Another year, another awards season. Once again, I am attempting to see all the movies nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards, on the big screen if at all possible and before the awards ceremony itself. Partly because there are a lot of movies out that I want to see, partly because I\u2019ve not seen many movies at the cinema in recent months apart from the great big blockbusters, and partly because I have had a few free evenings recently, I am attempting to get ahead of the game by going to see some likely contenders before the nominees are announced.<\/p>\n
My first visit\u00a0was to the poky confines of my local Camden Odeon for one of their Screen Unseen showings. The, rather fun, idea of these is that you pay a fiver and sit down to watch a film not yet released in the UK, but with (in theory) no idea what it is until it starts. In practice, they often give some pretty easy clues on their Facebook page, but I rarely look at these.<\/p>\n
So it was with some happiness that the film which unspooled on Monday was Alejandra I\u00f1\u00e1rritu\u2019s much-anticipated The Revenant<\/i> starring Leonardo diCaprio as an apparently unbreakable fur-trapper fighting for life and revenge in an American wilderness of the 1820s. This is not a film which is remotely interested in spoon-feeding the viewers. The exact nature of di Caprio and company\u2019s organisation, where and when they are, and what relationships \u2013 personal and formal \u2013 exist within and without are all pretty much left to the viewer to puzzle out. There are no handy captions to tell us what is going on, precious little dialogue of any kind (at least a quarter of which is not in English) and next to nothing in the way of back story.<\/p>\n
What it does have is a tremendous immediacy and almost physical power. Although not quite going as far as the apparently single-take Birdman<\/i>, I\u00f1\u00e1rritu shoots almost the whole film with long, swooping steadicam takes. When (as happens on several occasions) one of our characters is standing over the other, with a rifle in his face, there is no cut from one man to the other. The camera instead floats around the face of the aggressor and then glides down the barrel of the gun to eventually discover the other person lying on the ground. It\u2019s a technique which makes the two early stand-out sequences (the initial attack on the compound and diCaprio\u2019s mauling at the hands of a bear) utterly terrifying and engrossing.<\/p>\n
Once pragmatically ruthless Tom Hardy (once again strangling his vocal cords, Bane-style) and nervy na\u00eff Will Poulter leave diCaprio\u2019s ironically-named Hugh Glass for dead, much of the movie documents his agonising struggle to regain sufficient fitness to return to base and let Captain (I think?) Domhnall Gleeson know what has happened. Let\u2019s have a little talk about diCaprio. When Wolf of Wall Street <\/i>was released, I mused that I had previously found the career of this appealing but unexceptional actor hard to fathom, but that as crooked stockbroker Jordan Belfort I saw something of the power of which he is capable.<\/p>\n
Almost uniquely among modern Hollywood leading men, he manages to precisely straddle the divide between \u201cpersonality\u201d actors, who generally play some variant of themselves (Bradley Cooper, George Clooney, Robert Downey Jr) and \u201cchameleon\u201d actors who routinely transform themselves for each role (Johnny Depp, Gary Oldman, Christian Bale). (This is not, by the way intended to imply that this division is precise or absolute, nor that one kind of actor is more admirable than the other.) Different wigs and costumes aside, diCaprio generally looks and sounds the same, but there is something bizarrely protean about this blandly good-looking male. Want someone to play a tortured dream thief in an urban psycho adventure? DiCaprio will nail it. Want someone to play a happy-go-lucky conman chancer? DiCaprio is all over it. Want someone to play a delusional US Marshall? DiCaprio is your guy. Need a charming front for your slave-fighting gang? DiCaprio\u2019s got you covered. Quite how he does this still is not clear to me, but now he adds a fiercely protective, utterly determined nineteenth century fur-trapper to his resume.<\/p>\n
As I\u2019ve said, the film uses dialogue very sparingly. Often the only sound we can hear is diCaprio\u2019s stertorous breathing, and at times his breath even seems to fog up the lens of the camera \u2013 not an effect I can recall ever seeing before. It\u2019s probably a little flabby in the second half, and it\u2019s possibly telling that I began to become more interested in the lies that Hardy was having to tell in the safety of the compound, and less interested in diCaprio\u2019s physical ordeals as the film wore on, but the final confrontation is perfectly satisfying and the film as a whole is an amazing achievement.<\/p>\n
Next on my list, in the rather more luxurious confines of the embattled Curzon Soho, was Todd Haynes\u2019 Carol<\/i>. I\u2019d been hugely impressed with this director\u2019s 2002 offering Far From Heaven<\/i> and couldn\u2019t wait to see this simple tale (adapted with economy and grace by Phyllis Nagy from a novel by Patricia Highsmith) of forbidden love in the 1950s.<\/p>\n
I hope it isn\u2019t a spoiler, but although I hadn\u2019t read the book I was vaguely aware that it was famous not for its ground-breaker depiction of a lesbian affair (although it does depict that and it was ground-breaking) but because the lesbians in question don\u2019t end up dead or insane or grief-stricken. That isn\u2019t to say their story is entirely a happy one, but Haynes accurately steers a path between the tedium of a lack of incident and the deadening effect of too much melodrama.<\/p>\n
He is helped enormously by two absolutely stand-out performances without which the entire enterprise would founder. Rooney Mara is incredibly good, her pinched-pixie face and apologetic manner perfectly counter-parted by Cate Blanchett\u2019s far more lavish and statuesque bearing. Weirdly, as much as Mara put me in mind of Audrey Hepburn, Blanchett put me in mind of Katharine.<\/p>\n
Although it\u2019s Mara\u2019s Therese Belivet who learns who she is, what she wants and how to order lunch over the course of the movie, it\u2019s no surprise that the title is Carol<\/i> (and not for example, When Carol Met\u00a0Therese<\/i> or the rather more obscure The Price of Salt<\/i>, the title of the original novel). Blanchett\u2019s Carol Aird presents herself to the world, and to Therese in particular as gloriously and completely in control of her own destiny. In fact, her failing marriage and the struggle with her husband over custody of her child, the improbably-named Rindy, are gradually hollowing her out until she becomes little more than a gaily-painted husk. Finally, in the film\u2019s last reel, she is able to reconstruct her personality and become the person that Therese has begun to love. It\u2019s an incredible journey and Blanchett shines off the screen at every turn.<\/p>\n
Ably supported by familiar faces from TV (Sarah Paulson, Jack Lacy, Kyle Chandler \u2013 even Carrie Brownstein from Portlandia <\/i>and Sleater-Kinney), this centre pairing is certain to be among the Best Actress nominees \u2013 my guess would be Blanchett for Actress and Mara for Supporting Actress so they aren\u2019t competing with each other.<\/p>\n
I do have one quibble and it\u2019s perhaps an odd one. The power of the emotion between the two women is absolutely clear and the role than each can play in the life of the other is certainly vivid, but what was perhaps missing for me was any sense that they just enjoyed being with each other. Apart from one flirtatious comment about Therese\u2019s company-mandated Santa hat at their first meeting, these two never make each other laugh or share a joke. A curious omission I thought.<\/p>\n
Not a bad start to awards season then. Let\u2019s see what the rest of the month has to offer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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