Reviews from gulag: Am I out of touch? No, it's the Academy who's wrong

As we approach the 97th Academy Awards—as with all Oscars ceremonies—it's incumbent upon the dutiful film fan to at least make some good faith effort to try to see an appreciable fraction of the Best Picture nominees.  (This is what has been described to me as "a prison of my own making," but if I didn't live in such a thing, whose would I live in?)  It has been a harder task this late winter than maybe it's ever been for me, thanks to a somewhat moribund populist film industry and an Academy that has responded, contrary to their apparently abortive attempts to remain remotely culturally relevant, by veering as far out from the actually-popular culture as it has in years.  It's a particular pity with 2022 and 2023 right there in the rearview mirror, perhaps the highwater marks for any modern—like, post-70s at least—efforts from the Academy at trying to care about what actual audiences care about.  Hey, at least The Substance got nominated for BP.  It ain't gonna win, and I don't know why I ever got it into my fool head that it would, except for that whole "moribund populist film industry" thing and, other than Dune: Part Two I guess, it's the only film with what feels like to me any legitimate cultural impact to have been nominated that also has any right to be there.  (I am speaking incredibly out of turn about Wicked, I guess, and I will disclose that, though I feel pretty confident about it.)  I'm increasingly worried it won't win anything for which it was nominated, which is going to be miserable for me, and then that misery's going to be compounded once the Internet gets mad about it and that anger takes its inevitable form.

In any event, this made for one glum Sunday, and at this point I cannot say with certainty I will continue this quest—with Wicked, for obvious reasons; with Nickel Boys, because I'm not sure I'm interested enough in the two and a half hour race-in-America movie inspired, formally, by video game let's plays, and I think it's not even about cool boxing matches like I thought it was, what the hell; with I'm Still Here because, uh, it's all the way over there; and with A Complete Unknown, because ha ha ha, oh my God, no I'd rather not.  (These movies are also all between 138 and 160 minutes long.)  But I do feel a little bound to do so.  Not to be alarmist, but consider that the 97th Academy Award ceremony could be the last one to take place in a real country.

And yet, despite having been charged with that awesome responsibility, and confronted with that fearsome possibility, they gave us this anyway.  Thhpt.  Here's Conclave, The Brutalist, and Anora, which I somehow did in precisely reverse alphabetical order (because it's also in the order in which I liked them).

CONCLAVE

This is the shortest Best Picture nominee for 2025, in all but one case the shortest by a lot.  It's still 120 minutes long.

But it is, accordingly, also one of the comparative few that seems rightly-sized, and this helps it, this thing that's pulpier than it thinks it is and would likely be better if it were much more.  Despite its theatrical pedigree, director Edward Berger (of the year-before-last's most superfluous-seeming Best Picture nominee, the Netflix-distributed All Quiet On the Western Front) has delivered a film that looks "of streaming," but perhaps appropriately so, these crisp, sharp images from cinematographer Stefane Fontaine, of these semi-identically-dressed men standing or sitting in these sterilized surroundings, belying the enormity of their institution's history and their readily-acknowledged potential for cruelty, deciding the fate of their religion.  (And so Suzie Davis's production design and to an only slightly lesser degree Lisy Christi's costume design—because it's even more baked into the setting, though I did get a kick out of attending to its subtle variety—are both pretty reasonable Oscar nominees.)  The story is very easy to summarize: the pope's dead and a conclave has been called to elect a new one.  The College of Cardinals convenes in Rome under the administration of their dean, British cardinal Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes), and thus begins the struggle between the liberal factions (fronted by Stanley Tucci), and the conservative factions (Sergio Castellito, dressed up like Guillermo del Toro for some reason), and the even more conservative factions, albeit representing the long-deferred possibility of an African pope (Lucian Msmati), and, finally, the factions of a mostly-ideology-free, just-wants-to-be-the-pope desire (John Lithgow).  Meanwhle, there are terrorist acts afoot outside in Rome and conspiracies afoot within the Vatican, and there's some secretly-ordained cardinal no one's ever even heard of, from, get this, the archbishopric of Kabul (I feel like the practicing Catholics in an "archbishopric" should run into, at least, the double digits; Carlos Diehz), who keeps picking up what I assumed were protest votes.  Lawrence, against his own nature, will have to intervene to unravel the webs of intrigue that have been woven, and put his thumb on the scale more than he'd have ever liked.

So Fiennes might at least get his Lifetime Achievement Award, I mean Best Actor Oscar, for his Dean of Cardinals, and this isn't a strong year for male actors, so why not; though even with his Lawerence, it's more a "Fiennes has an automatic sense of inner turmoil expressed through quiet gravitas" thing that he could do in his sleep.  Nobody else, being basically just embodiments of ideas about the politics of Catholicism, is afforded enough actual character—I'm not necessarily complaining about that! it's not necessarily that kind of story—to acquit themselves even that well, though perhaps Msmati comes closest with his big scene, with Tucci close behind with his much littler scene that still makes a surprise out the sharper-edged realist than you might have initially thought "the liberal" would be.  It's certainly well-acted, anyhow, though Isabella Rossellini getting a Best Supporting nomination for her nun (she is long-suffering under this patriarchal institution? what a surprise!) is fucking nuts, even on a "lifetime achievement" basis.  I don't know where she'd get off if "Best Featured Extra" were a category.

So the various candidates vie, with an overbearing sense of false humility, to put themselves over as the new pope, and I perceived a better ending coming than the one we got—an ending that would've been simultaneously more joyfully politically labyrinthine while also truly engaging with the cynicism of that false humility.  (I mean, I really thought it was going to turn out Lawrence was the master of puppets all along, which would've been awesome.)  I suppose my twinned objections to the ending we actually get is that, unless the college of cardinals is a very different electoral body than every other political entity on Earth (and Conclave is arguing precisely that it is not, it just has its own peculiarities), it's simply not an enormously credible ending ("how do you do, fellow cardinals! you've never heard of me and frankly my story sounds made up, but I gave a cool speech, and I'm certainly willing to be your next pope!"); and also it's not as radical as it thinks it is, or at least doesn't seem particularly so, in that it feels (I am not an expert) like it fits in more or less with what my understanding of the Church's ideas on that issue would be, even if it would, of course, be controversial and "weird."  (Basically, there's a much wilder, even more confrontational version of the ending such as would have justified my hoot of "oh, they went for it!" delight when the ending made its most basic shape known.)  Nevertheless, a perfectly functional political thriller and of the Best Picture contenders I sat through yesterday, it was my favorite, at least in part because the bastard respected my time.

Score: 6/10 (a nice, "I liked it" 6/10, at that)

THE BRUTALIST

So here we go, the consensus's overwhelming choice for the Real Movie For Adults of 2024, albeit not, surprisingly, the frontrunner for the Oscars, possibly because even Academy members feel nervous pretending they watched a 202 minute fucking behemoth, because there's a lot that could happen in that runtime.  (It's probably that they think the actual frontrunner is more "hip" and "with it," and hence gravitated towards it, even though that frontrunner didn't make shit in real money, either.)  If it is the former, they needn't be so worried: not that much plot happens in The Brutalist!  That's okay, even 202 minute movies don't need to be about plot, and I wish this one had less plot, honestly, even if it were the same length.  That plot goes, briefly, like so: Holocaust survivor and once-celebrated Bauhaus architect László Tóth (Adrien Brody) emigrates as a refugee to America during that brief window we were thinking about letting that happen, separating him further from his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) and her orphaned ward, László's niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy).  László finds a spot with his American cousin's home furnishings store, and they get a big break to do a surprise renovation for Harry Van Buren (Joe Alwyn) on behalf of his father, shipbuilding magnate Harrison (Guy Pearce), which unfortunately goes poorly because Harrison truly hates surprises, though months later—at the construction site where László now works, because László's cousin threw him out for this and other perceived sins—he seeks out László, to tell him he loves what he did with the library.  Harrison's done his research, and taps László long-fallow talent to build a great brutalist fastness that is described as a "community center."  Complications ensue with the project, for instance László's uncompromising vision as well as his commitment to heroin.  The big complication is out of everyone's hands, though the disaster may not well be the end of László's great monument.  (Now, if that's not short, in fairness it does happen across two big-ass acts and a brief epilogue—the pair of major acts do not, I think, quite accord with the most natural act breaks of the story being told—but either way, I do have a proposed alternative logline that is shorter, "immigrant hopped up on goofballs ruins American architecture.")

I can't, of course, have many serious complaints about the (ugh) construction; the only big one is that cinematographer Lol Crawley is doing something to push greens to borderline Matrix levels in a way I found distracting and occasionally unpleasant, and he's doing it moreso, clearly accidentally, in the last half.  But mostly this is terrific as an audiovisual experience: the textures of the old-timey, specifically-50s VistaVision format Crawley and his director, Brady Corbet, elected to use, reflected in the attention to the textures of the materials and surfaces; Daniel Blumberg's sometimes-soaring, more-frequently-threatening score; Dávid Janscó's oft-oblique editing; all those things coming together in what I would call the movie's finest shot, the cut to the God's eye view of the train derailment that threatens László's legacy, where the plaintive score simply feels like it's taken on an appropriate fearful awe of the great work to be done, and the obscuring smoke-and-steam plume of the train's normal operation doesn't let you know for a while, until it hits you very suddenly, that the train is aflame; we may also consider the jauntily-blunt credits design, albeit only if we wanted to accord more importance to >1% of a movie's runtime than we probably should.  But there are probably some worries that should be prompted if most of the best shots don't have people in them, or the people in them don't matter: the upside down Statue of Liberty, the scarred mountainside of the Italian quarry, and in my favorite where Brody does matter, it's potentially because he's in 60s clothes and smoking a pipe above a drawing board and I regretted bitterly that they cast Pedro Pascal as Reed Richards, when Brody was here all along.  Yet, above all, The Brutalist is a Goddamn miracle of production designer Judy Becker's department and location supervisor Gergö Bakos's department working in beautiful tandem, for it is almost literally unbelievable this came in at under $10 million, while also still making Hungary look so much like Pennsylvania (and shit, I live here! though it probably says negative things about Hungary that it persuades as Pennsylvania seventy years ago), so hats off to Corbet for that.  I suppose "it's huge but also cheap" even dovetails into the most obvious thing you could say about The Brutalist: I am not insensitive to the basic concept that it's several big insensate blocks of movie arranged against one another, a monument to itself made with the bare minimum of sentiment, or of any adornment beyond that provided by its mid-century evocations, and isn't that apt?

But I also think you get to that point long before almost three and a half hours, and this absolutely does not need to be, nor benefits from being, almost three and a half hours long in the configuration it takes, in part because it does its form-as-function job all too well: I don't give a shit about anything in this movie besides the architectural procedural, and the attendant imagery of the materials and tools to be employed, and the landscape to be filled by human industry, and two and a half hours seems like it would be perfectly well-suited to that purpose, except I don't even think we get enough of that, because Corbet keeps feinting towards making a movie about people and relationships.  He didn't: Brody is too hollowed-out and inaccessible and "visionary" (and hopped up on goofballs) for any of that, and the rest of the cast almost recedes into straight-up unreality as a result of his detachment, which is "purposeful" but it's rather aggravating that we're obliged to spend just enough time with them anyway that it's bothersome that we have no idea who the fuck they are.  (And too much time with repetitions of Brody's squalid economic and spiritual isolation, too.)  Harrison is a slight exception, though I confess being confused by Pearce's accolades, including a Best Supporting nod—he's fine, but he's really just doing the archest Tom Buchanan you've ever seen, perhaps specifically patterned on Joel Edgerton's Tom Buchanan, and the best thing to be said is that he isn't nearly as visibly lacking confidence in his "this actually feels more like a Gilded Age guy" rich WASP dickhead as Alwyn is as his boy.)  Anyway, the exemplar of the film's vaguely pretentious intent to use "nominally artfully-applied discontinuities to chart the lives of anyone beyond László Tóth" comes with his niece, of whom an outright enormous deal has been made about her traumatized, psychosomatic muteness, but after a time jump, maybe it was just "a rude affectation," I don't know, because she just speaks now, and given that her first words are "I'm making aliyah," it's fairly annoyingly metaphorical.  I guess I should clarify I don't mean politically, or certainly not as much as I mean that this perfectly encapsulates the kind of indirect, ellipsis-filled, symbolic, and novelistic-in-a-bad-way storytelling approach Corbey and co-writer Mona Fastvold are taking with this, again, three and a half hour movie.  Although I also knew in the moment of it, when I had to rewind and ask the movie, "and, uh, why are you jacking off into a bathtub with the door open?", that the signs were bad.

I was along for the long ride nonetheless, invested in how László was going to raise up his ugly Space Church against all the obstacles of capitalism and shit, until the last hour, where that chronic tendency towards metaphor (in this movie about... brutalism) became highly acute, arriving in a turn that is, honestly, maybe just a special case of this film's disgust towards literally every form of sexuality (the "nicest" sex involves some of the most incredibly bad sex filming ever seen, even for a movie that may represent a new nadir in "the 2020s have witnessed people literally regress to a grade-schooler's concept of the kinesiology of sexuality"; this "nicest" one also resolves in sickly Erzsébet almost dying, for, aha, The Brutalist tricked ya, and it is also the one where body "doubles" with heads sliced off at the collar are deployed).  However, what aggravated me at the time with this two-act film's surprise third act turn, and still aggravates me, was how thunderingly gauche it seemed, just exactly the thing that you'd put in your film to prove you're making a grimly serious movie for grown-ups and about grown-up issues.  It's so fucking try-hard, this cognizable if stupid metaphor, that's not even "just a metaphor," it's what the movie is about now, when all I wanted was to just watch dude build a Goddamn building and have some proper conflict about his artistic vision and economic realities—things that, curiously, I personally regard as more "grown-up" than what we get—and while I would have accepted a movie that's about what this one's going to be about now, this would have needed to have been what it was about much earlier in the day.  This is some Tennessee Williams shit without any of the Tennessee Williams ferment.  The movie's not boring, though, which is at least an achievement worth respecting, though I am wary of how much its ability to not be boring comes down to how overpowering its own self-regard is.

I will conclude with some stray thoughts: I can at least get brutalism sometimes, but this guy's furniture is straight-up fucking laughable, more like a parody of modernism broadly.  Also, I don't think "a story about taking a bunch of a money from some millionaire maniac to build a vainglorious building that everybody in its community appears to despise, but which rich fucks will honor you for at the end of your life," is as much a blow against capitalism in favor of art as this movie and many of its interlocutors think it is, or if you can even approach "public architecture," of all Goddamn art forms, as even marginally extricable from the needs of the many under any system besides capitalism.  (It's probably a whole metaphor about fucking cinema, isn't it?)  Oh, and the AI fiddling with the accents to get them "right" is the apex expression of how generations of obnoxious commentators have foisted an entirely pointless standard upon filmmakers for dialect work, as well as a manifestation of the dumbness of pursuing "realism" to the exclusion of other, more important concerns.

Score: 6/10 (and not a particularly enthusiastic, "I actually liked it" 6/10)

ANORA

And here we get the frontrunner, and Jesus, while it's possible something's out there, I have not personally seen an Oscar-nominated film more attuned to making me fucking hate it.  I could be kind, and give it a 1/10, for it is conceivable that I could credit it for functioning craft—I like Drew Daniels's photography pretty alright, and I like all them 70s-style zooms, but I refuse to say that "wow, you shot a movie competently" earns you even half a cookie.  Learning just this moment that our multihyphenate creator, writer-director-asshole Sean Baker, served as his own editor makes tremendous sense, in that Baker is a seasoned vet by now so it's very proficient at the level of microstructure, but he's also an unreflective and indulgent hog whose success has only made him moreso, so it's total fucking slop at the level of macrostructure.

It is, without doubt, the most merciless movie of the year.  The plot: dancer/selective sex worker Anora (she prefers "Ani"; Mikey Madison) makes the acquaintance of the son of a Russian oligarch, Vanya (David Eydelshteyn), they marry out of an abundance of enthusiasm, and his parents disapprove so strongly they send some goons (Karren Karagulian, Vache Tovmasyan, and Yura Borisov) to deal with this embarrassment.  Now, to be clear: I still didn't like it when it was all just a lazily-conceived music video interspersed with softcore pornography, in part because its idea of "joy," slicked down with striving, consumerist capitalism, reaches a level only just sufficiently above atavism to be faintly disgusting in a way that pure atavism, as an expression of youthful lust, wouldn't be; but, more importantly, it's because it wasn't doing what its story absolutely demands of it, explaining to us why Ani gets stuck on Vanya.  There's the wealth, but that wealth is going to vanish, as is explicitly spelled out to her—on the fuzzy boundary between "this movie is about idiots" and "this movie is made by idiots," it's treated as a reveal, at least to her, that the mansion is Vanya's parents', like really, she's twenty-three Goddamn years old, you cannot be serious—so what we're left with is the most profoundly uncharismatic, unromantic twerp whose only traits are "likes sex, pot, and gaming, ventures he has leave to pursue thanks to money" and "is expressly not particularly good at sex, and I also got the impression he's bad at video games."  Madison is pursuing that infatuation with some well-judged looks that combine longing with a certain evaluative calculation—it's virtually the only aspect of her performance that is any good—but it is mystifying how she got the calculation this wrong.  It is, for that matter, mystifying what Vanya wants with her.  I spent a fair amount of time wondering what hookers that aren't trashy jackasses must cost in Baker's sex worker mythology.  Anyway, I do realize this is somewhat of the point, we'll circle back momentarily.

Yet I'll give it this: it's bright and boisterous, and I could comprehend why it was supposed to be fun, and full credit to Baker and Madison and Eydelshteyn for figuring out blocking that mostly doesn't artificially hide their nudity, and generally actually looks like humans fucking, perhaps even somewhat pleasurably, in this 2024 movie.  Even so, I sure was waiting for the movie to actually start, and damn my eyes, I eventually got my wish.  That kicks off with what I swear to God must be a twenty-five minute real-time scene, that, for starters, should put a bullet in the head of this as "a romance," even a very illusory one, but doesn't, but also inaugurates the second phase of this movie, which is just constant shrieking undertaken by Madison and her new supporting cast, this trio of bumbling Russians and/or Russian-Armenians sent to forcibly dissolve the impulsive marriage each partner fell into, and oh my fucking Lord, it's unbearable.  (The Ukrainian information warfare command could not make a movie with more forcefully hateful caricatures of Russian malevolence and incompetence.)  It would remain annoying even if it were good, funny, and snappily-written: an hour and more of this 139 minute wallow is premised on the idea of annulling the marriage, a legal concept that, to be only slightly hyperbolic, does not really exist, and is sure as shit not applicable here, another instance of the movie being unclear whether it's as dumb as its characters, though I think a lot of it really is the movie considering that even once the misconception's cleared up they sure have a dumbassed idea of Nevadan divorce law that might as well be science fiction.  For such a "realist," "naturalist" movie, it feels dementedly unserious, given that at no point do the stakes appear larger than a (weirdly low-balled) $10,000 settlement, and if these people were actually dangerous enough not to simply call the cops on, they'd have already just killed you, or at least roughed you up until $10,000 sounded like a bargain.

But it's not good, it is infinitely shrill and hideous, and stretched out to a degree that's downright physically punishing (as the goons seek Vanya, Baker permits what ought to be a brief cross-cut montage to become three or four entire five-minute scenes of "showing dude's picture to random strangers" one after the other).  It is theoretically leavened by something like an eternal cutaway to Borisov's good henchman Igor, as if he has been and always shall be making that concerned face with a soulful expression, separate and apart from the flow of time as mortals understand it, and as he's the only one not constantly screaming, and, as the co-lead for this part of the movie, the only co-lead with any dialogue that's not just swear words in an accent that sounds like an offended goose, I guess he's my "favorite," anyway.  Of course the whole point of the movie is to take on gutter romanticism, but not in the whole million minutes of Anora did I feel like it justified that.  It boasts a "good ending"—though the whole epilogue it's a part of is massively terrible like everything else—so I mean it's "good" in the sense that it does have some emotional heft and a pinch of psychological insight, for the first time since God separated the waters, though it's mostly merely "correct," in the way it shows you how much contempt Baker has even for his heroine.  Of course, I suppose I already knew Baker hates everybody, including his audience, and thinks it's funny to show what he thinks of the people on the both sides of the screen and, nonetheless, get rewarded for it.  Indeed, it's one of those historical ironies that the guy who made his name with Tangerine, a movie indistinguishable from an anti-trans screed if only any right-winger would have the sense not to verbally editorialize about it, has had his runway for Best Picture cleared by the implosion of Emilia Pérez.

Incidentally, whoever it is, the film critic whose pullquote was featured in the marketing, the one that goes "it makes Pretty Woman look like a Disney film," needs to go to a reeducation camp, for the obvious factual reason that makes the joke necessarily fall flat, but also because Pretty Woman is a good movie, and even the version of it that explodes the fantasy (because gosh, that's what the movies are for, after all, ruining fantasies!) should let you in on the fantasy.  Massively depressing that—purely because I don't wish it, I think—I'm sure this is gonna win Best Picture.  Likewise, while I've openly dreaded The Discourse that'll result if Madison gets a Best Actress win over Demi Moore, I unfortunately have to concede we'll deserve every tedious second of it when that happens.

Score: 0/10