Best Pictures #98: 2023 (96th) Academy Awards Best Picture Nominee: American Fiction

 by A.J.

Best Pictures #98: 2023 (96th) Academy Awards Best Picture Nominee

American Fiction

“Not being able to relate to people isn't a badge of honor.”

Satire is difficult enough, but successfully blending satire with recognizable everyday emotions is a most challenging feat that writer-director Cord Jefferson accomplishes with his more than impressive debut feature, American Fiction. It helps that he has Jeffery Wright in the lead role giving one of the best performances of 2023; Wright has very deservedly received a Best Actor Oscar nomination. More than just a hilarious satire of the literary world and perceptions of race, American Fiction is also a moving family drama, a smart comedy, and the kind of character study that feels like a throwback to the challenging and offbeat films of the late 1960’s and early 70’s. 

Wright plays Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, a talented but commercially unsuccessful author and college professor. Monk reaches a breaking point when his latest novel is rejected by publishers while a novel by another Black intellectual, Sintara Golden (Issa Rae), that indulges in stereotypes and street dialect so extreme it sounds more ridiculous than authentic, becomes a bestseller. His frustration leads him to write a parody of “Black trauma porn” called My Pafology under the incredible pseudonym Stagg R. Leigh. He has his agent send it to publishers as a joke but the joke is on Monk because they think it is a serious book and offer a very big payday.

Monk reluctantly takes the money because of the events of the other storyline: his family problems. A forced sabbatical from his university prompts Monk’s return to his hometown of Boston and the nearby family beach house. After a sudden tragedy, he finds himself the primary caretaker of his mother, Agnes (Leslie Uggams), who is in the early stages of dementia. His brother, Clifford (Sterling K. Brown), is little help as he’s going through his own major life events: a divorce and coming out as gay. A bright spot for Monk is a potential relationship with a neighbor, Coraline (Erika Alexander), a recently divorced public defender. Some extra money, and frustration, comes from being a jury member for a literary award with his would-be nemesis Sintara Golden and ends up judging his own secret book, a favorite of the white jury members.

Wright, who conveys so much while seeming to do so little, is grumpy and frustrated but not without reason and a lighter, even happy, side comes out in early scenes with Tracee Ellis Ross as his sister and later in scenes with Erika Alexander. Sterling K. Brown, who earned a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination for his performance, also does a great job handling comedy, drama, and believability. Each character feels like a person that you might know or maybe recognize in yourself. They also feel like they have lives outside of each other. Jefferson’s screenplay, adapted from the 2001 novel Erasure by Percival Everett, allows each character layers and dimensions; no one is only one thing. 

Most, but not all, of the comedy comes in the scenes dealing with the literary world. Monk has to pretend to be the escaped convict turned novelist Stagg R. Leigh which makes for some awkward and funny scenes. He does everything he can think of to kill the novel once he realizes that no one got the joke, but nothing will stop the hilariously obsequious, and ever frightened of offending, white publishing executives. Also, anyone who took any writing classes or advanced literature courses will very likely recognize the personality types of the three white literary award judges. 

Jefferson includes some broad stylistic choices, some of which might be more welcome than others depending on your sensibilities. When Monk writes My Pafology we see the characters from his novel spring to life in front of him and act out his writing. When he gets stuck, one of the characters (played by the great Keith David) turns and questions Monk. The ending is a bit of a departure from the rest of the film. Things don’t wrap up nicely with a bow and closure on each plot point, but life rarely wraps up that way.

Best Pictures #97: Academy Awards Best Picture Nominee: The Zone of Interest

 by A.J.

Best Pictures #97: Academy Awards Best Picture Nominee

The Zone of Interest

“I wasn't really paying attention... I was too busy thinking how I would gas everyone in the room.”

There are several scenes of pleasant sunny days in the countryside: picnics, swimming, horseback riding, a family enjoying each other’s company, enjoying their lives. Everything on screen is meant to evoke the word “idyllic.” It certainly seems that way, but the family is that of Rudolph Höss, the commandant of the Auschwitz death camp, and the camp itself is right on the other side of the wall of the family’s country estate. Nothing in The Zone of Interest, the first film in 10 years from director Jonathan Glazer, is played for shock or sensation. Unlike other Holocaust films, The Zone of Interest aims to unsettle and disturb its audience not in showing the atrocities inside Auschwitz but the cold indifference outside of Auschwitz. The film succeeds in this though that cold indifference hardly comes as a revelation.

There is very little story or plot. Glazer’s screenplay kept little of the novel by Martin Amis, aside from the premise and title. We do not get to know Rudolph Höss (Christian Friedel) or his wife, Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), so much as we observe them. There are very few close ups, no discussions of ideology or race or religion. The camera stays back and we catch snippets of their lives: the children show off collections of teeth they’ve found; Hedwig tries on a fur coat stolen from the latest group of victims; Hedwig’s mother wonders if her Jewish former employer is at the camp; the industrial sounds of trains and smokestacks mixed with distant shouting and gunshots are part of the everyday background noise. The closest the film comes to a plot is Hedwig’s concern over Rudolph’s transfer (he’s so good at his job he’s been promoted to an administrative position in Berlin) which threatens to disrupt or even end the lifestyle she loves (she is the “queen of Auschwitz” after all). 

Glazer, a music video director turned arthouse movie director, has managed to build a cult following around each of his films (Sexy Beast, Birth, Under the Skin). The Zone of Interest represents his most widely acclaimed film earning 5 Academy Award nominations including Best Picture and Best Director for Glazer. However, this is still an art film with experimental elements. It begins with about two minutes of black screen with discordant music. At one point there is a flash to a solid red screen. A scene of a girl hiding apples in a field is shown in polarized black and white (in the background of a later scene we hear a guard shouting at a prisoner about an apple). These abstract flourishes function like unexpected and jarring punctuation but do not necessarily enhance the viewing experience. The only affecting flourish comes close to the end and involves a flash forward in time. 

We never see inside the death camp. This film means to unsettle us with what Hannah Arendt called “the banality of evil.” A scene of  concentration camp commandants discussing what to do about the Hungarian Jews plays like a bland bureaucratic office meeting. To everyone in that room it was, and to the Höss family the regular eruption of the smokestacks on the other side of the brick wall was more than normal. It was acceptable. Their lives were calm and mundane because they thought there was nothing wrong with the industrialized evil of the Nazis. The closest the film comes to a hateful outburst is Hedwig coldly telling her Polish house servant, “I could have my husband spread your ashes across the fields of Babice.”

The Zone of Interest is well-done on just about every technical level, including the subdued performances from Friedel and Hüller, but overall it falls short of being an arresting film. Its detachment from the characters is meant to emphasize the detachment the characters have from the atrocities despite their physical proximity and involvement. That detachment, though key to the approach of director Glazer, makes for an intellectually interesting film but not an engaging one. The weight of what we see and don't see and only hear comes inherently from the subject matter and whatever knowledge of the Holocaust the viewer brings with them. The Zone of Interest is only effective when taken as part of the larger range of the Holocaust on film, including films like Schindler’s List, The Grey Zone, and the profoundly affecting, epic length documentary Shoah.

Best Pictures #96: 2023 Academy Awards Best Picture Nominee: The Holdovers

 by A.J.

Best Pictures #96: 2023 (96th) Academy Awards Best Picture Nominee

The Holdovers

“Such are the vicissitudes of life.”

There are plenty of movies that deal with how the holidays can make people feel miserable. The Holdovers, director Alexander Payne’s latest movie, set over the Christmas break of 1970-71 at a prestigious New England boarding school, is different from those because it is about people who would rather not be miserable. Ancient civilizations teacher Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti) would rather spend his break reading mystery novels. Rebellious student Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa) would rather be in St. Kitts. Mary Lamb (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), the school’s kitchen manager, would rather be with her son, who was recently killed in Vietnam. They end up more or less stuck together at the empty school and as the dreary days pass they slowly but surely open up and find unlikely comfort and joy. It’s a story we’ve seen before but rarely done so well. Payne’s previous collaboration with Giamatti resulted in Sideways (2003), probably Payne’s best film and one of Giamatti’s best performances. The results here are thankfully similar. 

David Hemingson’s original screenplay was written especially for Giamatti, who once again works wonders with a prickly character. As much as Paul resembles Giamatti’s character from Sideways (both are well educated misanthropes who end up on a road trip), he has much more in common with another notable Giamatti performance: John Adams. Both Paul and John Adams are well educated New England intellectuals who attended Harvard, are privileged but are conscious of the conditions the less privileged, are disdainful of the rich and undeserving elites they have to work with, are both hurt by and enjoy their isolation from their peers, and are aware that they are, to quote Adams, “obnoxious and disliked.” John Adams is an irritable personality but Giamatti makes him understandable and likable; he does the same for Paul. 

As punishment for failing the son of a rich politician, Paul is assigned to look after the students that are not able to go home for Christmas break: the holdovers. An amusing and welcome plot contrivance whisks the other boys away to a vacation with the father of one of the richer holdovers leaving only Angus behind, much to the equal dismay of Angus and Paul. Angus is played wonderfully by Dominic Sessa in his impressive screen debut. He is troubled and rebellious but far from a bad student or person. The revelation of Angus’s family troubles and how he deals with them feels free of dramatic contrivance. 

Da’Vine Joy Randolph has rightfully earned much praise and a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination for her performance. We learn early on that her son attended the boarding school on a scholarship but because she could not afford to send him to college he was drafted and died in Vietnam. Randolph’s Mary is not a sad-sack or a worn down character. On the contrary, she comes across as the most put together of the trio, but melancholy looms over her and finally spills over at a Christmas Eve party in a subdued but emotional, and therefore instantly believable, scene.

Alexander Payne went out of his way to make The Holdovers look like it was made during the era in which it is set. As a fan of films of that period I must say he succeeded. Though the late 1960’s and early 1970’s are remembered as a time of vibrant colors, the films from that period look drab and devoid of color and The Holdovers captures that look. It opens with a period accurate Universal Studios logo, a trend and pet peeve of mine, but it delivers on that promise. The score genuinely sounds like an original score from an early 70’s movie, vaguely folkish and wistful. There is plenty of period music but none of the “needle drops” are obvious or feel like a compilation of the best-of-the-1970’s. The most notable music sequence is an extended ice skating scene from Paul and Angus’s “field trip” to Boston set to Cat Stevens’s poignant and magical "The Wind." Like many films of that New Hollywood era, the screenplay is very light on plot and is more or less an assemblage of scenes that show an understated journey of personal growth. The side effect of this is that there are a few scenes that are entertaining but ultimately superfluous. The Holdovers brought to mind the films of Hal Ashby, director of Harold and Maude (1971) and The Last Detail (1973), which was likely the intent of director Payne, and this is a good thing. However, Ashby, who began his career as an editor, would likely have made a slimmer but equally affecting film.

The Holdovers is streaming on Peacock Premium and available on DVD/Blu-Ray.