John Hawkes not nominated for Best Actor in a Leading Role in The Sessions

I placed Hawkes’ performance, along with co-star Helen Hunt’s, as my top film work of the entire year, so this omission is a standout one. As a polio victim looking for physical with Hunt’s sex surrogate, Hawkes’ performance was demanding physically and emotionally, a triumph in each way. Making things more curious is that Joaquin Phoenix, who had not only not campaigned for his nomination but who had publicly decried the aggressive campaigning process, still got in – despite the lack of overall love for his film, The Master (co-stars Amy Adams and Philip Seymour Hoffman got supporting actor nominations, but there were no nods for Picture, Director, Screenplay, or amazing cinematography). That means Hunt really deserved her Supporting Actress nomination – apparently she was having sex with herself in the movie.

Neither Kathryn Bigelow nor Ben Affleck in the Best Director race

Did Argo peak too early? Did Zero Dark Thirty polarize too many people? Hard to say, because while the two early Best Picture favorites both made it into the category (which also includes seven other films this year), neither director did. This might be an especially hard blow to Affleck who was campaigning ultra-hard to be seen as a leading Hollywood director. The good news for them is that both still got nominated as producers. And oh yeah, they both already have statuettes on their mantles.

Ann Dowd, Compliance

Dowd was as perfect a performance as captured on celluloid this year. Alas, her film’s studio, citing budget restrictions, didn’t provide screeners to award nominators, allowing bigger stars with bigger representation to move right on in. I’m impressed by veteran Jacki Weaver – the character she played in Silver Linings was the emotional fulcrum of the novel but reduced to inexpressive wallpaper in the film. And still she got in over Dowd.

Ewan McGregor, The Impossible

Naomi Watts received a well-deserved Best Actress nom for tsunami story The Impossible, but in a more crowded Best Supporting Actor category, McGregor was dismissed. It’s a shame. Both carry equal halves of the demanding film, and McGregor had one scene, reconnecting with certain family members over the phone, that makes for a perfect “Oscar scene.” Making this category all the more yawn-worthy is that all five nominees have already won at least one Academy Award.

Leonardo DiCaprio, Django Unchained

DiCaprio’s Django co-star, Waltz, is terrific and got nominated this year. But his role is really a lead. And DiCaprio demonstrated remarkable prowess, cultivating a comically nuanced Southern villain. Maybe if his upcoming Gatsby role doesn’t do the trick for a leading actor nomination, he can play a singing alcoholic president grappling with mental illness. Just as long as the character doesn’t have polio.

Michael Haneke and Benh Zeitlin in the Best Director race

The directors of Amour and Beasts, two of my big 2012 triumphs, got in – pushing the aforementioned Affleck and Bigelow out of their presumptive slots. One’s a veteran and one’s a newcomer, and I’m happy to see both recognized. I just wish Life of Pi’s Ang Lee or Silver Linings’ David O. Russell could have lost their slots to make room for Bigelow and Master’s Paul Thomas Anderson.

The Oscars will be handed out on February 24.

By Armond White

Christopher Nolan doesn’t have a born filmmaker’s natural gift for detail, composition and movement, but on the evidence of his fussily constructed mind-game movies Following, Memento, Insomnia and the new Inception, he’s definitely a born con artist. Who else could rook Warner Bros. out of $200 million to make Hollywood’s most elaborate video-game movie and slap on a puzzling, unappealing title?

Lovely Leo in an elaborate video game?

Inception proves this is Nolan’s moment—a beginning-of-the-end moment for film culture, ha, ha—because it’s conceived to amuse an era hungry for hokum and a geek audience who, after his gross The Dark Knight pulled in $500 million, is primed for more baroque fantasia. It takes the form of a sci-fi adventure movie, updating the old Fantastic Voyage for the digital age, but instead of exploring the human body, Leonardo DiCaprio as dream-extractor Dom Cobb goes inside people’s unconscious with the help of his young exploratory team: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ellen Page and Tom Hardy.

“I am the most skilled extractor,” Cobb announces. “I know your mind better than your wife or therapist.” Playing with minds—Nolan’s specialty—is a perfect con-man’s scheme that involves undermining a mark’s confidence. As Cobb’s dream-warriors battle inside one industrialist’s head and then another’s, Nolan’s narrative, essentially a tale of corporate intrigue, goes from reality to dreams, then dreams within dreams. Its essential con is that, as in Memento, Nolan ignores the morality of his characters’ actions; he accepts that they will do anything—which is the cynicism critics admired in Memento, the con-man’s motivating nihilism.

Stuck in film-noir mode, Nolan’s dark sentimentality may seem classical to naive filmwatchers. But the way his clichés manipulate viewers’ perception of the world and human behavior is merely timely, not profound. Like Grand Theft Auto’s quasi-cinematic extension of noir and action-flick plots, Inception manipulates the digital audience’s delectation for relentless subterfuge. Cobb never runs into paradisiacal visions like What Dreams May Come—only terror, danger and violence. Nolan’s F/X set pieces are all large-scale fight scenes, like Gordon-Levitt levitating/grappling with anonymous henchmen or Page and DiCaprio observing various apocalyptic destruction scenarios.

Nolanoids have been faithfully awaiting a vision, and in these crystal-clear (fake) annihilation scenes, Nolan out-Finchers Fincher and seeks Kubrickian misanthropy—but there’s a simple-minded sappiness at the heart of this cynical vision. If anything, the time and consciousness tricks stolen from The Matrix make Nolan a bastard Wachowski brother, not a son of Kubrick. Despite its big budget (what Manny Farber would call a white elephant movie), Inception is full of second-rate aesthetics, yet when shoddy aesthetics become the new standard, it’s sufficient to up-end the art of cinema.

Inception’s gee-whiz tricks permit disbelief in reality. It substitutes fascination with exploring the physical and spiritual reality of the world (which the great critic Andre Bazin posited as the glory of movies) with an unedifying emphasis on shallow, unreal spectacle. Nolan’s fascinated by his cast of narcissistic criminals indulging their own treacheries—nihilism chasing its own tail. It distracts from how business and class really work. His shapeless storytelling (going from Paris to Mumbai to nameless ski slopes, carelessly shifting tenses like a video game) throws audiences into artistic limbo—an “unconstructed dream space” like Toy Story 3—that leaves them bereft of art’s genuine purpose: a way of dealing with the real world.

Reality is neither perceived nor penetrated in Inception. Cobb’s dream obsession suggests pop-culture addiction, mirroring how consumers habitually escape reality with video games and movies. But Nolan never critiques this as Neveldine/Taylor did in Gamer. Instead, gobbledy-gook like, “In dreams we create and perceive our world simultaneously” or Matrix-isms like “the smallest idea is a resilient virus, it can grow to define or destroy you,” offer pseudo-distractions. This conceptual failure is apparent from DiCaprio’s glib characterization. Nolan finally has the budget to work with his look-alike (Leo’s an irresistible movie star), yet fails to write him a good role. Cobb suffers the same marital nightmares Leo had in Shutter Island; this isn’t depth, it’s morbidity and the confusion is all over the screen. Inception should have been called Self-Deception.

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Inception
Directed by Christopher Nolan
Runtime: 148 min.

A horrible couple made in Hollywood Hell.

In the early 1950s, Daniels investigates the disappearance of a patient at an island-based hospital for the criminally insane. With his partner (Mark Ruffalo), Daniels encounters creepy prison guards, inmates and seemingly mad-scientist psychiatrists (Ben Kingsley, Max von Sydow). Scorsese piles on insanity: Daniels’ periodic flashbacks to the Dachau death camp, then ghostly visions of his wife (Michelle Williams) who died mysteriously—but gruesomely—during peace time.

Victim of at least two holocausts, Daniels undergoes haunted-house trauma in a slow, relentless, bug-eyed manner while Scorsese treats the audience like rats in a CGI maze. Wherever the narrative is going, it barely comes to a point. As incredulity shifts into absurdity then repulsion then hopelessness, Shutter Island respectively salutes specific cinematic figureheads: Val Lewton for the heebie-jeebies, Sam Fuller for the topical tension, Roman Polanski for the demonic and, of course, Kubrick for a nihilistic finish.

What happened to the filmmaker once so attuned to his characters’ cultural experiences that Pauline Kael was moved in her review of Taxi Driver to exclaim: “Scorsese is just naturally an expressionist”? Shutter Island fails a deliberate attempt at horror-movie expressionism, yet this isn’t Scorsese’s first go at the genre. After Hours (1985) was similarly dour and hopeless. Bringing Out the Dead (1999, Scorsese’s last decent film) successfully blended personal hysteria with big-city realism. Both urban nightmares connected to Scorsese’s knack for the New York City fantastic. His singular gift for ethnic authenticity and pop stylishness gave genuine power to Who’s That Knocking at My Door, Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, even Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.

Shutter Island is a perfect example of Hollywood excess: It demonstrates a once-significant filmmaker decaying into a big-budget, poorly-motivated hack. Its story could have been told better if it were cheaper and shorter. But Scorsese has found himself flummoxed: cosseting DiCaprio, a genuine box-office attraction, as if expressing his own private concerns. But where Lewton, Fuller, Polanski and Kubrick were visualizing their personal issues, beatnik and hippie-era Scorsese stays emotionally distant from the WWII and the House Un-American Activities Committee crises that haunt Teddy Daniels.

It’s exasperating—and tasteless—for Shutter Island to pile concentration camp atrocities on top of medical and penal institution outrages, then bring in marital psychosis, mass murder and infanticide. Screenwriter Laeta Kalogridis interjects a couple of speeches about violence (“You are men of violence”; “God gave us violence”) which ring hollow in the work of a director who exulted in violence to expose macho anarchy. It’s a weak way to address the 20th-century’s horror, and Shutter Island itself makes a paltry metaphor for what’s gone wrong with modernity.

When Daniels argues about “moral order” to a fiendish guard, it’s just another of Scorsese’s altar boy hiccups. The scene of Daniels and his squad slaughtering a troop of Nazi P.O.W.s—staged entirely without feeling, as if boomer Scorsese had no consciousness of even the My Lai Massacre—makes it clear that he’s simply laying out clichés. Personal feeling has gone out of his filmmaking.

The time has come to ask Scorsese to move on: Perhaps become a producer and lend other, hungrier filmmakers the benefit of his vast cinematic knowledge and technical enthusiasm. As an artifact of the boomer generation’s imagination ruled by the Bomb, Communism, Social Welfare and Sexual Revolution—in the form of enigmatic, elusive, predatory females—Shutter Island is remote and formulaic. Not even tough enough to embarrass Tarantino’s glib take on history, Shutter Island suggests Scorsese has no reason to make movies other than relieving boredom.

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Shutter Island
Directed by Martin Scorsese
Runtime: 138 min.

Why spy? Leonardo DiCaprio disappoints in Body of Lies.

DiCaprio and Crowe portray intensely unlikable professionals-a hands-on killer and a white-collar killer. It’s unsubtly implied that they’re doing our government’s shameful bidding; America’s dirty work exposes their tainted souls. Besides DiCaprio’s brief flush of guilt, nothing else is revealed.
The stars of Body of Lies lack the moral stability Newman evinced even when playing a cynical Korean War vet in The Rack (1956). They indulge a facile ugliness (Ferris outsmarting swarthies, Hoffman enjoying the American Dream while giving out lethal commands) that acts out post-9/11 distress. These actors readily don masochistic psychological garb but neglect the idealism that prompts people to become agents and soldiers. Vain professionals, DiCaprio and Crowe glamorize what French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut has described as the “penitential narcissism that makes the West guilty of even that which victimizes it.” Their twisted American self-hatred is established in the film’s prologue that identifies U.S. Middle-East policy as mere vengeance.
It takes Ridley Scott to push this turpitude as entertainment. The Bourne-like plot shuttles DiCaprio and Crowe, either bodily or by satellite, to Iraq, Jordan, England, Amsterdam, Dubai and Turkey. No James Bond travelogue has looked this sleek (there’s a beautiful rectangular composition of a plane landing on a tarmac with mirage-like black-and-green striations). Ultra-hack Scott has refined his pictorial style into obscenely impersonal depictions of warfare: nifty bomb F/X and sadistic views of wounds that vie with exotic locales. In order to have a hit, Scott amps-up violence, overwhelming the political subject. He doesn’t distill to genre essence-which structures meaning as in Philip G. Atwell’s underrated War. This is just more post-9/11 trauma.
Trauma being a word for damaged tissue, Body of Lies demonstrates the corruption of movie-star ethics in the post-Newman age. DiCaprio and Crowe inspire distaste and disdain-reversing the sympathy of Newman’s greatest roles which once were described as “anti-heroes” (in The Hustler, Hud, Hombre, Buffalo Bill and the Indians). When Pauline Kael complained, “No one should be asked to dislike [Newman's Buffalo Bill],” she missed that Newman actually made the character “likable” to more deeply understand a reviled historical figure. But DiCaprio and Crowe curry political contempt. Their espionage involves oily dealings with Jordan’s General Intelligence Department (GID) agent Hani Salaam (British actor Mark Strong slithering like Andy Garcia). For all these actors, Newman’s emotional connection (his popular belief in political virtue) is a thing of the past. Even when Leo falls in love with a Palestinian nurse, he doesn’t fulfill our political or romantic mandate.
DiCaprio might have brought charisma to Robert De Niro’s complex CIA drama The Good Shepherd, but here he’s simply an American sinner with no chance for redemption. Collaborating with a director who doesn’t give a damn, DiCaprio and Crowe have made a political action flick totally without emotional impact; it merely scolds: Leo’s big moment of penitential narcissism is announced “Welcome to Guantanamo!” A heartless counteragent then specifies, “It’s not torture; it’s punishment.” He could be describing this hateful movie.
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Body of Lies
Directed by Ridley Scott, Running Time: 129 min.
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