This Sunday, the entertainment industry will gather and congratulate themselves on another year well done. Some will go home with shiny statues. Others will leave with some nice parting gifts (Oscar swag bags are valued at around $75,000 this year). And most of us will have a chance to pass judgment ourselves on the winners and losers from the comfort of our couches.
We’ve already talked in this space about how much we liked—relatively speaking, of course—this crop of Best Picture nominees: We had good things to say about all nine of ’em (though, in true Plugged In fashion, none made it through our content-driven gauntlet with a completely clean bill of health). In this year’s best pictures, clothes were not shed, characters were not eviscerated. These films feel almost … innocent.
So maybe it’s fitting that many of them look at life as if through a lens of innocence—a child’s eyes, or an animal’s, or through the soft haze of nostalgia. That innocence may be beautiful or naive, childlike or childish, an innocence lost or an innocence found. Let’s take a look:
The Artist. In a year filled with movies pinned to a point in the past, The Artist is the most nostalgic of them all. A valentine to the silent movie era, it gives us the story of two stars—one on the rise, one on the wane. Peppy Miller is the young ingénue, an innocent waif hoping to make it big. And with a sly bit of mentorship from movie icon George Valentin, she does. But when the movie industry begins to gravitate toward “talkies,” George is ill-equipped to handle the change.
While Peppy’s the more obviously “innocent” of the two characters, it’s George who enters a new era of moviemaking like a scared, sometimes spoiled child. It’s up to Peppy—George’s “guardian angel,” the film suggests—to help George grow up a little. And when he does, he ironically regains his childlike verve.
The Descendants. The only R-rated film on the docket, The Descendents examines innocence through the eyes of a harried father—and again, as in The Artist, the roles are a bit reversed. Matt King has, in many ways, been sheltered from some of life’s hard bumps: His wife handled most of the child-rearing, so when she goes into a coma, he has little idea how to handle his two headstrong daughters. And when he learns that his eldest girl knew his wife was having an affair—the truth kept from him, as if he was a child incapable of handling it—he’s nearly destroyed.
But we’re given the opportunity to watch this 50-year-old father grow up a bit and become the true dad he should’ve been all along—a guardian, in some ways, of his own children’s innocence (instead of it being the other way ’round).
Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. When Oskar Schell’s father dies during 9/11, part of the boy’s innocence is quickly, horribly ripped away. His father was the only one who really understood him, after all. But in the midst of his pain, Oskar begins a childlike quest—a citywide scavenger hunt—to try to feel close to his father as long as he can.
We see in this a picture of how a child deals with impossible pain. Oskar wants to make sense of it—as, really, any child would. There must be a reason why my father died, he thinks. There must be a purpose. Oskar’s journey tells him and us that if there is a purpose, we can’t always uncover it. And yet we’re also given a slice of hope: That even in the face of unanswerable grief, some good can come of it.
The Help. Sometimes, “innocence” isn’t. Sometimes it’s ignorance—or worse. The Help gives us a glimpse of what some might call a more “innocent” time … the early 1960s. But that was also when America was edging toward the Civil Rights movement. And here we meet white people who treat their African-American help as if they were less than wayward children. In so doing, of course, they reveal themselves as the film’s true children, sometimes sadly ignorant, sometimes horribly spiteful and spoiled.
And yet there are people within this movie who aspire to a higher, more (truly) innocent ideal: The childlike desire that we should all be treated with respect and courtesy, regardless of our upbringing or skin’s color.
Hugo. Another boy who lost his father. Another tribute to silent film. Another poignant look at innocence in conflict with the harsh realities of life—and here, innocence wins.
Hugo, who lost his dad in a fire and was abandoned by his uncle, spends his days repairing clocks. But he longs to fix an automaton made by his father—one he believes holds a secret message. In the end, that message leads him deeply into the world of French silent film and, in spite of all the obstacles thrown in his way, he’s given a chance to work in the world of movies—a place where dreams can come true (at least onscreen).
Midnight in Paris. Not all of this year’s Best Picture nominees are obviously “innocent.” Woody Allen’s moodily beautiful fantasy is one of them. Certainly 1920s Paris, where and when lead character Gil visits, was not exactly an innocent time. But perhaps our human penchant for nostalgia—to romanticize every era but our own—is.
We have a tendency to look back and remember “the good old days,” when life was less complicated, morality more focused. But often those impressions are more based in wishful thinking than fact. And before the credits roll, Gil realizes that his own home era is as nifty as it gets.
Moneyball. Really? A story about how a numbers-crunching general manager kept the Oakland A’s competitive as some sort of rumination of innocence?
You bet. Innocence, after all, is about looking at the world through new eyes—and that’s exactly how GM Billy Beane looked at the world of baseball. Tossing out a century’s worth of conventional wisdom, Beane reshaped baseball by examining the sport with a sense of shrewd innocence. Oh, and let’s not forget how he did what he could to protect his daughter from some of life’s bumps as well, including turning down a massive contract with the Boston Red Sox so his little girl could grow up in the place she called home.
The Tree of Life. In director Terrence Malick’s impressionistic film we meet Jack—a middle-aged man who somehow, somewhere, lost his way. The film takes us back to Jack’s childhood, where we meet his gentle mother and strict-but-loving father, and where he rediscovers both grace and God.
The Tree of Life is all about innocence—the beauty of childhood and the struggle to grow up. It suggests we’re all made up of nature (cruel, strong, Darwinian) and grace (etheral, gentle, beautiful). That sense of grace is fleeting, Malick tells us … easy to lose in the relentless tromp of adulthood. The secret to regaining it again is to look through the eyes of a child.
War Horse. In Steven Spielberg’s sweeping drama, the true innocent we see on screen is, well, a horse—one incapable of truly understanding the horrors of the world war he’s in the midst of.
Through its eyes, we see how truly devastating war can be. And yet in the end, it’s something like innocence that brings he and his first owner back together again—a childlike insistence that, if they could both just survive, they might somehow be reunited with a whistle.
So there you have it—nine Best Picture nominees and what they tell us about innocence.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that so many films have dealt with the theme. After all, we live in a time when innocence is a bit harder to come by. We’ve lived through some hard years and been confronted by some tough realities. Perhaps, like Oskar, we’re trying to process what it all might mean. Perhaps, like Jack, we’re somehow trying to uncover the child in ourselves again.
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