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.

There’s no escaping it – Amour is a tough movie, made all the more exacting than other Haneke films Funny Games and The White Ribbon by its quiet stillness. Stemming from a purported personal brush with loss, his film examines true love and companionship. Anne enters a fugue state during a seemingly normal breakfast (aren’t they always, until something out of the ordinary happens?) with George. The cause is deemed an obstructed carotid artery, but a successful surgery yields devastating side effects. Anne loses function in the right half of her body, which shows no signs of ever recovering. George must tend Anne’s needs, which include dressing, feeding and bathing. Eventually, Anne’s weakening body infects her spirit as well, and she retreats within herself emotionally.

Amour’s approach is nothing but honest, as are the brave performances of Emmanuelle Riva and Jean-Louis Trintignant as Anne and George. There isn’t a hint of artifice to these two, who rank among French film royalty. Trintignant gradually reveals the corrosive effect his caretaking takes on him; several scenes with George dealing with a mentally recessive Anne are devastating, but never false. Riva, too, is a one-woman discourse on performance at its purest and most comfortable. Her work is heavenly. Haneke’s choices are also too spare to ever feel manipulative. He never explains, for example, during the recurring presence of their estranged daughter, Eva (Isabelle Huppert, excellent and essential), just why the relationship between parent and child has grown cold – and yet evidence is visible throughout his very specific movie. It may be depressing to many, but the overall message is clarion clear: decay is a necessary, inevitable denouement to all relationships.

If Amour were merely a sophisticated look at love and loss, it would be a fine picture, but not a masterpiece. What makes Amour the truly transcendent movie that it is – and it is, easily, the best movie of the year – is the subtly cunning visual acuity with which Haneke tells his harrowing tale. Much of the film’s important action, including doctors’ visits and surgeries, are only described, not witnessed. Almost every scene occurs within the confines of the couple’s apartment, which becomes a character unto itself (production designer Jean-Vincent Puzos and set decorator Susanne Haneke have done work as crucial to the film as the choice to cast the impeccable Riva and Trintignant). Cinematographer Darius Khondji, shooting in 1.85:1, adds invaluable perspective to every scene, using perspective to show Anne’s fraying grip on her vitality and, more importantly, George’s shifting frame of mind. (The slow physical decline of the apartment also, of course, mirrors the subtle deterioration of Anne and George’s relationship.) Playwrights should take note of Haneke’s methods. How often do people remark of the impossibility of adapting a work from the stage for the celluloid? Amour exists largely within the world of an apartment, but never feels stagy or confined. Where a director like, say, Roman Polanski would exploit the setting for claustrophobic causes, Haneke succeeds in gifting his mise-en- scène with psychological heft, peeling back layers of character information without feeling the need to highlight for viewers.

Of course, Haneke does follow in the footsteps of storied directors varying from Edwin S. Porter to Bob Fosse to Francis Ford Coppola in his choice to implicate his audience within Anne and George’s situation. In an early scene that does step outside of the apartment, Haneke positions his two leads, still in good health, in the audience of a pupil’s concert. It puts the audience on the same footing as his characters; the watchers become the watched. And it forces us to become active empathizers to the sad ballad of Anne and George. How would we react in their situation? What choices would we make? Most of all, could this really happen to us and our loved ones as well? Visually, viscerally, Haneke’s Amour is a stupendous film about the forms love can take that we try not to think about. And it asserts that from every loss, something far deeper will always be gained.

It’s Haneke’s second-hand art-movie affectations that impress festival curators and critics into thinking he ranks with cinema’s greats. They confer importance on his patronizing exploitation of modern pessimist mood—not the eternal truths that Dreyer and Bergman dramatized. Today’s children of corniness can’t tell the difference. The White Ribbon uses two devices: 1) implying the decadence of white racist inbreeding: 2) state-of-the-art (presumably superior) photography. Nothing impresses contemporary dilettantes more than Nazis and dig video technology. Haneke bedevils both.

The village where The White Ribbon takes place is full of strange disappearances, vicious recriminations and self-abnegating moral strictures. Women are kept in their place as chattel. Children are under severe control, lest sadistic punishment—a practice they learn to inflict upon animals and each other. Haneke produces suspense/disbelief from how nasty things can get; viewers wait for cruelty to occur as if the anticipation itself required intelligence or compassion. Pandering to viewers’ worst fears (here or in Pan’s Labyrinth) has become a sure way to win acclaim; especially if audiences are naïve enough to think cynicism is truth or that Haneke is doing something new.

Christian Berger’s videography is stark black-and-white; slick, yet without the luster or shadow of celluloid imagery. It’s not the revolutionary molding of light that Bergman achieved in the ’60s with Sven Nykvist (Winter Light, The Silence, Persona, Shame, Hour of the Wolf), although Haneke purposely alludes to those films. The effect is like the pseudo-postmodernism in Nine where the new movie feels even worse if you know Fellini’s 8 1/2 and can track the next narrative traduction. Here, the obvious symbolism (a scythe in a cabbage patch; a boy’s bowl-breaking tantrum upon learning about death) and the aggravated sexual antipathy (a paternalistic doctor humiliating his mistress; her angry accusations about his fidelity and incest) suggest parodies of Dreyer, then Bergman—except Haneke, as always, is humorless.

Haneke’s titular ribbon evokes Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter; it’s a badge symbolizing purity but a sign of penance (white ribbons are used to tie a boy’s arms to his bed to prevent masturbation). But Haneke is also aware that he’s evoking the badges (stars) that Nazis pinned on their various victims. No wonder The White Ribbon is being accorded more serious treatment than it deserves; it’s the same Nazi-junkie hysteria that makes people revere Tarantino’s Elie-Weisel-on-weed goof Inglourious Basterds. The Holocaust becomes a fallback for apocalypse junkies. When Haneke’s minister intones “Life in our community is God’s will,” his arrogance rouses modern secular skepticism. In a divinity class scene, students are forced to recite the Lord’s Prayer as punishment (recalling the blasphemous prayer scene in Haneke’s Funny Games). Bergman prelates were not signs of social decay, only personal turmoil, but Haneke sells easy nihilism. Set pre-WWI, before inevitable social change, The White Ribbon’s corrupt clergy and misanthropic villagers automatically incite the usual German distrust.

The White Ribbon looks especially lousy this year after Gotz Spielmann’s powerful Revanche found contemporary correlatives for the spiritual struggle that Dreyer and Bergman once defined for a troubled world. Haneke’s cornball routines also fail for me, having recently enjoyed the new DVD collection of the 1960s Peyton Place TV series where small-town intrigue was explicated with moral richness inspired by the emotive, mid-20th-century’s theatrical giants O’Neill, Williams and Inge. Whatever Haneke’s inspiration, the result is malice, envy, apathy, brutality. Haneke’s apocalypse—like his holocaust—is predetermined. His godless universe is a nihilist’s cliché.

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The White Ribbon
Directed by Michael Haneke
Run time: 144 min.