This determination brings to mind the leading presidential
candidates:
“Is this the best we can do?”
Lemme tell you something, and I am laying it
unapologetically on the line:
I could be very wrong about this.
A lot of times I have watched movies a second time and found
remarkable nuances that I had missed the first
time – “between the cracks” elements not
concerning the story which is inevitably my primary concern but in the
“emotional” presentation of the movie that upgraded it beyond my initial
response. A League of Their Own comes to mind here. Originally, I did not think much of the
movie. I saw it again, and now, it’s one
of my all-time favorites.
Maybe if I saw Spotlight
again, I would connect with its subler attributes. Spotlight
is indisputably a respectable offering, well-intentioned and skillfully
executed.
But “Best Picture”?
I realize that when it comes to annual awards, voters
obligatorily “mark on the curve.” They
can only pick from the, this year, eight available nominees. The current candidates do not have to compete
with Gone With The Wind, The Godfather, Bridge on the River Kwai or Lawrence
of Arabia, to name just four, and avoiding the terrible “Best Pictures.” Nor can voters decide, as with baseball’s Hall of Fame Nominating Committee, that
there is nobody this year deserving of the honor.
In contradistinction to Spotlight,
the four above-mentioned movie examples I subjectively selected display… how do
I describe it… ?
Scope and majesty.
These are big movies.
Lavish. Spectacular. Extravagant in ambition and execution.
In short (in my view):
Movies worthy of projection on a seventy-foot screen.
Setting aside the pervasive expansiveness of the exposed criminality
– the number of abusing Catholic priests that were involved – Spotlight bears a ringing similarity less to a film worthy of the Motion
Picture Academy’s highest recognition than to an ambitious episode of Law & Order: SVU.
(“Going the other way” in this regard, I think the Oscar voters’ hunger for the visceral
satisfaction of a “movie-movie”
explains why the Mad Max operation won
six Academy Awards. As Tina Fey astutely observed during the
program, how can Mad Max’s
hallucinogenic production design possibly lose out to Bridge of Spies’ “Tom
Hanks’s…. house”?)
There have been comparisons between Spotlight and All The
President’s Men, focusing on both films’ grounding in the procedural
application of journalistic shoe leather to ultimate spectacular effect.
I agree with that comparison. Hard work and exceptional perseverance are at
the meat and potatoes of both stories.
And both stories are big, although you cannot arguably get bigger than
breaking a story that leads to the resignation of the President of the United
States. But after that, comparing the
two movies is like Tiffany’s versus
“I know a guy who can get you the same thing but at a fraction of the price.”
From a conceptual standpoint, All the President’s Men did everything imaginable to make the
production feel “important”, while the Spotlight
M.O. appears committed assiduously to a realistic “human scale.”
There is All The
President’s Men’s hyper-realistic dialogue – William Goldman, the Aaron
Sorkin of his era, won a “Best Adapted Screenplay” Oscar for the script.
There’s the pervasive glitziness – All
The President’s Men made an empty parking garage shimmer with glamor and
excitement.
Most significantly, there’s the casting. Show me in Spotlight the superstarical mega-wattage of Robert Redford and
Dustin Hoffman.
Now, your preference – to which you are indisputably entitled
though it differ diametrically from my own – may be to believe that an everyday
(albeit agonizingly painful) story is most effectively communicated via a “No
frills” everyday sensibility, rather than as an over-produced Hollywood
spectacular.
You may be right about that.
I myself, however, have a word for Spotlight’s
stylistic approach.
Television.
Did that sound curmudgeonly to you?
This may require
further investigation.
2 comments:
I'm hoping this vogue for reenactments of true stories passes soon. I loved SHOW ME A HERO (apparently the project David Simon had in mind even before THE WIRE), but that was partly because I had never heard of the case it was based on (and it was brilliantly done). But it's getting ridiculous the number of these things there are now of quite famous cases apparently on the basis that people would rather watch reenactments of famous things whose endings they already know than new fiction in which anything might happen. Sort of the anti-sports. This past year alone: STEVE JOBS, JOBS, THE PROGRAM, GOING CLEAR, CONCUSSION...
GONE WITH THE WIND's filmmaking is still spectacular...but oh, the content has not aged well.
wg
Absolutely curmudgeonly!
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