Tom Salinsky

Nightmare Alley

Guillermo del Toro follows up his Best Picture-winning storybook fable about forbidden fish love with this noir remake based on a hard-boiled novel, but once again he renders it in a glossy, pixel-y style which is sometimes at odds with the content of the first act. It’s true that the exotic and colourful carnival world looks wonderful through his lens, but given that a key element of the story is the contrast between the wondrous sights presented to the public and the mundane reality behind the scenes, I can’t help but wish for a similar contrast in the style of shooting – here everything looks like a perfectly contrived videogame cut-scene.

Gliding through proceedings with his customary charm is an effortless Bradley Cooper, who manages to drive a clear line from the shy outsider fascinated by the carny schtick, to the nervy neophyte conman, to the hardboiled and cynical huckster, to the frightened man on the run he becomes by the movie’s close. But the tone and the structure goes awry when we leave the carnival and abandon the wonderful cast of characters we have established, who make a single brief token appearance after the time jump.

What follows is rather more predictable, rather more rote, rather more a product of the genre conventions, and again somewhat swamped by the lush visual style which overwhelms almost everything, rendering even the excellent Cate Blanchett a standard-issue femme fatale, and giving Richard Jenkins almost no room at all to show what he can do. A few shocks along the way don’t fully make up for a storyline which meanders to a conclusion which I was unlucky enough to see coming in the opening ten minutes.

King Richard

Assuming you don’t know the first thing about Venus and Serena Williams and the role their father played in their rise to competitive tennis superstardom, this film will fill you in. It will even tell you the second thing, although it does pretty much stop there. Taking nearly two-and-a-half hours to laboriously plod through the key points of their life story from 11 to 14 (Venus) this fails to achieve much except recreating episodes which are fairly well-documented already. That Richard Williams abruptly stopped his offspring from playing competitive matches until Venus suddenly debuted as a 14-year-old pro must have been hugely frustrating for those around him and I can see how it looks like dramatic conflict in a story outline, or even in a script. But on screen, it never generates any real tension or interest, or character development, with all the major players ending the film in exactly the same place they started it, only $12m richer. With the conclusion of the story never in doubt, the only reason to see this is for Will Smith’s excellent performance, completely inhabiting Richard Williams and giving him depth and soul which the limited screenplay and flat direction doesn’t deserve.

CODA

This was the last of the Best Picture nominees which I watched and one for which I had high hopes after it pinched the PGA award from The Power of the Dog. Nightmare Alley was dazzling but empty, King Richard was pedestrian and dull. CODA was never less than entertaining and left me suitably heart-warmed but for a film which is emerging as a front-runner in the Oscar race, it’s pretty unambitious, unconfrontational stuff, which in another year might have been little more than an after-school special.

A lot of what it attempts to do, it succeeds in. The eccentric family unit of deaf Frank, Jackie and older brother Leo, complimented by hearing daughter Ruby, is very well-drawn both on the page and on the screen. It’s always a delight to see Marlee Matlin, Troy Kotsur is a wonderful figure and has picked up a Best Supporting Actor nomination, but it’s Daniel Durant as Leo who impressed me the most with his easy charm, contrasted with flashes of barely post-teen anger.

The film also seems to have dodged some of the accusations of inauthenticity which dogged the French original (at which subtitles had to be provided for deaf audiences who couldn’t make out the poorly-executed sign language), although Deborah – who has worked as an interpreter – wondered at Ruby’s consistent editorialising, in contrast to the usual ethics of CODAs who generally interpret everything regardless of their own feelings, and also at the deaf people refusing to “turn on” their voices even when trying to be understood by hearing people. One can only imaging that the deaf actors and consultants on the film were aware of these issues, but it is strange.

What’s less easy to forgive is how much of a chocolate box of a film this is, with magically easy solutions to potentially intractable problems, ideal boyfriends, mildly eccentric and inspirational teachers, a minor work conflict which doesn’t required too much exposition to unpack, and some tasteful conflict all set to soaring ballads. Can the Academy really look at this and The Power of the Dog and call this the best film of the year? Will CODA be another Green Book, getting virtue points for its representation and providing a warm hug of reassurance when depicting a marginalised community? It’s not impossible.

Of course, representation only works if lots of people see your story, and – let’s be clear – a warm family drama on Apple TV+ is going to get lots more hearing Americans watching than this year’s other sign-language film the highly inaccessible Drive My Car, but then the prize should be lots of viewers, not the highest award that filmmaking has to offer.

Which leaves us with some predictions to make. I still think the sheer originality of The Power of the Dog can and must triumph over the very watchable but shmaltzy CODA, but I appreciate that Campion’s film is a hard one to love. Less in doubt, surely, is Campion for Best Director (you may remember that when Green Book won Best Picture, Alfonso Cuarón won Best Director for Roma). My personal favourite of this crop is probably the wonderfully original Licorice Pizza although I have a lot of time for the beguiling Drive My Car as well – but I enjoyed watching all of this year’s nominees except for This Way Up. My chief complaint is that room should have been made for Tick Tick Boom, Flee or (by reputation) The Worst Person in the World.

Best Actor looks like a straight fight between Will Smith and Andrew Garfield – both excellent and I think Garfield might have the edge, although Will Smith has waited longer for his. Best Actress I think is Jessica Chastain’s to lose, although I haven’t managed to see The Eyes of Tammy Faye yet. Best Supporting Actor might well go to Troy Kotsur, especially if CODA does not win Best Picture. Best Supporting Actress is going to go to Ariana DeBose and nobody else needs to bother writing a speech.

The screenplay awards are harder to call, but I think I’d bet on Kenneth Branagh winning for Belfast, and that film winning nothing else, and Adapted Screenplay could well make it three for three for The Power of the Dog, unless the Academy turns on Campion, following her stupid crack about the Williams sisters at the Critics Choice Awards.

My previous poor record at this game has taught me to hedge my bets a bit. See you back here soon to pick over the results.

Here be spoilers – you have been warned.

Belfast is this year’s “small” film, and like previous such Best Picture nominees (think Brooklyn, Lady Bird, The Kids Are All Right) it doesn’t really have much of a chance when it comes to Best Picture. But it does have a bit more heft than some of those, firstly because it’s a Kenneth Branagh film and secondly because the background of The Troubles anchors it to something a bit more meaningful.

Branagh, serving as writer for only the second time after In the Bleak Midwinter, has crafted a story drawn from his own memories of growing up in Northern Ireland. As such it’s quite a personal film, but I often find him rather an anonymous director, capable of slinging the camera around if he feels like it, but rarely stamping much personality on the material. Here, he manages to create an intimate family portrait, with some occasional flashes of directorial inspiration, such as having the movies that the characters go and see film the frame with colour, whereas everything else is shot in crisp black-and-white

But it’s an actor’s film first and foremost and Branagh’s cast easily rise to the challenge. Catriona Balfe leads from the top, turning what could have been a mere obstacle into a complex and relatable character. Jamie Dornan’s straight-arrow dad has a little less to work with, but he’s always a compelling presence, and Ciaran Hinds and Judi Dench somehow make a believable couple despite the almost twenty-year age gap between them.

Walking away with the picture though is ten-year-old Jude Hill as Buddy who is never less than completely convincing, with his wide earnest eyes taking in the delights and horrors that life presents him with. What the film isn’t is in any way subtle. The child’s eye view of adult concerns is often used to hint at deeper themes, but here everything is laid out as clear as can be, and if anything the need to always have Buddy in the frame eventually becomes a distraction. And it walks a perilous tightrope between heartfelt sincerity and mawkish sentimentality, tipping over into the latter as Dornan stares impassively out of the window of a departing bus to the syrupy strains of Van Morrison.

Belfast is a perfectly charming way to spend an evening, it’s impeccably made and it doesn’t outstay its welcome. But it doesn’t confront any deeper truths about life, love, family or politics along the way. Like its paternal hero, it won’t get involved and it won’t take sides.

I also took in The Batman, which should have been right up my street, and has been getting strong reviews. Maybe I just wasn’t in the mood, but it didn’t work for me at all. Nothing seemed to gel from Robert Pattinson’s absurd Robert Smith-like emo Bruce Wayne to Zoe Kravitz’s ridiculous nosekini balaclava to Riddler’s secret plan to assemble a secret militia via the secret means of public YouTube video comments. The entire movie seemed to consist of people walking through shadows, reciting enormous paragraphs of complicated exposition at each other, and then sinking back into the gloom again, while a monotonous soundtrack continually thumped away.

The nadir was the near-death of Alfred, who seemed to be largely the architect of his own misfortune (although lucky for all concerned that the Riddler chose to try and knock off Bruce Wayne remotely rather than in person the way he did all his other targets). The explosion which takes out a wing of Stately Wayne Manor when Alfred blithely opens an extremely suspicious lookin package only renders him comatose, and Bruce is there when he finally wakes up – and immediately begins info-dumping again like nothing has happened. That’s also his last appearance in the film.

Quite why it’s had such good notices isn’t entirely clear to me. Maybe I missed something, maybe other people really hated Ben Affleck’s version, or maybe the critical consensus will move over time. Or maybe I’m just the outlier who doesn’t appreciate good Batmanning when I see it. Regardless, I’m not in a hurry to see the inevitable sequel.