Beyond the Multiplex

Awards season begins. No, really. Plus: Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney make family dysfunction funny (no, really).

By Andrew O'Hehir

Read more: Andrew O'Hehir, Movies, Movie Reviews, Arts & Entertainment, Independent Film, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Beyond the Multiplex

Photo: Twentieth Century Fox

Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney in "The Savages."

Nov. 29, 2007 | Let's see: Between the prospect of a nuclear-armed Pakistan descending into chaos and the tragic news that the movie version of Thomas Kinkade's painting "The Christmas Cottage" has been delayed until next Christmas, it's a tough week to get your head screwed on. But with the last leaves filling up the backyards and glassy-eyed shoppers filling the malls, it's time to think about the really important things in life. Like awards season!

As an equally cynical friend and critic said to me the other night, in tones of wonderment, it's time to crawl out on a limb and pronounce this a pretty darn good fall season for movies. (We were at a screening of Guy Ritchie's completely insane new movie "Revolver," and more about that next week.) And I still haven't seen most of the fall's so-called big movies, like Joe Wright's high-gloss adaptation of Ian McEwan's novel "Atonement," or Paul Thomas Anderson's much-anticipated Texas-oil epic "There Will Be Blood." Both of those are plausible Oscar nominees, to be sure, but where are the outliers, the surprises, the underdog little-miss-whoozits?

That's not completely clear, but there's lots of contenders yet. As has become customary, the two rival indie-film awards, embroiled in a bicoastal cold war that almost nobody understands or cares about, have kicked off the season in highly confusing fashion. On Tuesday night in Brooklyn, N.Y., the indie umbrella organization IFP handed out its Gotham Awards, with Sean Penn's "Into the Wild" winning best feature and Michael Moore's "Sicko" best documentary. So there's two Oscar candidates up and running. (Full disclosure: I was a member of the committee that selected the Gothams' best-documentary nominees, but was not involved in choosing the final winner.)

Across the country earlier that day, Film Independent (which used to be the Los Angeles branch of IFP) announced the nominations for the Spirit Awards (which used to be called the Independent Spirit Awards). Coincidence? Oh, I'm so sure. Todd Haynes' Bob Dylan-influenced hallucination "I'm Not There" tops the Spirit list with five nominations, while Jason Reitman's "Juno," Julian Schnabel's "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" and Tamara Jenkins' highly entertaining family comedy "The Savages" racked up four apiece. (More on that last one below.) Also nominated for best feature are Michael Winterbottom's "A Mighty Heart" and Gus Van Sant's "Paranoid Park." ("Into the Wild," by the way, was ineligible for the Spirits because its budget was too big, while Van Sant's film is eligible even though it won't be released until March. It's hopeless trying to make sense of these things.)

OK, so now we've launched inflated Oscar hopes for a whole raft-load of indie filmmakers. It's a wide-open contest! Let the pointless horse-race speculation begin! As usual, the genuinely encouraging tidbits can be found by scrounging around the edges of the indie awards. Both organizations extended some love to Craig Zobel's "Great World of Sound" (and its magnetic star turn from Kene Holliday), nobly ignoring the fact that it drew approximately no real-world audience, as well as to "Frownland," the debut feature from one-time Museum of Modern Art projectionist Ronald Brownstein, which is shaping up as the year's best-loved undistributed film. I'm also gratified to see that the Spirits committee nominated Texas filmmaker Laura Dunn, director of the strange and moving real-estate documentary "The Unforeseen," for its Truer Than Fiction award, and Jennifer Baichwal's extraordinary film about photographer Edward Burtynsky, "Manufactured Landscapes," for best documentary.

Along the way I also learned that there is a new adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft's legendary horror tale "The Call of Cthulhu" making the festival rounds. Unlike Andrew Leman and Sean Branney's mock-1920s silent version (which is completely great), Dan Gildark and Grant Cogswell's "Cthulhu" has a contemporary setting, a gay central character and a supporting performance from Tori Spelling. Hello, producers of this film! I so completely cannot wait!

But I will have to. For now, in the name of Jiminy Christmas, we've got a lot to cover. Along with Tamara Jenkins' aforementioned "The Savages," we've got Jessica Yu's fascinating and unclassifiable documentary "Protagonist," a grueling thriller set during the Argentine military dictatorship of the '70s, British documentarian Robert Stone's meditation on the JFK assassination and its long hangover, and three major retrospectives of underappreciated world-class directors. Let's stop to shed a tear for the absence of "The Christmas Cottage" and, somehow, try to move on.

Next page: Tamara Jenkins' long-awaited return