Half-Year Awards — Best Screenplays, Director, and Film

You know the preamble. Let’s just dive right in:

Best Adapted Screenplay: Darren Aronofsky & Ari Handel, Noah

A lot of people hate the story in Noah. It’s too bastardized, they say. Damn straight, I say. The story of Noah doesn’t belong to the Bible. It was around long before, transmuted into a plethora of different stories across different cultures that highlight contrasting details. Noah never adopts an orphan in the Bible. This is a reference to Korean flood mythology. There are no giants in the Bible’s Noah. This is a Midrashic conceit that belongs to certain sects of Judaism. Noah doesn’t contemplate exterminating his grandchildren in the Bible. This sequence combines reflections of other Biblical books – the jettisoned baby in Exodus, the crisis of faith in Job, and most importantly the tale of Abraham in Genesis.

There are countless other details from a variety of other religions folded into Aronofsky’s retelling of Noah. It creates a Frankenstein’s monster of a myth, housing itself inside Abrahamic and non-Abrahamic religions alike and vibrantly socially aware of the moment in time it arrives in our world.

Feel free to hate it for not being accurate to your interpretation of Noah, but Noah was never yours to begin with. Neither is it Aronofsky’s or Handel’s, and their patchwork retelling reminds us that it’s not so much the detail in the story that’s important – those details are completely different for everybody – but it’s the common meaning those various interpretations seek to teach us that is crucial.

The narrative details aren’t sacred. They’re just as bastardized in the Bible as they are out of it. The meanings are sacred. The world’s done a horrible job of getting this through its head. We argue about the length of Noah’s ark and its width and what wood it was made from and how he fed the animals while we ignore that in all those stories, God sends down the flood because we were annihilating each other and so lost in petty bickering we ignored the needs of the helpless among us. Understand that before you come at Noah complaining it’s not accurate enough.

Devoutness of detail can often be a useless habit. Give me a new interpretation that reminds me of the old meaning any day of the week.

Best Original Screenplay: Joel Edgerton & David Michod, The Rover

We so rarely get short stories on film anymore. Our movies today sprawl, like labyrinths meant to make the biggest and most widely talked-about mark on our social calendars. Every character gets his or her own realization mid-plot, so we can check the character development box off the list and justify a dozen different character-specific posters. Even in our blockbusters, two sides aren’t enough anymore. I like my seven-sided, choatic end-battles, believe me, but there are only so many writers and filmmakers who can truly hack that.

What about the short story? What about visiting a time and place for just a moment, getting just a glimpse? What about leaving us wanting to know more? Many of our works of art have forgotten how to shield their characters from us. Characters are thrown at us with gadgets and costume changes and sidekicks for spinoffs. That’s fine…so long as we don’t forget those other movies, the ones that contain characters we should never want to see again, or that we should wish to save, or that we should pity, or that we should hate. Sometimes all at once. The Rover visits a time and place we should never want to see and delivers characters we should never want to meet. It stays long enough so that we begin to care what happens anyway, that we begin to understand why someone might be a way we never could be ourselves, and then it exits gracefully.

Like The Proposition a decade before, which also starred Guy Pearce, it crafts a haunting story from an elegant blend of poetic dialogue, stark visual, and simple structure. In a short story, every word matters. So, too, in The Rover. Every word, every shot, every cut matters, and builds to a whole at just the right moment – the second before the credits roll. It forces you to take a piece of that time and place you’d never visit back with you into the real world, to contrast the two, to be terrified at their similarities and joyous at their differences. It’s a staggering work that demands tears and silence and reverence. The Rover is a fire-and-brimstone sermon in the church of film.

Best Director: Jonathan Glazer, Under the Skin

My choice for this at the end of last year was Alfonso Cuaron for his pioneering work in Gravity. At least until I saw Wong Kar-Wai’s The Grandmaster. But that’s another essay. This year, it’s the polar opposite of those two directors. Instead of Cuaron’s painstaking cinematic techniques, so groundbreaking they demanded new inventions, and instead of Wong Kar-Wai’s precise, artistic framing (nearly every shot is so painterly it’s worthy of its own essay), Glazer is much more hands-off. He gathered a wild array of fringe talent and let them go wild.

In various Guardian articles, and in my own interview with author Michel Faber, who wrote the novel on which the film Under the Skin is based, Glazer’s loose, guerrilla approach to filmmaking began to take shape: Conversations with passersby recorded on hidden camera. Covert microphones hidden in umbrellas picking up stray conversation on the streets of Edinburgh. An FX studio let loose to envision an alien’s digestive tract in visual metaphor. Documentarian shots of both nature and civilization. An experimental rock musician asked to score it all.

What Glazer does is invite chaos into his movie, trusting himself enough to shape it. The result is a mash of experimental techniques fused into a powerful whole. These diverse technical experiments shine through so much that you can even see how contributors’ interpretations agree and disagree. It’s rare that so loose and experimental an approach results in a film so tight and complete. The most difficult part of directing is knowing when to control chaos and knowing when to unleash it. For mastering the balance, at least for this film, Glazer does something just as impressive as inventing new technologies or framing everything with painterly perfection.

Best Film: Under the Skin

Any other year, this wouldn’t be a contest. It would be The Rover with nothing else close. But Under the Skin is the best film we’ve had in many years, the most challenging, the one that does something film is very often incapable of doing. Many films put you in someone else’s shoes. Almost none trick you into filling out the shoes of a sociopath and rapist. The film has such command of allegory, it truly makes you stop and contemplate a perspective that’s (hopefully) completely alien to you, and it transports you very uncomfortably outside of your own realm of sensation and experience.

Also take a look at our Half-Year Technical Awards and our Half-Year Acting Awards.

Half-Year Awards — The Performances

We’ve already had several Oscar-worthy performances this year. What’s unfortunate is that they’ll all be forgotten come the Oscars and the rest of Awards-season, as voters only seem to remember their last few months. Certain performances deserve a hell of a lot more, and I have a few in mind:

Best Supporting Actress: Jennifer Connelly, Noah

Anthony Hopkins. Russell Crowe. Ray Winstone. Emma Watson. That’s Hannibal Lecter, Maximus the Gladiator, Beowulf, and Hermione Granger all in one cast. And none of them holds a candle to Jennifer Connelly. She chooses her projects very carefully, so it’s easy to forget just how very human she can be.

Director Darren Aronofsky got the best performance in her career out of her once before, in Requiem for a Dream. You can feel Aronofsky trusts her enough to give her free emotional range in Noah. She’s smart enough to understate her role most of the time, to exert a sort of quiet power and patience over the film. It makes that one moment when her measured performance is lit on fire something special. It is a daunting and undeniable moment of pure acting, and it sets everything else – Russell Crowe’s dramatic power, the raging visual effects, Aronofsky’s pure auteur-ism – to the side.

For a moment, everything becomes meaningless aside from her. It’s a viciously human moment, and it’s a rare skill to know how to complement four such powerful actors for two hours and when to sweep them all away for five minutes. This is one of the unique gifts Connelly brings to film acting – her performances are very often in support of the films around her, yet she can overpower them at a moment’s notice. In this way, she’s one of the wisest actors we have, never showing off, yet with a fount of pent up, dramatic power always locked beneath her performances.

Best Supporting Actor: Robert Pattinson, The Rover

Playing someone who’s “slow” is a daunting task. Watch Forrest Gump all these years later and it doesn’t feel quite as acceptable as it once did. And that’s Tom Hanks. The Rover is wise to never quantify the intelligence of Robert Pattinson’s Rey. Whether he’s mentally handicapped or not isn’t particularly important to the plot. He’s slower to pick up on the reality of a situation than everyone else and this leaves him deeply impressionable. His conscience is malleable in a way the rest of ours aren’t. This makes him the only hopeful element in The Rover‘s post-apocalyptic wasteland.

Pattinson’s Rey progressively turns to violence more as a solution than a danger as the reality sinks in that there’s no one around to foster the hope that he represents. It’s a shade too real. We see it every day. It reflects a society that may already be experiencing a sort of moral post-apocalypse, whose world may’ve ended in a whimper so quiet nobody noticed. It’s a phenomenal performance on Pattinson’s part, full of personality tics and a man’s thought processes laid bare. What it has to say about the rest of us and how we treat the least among us is why his performance will last.

Best Actor: Guy Pearce, The Rover

And then there’s Pearce. Have you ever looked at a Hieronymus Bosch painting and wondered what its tormented denizens might feel? What they’d have left in them, what possible drive could keep them going through it all? It might be impossible for us to know the answer. The distance from here to there, the amount of experience a human mind would have to undergo to cope with it all…it might just be too alien.

In The Rover, this is what Guy Pearce accesses. We can understand at the most basic mechanical level how he does and says the things he does and says, but we have no way to comprehend his inner workings or private feelings. He seems so vacant of soul that his monstrousness feels droll, normal, uneventful. Maybe that’s what Bosch’s hellfiends feel – normality. Nothing special. Another day. It makes those flashes in Pearce’s eyes, those brief acknowledgments of his humanity painful, searing, unforgettable. Those flashes are subdued so quickly, shielded with such hardness, that the humanity in his performance only exists in his viewers.

We have to be human for him, even at the end when we understand…well, not everything – we just understand a moment in his life. That’s it. A moment. And it wrecks us, one moment finally understood in this world of his. And we have to walk out of the theater feeling humanity for him, feeling as if his tragedy is special in a world where tragedy is droll, normal, uneventful. That’s the beauty of Pearce’s performance – making us feel everything he won’t. It’s one of those rare performances you realize no other actor could have realized. It may be the singular masterpiece of his career.

Best Actress: Scarlett Johansson, Under the Skin

A few years ago, I referred to Scarlett Johansson as a showhorse. Like Taylor Lautner and his abs in the Twilight franchise, I believed she was getting roles she didn’t deserve based off her looks. In movies like The Island and The Black Dahlia, I felt she was either flat or campy. She lacked the dramatic core to sustain the lead performances she was being given. It never occurred to me her performances were the result of working with a run of directors whose abilities had long ago dried up.

I was wrong about her, and this year proved it. She was the most compelling part of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and she delivers one of the best performances of the year in Under the Skin, as an alien who preys on lonely drifters, luring them in with the promise of sex only to consume them. It’s a difficult performance in that the amount of silence in the film could easily trick an actor into playing the role too flat, and the subject matter could tempt an actor into playing it too campy. She does neither, playing a sexual predator, an unfeeling murderess, and a pioneer in a wilderness that’s strange to her.

Johansson communicates her own character’s alien experience while inviting viewers to see the world through sociopathic eyes, an experience that’s a bit scarring for the empathetic viewer. It’s a scary role, sexualized yet rarely sexy, unemotive yet immensely sensory. She nails her performance by simply playing it – moments of understatement or overstatement are rare. It demands a lot from an actor to simply exist as something so alien without big moments to express that difference.

Best Ensemble: The Monuments Men

There’s a lot in this movie that shouldn’t have worked as well as it did. Quiet, contemplative moments in which men consider themselves and each other and make a subdued, witty comment before getting back to contemplating. Yet this is a rare cast, a group of older comedians whose youthful zeal to tell every joke has given way to the wisdom to tell the right one at the right moment. The Monuments Men wouldn’t be the film it is without the patience and nonchalance of Bill Murray, Bob Balaban, John Goodman, Jean DuJardin, and Hugh Bonneville. Combined with the frenzy of George Clooney, the optimism of Matt Damon, and the tenacity of Cate Blanchett, this is a cast that lends their film an unassuming earnestness unheard of in today’s build-a-better-mousetrap school of event filmmaking.

Take a look at yesterday’s article for the technical awards. Tomorrow, I’ll tackle best screenplays, director, and film.

The Good, The Bad, and The Australian — “The Rover”

It felt like the summer needed to take a breather. Between the superhero movies and animated sequels and giant monsters, we needed a week off from visual effects, especially with the looming cloud that is a fourth Transformers movie on the horizon. This made it a very strange summer weekend at the movies. Nothing major opened – only a by-the-book comedy sequel and a classy but cliché-ridden band backstory.

It’s a perfect opportunity to highlight a smaller film, in this case a post-apocalyptic vengeance tale out of Australia called The Rover. It stars Guy Pearce, a veteran of these kinds of bloody art films, and Robert Pattinson, of Twilight infamy.

Its story is simple. A global collapse 10 years ago has left Australia a third-world country. Three bandits argue about leaving one’s younger brother behind, and crash their truck. They take a car belonging to Eric (Pearce), who finds that younger brother, Rey (Pattinson), and uses him to track down the car.

Why is Eric so intent on getting his car back? He’s left with the bandits’ better, faster truck. It’s at the core of the story, but for a long time, it becomes secondary to Eric and Rey’s journey. In an American film, the two would be good guys. They’d start at each others’ throats but through witty banter and close calls they’d grudgingly learn to work together. Not so in The Rover.

Eric makes it clear early: the two are not friends. The more we learn about Eric, the more we realize he’s got very little soul left. He’s vicious and remorseless, and would sooner kill than be cornered into a conversation. Rey is slow, perhaps even mentally handicapped. In him, we see an impressionable boy who lacks the tools for this world. Rey’s growing loyalty to Eric breeds in the boy a growing need to commit violence. Drawing a parallel between Rey and the Elliot Rodgers and Dylan Klebolds of the world isn’t difficult – these aren’t murderers created by music or movies, they’re murderers created through misguided loyalty to someone who teaches them hate.

Australian movies have a habit for removing the usual gloss of Hollywood filmmaking. There’s far less violence in The Rover than in a single action scene of any of this summer’s blockbusters, but when it does happen, that violence is raw, quick, and brutal. Characters don’t get slow-motion death scenes with an orchestral crescendo; they get left in the dust with the buzzards. There’s eloquence in its hideousness, though. When there’s no room for escapism, the viewer is confronted by what a film has to say, and The Rover traps you in a corner.

Director David Michod and cinematographer Natasha Braier create a bleak and broken landscape – even the sky is sand colored. Yet the film always stays visually arresting. Scenes start at odd angles to where they’ll take the story; they don’t telegraph moments beforehand.

Pearce’s performance is stunning. At one point, he thinks it’s all over for himself, that he’s going to jail for the rest of his life. He speaks with the knowledge that this is long overdue. It’s almost a relief to be caught. It’s a chilling moment, watching something so dead and soulless speak. Yet there are other times when the shreds of Eric’s remaining humanity peek through, brief moments when his eyes come to life just as quickly gone.

None of this should overshadow Pattinson. I’ve never held the Twilight franchise against any of its actors. (If you paid me a hundred million dollars to stare off-camera and look pained, I’d be there early every day.) But Pattinson is a revelation in The Rover, the best performance of the year so far. Rey is a character who could easily go off-the-rails into lampooning territory, but he never does. You can see him processing the world around himself, violence becoming easier, changing from a danger to a solution.

And then there’s the ending – unexpected, taut, graceful, tender. It changes everything that’s come before. “The Rover” asks challenging questions without offering answers. It’s a cynical reflection of all the hope we have in our cinema today. That hope – costumed heroes saving the world – is important to cling to. It’s crucial, but so are films like The Rover. They’re a worst case scenario – what if that hope doesn’t work out? A necessary question, though not one many viewers may wish to face.

The Rover is rated R for language and violence.