Every Oscar season, pundits bemoan the preponderance of films that are so safe, they seem to have been designed with an awards blueprint in mind. You'd think then, that the chattering class would be excited by this year's crop of contenders; whether by virtue of the expansion of the Best Picture race or by simple coincidence, some of 2009's nominee hopefuls are over-the-top, outlandish, and, well, as far from Frost/Nixon as can be.
Yet I've read reviews and gotten in countless debates about movies like Precious, A Single Man, and even Inglourious Basterds where the films' wild natures seem to be held against them. Their fantasies are too campy! Their flights of fancy are too popcorny! It's funny, because I agree -- only I think those are good things. Here's a spirited defense of each movie's "excess is best" raison d'être:
Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire
Precious wasn't made with awards in mind (as director Lee Daniels has said, he expected the film to go straight to DVD) and the film itself is glorious proof. The title is too much. The protagonist's weight? Too much. It's definitely too much to cast Mariah Carey as a social worker named Mrs. Weiss, but to affix her with a light mustache pushes the "too much" levels past radioactive. By the time classmate Joann (played by the deliriously named Xosha Roquemore) announces with a fierce flourish that her "favorite color is flourescent beige," it's clear that Precious -- thankfully -- is anything but bland.
The film's most divisive touch of excess is its fantasy sequences. When Precious is feeling as beaten down as can be, she's given to vivid imagination, and her rape is obscured by a ripped-open ceiling, a miserable existence left behind to escape to a rap video dream world. Over the top, as its detractors claim? No more so than elsewhere in the film, when a hairy-armpitted Mo'Nique gyrates in a leotard in front of the TV -- yes, it's that kind of movie. There is one ridiculous fantasy -- Precious imagining a beatific Mo'Nique in the context of Vittorio De Sica's Two Women (as unlikely a film to be playing on their TV as possible) -- but honestly, I could use a few more ridiculous fantasy sequences in my Oscar bait. It's a sign of pulling the stops out and going for broke, and Daniels was fortunate enough to have an actress like Gabourey Sidibe who could ground every out-there impulse in something real. If a movie this wild can be an Oscar frontrunner, I can't be mad at it.
A Single Man
Much of Tom Ford's A Single Man is seen through the eyes of George (Colin Firth), and I mean that quite literally. The camera is not an impassive observer -- it burrows in on details that the fastidious George would appreciate, and if they infuse his cool, gray world with an unexpected burst of glamour, feeling, or eroticism, they come alive in warm hues, as though a radiator dial has been rotated in a giddy rush.
A friend of mine hated the color shifts, calling them a gimmick that felt too on-the-nose: "I get it!" he cried. "It's supposed to be a sensual moment!" He wanted the characters to carry the moment, for the photography and framing to suggest something for the viewer to discover. That's a perfectly valid point of view -- no audience member wants to have their hand held, after all. It also would have made A Single Man a much less interesting movie.
Since when did everything have to be theater? In cinema, I don't mind a visual flourish or an attempt to convey something subjectively. Firth's performance is fantastic, and though it certainly carries the whole film, to drop the color shifts and POV shots would be to its detriment. We're as fascinated when we're looking at Firth as we are when we're looking at the world through his eyes. George is so obsessive about details that when he prepares for his suicide, he pointedly underlines an instruction that he be buried in a tie pulled into a windsor knot. Ford is just as exacting, and his ability to elaborate on George's tics in such a lavish visual fashion is what makes A Single Man so singular.
Inglourious Basterds
Now that Inglourious Basterds has become an unlikely Oscar contender, does it need to be reevaluated through a more staid lens? I hope not. Though some of its wild notions didn't work for me (still can't get behind that Brad Pitt performance, sorry), just as many of them did. I'll tell you, I'm giddy about the idea that a film could get nominated for Best Picture where these three things happen in the third act:
1) A title card flashes, announcing that the segment will be graced with the preposterous name, "Revenge of the Giant Face"
2) 1940s heroine Shosanna walks down a corridor to the triumphantly anachronistic sounds of David Bowie's "Cat People (Putting Out the Fire)"
3) Melanie Laurent is called upon to deliver a prolonged, over-the-top, sinister laugh as a very important Nazi has his head splattered open by machine guns at close range
So much of the Oscar race is boring and predictable. Can't we celebrate the fact that this year, the movies aren't?