Calendar Goes To the OSCARS : The Directors: Reborn on the 26th of March : Two of the five nominees don’t deserve to be there, but these selections can be . . . twitchy
This year’s quintet of Oscar nominees for Best Director is a mix of hifalutin’ pile drivers, stage-based phenoms and lapidary craftsmen. As Academy slates go, it’s slightly better than most. Only two of the choices make me twitch, Oliver Stone, for “Born on the Fourth of July,†and Peter Weir for “Dead Poets Society.†The remaining three, Woody Allen for “Crimes and Misdemeanors,†Kenneth Branagh for “Henry V,†and Jim Sheridan for “My Left Foot,†are more felicitous choices, particularly Branagh and Sheridan, both first-time directors.
Stone, the winner of this year’s Director’s Guild of America award, will almost assuredly win the Oscar Monday night, too. He’s the pile driver in the pack. As a director, Stone is so relentlessly bullish that his movies--â€The Hand,†“Salvador,†“Platoon,†“Wall Street,†and “Talk Radioâ€--leave little room for an audience’s sympathetic participation. “Born on the Fourth of July,†about Ron Kovic’s transition from hawk to militant dove, is so bombastic that it neglects to make credible the political conversion which is central to Kovic’s story.
Stone seems unable to film an actor just crossing the street: the scene has to be freighted with a jacked-up score, immense close-ups, “mythic†slow-motion, hollering. It’s often mistakenly assumed that the funniest films are those which include only funny scenes. It’s equally mistaken to assume that the most powerful films are those which are wall-to-wall “intense.â€
Two of the best scenes he’s directed occurred when he lowered the volume: James Woods’ confession-booth monologue in “Salvador,†which is still his best picture, and the near-wordless reunion between Kovic and his father in “Born on the Fourth of July.†But these are vast exceptions to the rabid rule.
Intensity is not necessarily a negative. But Stone’s intensity is a form of bombast; it doesn’t allow for enough varieties of emotional experience, and so it often has a bludgeoning, propagandistic quality. Take, for example, the most controversial scene in “Born on the Fourth of Julyâ€--controversial, in part, because it apparently never happened. Kovic seeks out the parents of the comrade he accidentally killed in combat. Despite the fact that they believe their son was shot by the enemy, Kovic uploads his guilt by telling them the truth. The parents’ response is all-too-obligingly “understanding.â€
That this scene is meant to clinch Kovic’s coming-of-age for us is astoundingly insensitive; the focus is entirely on Kovic, not on the parents’ grief and rage at having their illusions shattered. The way the scene is played, there is no rage. Stone knows how to work up a fount of emotion in his movies, but the emotion is often out of sync with the totality of the characters’ sympathies. Stone equates grandstanding with feeling, and that’s not something that ought to be honored.
As an example of how an “intense†subject can be rendered emotionally complex, Jim Sheridan’s work in “My Left Foot†is exemplary. Daniel Day-Lewis’ Christy Brown, the cerebral palsy victim whose life was a triumph of the spirit, is not employed by the director as the agent of his own pontificating. Sheridan, who has an extensive theatrical background, understands how actors can dominate a moment without the need for a lot of camera pyrotechnics. And he’s almost frighteningly aware of the emotional cross-currents in a scene; he recognizes each character’s claim to self-awareness. Instead of keying each sequence in “My Left Foot†to Christy, he creates a thick webbing of emotional interaction between Christy and his family, his speech therapist, his community.
In the film’s most powerful scene, Christy reacts in a jealous rage to the news that his therapist, who is seated next to him in a restaurant, and with whom he’s in love, is about to marry. What’s remarkable about the sequence is not just the way it distills Christy’s furious incapacity; equally startling is the pain and stupefaction of the other people at his table. The scene has a kaleidoscopic power. Everybody’s conflicts are fully represented, every hurt is given its due. And Sheridan films the sequence in a series of stationery, unobtrusive set-ups. Sometimes the most eloquent camera movement is no movement at all.
Kenneth Branagh, like Sheridan, is a man of the theater. His “Henry V†is theatrical in the best sense. It doesn’t merely provide a stirring, and revisionist, transcription of Shakespeare’s play, it exalts the play’s dramatic core. Branagh’s direction, at its best, destroys the usual artificial notions of what constitutes “film†and “theater.†The outsized performances in his film might seem comfortable on the stage but, because Branagh has scaled the movie to match the epic nature of its themes, they also seem equally at home on screen.
The brackish, sunless battlescapes of this “Henry V†is the key to its revisionism, its depiction of war’s grungy ingloriousness. The performances, from Branagh’s King Henry on down, are almost obscenely spirited. It may not seem like such a great director’s achievement to assemble a cast of luminaries like Paul Scofield, Ian Holm, Derek Jacobi and Alec McCowen. But Branagh can take credit for the ways in which their performances are modulated with the overall mood. We’re watching a gallery of tours de force linked by a single controlling intelligence.
I’ve also seen Branagh’s two recent directorial efforts at the Mark Taper Forum, his productions of “King Lear†and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,†and they are all-of-a-piece with his film work: impetuous, uneven, alarmingly brash, devoted to the beauties of language and performance and imagery. It could be that Branagh’s Oscar nomination is intended to ballast the academy’s cultural imprimatur, but his work is too low-down exciting to fulfill such high-art hoo-ha.
Because Peter Weir is such an accomplished craftsman there’s a tendency to overvalue his movies simply because they work so well. Like Oliver Stone, Weir is often effective even when he isn’t good. I didn’t much like “Dead Poets Society,†a movie about an inspiring boys’ prep school teacher circa 1959. Its sentiments are spurious: it’s a movie about the liberating powers of art, how art makes you a better person, how it’s good for you--like oat bran, maybe.
But Weir stages this maudlin psychodrama with enough conviction that, if he doesn’t believe the gist of Tom Schulman’s script, he does a fine job of faking it. The film is a creditable piece of cinematic engineering, with each shot framed and timed for maximum sentimental impact. It’s not the kind of film making that I have much respect for, though. It substitutes the audience’s instincts for the director’s, and that way leads directly to a demagoguery in the arts. Weir’s greatest accomplishment, I think, is in allowing Robin Williams the opportunity, for a change, to under play in the movies. Or perhaps Weir reined him in. Either way, it’s Williams best performance to date.
Woody Allen will never be accused of catering to his audience’s schmaltziest demands. He’s too busy catering to his own sentimentalities. In its own way, “Crimes and Misdemeanors†is as schematic and engineered as “Dead Poets Society,†but it is clearly the work of a writer-director who is trying to elucidate dramatic themes of the first importance--at least they’re important to him . Allen has by now achieved a position as film director where technique is wholly at the service of ideas; if his movies fail, as they do as often as not, it’s not because his film making falters.
“Crimes and Misdemeanors,†like most of Allen’s “serious†films, has its directorial antecedents, primarily Bergman. That’s not all bad. Like Bergman, Allen has developed an extraordinarily intimate and expressive rapport with his ensemble of actors. He knows how to frame them, how to group them in ways that set off their conflicts without seeming unduly emblematic and “staged.†Allen’s direction is in the rare and underrated tradition of those film makers whose technique draws attention to the story and the ideas, and not the technique.
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