{"id":3335,"date":"2023-02-13T16:27:51","date_gmt":"2023-02-13T16:27:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/?p=3335"},"modified":"2023-03-06T11:16:27","modified_gmt":"2023-03-06T11:16:27","slug":"oscars-2023-tar-all-quiet-on-the-western-front-women-talking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/2023\/02\/13\/oscars-2023-tar-all-quiet-on-the-western-front-women-talking\/","title":{"rendered":"Oscars 2023: T\u00e1r, All Quiet on the Western Front, Women Talking"},"content":{"rendered":"

T\u00e1r<\/strong> is one of those films built around a single actor. You sometimes hear directors saying \u201cI wouldn\u2019t have made the film if I couldn\u2019t have got X to play the part.\u201d Is that always true? I doubt it, but it probably is here. The intricacies of the performance is the whole point. Just as Lydia fanatically teases out details of classical pieces from her orchestra, so too does Cate Blanchett tease out details of this fascinating, complex, unlikeable, tyrannical, desperate, cruel, selfish and yet somehow relatable individual.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s lengthy, and it takes a while for anything to \u201chappen\u201d. I mean, stuff happens, but it\u2019s not at all clear for a very long time what the actual point is, and I have to say, even now, I\u2019m still not 100% sure what it\u2019s trying to say. But like a number of other relatively plotless films which take place in very unfamiliar worlds (Gosford Park<\/em>, The Hurt Locker<\/em>, The Wolf of Wall Street<\/em>) it\u2019s the immersion in the details of the world that sustained my interest \u2013 although I\u2019m not the least bit surprised to learn that it tried the patience of others.<\/p>\n

But if all of the supporting players and the minutiae of a conductor\u2019s life are the orchestra, then the soloist is of course Cate Blanchett who wrings every drop of nuance she can out of what could in lesser hands have been a wildly undisciplined caricature or a thin portrayal which couldn\u2019t summon up the sheer charisma required to make the story work.<\/p>\n

Women Talking <\/strong>has even less plot than T\u00e1r<\/strong>, and the most dramatic scenes all take place before the movie starts and are generally only described, or shown in brief flashbacks. But Sarah Polley\u2019s unhurried and literate screenplay focuses on the rigour of the debate and the shifting moods of the characters. Essentially, this is Twelve Angry Men<\/em>, restaged in a Mennonite Barn and where the stakes are far more personal.<\/p>\n

Polley\u2019s direction is also clear, unfussy and sensitive. She knows when to just let the words and the faces do the heavy lifting and when a little bit of an extra flourish will be helpful. And she has an absolutely crackerjack cast, led by Rooney Mara, Claire Foy, Jessie Buckley and Ben Whishaw, but also including a brief turn by Frances McDormand (who also co-produced) and a remarkable performance from Michelle McLeod as the fragile Mejal.<\/p>\n

Polley\u2019s control of tone is precise and when things take a turn for the melodramatic in the closing fifteen or so minutes, she\u2019s able to prevent the story from tipping over into action movie or soap opera clich\u00e9s, but instead remains steadfastly intent on the details of the character interactions, all the way to the incredibly moving final shots. It\u2019s a deeply absorbing piece of work, and what\u2019s delightful about this very strong slate of Best Picture nominees is that it\u2019s hard to think of two movies more opposite in their aims, intentions, methods and influences than Everything Everywhere <\/em>and Women Talking<\/em> and yet they\u2019re two of my favourite films of the year. (Top Gun Maverick<\/em> I guess is the third leg of this stool, but that\u2019s my least favourite of the ten nominees by some distance.)<\/p>\n

Lastly, let\u2019s look at All Quiet on the Western Front<\/strong>. Remakes of previous Best Picture winners are rare, but not unheard of (and we had another one last year with Spielberg\u2019s take on West Side Story<\/em>) but this is particularly interesting. Lewis Milestone\u2019s 1930 film of Erich Maria Remarque\u2019s 1928 novel had been conceived as a silent film, and traces of this earlier style of film grammar remain. It\u2019s a testament to the studio\u2019s desire to render the story as accurately and unflinchingly as possible, as well as the skill of the director and crew, that it has as much power as it does. When we watched it for our Best Pick podcast, we were all blown away (sorry) by the sheer force of the storytelling.<\/p>\n

But this was a film about Germans in World War One, made by Americans in the inter-war period. The 2022 version is made by Germans, and is made not only with two world wars now in the history books, but also at a time when another conflict is raging in Europe. So, not only is there the opportunity to re-tell this story with the extra detail, sophistication and nuance which one would expect after ninety years of advances in filmmaking, but the time and nationality of the filmmakers gives it extra resonance.<\/p>\n

There are plenty of changes from the earlier film, which was a pretty faithful rendering of the novel. Most obviously, this version is in colour, but this is no Technicolor fantasy. Director Edward Berger and cinematographer James Friend shoot it all in muted, muddy reds and fetid, billious greens. Milestone\u2019s version kicks off with the rousing patriotic speech which inspires our young, callow heroes to enlist. Berger knows we won\u2019t fall for that, and gives us the horrors of the battlefield right up front, with the dark irony that the jacket ripped from the shoulders of one unfortunate young soldier has the bullet holes patched up and is then given to the next new recruit.<\/p>\n

Some of the episodes from the novel make it through intact, some are expanded or deleted. The most obvious omission is the sequence where B\u00e4umer gets to go home briefly and discovers that he no longer fits back into civilian life. Instead Berger hints at his hero\u2019s disassociation, and keeps him trapped on the front lines. He also gives us a window into the political dimension of the war, pitting Daniel Br\u00fchl\u2019s Erzberger against Thibault de Montalembert\u2019s Ferdinand Foch \u2013 whereas Remarque\u2019s novel kept us in the trenches with the grunts. This leads to what I think of as an overreach, however, since the final death of B\u00e4umer, instead of being the simple banality of the novel or the famous image of the first movie, is the product of an over-engineered ironic twist, which was such a shift in tone that I suspected it must have been based on a specific real event, but I\u2019ve been unable to find any evidence of that.<\/p>\n

However, the rest of the film is incredibly strong, with horribly convincing battle scenes, stripped of the grand tragedy of Kubrick\u2019s Paths of Glory<\/em>, or the fleetingly optimistic showmanship of 1917<\/em>, but reminding me more of a more reserved, more European Platoon<\/em>. And Felix Kammerer as B\u00e4umer is superb, as the enthusiastic idealism of the early stretch is replaced by horror and revulsion, and finally a blank fatalism as he reaches the end. It\u2019s clearly going to win Best International Feature, and although I\u2019ve yet to see the other nominees, I suspect deservedly so.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

T\u00e1r is one of those films built around a single actor. You sometimes hear directors saying \u201cI wouldn\u2019t have made the film if I couldn\u2019t have got X to play the part.\u201d Is that always true? I doubt it, but it probably is here. The intricacies of the performance is the whole point. Just as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[25,11],"tags":[13,533,19],"class_list":["post-3335","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-at-the-cinema","category-culture","tag-oscars","tag-oscars-2023","tag-reviews"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5JY5l-RN","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3335","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3335"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3335\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3337,"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3335\/revisions\/3337"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3335"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3335"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3335"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}