Nine movies. Nine movies nominated for the Academy Awards’ Best Picture. On the surface, they couldn’t be more different, really: They swing from romantic dramedies (Silver Linings Playbook) to sweeping musicals (Les Misérables) to gritty war pics (Zero Dark Thirty). The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences praised youth (Quvenzhané Wallis of Beasts of the Southern Wild became the youngest Best Actress nominee in Oscar history) and age (Emmanuelle Riva of Amour became the oldest such nominee). It lauded movies filled with childlike innocence (Life of Pi) and horrific violence (Django Unchained). Oscar served a cinematic buffet this year—perhaps knowing that most of us wouldn’t like everything, but hoping that we’d all like something.
But for all that variety, many of these movies share a handful of commonalities. For instance:
Arguably, all nine nominees fall into the realm of someone’s “history” (even if that history can hardly be believed). Life of Pi takes us on a fantastical journey, but it takes place in flashback—via Pi’s own memories. Most of Amour, too, is told in flashback. Beasts of the Southern Wild is perhaps the most uncomfortable fit here: It, too, feels a bit like fantasy, and yet much of what we see here is clearly meant to evoke the devastation brought on by Hurricane Katrina. Even Silver Linings Playbook can be pinpointed to a particular football season in the not-so-distant past.
The other five take place in periods we might’ve read about in history class. Two (Django Unchained and Les Mis) take massive license with a period of time in order to tell a purely fictional story. But three, Argo, Lincoln and Zero Dark Thirty, seek to truly present a swath of the past—bringing, more or less, an important moment to life for us.
But that apparent throwaway phrase “more or less” is pretty important in this context. All three have come under fire for inaccuracies. Some Canadians feel that Argo downplays their country’s role in rescuing hostages from Iran in 1980. Zero Dark Thirty, which documents and dramatizes the hunt for Osama bin Laden, sparked congressional ire for seeming to suggest that “enhanced interrogation methods” were instrumental in finding the terrorist. And Lincoln—a movie that incorporates Honest Abe’s real pocket watch but took some liberties with voting records and profanities—has been the source of much discussion on this very blog.
Some of you have talked about whether it’s “right” to take liberties with history in film—an appropriate discussion, given that most of these films were themselves caught up in huge questions of right and wrong. Is it OK to do bad things for a good cause? Is it OK to do the wrong thing for the right reasons? Filmmakers were pretty caught up in such heavy issues this past year—and the questions and answers that translated to the screen were often uncomfortable.
Take Amour, for example—a movie that culminates in the “mercy” killing of a woman stricken with dementia and suffering debilitating strokes. Her longtime husband makes the decision to kill his beloved and, in so doing, believes he’s making the most “moral” decision available to him—freeing both of them from her suffering. But is the killer in the right? While the film seems to have certain leanings, it does not explicitly tell us. It’s up to us, the moviegoers, to answer (and we at Plugged In have indeed answered emphatically).
Lincoln showcases the United States’ most beloved president pushing to enact a near-sacred piece of legislation—the 13th Amendment, which officially outlawed slavery. But to push the measure through, Lincoln and his staff resorted to questionable, borderline illegal tools—and also extended the Civil War. Clearly, the 13th Amendment itself speaks to a high sense of what’s right … but the movie gently tells us that it didn’t come without both ethical and human cost.
Zero Dark Thirty asks many of the same questions as Lincoln, but on a murkier battlefield—whether to kill a horrible killer it was worth the means and the cost.
Not all of Oscar’s faves force moviegoers to look at issues of right and wrong through such a jaded lens … but perhaps they should’ve. Django Unchained is a tale of revenge, taking slavery to bloody task for its historical evil. And while we can all agree that slavery is, indeed, evil, discerning moviegoers might believe there are better, more mature ways to address it. Beasts of the Southern Wild is a beautiful, inspiring story of indomitable courage and community—and yet when I reviewed it, there was part of me that wanted this community to move, literally, to higher ground.
That said, almost every movie here, with the possible exception of Amour and Zero Dark Thirty, embraced the idea that there is a right and a wrong separate from human understanding. And that leads us to perhaps the year’s most surprising trend:
Faith.
Among my six years at Plugged In, I don’t think I ever remember one where religion formed such a huge bedrock for so many Best Picture nominees.
Now, in them faith and religion are not always presented as great things. Argo and Zero Dark Thirty are predicated on struggles with Islamic fundamentalism. Our “heroes” in these movies are largely secular. And yet there are hints of positive faith even here: Maya, the protagonist for Zero Dark Thirty, admits to a co-worker that she feels it’s her calling—something that goes well beyond a job description—to hunt for bin Laden. We see a character in Argo look fondly at a Catholic holy card in a moment of crisis.
Lincoln suggests that the drive to abolish slavery had its roots for Abraham and others in their desire to wash the country free of its gravest sin—even as it also tells us that those opposed to the Amendment were just as religious, and just as certain of God’s will.
Life of Pi, as we’ve said many times, is spiritually confused. And yet it gives us perhaps the most intense rumination on faith (broadly speaking) of any of the films. And then, of course, you have Les Mis—an explicitly Christian story juxtaposing a Pharisaical sense of law and order with God’s love and grace.
This year’s Oscar picks are not as “family friendly” as they were last year, when just one R-rated film made the cut for Best Picture nominees. These contenders all have problems, and often significant ones. But while studies suggest that the U.S. is growing ever more secular, these films indicate a strong instinct among both moviemakers and moviegoers to grapple with eternal concepts.
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