Oscar Contenders #4: Embracing Our History

Review: The Artist + The Descendants

If The Artist isn't the greatest silent film, it may be the best you've seen. Or the only one you've seen. Writer and director Michel Hazanavicius has an assured touch, moving almost seamlessly from melodrama to comedy to romance. This is classic silent cinema of the Charlie Chaplin variety--a wink to the camera accompanies each tug at the heartstrings. We rely on actors more than ever: their faces, their sighs and smirks. To this end, The Artist mostly succeeds. 


The physicality hasn't quite been mastered. The comedians and tragediennes of the 1920s relied on their bodies, nimble with a gag, drooping like a wilted flower at each tragic intertitle. No one beyond the two leads seems to inhabit a truly silent world, where movement and mime is everything. For the film-within-the-film director, John Goodman has the dour face of a beloved pug, but the script feeds him line after line to orate silently. We don't need to see them speak; we need action.

Oscar Contenders #3: Come Together

Review: Shame + Melancholia

Brandon Sullivan (Michael Fassbender) glances at a woman across the subway car, prolonged glances. She adjusts herself, averts her eyes, stands to exit the train. He follows her through the car doors and up the stairs, expecting more, but she gets away before he can reach her. This is one of the most erotic scenes of Shame, director Steve McQueen's study of sexual addiction, but we can read it as a metaphor for the whole experience. After a breathless, enticing first hour, the movie (and Brandon) seem to get away from McQueen.

As confident as Fassbender's performance is, the central character is New York City. For an intimate film, McQueen stays on location often (especially several erotic trysts at the exhibitionist Standard Hotel). Counteracting Brandon's private routine, bare white walls and soulless office job, the streets of New York are both empowering and stifling: just look at that shot halfway through of Brandon running several blocks late at night, ultimately stalled at a red light, jogging in place. There's no real escape in this Manhattan. To this end, Carey Mulligan as his sister Sissy sings a melancholy "New York, New York" in a relentless close-up. Mulligan is surprisingly extroverted; but her childlike qualities are still her most interesting feature.