceptible beneath her coked-up haze and tripwire jealousies. Grotesquely, the performance was one of many superlative achievements in this category that 1998 Oscar nominators passed over in favor of Brenda Blethyn's screech in 
Since I'm a sucker for good actresses, there's no way I'm going to skip over a project like Gaudí Afternoon when it rolls around, despite every sign that I should. An intended theatrical release that got dumped onto DVD, a self-consciously "quirky" plot, and a box cover where all four actresses look uncomfortably made-up into mix-n-match Barbie versions of themselves (a dishwater-blonde Judy Davis, Lili Taylor dressed up like Ron Howard). If Harden looks especially bizarre to you on the cover, like a bull-chinned drag queen playing Marcia Gay Harden, trust your instinct: she is, in the perennial language of dumb trailers and inane taglies, "not what she seems." The movie isn't anything at all, and in fact, it's by far the worst of all the movies I watched for this assignment—yes, worse than Tank Girl. I hope these talented women had a ball on location in Barcelona; would that their fun communicated to their audience in even the slightest degree.
Holly Hunter is one of the strongest, most sensational character actresses of her generation, which is kind of a marvel, considering that her small size and Conyers twang could easily have typecast her in a narrow range of parts. Instead, she is uncannily flexible with her bold gifts, able to stretch them all the way into comic lunacy or severe drama, and at almost every second, she manages to play more than one emotion at a time. Check out the contrast here, in two superlative turns that debuted on cable TV though each is a screen-sized achievement. In The Positively True Adventures..., Hunter's hilarious tour-de-force as Wanda Holloway, the Channelview, TX, woman who tried to assassinate her daughter's cheerleading rival, ignites a goofily inspired send-up of tabloid-derived TV movies. In her interview scenes as Wanda, she makes the whole story come alive before we've even seen a single location or any of the other actors, and she keeps us in stitches until suddenly making us feel for this southern-fried Gorgon.
I've gotta laugh whenever I read Renée Zellweger being compared to Streep or De Niro (believe me, it happens) just because she gains some pounds for 
Alec Baldwin, handsome, gifted, and intense, is often cited as an inexplicable case of major stardom that never quite happened. His legendary temper, of course, is often blamed for his stalled career, even when he was connecting with the public in The Hunt for Red October and with the critics in Glengarry Glen Ross. But maybe more people share my hesitation about Baldwin's performances, which often seem to me to be kind of interesting and kind of boring at the same time. I just can't make up my mind. I enjoyed his ferrety take on Stanley Kowalski in the TV version of A Streetcar Named Desire in 1995, with Jessica Lange as Blanche, though I'm not sure I didn't appreciate the novelty of the approach more than the actual interpretation. Probably my favorite Baldwin turn to date was in 1990's Miami Blues, where he played a sadistic killer who is also strangely likable, as he shacks up with a ditzy call-girl played by Jennifer Jason Leigh (who else?) and funds their oddball domestic experiment with a little robbery here, a little murder there. What I loved about the film in my first viewing is the trickster tone: it plays like a comedy with truly upsetting violence, and its best moments are throwaway non sequiturs. But then, returning to Miami Blues for this feature, the magic seemed to have dimmed. I still like the film, but I can't quite account for my earlier enthusiasm. The Baldwin Riddle continues.
Easily the most fascinating item on Criterion's DVD of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas—and I include the film itself in this competition—is the title menu, where the hand of some invisible artist inscribes the film's title in real time, in the trippy, scratchy font familiar from the poster. Who knew that watching ink get spilled could be so engrossing; then again, there's the movie itself, which is like watching paint dry, a different activity entirely. Other people's acid trips (or heroin trips, or drug binges, or popper fantasias, or everything else we see in this movie) just aren't that interesting, and the visually profligate Gilliam keys up everything in the movie, including the outrageously mannered performances of Johnny Depp as the Hunter S. Thompson figure and Benicio Del Toro as his lawyer/accomplice, without ever providing a reason for us to care about either the characters or the film's own unbridled disorganization. Del Toro seems to administer his trademark intensity pretty indiscriminately, in high-minded dramas like 
Part of why Djimon Hounsou's work in In America is so wonderful is that, despite the exoticist trappings that still cling to the role of the strapping, wailing, dying benefactor, the screenplay accommodates a decent range of tones in his performance, and the whole film (not just his role) is stylized in the direction of urban fairy tale. This seems quite different than the noble-savage stereotyping of Hounsou in Spielberg's 
This was an opportunistic pick on my part, since Robbins' role in Jungle Fever is limited to just two scenes as Wesley Snipes' snide boss at an urban architectural firm. It's a fall-guy role, allowing Robbins little choice but to embody the kind of unself-conscious racist jerk we've seen elsewhere in Spike Lee's filmography. If I'd really wanted to see Robbins sport his stuff, I would have finally delved into one of his offbeat dramas and thrillers (Jacob's Ladder, Bob Roberts, Arlington Rd.) which tend to have interesting word of mouth, and which he can presumably afford to film with those bogus paychecks he signs for shit like Nothing to Lose and Antitrust.
Oscar 2003's final attempt to complicate this feature: Aghdashloo wasn't easy, Castle-Hughes required a cop-out, and Ken Watanabe's tiny catalogue of films are mostly Japanese-language pictures unavailable on these shores. But it turns out he was one of the taciturn sidekicks in Tampopo's, Juzo Itami's well-known and well-liked paean to pork noodles, spaghetti Westerns, Godardian metacinema, and lots of other heterogeneous inspirations. The film has an odd structure, with a central story about a widow trying to rehabilitate her shabby noodle restaurant (with the help of some itinerant truckers and ancient chefs), but Itami regularly cuts away to self-contained vignettes on the subject of food. We hear elegies to boar sausage, see slapstick routines about pasta, and watch a man and woman make love using a variety of culinary toys (egg yolks, crayfish, you name it). It all sounds weird, and it is, but everyone I know who has seen Tampopo is charmed by it. The slim little teenage truck-driver who sidles up to the noodle bar may not remind you one whit of the imperious, lofty-browed samurai whose charisma runs circles around Tom Cruise, but that's just part of the mystery of the movies!