When you go see “K-19: The Widowmaker,” Kathryn Bigelow’s gripping account of the 1961 nuclear accident aboard a Soviet submarine that nearly launched World War III, bring a sweater. First of all, it’s midsummer and the proprietor of your local multiplex probably has the air conditioning cranked up too high. Second of all, you’re about to spend two and a half hours in a steel tube beneath the freezing Arctic seas, trapped between a leaking nuclear reactor, an autocratic captain and the paranoid Communist Party bureaucracy, convinced you’ll never see the Motherland again.
OK, you won’t really. It’s an illusion. But it’s one hell of an illusion. “K-19: The Widowmaker” may be a bit too grim and claustrophobic to become a certifiable summer blockbuster, but it’s a pulse-pounding thriller that brings one of the Cold War’s darkest and deadliest episodes to the big screen. In place of the overblown histrionics of most summer movies, “K-19″ offers a vivid, highly realistic yarn of real-life heroism, the story of a small group of isolated and terrified men who risked death to save the world from apocalypse.
Like so many military movies, “K-19″ is about a conflict between two strong personalities, but it has no villains as such. With its mesmerizing scenes of the great sub diving to a human-crushing depth of 300 meters, or surfacing through the Arctic ice cap, it’s also a tribute to the marvels of large-scale machinery, so impressive when it works and so devastating when it doesn’t. On one hand, this joins Wolfgang Petersen’s “Das Boot” at the top of a very short list of the best submarine movies ever made. On the other, it’s also a clever and subtle work, not a war film or an anti-war film but a non-war film that’s designed to humanize and complicate viewers’ understanding of Cold War propaganda and the nature of bravery.
“K-19″ is also an old-fashioned Hollywood movie in the best possible sense of that term, the kind that only a handful of filmmakers — Steven Spielberg and Steven Soderbergh, say, along with Bigelow’s ex-husband, James Cameron — still have the power and freedom to create. It allows its big stars, Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson (as the captain and first officer of the stricken sub, respectively), to loom above the rest of the picture like dueling colossi, without losing touch with the escalating dramatic tension or the generously handled ensemble around them. For Bigelow herself, one of the most ambitious and intriguing of Hollywood action-film directors (as well as pretty much the only woman working in the genre), it’s also a triumphant comeback. Best known for the gritty vampire flick “Near Dark” and the sadistic cop-actioner “Blue Steel,” she hasn’t released a major-studio picture since the flawed if distinctive “Strange Days” in 1995.
Perhaps only Bigelow would have had the subversive sensibility — or the sheer balls — for this project: a Hollywood movie set at the height of the Cold War in which every major character is an officer or sailor in the Soviet Navy. No crewcut-sporting Americans show up to save the day or refocus the audience’s attention (in fact, this becomes a plot point in the canny screenplay by Christopher Kyle, from a story by Louis Nowra) and there are essentially no women in the picture. Like Capt. Alexei Vostrikov (Ford), the hardened-steel commander of K-19, we’re stuck in that sub with those men, that treacherous early-’60s Soviet technology and absolutely no way out.
Initially it sounds odd to hear Ford, Neeson and the rest of the cast speaking English with “Russian” accents, but the choice is part of Bigelow’s overall aesthetic strategy, not just bogus Hollywoodism. For one thing, the cast of “K-19″ is intended to simulate the wide range of nationalities and ethnicities found in the Soviet military, and so is drawn from all over the Northern Hemisphere, including the United States and Ireland (in the case of the two stars) and also Russia, Britain and Scandinavia. So having the actors speak a slightly uncomfortable lingua franca is a legitimate decision. More than that, the Slavo-English compels the cast to leave their comfortable 21st-century actor-dude mannerisms behind, drawing them and us materially and psychologically into a different place and time.
Vostrikov, for example, bears little resemblance to any character Harrison Ford has played before, reminding us how good an actor he can be when a director pushes him beyond his customary concerned-American-dad shtick. Vostrikov is every inch a Russian, a military hard man with a philosophical, even fatalistic streak who believes in driving his men — and his untested, nuke-powered submarine — to the edge of exhaustion. As the K-19 disaster unfolds, we learn almost nothing about Vostrikov’s personal life. According to gossip aboard the boat (all submariners call their craft “boats”), he got his appointment by marrying a Politburo member’s niece or daughter, but if it’s true she is never mentioned by name. Bigelow gives us just one momentary scene in Vostrikov’s quarters, where viewers who know a little music and can make out a little Cyrillic will learn that he’s a Beethoven fancier and a Tolstoy reader.
Vostrikov is brought in to command the K-19, the Soviets’ first ballistic nuclear submarine, after a dry-dock exercise goes awry under Mikhail Polenin (Neeson), its beloved captain, and the crew begins to believe that the great boat may be cursed. The navy brass, headed by the forbidding Marshal Zelenstov (Joss Ackland) don’t want to hear about any problems, and in Vostrikov they’ve got the right guy. Well before the boat leaves the port city of Murmansk (Halifax, Nova Scotia, is used as a convincing substitute) we know that Vostrikov has his doubts about the mission, but is not a man who believes in complaining or showing weakness.
If the resulting conflict-friendship drama between Vostrikov and Polenin is standard fare in military films, like most of “K-19″ it is marvelously executed. Neeson has also rarely been better; an actor of tremendous physical presence and charisma, he nonetheless plays Polenin as a withdrawn man locked in internal combat, torn between his sense that he’s the genuine leader of the K-19′s crew and his unwavering loyalty to military protocol.
The K-19′s officer corps also includes a Communist Party official, who’s on hand to show the men propaganda films about the evils of American life: Klan rallies, lynchings, forcible suppression of civil-rights demonstrations, widespread urban and rural poverty. He’s a discomfiting comic presence in the film; the professional navy officers around him can barely stand his pompous moralizing, but his arguments about the hypocrisy of Western materialism strike disturbingly close to the mark. (I’m reminded of a contemporary Russian witticism about the post-Soviet era: “At last we understand. Everything they told us about communism was false. And everything they told us about capitalism was true.”)
For the Kremlin leadership, the K-19′s maiden voyage in the spring and summer of 1961 was a question of survival. In terms of nuclear weapons, the Soviet Union was outgunned 5-to-1 by the U.S., and American nuclear subs were patrolling Russian coastal waters, within easy missile reach of Moscow and Leningrad. Without a credible submarine-based deterrent of their own, the Soviets feared a devastating first strike by the U.S. (and, yes, class, there really were Washington hawks who advocated such a thing). But whatever the level of genuine threat may have been, sending an untested and ill-equipped boat out into the North Atlantic, armed with dangerously unstable weapons of mass destruction, was clearly a reckless decision.
Bigelow and Kyle supply only a little of this background, nor do they attempt to assign blame for what went wrong aboard the K-19 (although Vostrikov, who ultimately became a hero, must carry at least some of the responsibility). The film’s only political agenda is to make us see that the crew of the K-19 were following orders, as military men have always done, that they believed they were on the right side of history opposing a great evil and that they displayed incredible courage in the face of grave peril.
Bigelow’s measured pacing, her long traveling shots through the body of the sub that gradually convey its social and mechanical geography and her large-scale, heroic compositions are strikingly different from anything you see in contemporary Hollywood movies. I suspect she’s trying to channel the grandiose mood and spirit of classic Soviet films her audience has probably never seen, from Eisenstein and Dovzhenko to Aleksandr Askoldov’s “Commissar” and Eldor Urazbayev’s “Trans-Siberian Express.” (No, Blockbuster doesn’t carry those, but your nearest big-city public library might.)
There are admittedly moments when Kyle’s dialogue creaks and groans as much as the K-19′s hull at 300 meters, but most of the film is so exciting you won’t much care. Once Vostrikov has brought the boat crashing upward through the ice and successfully launched a test missile, things start to go wrong. A coolant leak develops in the aft nuclear reactor, which is supervised by Vadim (Peter Sarsgaard, in the movie’s standout supporting role), a young lieutenant fresh from the academy. With the reactor core overheating uncontrollably — and backup systems that either don’t work or were never installed — a meltdown is only hours away. If the core melts through its container, the boat’s thermonuclear warheads could explode, taking out not just the K-19 but the American destroyer shadowing it a mile away. Quite conceivably, this would be the opening shot of a new world war.
A group of crewmen, among them a sleepy-eyed, handsome sailor named Pavel (Christian Camargo), volunteer to enter the sealed reactor chamber — wearing nothing but rubber chemical suits — risking severe radiation exposure to make the difficult repairs. How long can the jury-rigged patch job hold? With its engines crippled and no radio contact with Moscow, will the K-19 crew ever get home? Will they be forced to scuttle their priceless sub or surrender it to the watching Americans? Obviously the world doesn’t blow up in the end, but I shouldn’t say more in deference to those who don’t know the real K-19 story (to which Bigelow and company stick pretty closely).
It would be a grave mistake to view “K-19″ as a pro-Soviet film, although in today’s frightful cultural climate I’m sure some idiot will make that charge. Much of the brilliance of Bigelow’s approach to this material (as in her other films) lies in her appreciation of its ambiguity. As an audience we must acknowledge the brave self-sacrifice of men who believed they were serving the Communist Party and the Soviet state, even though that party and that state had sent them out into the ocean on a poorly insulated pile of smoldering plutonium.
Of course the Hollywood party line is that “K-19″ is nothing more than a good story, but Bigelow is a cannier and trickier filmmaker than that. Not only does she not seek black-and-white moral equations, she actively tries to undermine them. Even in this movie’s few lighter moments, as when we watch these servants of the Evil Empire joyously playing soccer on the frozen surface of the Arctic Ocean, it remains a fable about the perils of a Manichaean worldview, the danger that dividing the world into implacable camps of friends and foes leads to the annihilation of both. It’s just as valuable a lesson as it was 40 years ago — and just as devilishly difficult to apply to reality.
Have things improved in Iraq and Afghanistan since we decided to gung-ho the hell over there and blow stuff up? Let’s just say that expert opinion is divided on that question, but the movies have been amazing. You could curate a dynamite film festival out of post-9/11 war movies, both documentaries and narrative features, starting with Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein’s prescient “Gunner Palace” — made in 2004, just as the Iraq conflict was going seriously south — and moving forward through “The Situation” and “Iraq in Fragments” and “Battle for Haditha” and, of course, “The Hurt Locker” and last year’s Oscar-nominated, you-are-there documentary “Restrepo.”
So Danish director Janus Metz’s widely acclaimed “Armadillo” (winner of the Critics’ Week prize at Cannes last year) arrives in a crowded field and belongs to a familiar genre: Meet a group of ordinary, likable guys — and then go with them into hell. It isn’t in English and reflects a non-American perspective, which only makes it less likely that it will find any kind of audience here. That doesn’t change the fact that it’s a brilliant work of cinema, a nonfiction film as intense and visceral as any drama, and an emotional and moral experience that feels horrifying and exhilarating at almost the same moment. Metz and cinematographer Lars Skree spent six months in 2009 living with a group of Danish soldiers at Forward Base Armadillo, in the opium-rich province of Helmand in southwestern Afghanistan, where they experienced several firefights with Taliban forces dug in less than a mile away. The filmmakers were fortunate to come back to Europe alive — and what they came back with was a mesmerizing, beautiful and terrifying documentary that can stand among the greatest war movies ever made.
“Armadillo” has provoked something close to a political firestorm in Denmark, a customarily calm social democracy with a smaller population than New York City and greater income equality than any nation in the world. Only a few hundred Danish volunteers have joined the United States-led coalition forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, but war is war, and as the climactic scene in “Armadillo” makes clear, it’s often very ugly indeed. Metz and Skree were on hand to witness a hair-raising battle that ends when a small detachment of Danes ambushes a group of Taliban snipers in a ditch, and let’s be very clear about this: What you see in the film is death, right up close, and everything about it is dreadful.
Whether the Danish soldiers engage in vicious, callous or criminal conduct, as some commentators have suggested, is perhaps a subjective question, or one that looks different to European eyes than American ones. What I saw in “Armadillo” was a group of amped-up young men high on the drug of war who survive a kill-or-be-killed situation, one where moral considerations have all but evaporated. Their behavior is not exemplary but it seems comprehensible, and those of us watching cannot know what we would do in the same situation. This is a cliché that’s applied to war movies way too often, but your political outlook and opinion about the Afghan conflict are pretty much irrelevant to “Armadillo.” It’s a strict cinéma-vérité film with no narration or commentary; war opponents can find plenty of evidence that the whole endeavor is a pointless morass, while those who believe that the Taliban must be defeated, whatever the price, may conclude that these young soldiers and others like them are making a valuable sacrifice and slowly turning the tide.
I guess those questions can never be overlooked, given how much of the Western world’s so-called prestige, not to mention America’s national debt, is tied up in the Afghan conflict. But at the risk of retreating to aesthetics, let me say that Metz and Skree have made a movie that is first and foremost a movie, a sensuous widescreen landscape of helicopters and mist-shrouded groves of trees and agricultural canals and bored, agitated young men who ride motorcycles and watch pornography and risk their lives every day for ambiguous reasons. I assume “Armadillo” was shot in the field on digital video and then blown up to 35mm, but it so magnificently constructed that I became disoriented at certain moments: That isn’t an actor convincingly rendering a man in shock; he’s actually been shot. That isn’t brooding Method acting; that guy has just learned that a mortar shell whose target he selected has killed a little girl.
Every 21st-century war film tries to grapple with the eerie disconnection of modern warfare, whose soldiers return (if they do return) to a comfortable consumer society that seems less than eager to know about what they saw and felt and did. Jeremy Renner’s memorable “lost in the supermarket” scene in “The Hurt Locker” was one version of this, and Metz delivers an intimate, distinctly Nordic response, with the soldiers of his platoon arriving home to a small country that’s so polite and clean and pleasant that it seems as if the grisly deaths we witnessed in that ditch in Helmand province couldn’t have happened in the same universe. “Armadillo” can’t resolve the vicious moral and philosophical conundrums of war in general or this one in particular, but it may do something even more valuable: Whatever you think — or whatever you think you think — it will leave you shocked, gasping, uncertain.
“Armadillo” is now playing at the IFC Center in New York, with more cities and DVD release to follow.
I’m grateful to have been thoroughly and completely wrong about the best-picture race — as were a great many other supposedly knowledgeable stooges — for a whole bunch of reasons. First and foremost, Kathryn Bigelow’s historic sweep was a genuinely moving and surprising capper to one of the most tedious Oscar broadcasts in recent memory. All that industry hand-wringing, a much-touted new production team, and what do we get? Interpretive dance numbers set to fragments of the nominated scores. Seriously? If they’d hired the Sparkle Motion dance team out of “Donnie Darko,” it couldn’t have been any lamer. (Actually, that would been a lot more fun to watch.)
Although I have mixed feelings about “The Hurt Locker” itself, and about the cultural-psychological reasons for its ascendancy, Bigelow herself is a genuine and strange cinematic genius who has paid her dues several times over and richly deserves her moment of triumph. (Is “Hurt Locker” her best film? Probably not. Her second-best? Not even sure about that.) I wish producer-screenwriter Mark Boal hadn’t complicated Bigelow’s big moment on the stage of the Kodak Theatre by persistently tugging on her elbow, like a kid in a department store who needed to use the john. That was odd.
Did it take a grueling, ¿Quién es más macho? war thriller for a female director to win a pile of Oscars? I know there are counter-arguments — mainly, there just haven’t been that many Oscar-scale movies made by women — but I kind of think, yeah, it did. This may have more to do with the Academy’s recent preference for “serious,” male-coded film genres than with simplistic sexual discrimination. Hollywood legend Joseph L. Mankiewicz won back-to-back writing and directing Oscars in 1950 and 1951 for “A Letter to Three Wives” and “All About Eve,” but it’s difficult to imagine such female-centric movies garnering those kinds of honors today.
Taking the longer view, this year’s Oscar campaign and its conclusion offered some crucial flashes of insight into how the Academy works in the 21st century, which is a whole lot different from the way it used to work. Although this goes against nearly everything I believe about life on Planet Earth, I have concluded that Academy voters as a group are less cynical and calculated than I thought — but also that there is a conflict or schism between the membership and the needs and desires of the Academy’s leadership, or at least its image-management and P.R. teams.
I exchanged e-mails late on Sunday night with a critical colleague, one who’d made the same misguided assumptions that I had about the inevitable victory of “Avatar,” notwithstanding the accolades heaped upon “Hurt Locker” by every critics’ group and industry trade organization. Our fundamental error, we concluded, lay in believing that after several years of victories by mid-budget Indiewood pictures the Academy’s collective thinking, and voting behavior, would at some point return to “normal.” What we meant by normal, of course, was an ingrained institutional preference for big-budget spectacle. But that old normal is dead, and here’s the new normal: Hollywood’s central trade group doesn’t like its own movies that much.
Allow me to quote an esteemed expert: “One thing that’s become clear is that the film industry feels no confidence about the cultural significance of its own products. Hollywood’s self-appointed division of self-importance, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, passed up the chance to honor one of the most ambitious and successful films the American movie factories have ever made in order to hand out hardware to a mid-budget, semi-independent production made in Jordan without movie stars.”
OK, the expert is not all that esteemed. It’s me, and other than replacing “India” with “Jordan,” that’s taken verbatim from the article I wrote last year about the Oscar victory of “Slumdog Millionaire” and the shunning of “The Dark Knight.” If anything, the contrast is even starker this time around. “Avatar” is, of course, a much bigger hit than TDK, and its use of motion-capture technology and 3-D clearly points toward the Hollywood future. “The Hurt Locker” is a genuine indie production, financed and made entirely outside the studio system, which grossed less than $15 million in the United States.
Comparing different eras of financial and cinematic history is rife with pitfalls, but that clearly makes “Hurt Locker” the lowest-grossing best-picture winner in Oscar history. (No. 2 is probably “The Last Emperor” from 1987, but when you adjust for inflation, Bernardo Bertolucci’s costume drama made almost three times as much money as Bigelow’s war epic.) It’s delicious and strange and at least potentially ironic that this happened in the year when the Academy expanded the best-picture category from five to 10 nominees, in an evident effort to make the competition more commercial and more attractive to mainstream audiences.
Honestly, the only conclusion I can draw is that Academy members are voting with their hearts. Who’da thunk it? Maybe an earlier generation of Oscar voters was more persuaded by box-office numbers, mass popularity and marketing muscle — or was simply more in tune with mass taste — but they evidently don’t give a damn about those things now. Personally, I’d have ranked a couple of other nominees above “Hurt Locker” — definitely “A Serious Man,” maybe “An Education” — but it’s an idiosyncratic film made by a genuine visionary. Even setting aside the history-making element of this vote (which was surely a consideration) it’s a respectable choice.
Now, the Academy brass, especially its marketing mavens and the shepherds of its lucrative contract with ABC, may take a more jaundiced view of the membership’s sudden attack of integrity and independence. Oscar’s long relationship with the wider moviegoing public has always been tempestuous, but both as a television franchise and a touchstone of cultural relevance, the Academy Awards cannot afford to be seen as some elitist, out-of-touch coastal bastion of indieness. If we allowed ABC execs a free spin in the time machine, and a chance to replace the last four or five years’ worth of Oscar-winners with movies heartland consumers actually paid to watch, they’d take it in a heartbeat.
Still, at least in terms of water-cooler controversy, this year’s Oscars were largely successful. Mind you, the telecast was a misbegotten mishmash, and the toxic, unfunny repartee of Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin made Hugh Jackman’s 2009 song-and-dance numbers look like the height of showbiz professionalism. But viewership was up, reaching the best numbers since the “Crash on Brokeback Mountain” showdown of 2006, and the huge roster of nominated films yielded contradictory but complementary results: Multiple nominations for hugely popular films, and an underdog victory. A lifetime achievement award for Jeff “The Dude” Bridges (let’s be honest; that’s what it was), and shocking proof that Sandra Bullock is not just a human being but a funny, warm and generous-spirited one as well.
But the repercussions of “The Hurt Locker’s” victory over “Avatar” go well beyond Kathryn Bigelow’s historic breakthrough, and well beyond questions of which movie you or I like better, or which one made more money. It’s another salvo in Hollywood’s peculiar, long-running war against itself, a war unlikely to have any winners.
“The time has come,” said Barbra Streisand late Sunday night. And with that, Kathryn Bigelow, whose low-budget “The Hurt Locker” edged out the most successful movie of all time, became the first female in Academy history to win an Oscar for best director. (Moments later, she’d make a twofer by winning best picture as well.)
But like every historic first, Bigelow’s dual victory was both a stunning personal achievement and resonant metaphor. And not everybody’s been thrilled.
Just a few weeks ago critic Martha P. Nochimson wrote an essay here that lambasted Bigelow as “the Transvestite of Directors … masquerading as the baddest boy on the block.” And after last night’s ceremony, journalist Farai Chideya promptly tweeted, “Among Bigelow’s best-known films are three male ensemble casts: ‘Hurt Locker,’ ‘Point Break,’ ‘K-19 the Widowmaker’. … kudos to cast and to filmmaker and to topic. Gender matrix not so much.” So before we bust the pink champagne, perhaps we should ask: Does Bigelow’s victory still count for the ladies?
I have a diploma with the word “film” on it, so let me take a crack here.
Of course it does. Are you freaking kidding me?
It’s funny, I don’t remember anybody trotting out drag queen metaphors when John Madden’s “Shakespeare in Love” or Anthony Minghella’s “The English Patient” won Oscars, despite their weepy, girly plots. For that matter, in all the conversation about the big battle of the exes between Bigelow and James Cameron, did anybody stop to chide Cameron for an entire career built on decidedly female-centric fare? “Aliens,” “The Abyss,” “Titanic” and “Avatar” might not be “You’ve Got Mail,” but they’re all lousy with strong leading ladies and maternal subtext. (If Cameron were a woman, many large, serious books would be written about the feminist iconography of his otherworldly oeuvre.) Why then are Bigelow’s critics so quick to bag on her for doing what good filmmakers do — making movies with a unique perspective, and an appeal outside of the director’s own demographic? Do we really still think the length and breadth of female filmmaking is “Julie and Julia”? Dear God, please, no.
When I was in film school in the ’80s, a time when professors still thought it was acceptable to comment on the weight and dating habits of girl students, there barely was any concept of women’s cinema. In four years, I studied exactly one female director — Leni Riefenstahl.
Fortunately, it was also a golden moment for young independent filmmakers, some of whom, miraculously, were not males. (Not all of them were white either — go figure.) Patricia Rozema, Martha Coolidge and Mira Nair were just breaking out, but the women who electrified my little group of black-clad clove cigarette smokers were Penelope Spheeris and Kathryn Bigelow. Spheeris made rock ‘n’ roll documentaries and the cult hit “Suburbia”; Bigelow made a weird little vampire movie called “Near Dark.” No hankies. No hugging. Kickass!
As the years went by and Bigelow went on to make tough little dramas like “Blue Steel” and “Point Break” — as well as directing plenty of television cop shows. Her action-oriented style matured, but her style remained distinctive, consistent and always adrenalized. Does that make her a gender betrayer? I don’t know, is “Precious” director Lee Daniels a chick for making a movie about a pregnant teenage girl and her mom?
Yet Bigelow’s win seems to raise a nagging question in certain heads: Why is it that when women finally get a big award winner, it’s for a war picture instead of the kind of fare we so often wind up directing — those warm Nancy Meyers/Nora Ephron relationship stories? Well, maybe the reason movies like “Mamma Mia!” don’t snag the big prizes is as simple as the fact that they’re just not that great. Does anybody complain that men are being artistically shut out from serious competition when they go ahead and make “X-Men”?
That’s the thing that’s both scary and fantastic about Bigelow’s win; it says that maybe if we women are stuck making rom-coms and weepies, it’s not the fault of the system but ourselves. Want more golden statues on the lady shelf? Then fight like hell to make better movies, whatever the subject matter. The last time a woman was nominated for a best director Oscar, it was Sofia Coppola for “Lost in Translation,” a film that was piffling at best. (The only other two female nominees — the indisputably great Jane Campion for “The Piano” and Lina Wertmüller for “Seven Beauties” — had their work cut out for them against “Schindler’s List” and “Rocky,” respectively.) The problem with devaluing Bigelow’s win as being merely a clever bit of cinematic cross-dressing is that it takes away from the fact that “The Hurt Locker” is a great film, full stop.
So it’s no wonder that a groan went up from my couch when Bigelow’s walkout music last night swelled to the strains of Helen Reddy’s cheeseball anthem “I Am Woman.” (What was the Academy’s plan if Lee Daniels had won? Run DMC’s “Proud to Be Black”?) See, everybody? Hollywood can recognize a woman! Let’s give a hand for the little lady!
Of course masculinity and femininity inform the stories we tell. “An Education” was the story of a girl. “The Hurt Locker” was the story of a man. “Avatar” was the story of a bunch of blue people in a tree. Filmmakers bring their own brand of life experience to the table; there isn’t nor should there be an utterly gender-neutral perspective. But anyone who’s seen “The Hurt Locker” and thinks that it’s just some dude flick is selling its director far short. As a filmgoer who’s been following her career for the last 23 years could tell you, it’s a Kathryn Bigelow movie. It has her gritty style, her unmistakably dark humor, her gut-punching humanity.
Perhaps, then, it’s a good thing the Oscars chose to remind the world last night that Bigelow is both a filmmaker and a female. I hope every film school chick in the world is cheering her triumph, because it represents a victory over sexist college professors and dumbass studio executives and every producer who thinks ladies should stick to baby comedies. It represents the door opening just a little wider for talented, accomplished women to tell the stories they want to tell, whether they’re about sweeping romance or kooky comedy or blowing stuff up. There is no need to take away one iota of her accomplishment by suggesting Bigelow earned it by being a dude in a dude’s genre. She got it by being Kathryn Bigelow — a fierce, independent and utterly deserving filmmaker. She’s not the king of the world. She is woman. Hear her roar.
How did they do it? As crazy as it sounds, this year’s Oscar festivities were dynamic, funny and moved along at a good clip. Hosts Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin were hilarious, there were great jokes by everyone from Tina Fey to Ben Stiller, and the speeches were less long and dull than they’ve been in years. For once, no one rambled on forever and agents were rarely thanked. Not only that, but the usual endless tributes that serve no purpose whatsoever were gone, cut down to a great John Hughes segment and an entertaining horror-movie montage. Best of all, the best original songs were not performed, which means we weren’t forced to sit through two more blandly upbeat tunes with those old familiar Randy Newman melodies you’ve heard on every Oscar night for decades now. And I think we can all agree that an Oscar night without a Disney ballad performed or a long, rambling Lifetime Achievement acceptance speech is a winner in anyone’s book.
Here are a few of the highs and lows of the night:
Best new twists on old features: 1) James Taylor’s sweet, wavering voice singing live during the “In Memoriam” portion added a touching and personal dimension to this segment; 2) Remember when the dancing on the Oscars was limited to lackluster, paint-by-numbers choreography by hammy, foolishly costumed Broadway wannabes? The Legion of Extraordinary Dancers blew that tradition out of the water in bringing the best original score nominees to life. The dances for “The Hurt Locker” and “Avatar,” in particular, were evocative and breathtaking.
Worst new twists on old features: 1) Neil Patrick Harris is very talented, but after last year’s hilariously funny Hugh Jackman showstopper, this song and dance was only OK. 2) Bringing the best actor and actress nominees onstage in the first moments of the awards? Awkward and pointless. 3) The John Hughes montage was wonderful, but the tribute wandered astray with the big group of actors standing and honoring him with one or two sentences. “He gave us the gift of laughter,” one of them says, thereby giving us the gift of queasiness and John Hughes the gift of turning in his grave.
Best joke of the night: Alec Baldwin explains, “In ‘Precious,’ Gabourey Sidibe is told she’s worthless, nobody likes her, that she has no future. Hey, I’m with CAA too!”
Off-color joke of the night: Robin Williams: “Later this evening, the governor’s ball will be held, just one of many balls being held all over Hollywood tonight.”
Worst dressed: Miley Cyrus appears wearing what looks like one of those 24-hour girdles Jane Seymour used to hawk on TV.
Best exchange of the night: Between Robert Downey Jr. and Tina Fey, in a prelude to the best original screenplay.
Fey: Great movies begin with great writing.
Downey: What does an actor look for in a script? Specificity. Emotional honesty. Catharsis.
Fey: And what does a writer look for in an actor? Memorizing. Not paraphrasing. Fear of ad-libbing.
Downey: Actors want scripts with social relevance, warm weather locations, phone call scenes that can be shot separately from that insane actress that I hate, and long dense columns of uninterrupted monologue, turning the page, and for instance seeing the phrase, “Tony Stark, continued.”
Fey: And we writers dream of a future where actors are mostly computer-generated and their performances can be adjusted by us, on a laptop, alone.
Downey: It’s a collaboration, a collaboration between handsome, gifted people and sickly little mole people.
Strangest moment: Elinor Burkett interrupts Roger Ross Williams while he’s accepting the best doc short award. “Let the woman talk,” she says. At first it looks like she’s some random crazy person who jumped up onto the stage. It doesn’t help that Roger Ross Williams doesn’t really move over and let her stand in front of the microphone. Salon’s Kerry Lauerman spoke to both Williams and Burkett post-Oscars, and the whole crazy clash is explained here.
Best impromptu joke: When screenwriter Geoffrey Fletcher wins best adapted screenplay for “Precious,” he gives a heartfelt but stunned speech and ends it all with, “Sorry, I’m drawing a blank here. Thank you, everyone.” Martin appears and brags to the audience, “I wrote that speech for him.”
Worst incidence of playing with fire: Several people give James Cameron credit for their Oscar and one calls him a genius. Is it really in our best interest to make James Cameron feel more powerful than he already does?
Least gracious remarks of the night: 1) Mo’Nique, “I would like to thank the Academy for showing that it can be about the performance and not the politics.” She’s referring to the criticism surrounding her refusal to campaign for an Oscar, but it ends up sounding like a slapdown of her fellow nominees — that if, say, Maggie Gyllenhal won the Oscar, it wouldn’t have been about the performance.
2) Best costume design winner Sandy Powell (of “The Young Victoria”) starts off her speech with, “Well, I already have two of these, so I’m feeling greedy. I’d like to dedicate this one to …” It’s not a handbag, woman. Guess this is just another ho-hum Oscar-winning day in her sparkly-hat life.
3) Joe Letteri accepting best visual effects for “Avatar”: “Just remember the world that we live in is just as amazing as the one we created for you.” Thanks for that little reminder. Also, remember that the real Lord and Savior and Creator of the Heavens and the Earth is just as all-powerful as James Cameron.
Most accurate mistake of the night: Keanu Reeves, who has become a parody of himself, comes out and speaks in his signature monotone. “Isn’t he paralyzed?” asks my 12-year-old stepson. “Pretty much,” I answer. “Oh, I was thinking of Christopher Reeves,” he says.
Best introductions: Both by Steve Martin. 1) On Sandra Bullock: “You loved her in ‘The Blind Side,’ adored her in ‘The Proposal,’ and thought she was just OK in ‘Miss Congeniality II.’” 2) On “Precious”: “The one film that really lived up to the video game.”
Best gags: 1) Ben Stiller with a blue face and scary yellow eyes, speaking Na’vi. 2) Cutting to Martin and Baldwin backstage wearing Snuggies. 3) Martin and Baldwin’s parody of “Paranormal Activity,” in which they sleep fitfully all night in the same bed.
Best recovery: Just when the tributes to the best actor nominees is getting a little bit over-the-top with talk of the “enormous talent” of “the magnificent Colin Firth” and so on, Tim Robbins saves the day in his tribute to costar Morgan Freeman: “I’ll never forget what you said to me about friendship on the last day of shooting. You said, ‘Being a friend is getting the other a cup of coffee. Can you do that for me, Ted? It is Ted, isn’t it?’”
Best reaction shot: When Stanley Tucci says of Meryl Streep, “The two movies we did together were the highlight of my career,” Streep giggles at the audacity of this, which she clearly believes is an exaggeration.
Strangest trend of the night: Jokes about being gay. Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin have numerous “we’re a couple” gags, Colin Farrell brags about spooning with Jeremy Renner, and Sandra Bullock refers to “my lover Meryl Streep.” It’s official: Pretending you’re gay is the new pretending you’re not gay.
Most abrupt transition: In the wake of Kathryn Bigelow’s best director win, Tom Hanks appears and announces that “The Hurt Locker” has won best picture without reminding us of all the nominees. There are 10 of them, after all, and even if they were introduced throughout the night, that doesn’t mean we couldn’t use a little suspense building, along with a glimpse at all of the honored filmmakers.
Best way to one-up your ex: By snatching two Oscars out of his hands in one night. “Avatar” is certainly an inspired film, not to mention the highest-grossing movie of all time. Maybe that’s why it’s particularly satisfying to see Kathryn Bigelow win best director — the first woman to do so, by the way — and best picture for her relatively humble film “The Hurt Locker.” Suddenly her ex-husband (and our Lord and Savior and Creator of the Heavens and the Earth) Cameron seems not nearly as all-powerful as he did a few hours ago. Hurray for Bigelow! One small slap upside the head to the King of the World, and one giant step for womankind!
In “The Hurt Locker,” Sgt. 1st Class Will James (Jeremy Renner) is the second coming of John Wayne. Just not as cuddly.
What’s the point of this metaphor? It’s that I’m still coming to grips with how a woman could possibly have dreamed up this spartan American soldier in Iraq, who, while obsessively romancing death as a bomb-squad ace, outdoes the most extreme images of machismo ever produced by mainstream America. While Wayne set the testosterone standard in playing characters who lived to fight, his guys also found time to love women — Ethan’s Martha (Dorothy Jordan) in “The Searchers” and the Ringo Kid’s Dallas (Claire Trevor) in “Stagecoach,” to name two.
When they bonded with young, earnest boys, Wayne’s men became meaningful mentors — Gillom Rogers (Ron Howard) in “The Shootist” couldn’t have grown up without the wit and wisdom of Wayne’s John Bernard Books. But Will, with his Wayne-ian steely gaze, his laconic ease at the portals of death, and his patented hero saunter, loves “just one thing,” as he tells his baby boy before leaving him, maybe forever, to return to the killing fields of Iraq. And it isn’t women or kids.
To their credit, director Kathryn Bigelow and writer Mark Boal never reduce “the thing” to a word. Will’s unnamed passion is left to the enormity of our imaginations when we see him back in Iraq in the humongous bomb-disposal suit that insulates him from any direct contact with the world. What’s less happy is the confused adulation of this solitary savior at the end of the film, as Will takes the place of the bomb-disposal robot we saw in the opening scene — a better “bot.”
Though none can say with certainty who in the partnership of Bigelow and Boal took the lead in forming Will James, credit has been given to Bigelow, the first woman to win a Directors Guild of America award, and now favored to become the first to win an Oscar for directing. But no cheers for Miss Kathy for breaking the glass ceiling by fabricating my worst cinematic nightmare. Quentin Tarantino, who should know better, having just directed a piercingly original ironic study of war and blood lust, dubbed Bigelow the “Queen of Directors” when she took the DGA award. I prefer the “Transvestite of Directors.” Looks to me like she’s masquerading as the baddest boy on the block to win the respect of an industry still so hobbled by gender-specific tunnel vision that it has trouble admiring anything but filmmaking soaked in a reduced notion of masculinity.
OK, I see you objecting back there in the last row. Is it because Bigelow and Boal seem to think they have made an antiwar film, as they made clear when they accepted their BAFTAs (the British Academy Awards)? Something to do with an ironic presentation of Will? Uh-huh. We spend one-and-a-half hours enduring crisis after crisis in which Will is the only person with the daring and skill to save us (since we identify with the American soldiers) from being blown to bits. We hover over him anxiously, for seemingly endless stretches of time, watching (beautiful) extreme close-ups of his skillful and steady fingers palpating wires and wielding wire-cutters, our vicarious lives hanging on each motion. Our field of vision is so completely limited to his expertise in defusing bombs and dealing with invisible enemies that our capacity to think about the larger context of the American presence in Iraq is replaced by nuance-free instincts more characteristic of the tea party movement. This is likely to distance us from this man sufficiently to criticize him, how?
When Will returns home briefly, his wife and child are rendered clichés, as is ordinary American life, summed up in this film by the consumer madness embodied in the ridiculous proliferation of products in the cereal section of a supermarket. He’s happy to go back to the bombs. I don’t buy this as ironic — or valid. Apparently neither do a number of vets, who contend that “The Hurt Locker” has falsified the Iraq experience. Writing in the Huffington Post, Iraq veteran Kate Hoit takes aim at the film as “a full-throttle adrenaline rush that is comprised of ditching common sense and the realities of war” and calls its action climax “pure magical bullshit.” Seems that at least one real woman who served in Iraq is not pleased with Bigelow’s approach to her story. And how about the way Will’s wife is robbed of a point of view by a woman director? (If Bigelow didn’t intend all the hyped-up admiration of Will, then her material got away from her — in a big way.)
I also have a hard time with Will’s relationship with Beckham (Christopher Sayegh), a young Iraqi boy who sells bad DVDs to American soldiers. Because he likes Beckham so much, Will gets one of his fellow American soldiers badly shot up trying to avenge what he thinks is the boy’s horrible death — before he discovers that the Iraqi boy is alive. D’oh, he has misidentified the corpse. And he joyously embraces the living child … No, he doesn’t. He renders himself superhuman by cutting himself off from the kid because — see? — this is where caring gets you. And this is why he prefers “just one thing” to his family! Will is depicted as a majestically manly man in comparison with the merely human Sgt. Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) at his side, who, shattered by his war experiences, takes the lesson from war that he wants a son.
Yep, Bigelow produces some glorious montages and shots, like the spare geometry of the almost completely white film frames in the army morgue. But I think the outsize admiration for her masterly technique and the summary dismissal in the current buzz of directors like Nora Ephron and Nancy Meyers reveal an untenable assumption that the muscular filmmaking appropriate for the fragmented, death-saturated situations of war films is innately superior to the technique appropriate to the organic, life-affirming situations of romantic comedy.
I don’t begrudge the praise for Bigelow’s depiction of urban war violence, but why the general opinion that Ephron and Meyers aren’t up to much because they don’t use hand-held cameras and flashy cuts that tensely survey an inscrutable environment? That’s not their material. Why isn’t there also some praise for Ephron, for example, for the scenes in “Julie & Julia” that capture the love of life conveyed by Meryl Streep in her celebrated performance as Julia Child? When Julia and her sister, reunited in a Paris train station, run toward each other, so adorably full of affection they don’t care about their resemblance to two lurching cows high on jouissance grass, does anyone think that incandescent moment was achieved only by acting? That the director’s framing of the scene had nothing to do with it?
I’m talking about the way the Hollywood machine doggedly preserves the hierarchy of men above women, and the military landscape above the domestic landscape, even when it’s a woman who directs a war picture. (And often even when men direct rom-coms.) And I’m baffled by how this entrenched prejudice has managed to produce the unfathomably widespread belief that Bigelow’s technically praiseworthy valentine to an emotionally challenged war addict strikes a blow for peace.
A still from "Armadillo" 
James Cameron and Kathryn Bigelow before the Academy Awards on Sunday. 
