Five big Oscar contenders that are all worth watching for different reasons…
Nocturnal Animals…Tom Ford’s follow-up to “A Single Man” (still a great movie and all-time best performance from Colin Firth, if you haven’t seen it) isn’t as deep and doesn’t stay with you as long, but it’s still a fun head-game in the moment. The movie is falsely advertised as being about a jilted ex-husband (Jake Gyllenhaal) getting revenge on Amy Adams in a conventional thriller sense, but it’s really about Adams reading her ex-husband’s book which is about a man (Gyllenhaal portrays the character in acted-out scenes) trying to get justice against a hillbilly (Aaron Taylor-Johnson becoming the latest Brit to butcher a Southern accent and win an award for it, in this case a Golden Globe) who committed a terrible crime. Michael Shannon deserves his Best Supporting Actor nomination as an ambiguous sheriff, but much of the movie belongs to Amy Adams. It’s really about discovering you can’t outrun your worst impulses–she appears to leave Gyllenhaal’s character for shallow reasons, as her own mother told her she would–and exactly what makes a man “strong,” but none of that would mean much if Adams didn’t give such splendid internal acting as many of her best scenes are alone. It’s also the most literal movie I’ve seen about a writer’s creative process, as feelings and themes from your life can take decades to shape themselves into a plot. Grade: B+
Manchester By the Sea…A film about tragedies, and that’s right, I did use the multiple for tragedy. Certain viewers may feel like writer-director Kenneth Lonergan piled on too many heartbreaks for the suffering characters in this movie–his stellar directorial debut “You Can Count On Me” certainly had a lighter touch dealing with more universal obstacles–but Oscars are rarely won by characters with no real problems, and Casey Affleck truly does deserve to win Best Actor this year. Lonergan is smart enough to layer sly-humor and rage into Affleck’s moroseness, and the moment when he said “I just can’t beat it” may find more than a few viewers bursting into spontaneous tears. Best Supporting Actor nominee Lucas Hedges is every bit as good as a teenager who only appears to be handling his father’s death well. Grade: A-
Fences…Another likely Oscar Winner is Viola Davis in “Fences” and it’s a role that has some surface similarities to her other Oscar nominations (“The Help” and “Doubt”) as she’s playing a home maker character trying to raise a son around a forcefully-regressive father who may or may not love him. I liked Davis’ more poker-faced turn in “The Help” where it felt like she was having to hide her true self in a world that didn’t want to see it, but in “Fences” everything is just a little bit too on the surface, and that certainly applies to Denzel Washington’s bellowing turn as a washed-up “negro leagues” athlete turned city garbageman who can’t see–or doesn’t want to see–that racial progress is happening even when it’s happening to him directly. It’s a realistic portrait of a character addicted to their own bitterness and the seductive power in being tyrannical at home to make up for insignificance in the outside world. [“Fences” makes an interesting connection between people who demand “respect” from their children and those that are denied said respect from everyone else.] But you might feel letdown that the other characters keep tiptoeing around how bad a guy Denzel’s Troy really is. “Fences” feels like a movie that keeps building toward a climax that never really comes, and it needed to deviate more from the play it’s based on to create a satisfying movie experience. Grade: B
Hidden Figures…Satisfying, well-acted, well-staged, but ultimately a little bit bland. Taraji P. Henson, Janelle Monae, and Oscar-nominated Octavia Spencer (hooray for an Alabama native!) do their best to bring alive characters that may have not been fully fleshed-out on the page. There is little to them on-screen than competency, and that may be because the behind-the-scenes work at NASA is not really interesting enough for a movie of its own. Sure, for every astronaut in space, there are a thousand behind-the-scenes professionals working overtime to make that happen, but who has ever really watched the glorious space epic “The Right Stuff” and said “When in the hell are they gonna make a movie about the mathematicians damnit?!” Grade: B
Jackie…For me personally, this film is a little bit boring, and that’s partially because I have honestly never cared what was going through Jackie Kennedy’s mind in all the pictures I’ve seen of her. I’m not saying she’s a Melania Trump-style First Lady, and for all I know she was as smart and interesting as Hillary Clinton or Michelle Obama or Eleanor Roosevelt, but it never came across that way to me. She seemed to exemplify a type of First-Lady-as-Elitist-Mannequin and although I’m sure it wasn’t that way, this film doesn’t really make a case that Jackie was the most populist First Lady America ever had. [It also gives her a lot of credit for shaping John’s post-assassination legacy, but the fact that he was killed during the age of television probably ensured his remembrance.] Grade: B