“Deep Vote,” an Oscar winning screenwriter and a member of the Academy, will write this column — exclusively for ScottFeinberg.com — every week until the Academy Awards in order to help to peel back the curtain on the Oscar voting process. (His identity must be protected in order to spare him from repercussions for disclosing the aforementioned information.)
Thus far, he has shared his thoughts in column one about his general preferences; column two about “Winter’s Bone” (Roadside Attractions, 6/11, R, trailer) and “Solitary Man” (Anchor Bay Films, 5/21, R, trailer); column three about “Alice in Wonderland” (Disney, 3/5, PG, trailer), “Toy Story 3” (Disney, 6/18, G, trailer), and “Mother and Child” (Sony Pictures Classics, 5/7, R, trailer); column four about “Get Low” (Sony Pictures Classics, 7/30, PG-13, trailer), “The Kids Are All Right” (Focus Features, 7/9, R, trailer), and “The Social Network” (Columbia, 10/1, PG-13, trailer); column five about “127 Hours” (Fox Searchlight, 11/5, R, trailer), “Biutiful” (Roadside Attractions, 12/17, R, trailer), and “Shutter Island” (Paramount, 2/19, R, trailer); column six about “Inception” (Warner Brothers, 7/16, PG-13, trailer), “Made in Dagenham” (Sony Pictures Classics, 11/19, R, trailer), and “Somewhere” (Focus Features, 12/22, R, trailer); column seven about “Another Year” (Sony Pictures Classics, 12/29, PG-13, trailer), “Fair Game” (Summit, 11/5, PG-13, trailer), and “Rabbit Hole” (Lionsgate, 12/17, PG-13, trailer); column eight about “Blue Valentine” (The Weinstein Company, 12/29, R, trailer), “The Fighter” (Paramount, 12/10, R, trailer), and “True Grit” (Paramount, 12/22, PG-13, trailer); column nine about “The Ghost Writer” (Summit, 2/19, PG-13, trailer), “The King’s Speech” (The Weinstein Company, 11/26, R, trailer), and “The Town” (Warner Brothers, 9/17, R, trailer); column ten about “Black Swan” (Fox Searchlight, 12/3, R, trailer), “Conviction” (Fox Searchlight, 10/15, R, trailer), and “I Am Love” (Magnolia, 6/18, R, trailer); and column eleven about his nomination ballots.
This week, he assesses three more awards hopefuls: “All Good Things” (Magnolia, 12/3, R, trailer), “Animal Kingdom” (Sony Pictures Classics, 8/13, R, trailer), and “The Way Back” (Newmarket, 12/29, PG-13, trailer).
“All Good Things” is a movie which bills itself as “a love story and murder mystery based on the most notorious unsolved murder case in New York history.” (Those familiar with the case strongly suspect the young lady’s husband, a rich heir of a New York real estate family, who later admitted killing — supposedly in self defense — an old man he met while living disguised as a woman in a boarding house in New Orleans. Remember?) But neither the love story nor the murder mystery play out here. The sweet, shy husband’s personality inexplicably changes, his lovely young wife disappears, and then he becomes an oddball on the run.
What is on the screen is like notes for a movie that was never made. Boy (Ryan Gosling) meets girl (Kirsten Dunst) and, since it seems to suit him and he is rich and she is devoted, they happily run an organic grocery together in an obscure rural location. But he is in retreat from his righteously overbearing and intrusive father (Frank Langella, who seems able to use his bulk and force as any movie may require), a real-estate man who projects civic “visions,” but in actuality owns the grubby half of Times Square (back when it was half-grubby). Langella wants his son to help run the business (though all he will let him do is collect rents) and live “as he should” (as a member of Manhattan fashionable society). Langella has dark power, we are given to know, partly because he allowed his son to witness his mother commit suicide when the boy was seven; and his motive is not revealed until the end of the movie. Needless to say, the boy’s life was an idyll pre-suicide, and we never know more about his mother’s motives or the inside story of how the event affected him.
Dunst is wonderfully sweet, and charming, and pretty. She takes the move to New York in stride, but is perplexed when her husband begins to act strangely, and is hurt and tearful when he refuses to have children and flies into a rage rather than discuss why. She begins to go to law school at a campus near their weekend home, to get caught up in it, which further angers him… and then, suddenly, she vanishes.
The movie is over before the relationship has begun, so there’s little more to discuss. But since the rapidly deteriorating husband is played (well enough) by Gosling, and since Dunst has power as an actress that is only hinted at here, it was natural to imagine a comparison to “Blue Valentine,” where so much more is explored, emotionally, between the two young partners. One difference is that everything that is challenging is attempted in “Valentine.” One may not know the whole inner histories of the young couple, but one sees what’s going wrong between them in great nuance. There were possibilities like that in this story, but they were avoided.
Sometimes the existence of a true story (which may come bound by legal limits) are inhibiting, in which case, the true story should be tossed aside and a new one explored, even if it means losing that “based on” advertising link. There was nothing to lose here, in any case, and fine performances by Gosling, Dunst and Langella are wasted on a movie with little to offer.
* * *
“Animal Kingdom” is a low-key crime-family film, of the lower-class variety, which critics always like better than audiences — not a bad film, except that finally not enough happens. It centers around an Australian family whose members are often in jail or running from the cops, who make non-surprise armed entries at odd moments. The style — of the family, and of the movie — is relatively quiet, and American audiences, accustomed to shouting and anger with their crime families, may find this odd.
The director, David Michod, wrote the script. This is not one of those rare cases where a director-produced script is brilliant, but there are brilliant things about it, and a series of somewhat improbable scenes builds an eerie tension, as one realizes the three Cody brothers and their grandmother are capable of doing just about anything, including killing the girlfriend (Laura Wheelwright) of the youngest brother, “J,” who is hesitating on the brink of a life of full-fledged crime. The others see the girlfriend as an impediment to family unity, and she is done for, casually and brutally — and they think “J” doesn’t know who did it. They manipulate him to the edge of a scene where they kill policemen, and it would be easy for him to keep on running and hiding, and to become what they are without remembering where and how it all started.
Not exactly masterminding everything, but keeping the family household, is the grandmother, “Smurf,” played by Jacki Weaver, whose aging but pretty face with its crooked teeth has a look of dreadful big-eyed innocence as, at critical moments, she asks each of the Codys for a kiss on the lips. What she knows behind each kiss is something that’s not so pretty. She’s being pushed for an outside shot at an Oscar, but really, her character is not under any pressure.
It is Ben Mendelsohn, who plays the psychopathic brother, who deserves the supporting nod, and I would vote for him, if given the chance. Mendelsohn plays a fascinating personality not often enough seen in films. Not the out-and-out villain, who, when unmasked, revels in his evil, but the cool and friendly guy who simply is evil, and who makes the hair on the back of one’s neck stand up every time one sees him. And yet one wants to see him — one cannot get enough of him — not unlike, say, the Harry Lime character in “The Third Man” (1949). He is rarer in film than in real life, perhaps because he’s difficult to catch in either case. Here one cringes as he seems almost to beg “J” to confide in him, saying that’s what he’s there for, he’ll always be there, etc., when we know what he really wants is to master “J,” to twist him around his little finger, to have him take the rap, if that suits him, or to kill him. He never stops trying, nor does he let any circumstances whatever penetrate his terrifying cool.
* * *
In “The Way Back,” a group of men escape from a Stalinist political prison in a Siberian winter and show up the following year in India, having walked 4,000 miles across the Saharan desert and the Himalyan Mountains. This is a natural movie, and has been powerfully made in a number of variations, most notably by Russian directors who have a Jack London-ish knack for conveying the overwhelming power of nature.
Here, the theme of men alone in the great outdoors is handled by Peter Weir, a veteran Australian pro, who over the years has directed all kinds of excellent and near-excellent movies (six of which have been nominated for Oscars), and has some fine actors — including Jim Sturgess, Colin Farrell, and Ed Harris (who has aged into a rugged sage) — to work with. The cinematographer, Russell Boyd, certainly gives us wild and beautiful and dangerous weather and settings.
And yet, and yet… there is not enough of a movie here. The characters are various, as convention calls for, yet there are no conflicts between them… at least, nothing a man would kill for. And the theme of man vs. nature in the extreme requires nothing less than a series of life-or-death clashes and transformations.
There are a few telling human touches. Two escapees die along the way, and that is suitably sad… but not much more. The travelers find an attractive young girl (Saoirse Ronan) in the middle of nowhere, and — remarkably — they do not fight over her, or try to seduce her, or rape her. She is the liveliest person in the film — she digs out their personal stories and brings them together — and then she, too, is gone, all too suddenly, in the manner of Jack Nicholson in “Easy Rider” (1969) or, this year, Naomi Watts in “Mother and Child,” and one’s hopes for the picture sinks without her.
No conflicts, no hot pursuit, nothing in the outer world hinging on the survival of this little band, not even anyone important to the audience waiting. I’m not sure why Weir went to the immense trouble of making “The Way Back,” but I hope he soon finds his way back to smaller films like “The Plumber” (1979), a wonderful little one which he directed decades ago.
Photo: Ben Mendelsohn and Laura Wheelwright in “Animal Kingdom.” Credit: Sony Pictures Classics.
