Best Live Action Short Film of 2009

The Door is an Irish film about an incident that occurred in the former Soviet Union. I suppose by now most people have heard that the subject of the film is the aftermath of the accident at Chernobyl, but at the start of the film, we only know that an entire town is being evacuated. We are not explicitly told why. I first suspected that I was watching a Holocaust film, but the more contemporary clothing dissuaded me from that conclusion. We follow one family, primarily through a series of flashbacks, as they deal with the declining health of the daughter. When we see the end credits' reference to Chernobyl, the film makes sense in retrospect, but that doesn't make it any less bleak. It is a well-made film, certainly, but this is pretty dark material to watch.

Sweden's Instead of Abracadabra is the funniest of the nominated films. It's about a rather inept self-identified magician who still lives at home with his parents. He's really terrible at his craft, having seriously injured his mother in the famous trick of inserting a sword into a box containing a person. The magician's father wants him to take a more serious job, but the younger man knows that he can show everyone his talent and win the heart of a lovely nurse who's just moved in next door to his family's farm. There are many laughs to be had watching this film; it's the only one of the five that is primarily designed as a comic piece. After the screening I watched, almost everyone was repeating the magician's catch phrase of "Chimay!" (or something to that effect), suggesting that it was the one that stuck with people the longest.

Kavi is a co-production of India and the United States and deals with serious subject matter in a very restrained, adult way. The title character is an Indian boy whose family is forced to work at a brick factory in what amounts to slave labor. They are attempting to pay off a debt by making bricks, but we quickly get the sense that their debt will never be allowed to be paid in full. Despite efforts by government officials and activists to rescue the workers and despite attempts on Kavi's part to flee, the bosses always seem to succeed. This is not necessarily an easy film to watch, given how unflinchingly it depicts the forced labor that some in India must endure, but it is clear in its message and offers a sense of hope that young people like Kavi might be saved from a life of endless, brutal work. The writer-director, Gregg Helvey, graduated from one of my alma maters, the University of Southern California, but I was already impressed by this film (his master's thesis) before the end credits revealed that piece of information.

Miracle Fish is an Australian film about a little boy who, on his birthday, seeks refuge in the nurse's office at his school. He's been teased by some of the other boys at school for his lack of presents (save for the title fish, an odd piece of plastic that curves to tell your fortune or something—I never quite got a handle on this), and he just wants to get away from everyone for a while. When he wakes up from his nap, the school is empty. At first, the boy is very happy because it means he won't be teased any longer about being poor, but there are signs that something odd and dangerous has occurred. Much of the second half of the film is incredibly dark and rather frightening. Even though the subject of the film is a young boy, this is definitely not a movie for children.

The New Tenants is mostly just an actor's showcase, and as such, I found it to be a little dull. The title characters are a gay couple who have just moved into an apartment that was the site of a gruesome murder. We watch as one strange neighbor after another appears at their door, each one adding a little piece of information to the puzzle of what happened in the apartment. A couple of recognizable actors appear in this short, notably Vincent D'Onofrio and Kevin Corrigan, but the others (all character actors, unsurprisingly) are vaguely recognizable as well. The plausibility of the sequence of events was a bit much for me, and the ending is just a bit too bizarre. To be honest, I also didn't particularly enjoy the rather stereotypical depiction of gay characters either. At this point in our history, do we still need to be trafficking in stereotypes for the sake of overacting?

Oscar Winner: The New Tenants. I suspect that the quirkiness of the film coupled with the performances of actors many of the voters probably know personally was just too tempting to overlook. It is certainly an accomplished film, but I still feel unsatisfied with the ending, which seems to take the movie and its characters firmly out of the realm of the "real" where the film has (perhaps absurdly) kept them throughout the narrative.

My Choice: Kavi is the most accomplished of the five films. I admired it on almost every level: acting, directing, cinematography, you name it. It's also one of the most emotional films, and I think it earns the sympathy for its characters honestly. 

Best Animated Short Film of 2015

Bear Story is a wordless, computer-generated animated film about a bear who fixes a mechanical toy that he takes to the town square in order to earn money. When someone gives him money, he cranks up the toy and we learn about his own life. He was apparently kidnapped and forced to perform in the circus, leaving behind his wife and child. This film is essentially wordless, but the tale depicted by the mechanical toy is very clear in its sequence of events. To make such a toy in real life would be nearly impossible, I think, but the depth of the action and the range of characters it includes are just spectacular. This film has a melancholy tone for much of its running time, but that doesn’t detract from the emotional impact that this sentimental and moving film has.

During the screening of the Animated Short Film nominees that I attended, a disclaimer appeared about Prologue, warning that due to violence and nudity it would inappropriate for children and they should be taken out of the theater before it began. That message left me puzzled over what to expect, a feeling that didn’t necessarily leave after watching the film. The violence is indeed graphic, and there’s a lot of it since the story primarily involves a battle between two sets of warriors. The film is drawn in black and white, almost like pencil drawings, similar in some ways to the ones in a-ha’s famous “Take on Me” video. The artwork is well executed overall, the men’s bodies are nicely detailed (and two of them are nude and rather realistic), and the use of bright red to depict profuse amounts of blood is effective. However, the point of the story was lost on me. It feels almost like this was a sketch made to be a part of a longer narrative. We’re never told in this wordless film why these men are fighting or what different sides they represent. It’s too much of an enigma to enjoy, so you wind up just admiring the talents of the artists but little more.

Sanjay’s Super Team is a charming little tale of a young boy (the Sanjay of the title) trying to watch his favorite cartoon superheroes. However, his father wants to worship, and they struggle over who gets his way. The tension between popular culture and religion is somewhat downplayed here in favor of a story about the boy’s imaginative melding of the deities of his family’s religious faith with the adventure of the cartoon shows that he prefers. This is another wordless film that works best when the three figures from his father’s small altar become, in Sanjay’s fantasies, superheroes taking on evil in the world. It’s good to see Pixar, one of the giants in animation for decades now, taking on different cultures in their short films. Sanjay’s Super Team displays the typical look of a Pixar film with its bright, glossy colors, and it only takes about seven minutes to ground us in a captivating narrative.

We Can’t Live without Cosmos features two Russian cosmonauts who are competing to be shot into space. As the film progresses, we learn that they have wanted to be astronauts for most of their lives, and they have been together as friends—or perhaps more?—for many years. This is yet another wordless short, but the story is very clear and easy to follow. (By the way, what is going on with the short films without dialogue? This is getting to be quite the trend among nominees.) We get to see what kinds of tests they endure and how easily they can perform the tasks. They have such a sense of joy and giddiness that you come to root for them to succeed. It appears to me that the two men who are the central characters are in love with each other, and there are several homoerotic elements to the film, not the least of which is when the men share a bed together while fantasizing about traveling through space. There’s also an undercurrent of melancholy to this film as well, given its focus on the dangers of space travel, but I found it to be very charming overall. It’s not a spoiler to tell you that the title of the movie is also the title of a book that the two men have shared throughout their lives, and while I was watching the short, which clocks in at a brisk sixteen minutes, I kept wondering whether the filmmakers were hoping that the different meanings of cosmos (space, yes, but also the cocktail) would be on anyone’s mind.

World of Tomorrow is the one film among the 2015 nominees that involves characters talking, and they are very chatty, particularly one of them. It’s tough to explain quickly what the plot addresses, but here goes: A clone from a dystopian future contacts the girl from whom she has descended, Emily Prime. The “prime” designation, of course, refers to the fact that Emily was the first in a line of Emilys. The clone then transports the first Emily to the future so that she can learn about the horrific events that will occur in the future and about the dangers of such things as time travel. It’s all delivered in a rather flat, emotionless tone that doesn’t particularly suit the subject matter, and honestly, this short’s characters are rather crudely drawn—little more than stick figures, really—and they interact with (act in front of?) a lot of computer-generated backgrounds that float behind them. I suppose the message of the film, something about how much we desire to hold on to memories because they provide us comfort during difficult times, is admirable, but it’s tough to appreciate or enjoy much other than the comic statements by Emily Prime, who doesn’t fully understand what her clone descendant tries to tell her but who does comprehend sadness and loss in others.

Winner: Bear Story, a solid choice given the accomplished style of the film.

My Choice: We Can’t Live without Cosmos, a charming and offbeat tale with a richness of mostly unexpressed emotion.

Best Live Action Short Film of 2015

Ave Maria is the most humorous of this year’s nominees for Best Live Action Short. It’s about the clash of cultures and religious faiths in the settlements on the West Bank. Three Jews—a husband, his wife, and his mother—crash their car into the statue of the Virgin Mary in front of the home of the Sisters of Mercy. The five nuns there have taken a vow of silence, so they are not able to help very much when their unexpected visitors need help. For example, the Jews need someone to operate the phone for them because their accident has occurred after Shabbat. They also keep kosher, not something that the nuns have done, making even getting a drink of water fraught with tension. This is a charming film overall and a quite funny one, even though it traffics in stereotypes, and broadly so at times. I suppose there’s a message here about how we can manage to live together even though we come from very different backgrounds, but it’s probably lost on the audience members, who are more likely just to chuckle at the plot.

Day One covers the first day on the job for a woman serving as an American military translator in Afghanistan. It’s a harrowing short film because she seems completely unready for the horrors of war; almost everything upsets her and prompts her to claim that she can’t accomplish any of the tasks she is assigned to do. Like Ave Maria, Day One deals with the clash of cultures although the focus here is on the occupiers (the United States military) and the occupied. When a pregnant woman has complications while giving birth, the complications of gender arise. The one doctor who is available is male and cannot be in the room with the mother; his attempts to explain the necessary procedure to the translator fail, of course. This is a well-made film overall, but the tone is rather somber and the film is uncomfortable to watch on occasion.

Everything Will Be Okay, a German film, is the longest and perhaps the most accomplished nominee. It is not, however, an easy to film to watch. It begins simply with a father picking up his daughter up from her mother’s house. We slowly learn that the parents are divorced and that the father, who has apparently lost joint custody of his daughter, is planning to run away with the child to Manila. We watch as he takes her to a series of places to get ready to escape, obtaining an emergency passport for his daughter and getting rid of his car so he will leave nothing behind. The tension increases as the movie progresses, and it’s particularly frightening to watch the little girl slowly gain awareness of what her father is doing. He’s tried to distract her by getting her gifts and taking her to a fair, and she seems to be having a great time when they are just having fun. However, the second half is particularly grueling to watch, and the most difficult sequence occurs when the mother and the police show up at the hotel room where he’s hiding due to a flight delay. His desperation at trying to keep his daughter from being taken away from him is heartbreaking. We don’t really get the mother’s side of the story, but there is enough here to evoke both anger at and empathy for the father. While this short could easily be expanded to become a feature length film, it already stands as a complete and emotionally complex story.

Shok follows the friendship of two Albanian boys living in Kosovo during the Serbian takeover of the 1990s. One of the boys, Petrit, convinces his friend Oki to take a bicycle to the camp where the Serbian soldiers are headquartered. Petrit finds stuff to sell to the soldiers, but one of them demands Oki’s new bike, claiming that Serbian children should get bicycles before Albanians are allowed to have them. It’s pretty easy to get angry watching a grown man take a bike from a child, but the suffering doesn’t end there. The boys and other Albanians are harassed on the bus and have to leave in a constant state of fear. The two central characters get upset with each other and refuse to talk to each other from time to time, but they manage to forgive each other and keep their friendship alive in the face of what is happening to their people. In fact, the most harrowing sequence involves Petrit’s family being forced out of their homes and only being allowed to take a few possessions with them. A frame around the narrative involves Petrit, now grown, discovering a bike on the road and taking it back to where his family once lived. The frame device is really unnecessary, to be honest, because the film is powerful and sad enough without it.

Stutterer is a charming romantic tale that features as its title character a young typographer who has fallen in love with a woman that he’s met online. By the way, who works as a typographer any longer? The young man decides that she wants to meet in person to see if the relationship can progress in real time, but he’s just too uncomfortable trying to talk to people and is too anxious to take her up on her offer initially. He can speak to his father the easiest, but every phone call that he makes is a disaster, and you can sense just how frustrating it is for him to speak to anyone else. The filmmakers present several of these phone calls to demonstrate how difficult his life is. He doesn’t stutter in his thoughts, though, so the narration of what he’s thinking, particularly the snarky characterizations he makes of other people, is clear. The main character may not be the most handsome fellow, but he is such a nice guy, and you root for him to be successful in his love life. There are, of course, uncomfortable moments because you sense that he might not be able to overcome his fears, but in true romantic comedy fashion, the ending is a delightful and satisfying finish to the plot. This is the shortest film among the nominees, but it manages to convey a full and interesting story in only about eleven minutes.

Winner: Stutterer, a worthy choice given how the film manages to bridge a range of emotions honestly.

My Choice: Everything Will Be Okay, the most technically polished and emotionally wrenching of a pretty downbeat bunch of shorts.

Best Animated Short Film of 2014

The Bigger Picture, a short from the United Kingdom, is a very downbeat film. It concerns two middle-aged brothers and their ailing mother who needs to be committed to a nursing home. One of the brothers, Richard, does all of the work caring for her, but he remains perpetually underappreciated. The other, Nick, is a bit of a snob, to be honest, and quite unappealing, but he always takes credit for anything good that he does, no matter how small. The film gives a clear sense of the different personalities of the two brothers, one of whom is unemployed and a bit of a loser and the other being the one for whom everything seems to come easily. The short features a couple of moments of levity here and there, but I suppose a filmmaker would find it tough to make this material funny. At times, the short’s images look almost like paintings, crudely drawn perhaps, but they must have been large to match the actual sized furnishings on display. The attempt at reconciliation seems forced here despite knowing that this scenario is too common among siblings.

The Dam Keeper tackles the subject of how important friendship can be to someone being bullied. A little pig lives alone in a windmill that keeps darkness (pollution? bad weather?) away from his town. He took over the job from his father after the elder pig’s passing, and even though he is still in school, he has to reset the windmill twice daily to preserve the town. Sadly, all of the other animals in the school harass and tease the little pig; the reason is never clear although I guess the implication is that he’s a loner who prefers to keep to himself, and young people never seem to understand that impulse. The arrival of a new student, a little fox, changes the pig’s life when the two realize that they both like to draw. Although they would seem to be “natural” enemies—after all, a pig and a fox being friends?—but perhaps the message is that even opposites can have things in common. A misunderstanding separates them, and the pig doesn’t make it home in time to prevent the town from being immersed in darkness one day.  All is resolved happily eventually, and the fox and the pig enjoy their time alone in the large windmill. I don’t know how young a child could be and still understand the message of this film, but given how many young people we’ve lost in recent years to suicide because of bullying, I’m certain it would resonate with many, many people. You could easily “read” the friendship between the pig and the fox as the beginning of a budding romance, given that both of them are male, but most people would probably prefer to concentrate just upon their friendship.

Feast, a very polished entry from the United States, is a delight. A Disney short that aired before Big Hero 6 in theaters, it features the story of a puppy whose love of food propels the narrative. Unfortunately, what happens in its owner’s life determines what kind of food the little French bulldog gets. When it’s tiny and first rescued, the dog gets delicious scraps from the table, pretty much whatever the owner wants to eat since he’s a bachelor at the time, but when the owner gets a girlfriend (a waitress) the food switches to healthy food served with garnish. When the couple breaks up, the food doesn’t revert back to the meatballs and pizza the dog once enjoyed. The owner’s depression over the split prompts the dog, now grown bigger and seemingly wiser, to reunite the couple despite its fears that it will have to keep eating healthily. Later, though, the arrival of a baby in the house means the dog now gets to eat everything again, so he gets a happy ending after all. I would warn you not to watch this short if you’re hungry because the food, especially in the early scenes, looks delicious. What we’re watching here, of course, isn’t the story of the dog. It merely foregrounds the story of the couple’s relationship, but the choice to keep the dog as the central focus is a wise one. Anyone who loves dogs will enjoy watching the facial expressions on this one’s face.

Me and My Moulton tells the story of three sisters in Norway whose family life seems to them to be too different (i.e., strange) from their friends’ lives. Narrated by the 7-year-old middle daughter, this co-production of Norway and Canada brings into contrast the lives these girls lead as the children of architects when compared to their apparently wealthier neighbors. For example, everyone else in the area seems to have a bicycle, prompting repeated appeals to the girls’ parents to purchase them one as well. Unfortunately, the parents can’t afford an expensive bike and they can’t purchase one immediately, leading the narrator to bemoan why her parents aren’t more like everyone else’s. We learn, though, that the downstairs neighbors who seem to be so happy truly aren’t. Meanwhile, the girls and their parents live more simply and seem to enjoy each other’s company more. The arrival of the bicycle, the Moulton of the title, adds to the girl’s eventual realization that you should accept your situation in life. It might not be quite as bad as you imagine it to be. The animation for this short is rather simple, but the use of bright colors helps to heighten its impact. A few clever moments also add to the humor, especially the three-legged chairs that keep tipping over and depositing their sitters on the floor. The narrative doesn’t reveal anything particularly profound, but Me and My Moulton is enjoyable to watch.

A Single Life clocks in at little more than two minutes long and, to be honest, ended just about the time I figured out what was happening. A woman receives a 45 rpm single in the mail and puts it on her record player. When the record skips, if it moves forward in the song, she ages. If it skips backward, she becomes younger. That’s really it. Maybe there’s a message here about living in the moment rather than trying to move too quickly to your future or always trying to relive your past. However, given its quick running time, this short from the Netherlands doesn’t really have or take the time to have much of an impact. It’s cute and clever, but not much else. This is the slightest film in the category, and you have to wonder how the voters selected it over all of the other animated short films released in 2014.

Oscar Winner: Feast. This short is yet another example of the revived Disney tradition of quality short films to accompany its feature films.

My Choice: Feast. It’s beautifully drawn, which you cannot say about most of the other entries, and the story is beautifully resonant as well. 

American Sniper (2014)

I had a very complicated, almost divided reaction to American Sniper, which is based on the life of Chris Kyle, the most successful sniper in the history of the American military. The movie itself seems divided as well. Kyle (played by Bradley Cooper) managed to kill hundreds of Iraqis while trying to protect Marines and others who were a part of the war effort, yet he found himself increasingly unable to return to civilian life after each of his tours of duty. While the film doesn’t ostensibly seem to take any sides in the debate over the war itself, its depiction of Kyle’s single-minded dedication to his job as a killer struck me as troubling. We are asked both to accept the depth of his concern for the lives of those he protects in battle and to recognize that his career—particularly his remarkable skill and success at killing—is destroying his ability to have a “normal” existence with his family. I realize that the filmmakers were hewing very closely to the best-selling autobiography Kyle wrote, but the film makes little effort to make connections between what happens during war and what the consequences of those events are.

The center of the film is the performance by Cooper, who plays Kyle as a man who never questions what he is supposed to do in life. When he is younger, still a child, he obeys whatever his father tells him. His father is the one who teaches him how to shoot and how to not only defend himself but those who need defending. As a result, Kyle develops a rather strict moral code that he tends to follow for the rest of his life. For example, when he returns early from a rodeo weekend to discover a girlfriend cheating on him with another man, he throws out both the guy and then the girlfriend. He asks no questions and he refuses to accept her explanations; she has done something wrong, so she is no longer a part of his life—it’s that simple. He realizes that he has to look after his younger brother, and so he does. He knows that he’s supposed to go to church and read the Bible, so he does. He knows he needs to serve his country when he sees the attacks on our embassies, so he does. Later, when he and his wife watch the attacks on the World Trade Center on 9/11, he doesn’t have to wonder what he should do. He knows that he will be going after the people who have attacked America and he will be trying to protect his wife and family.

Of course, such a story sounds incredibly simplistic. Were there never any thoughts, for example, that perhaps his father was too stern with his younger brother? (The father does seem to be ready to whip the little boy after he’s been bullied at school. All that saves him is their mother and the fact that Kyle has beaten up the bully to protect his sibling.)  Does he ever contemplate whether or not the United States is going after the right people by invading Iraq or does he just accept that what his commander-in-chief tells him is the truth? Where does the film grapple with these issues? They might have provided some context for understanding Kyle as a more realistic human being, but they are absent from American Sniper.

After the opening sequence (more on that later), the film follows a somewhat predictable chronological order. We see Kyle’s childhood, his enlistment and training, his courtship of his wife Taya (played by Sienna Miller), and then a series of tours of duty and returns to the States. Most of the choices for the overall plot are reasonable. However, the montage of how he and the other Navy SEALs are trained seemed rather, well, silly. I hope that the Navy actually toughens them up by means other than forcing them to sit in cold mud and lying in the ocean waves with their arms interlocked with fellow candidates. Yes, I realize that I don’t want someone to spray me with a hose while I’m trying to do leg lifts, but surely a SEAL goes through much more arduous training that what is shown here. Perhaps the Navy wouldn’t allow a depiction of the actual methods used for making enlistees into SEALs. You have to expect it’s a great deal more than this, though.

I tried for a while to keep count of the number of people that Kyle kills, but the numbers got too overwhelming too quickly. The ones that are shown, especially in a sequence involving a massive dust storm, are very tense moments. The film does an admirable job of depicting the dangers of war and the kinds of loss that the men and women who serve must make. It also opens our eyes to the kind of dedication that being in a war zone takes. A significant portion of the film focuses on the search for an Iraqi called “The Butcher” and Kyle’s plan to kill both The Butcher and his accomplice, a Syrian sharpshooter only known as Mustafa. Since the film uses these historical figures as part of the plot, you get to see just how close the Americans came at times to stopping some of the worst of the war criminals and how they felt when they lost out on an opportunity. To watch American Sniper is, to a large extent, to experience the sense of both the dedication and frustration that people like Kyle experienced.

The scenes of war are interspersed with scenes of Kyle’s life when he returns from a tour of duty. These moments are some of the most painful to watch, including a scene where his wife’s doctor tries to get him to seek some medical help or when a fellow soldier tries to get him to come to the local VA to talk with some other returned veterans. Kyle refuses all help because he thinks that he is fine even though almost anyone around him can tell that he is too tense and wary to be truly okay. What is difficult to determine is whether or not Kyle ever realized that his mental state back in the U.S. was being so severely affected by what he witnessed in war. He’s unable for long periods of time to share with his wife what he has seen and done, a sore spot in their relationship. He won’t acknowledge the losses of his comrades, and he even refuses to accept the thanks that he receives for all of the good that he has done on behalf of the other soldiers. When he makes a remarkable transformation after meeting with some wounded veterans, we aren’t given any information to let us know what has changed for him, just that he’s changed. It’s moments like this that I found most infuriating about this film. What prompted Kyle to leave the Navy and start working with his fellow veterans would have provided us some insight into what makes this man who he is, but the film leaves it to our imagination to wonder what has happened to make him such a different man.

The Iraq war has become a subject of a spate of recent movies, and it’s both tempting and difficult to compare them. If this film differs from The Hurt Locker, a film that won the Oscar for Best Picture just six years ago, it’s the greater emphasis on how difficult a time the soldiers have in adjusting back to civilian life. While The Hurt Locker placed more emphasis on how an adrenaline junkie like its main character finds life back at home boring, American Sniper really focuses on the sense of purpose someone like Kyle misses when not in country. Cooper, so very different in this film from much of his previous work, does manage to convey just how lost Kyle seems to feel when he’s not involved in helping his country and his countrymen in trying to stop what he sees as evil in the world.

Technically, the film is solid work overall. Director Clint Eastwood doesn’t tend to go for flashy cinematography and editing in his films. Even the special effects do not “stand out” as distinctive; they’re just what you would expect in a war movie, nothing more and nothing less. American Sniper is rather good old-fashioned classical Hollywood-style movie-making. There are a few exceptions here and there such as the opening sequence involving Kyle’s first kills: a boy and a woman who are trying to blow up some Marines on the ground. The camera allows us here—and at a couple of other times—to see what Kyle sees through his rifle’s scope, the limited amount of vision that he has to rely upon to make a decision that could be the difference between life and death and between glory and dishonor. After that sequence, though, the film reverts to a more standard biopic structure only to return briefly to this moment in Kyle’s life when it fits more properly into the story of his life.

In a way, it was a very savvy choice on the part of the filmmakers to withhold information that would or could have forced the audience to have only one narrow option for interpreting the film’s politics; it might have been easier to choose a side and present it relentlessly throughout the film. However, liberals and progressives can watch American Sniper and concentrate primarily upon the damage that war inflicts on its soldiers. They can pay close attention to Kyle’s difficulties in transitioning to civilian life and how some involvement with others who have had similar experiences is necessary in order for his healing to begin. They can use the film’s plot as evidence for additional funding for therapy and/or other approaches to helping returning veterans and even as an argument against war given the drastic impact that it has on its participants. By contrast, conservatives can emphasize Kyle’s level of devotion to his country, the kind of unquestioning patriotism that he exhibits. They can point to the level of sacrifice that it takes to serve one’s country, a willingness to give up all of the privileges of being an American in order to maintain the way of life that we have come to expect. They can describe the film’s plot as a testament to the need for more support, financial and otherwise, for the military and those who are serving on behalf of the United States and even as evidence for additional involvement in war efforts in order to continue preserving the culture that produces people like Kyle. Because of the somewhat enigmatic approach taken by the creators of the film, both sides can make their case, and in a sense, both will be correct. Some viewers, of course, will consider this ambiguity a failing of the film, but I would consider it the component that raises American Sniper from being a merely good or competently made film into one that raises rather than settles important questions about our involvement in war and the impact on the people who are most directly affected by it.

Oscar Win: Best Achievement in Sound Editing

Other Nominations: Best Motion Picture, Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role (Bradley Cooper), Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Achievement in Sound Mixing, Best Achievement in Film Editing

Room (2015)

Room, adapted by writer Emma Donoghue from her own novel, has two distinct, equally emotional segments to its narrative. They stand in stark contrast to each other, with the first half very confined to a single small space and the latter half being set in the wider but sometimes just as frightening world. The filmmakers manage to keep the suspense taut throughout the film, though, even though the initial half could have easily been devolved into a kind of horror-film excess and the second part could have fallen into overly sentimental melodrama of the worst sort. Watching Room is not an upbeat experience, honestly, but what emerges is a powerful depiction of the kind of strength it takes to survive a hellish experience.

The first half of the film reveals itself in very measured steps as the audience comes to realize that a woman and her son are imprisoned in a 10-by-10 foot garden shed by a man they refer to as Old Nick. Old Nick kidnapped Joy (played by Brie Larson) seven years earlier and fathered Jack (played with great depth by newcomer Jason Tremblay) two years later. In order to protect Jack from the truth, Joy convinces her young son that the space that they call Room is actually the entire world, that there is no existence outside of the shed. She becomes increasingly desperate to escape from the forced malnutrition, power shut-offs, and repeated rapes (and other forms of violence), so she begins to reveal aspects of the truth of their situation to an initially skeptical Jack. The escape that they plot and execute provides a harrowing centerpiece to the film.

The second half is no less tense than the first. While the threat of constant physical danger may have been removed, both Joy and Jack have significant and challenging adjustments that they must make to their new existence. Joy, suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, finds it difficult to reintegrate into life with her mother (the great Joan Allen) and her mother’s new live-in boyfriend, Leo. She finds it difficult to express clearly how she’s feeling since she knows that no one could perhaps comprehend what she has endured for seven years. Jack has his own issues, given that he’s grown up in such an isolated environment. The world is such a mystery to him, one that he is initially reluctant to encounter directly. He has to build a sense of trust with other people besides his mother, but the transition is frightening.

There’s a powerful lesson here about what our imagination can do. Given only one skylight through which to experience the world, Joy and Jack initially have to make their own world. Joy’s initial creativity in explaining what they see on television, for example, demonstrates what a keen mind she has. To give her son more of a sense of the vastness and greatness of the world outside Room would lead to potentially destructive consequences. When she does begin to share more realistic details about the world, Jack’s ability to comprehend such matters goes a long way toward explaining how he has managed to survive locked away in the wardrobe at night when his mother is being raped a few feet away.

This film also makes a strong point about how much we come to depend upon each other. Jack, of course, needs his mother in order to survive. She fights for him by asking Old Nick to supply vitamins for the boy’s health and even to acknowledge the boy’s birthday. She decides it’s time to escape when she realizes that she and Jack can no longer live in the confining environment of Room. However, interestingly, Joy needs Jack almost as much. Without him, she might have given up years earlier. It’s his importance to her life that keeps her motivated to escape and get back to a “normal” existence. This doesn’t mean that the two of them are always happy with each other; it’s easy to get on each other’s nerves when you’re in contact with each other 24 hours a day. Even after the escape, the bond between them is at times intense and needy and supportive and exhausting. When it is no longer just the two of them, they still cling to each other and get frustrated with each other.

The performance by Tremblay as Jack is integral to the success of the film. He’s astonishingly good without demonstrating a sort of “Hollywood precociousness.” He reacts the way that a five-year-old boy might react, and the way that he plays with his toys or bounces around a room would be familiar to anyone with a little boy in the family. Had Tremblay given a less nuanced performance, Room would have nowhere near the emotional impact that it ultimately has. We have to experience a great deal of the narrative through Jack’s perspective, and Tremblay shows us with amazing clarity what it is like to experience the world for the first time, how confusing and exciting that can be. He would have been a formidable candidate for Best Actor in a Leading Role had he been nominated, but Hollywood (and the Oscars, as a subset of it) has a long, sad history of ignoring child actors with this kind of depth.

All of the performances in the film are first rate. Larson has been justifiably recognized by many awards groups for her performance, including the Oscars, and she and Tremblay receive able support from Allen as Joy’s mother, who reveals a full history of her own brand of suffering and pain in the way she reacts to her daughter’s return. It’s good to see Allen even in such a small role; she always is such a welcome presence to a film. William H. Macy gets only a couple of quick moments as Joy’s father, but he provides an interesting counterpoint to the happy-you’re-free response from the other characters. He is the astringent that wipes away the possibility that everyone will be supportive of Joy and, particularly, Jack, making the overall film more realistic in its tone. Even Sean Bridgers as Old Nick brings an essential villainous presence to the first half without resorting to stereotype; there’s a true sense of relief when he disappears halfway through the film.

The challenge of filming in such a small space as Room could have been (and probably was) quite daunting. The production design team has created a remarkable environment within the garden shed, with the kinds of touches that demonstrates a keen attention to the kinds of details that would evolve over a seven-year span of time in such a confining space. The child’s drawings on the wall, the egg shell snake created as a craft project to distract Jake, the small area that serves as a kitchen—all of them and many other touches blend together to give a sense of a room truly being lived in. Similar kudos go to the costume design team, particularly for the clothes that Jack wears while he and his mother are still in Room. You can imagine what limits there would have been to these two captives and how they would have been more creative in what to wear each day.

The Hollywood version of this film would undoubtedly have had a more upbeat ending; there is a reason, after all, that they’re called “Hollywood endings.” However, as an independent film with a strong undercurrent of international funding support (Canada, Great Britain, Ireland, etc.), Room provides a muted ending more appropriate to the situation being depicted. It’s not that there isn’t a sense of happiness or even optimism earned by the ending; it’s just that everything couldn’t be tidy and completely resolved to everyone’s satisfaction and still stay true to the spirit of the rest of the story.

Oscar Win: Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role (Brie Larson),

Other Oscar Nominations: Best Motion Picture of the Year, Best Achievement in Directing (Lenny Abrahamson), Best Adapted Screenplay

State Fair (1933)

The 1933 version of State Fair is the first of three movie versions of the novel by Philip Strong about an Iowa family’s journey to the titular annual event. I prefer the 1945 musical version myself because it includes some amazing songs (“It Might as Well Be Spring,” “It’s a Grand Night for Singing”) and good performances by Jeanne Crain, Dana Andrews, and Dick Haymes, among others. The 1962 film features Ann-Margaret and Pat Boone and switches the action to Texas rather than Iowa. However, the earliest version is the only one to have garnered a Best Picture nomination, and without the success of this first film, the others would never likely never have been made.

State Fair (to be clear, I’m talking about the one from 1933) is ostensibly a comedy with some romantic and dramatic elements included for good measure. A frame story shows the Frake family’s preparations for the Iowa State Fair and their reactions after returning home. It’s the middle part of the film that depicts the fair itself, and it’s the most significant part of the narrative in terms of the plot complications. As such, the fair provides a brief escape, a sort of vacation, from the drudgery of the real world. Anything might be possible at the fair, and you don’t have to live by the usual “rules” of society when you’re there and far away from your home.

Initially, each member of the family has a reason to be excited about the upcoming fair. The father, Abel (played with cornpone charm by Will Rogers), has been raising a Hampshire boar that he hopes will be named Grand Champion. The mother, Melissa (Louise Dresser, nicely understated), has various pickles and mincemeat recipes that she hopes will garner her some ribbons for her cooking prowess. The brother, Wayne (Norman Foster, grating with his exaggerated accent and hick-like behavior), has been practicing tossing hoops for a year in order to get back at the carnival barker who tricked him at the previous year’s fair. Finally, the daughter, Margy (Janet Gaynor, a true movie star and a fine actress), just wants to have some adventure in her life before she possibly settles for marrying a local dairy farmer.

Abel makes a $5 bet (no doubt, a lot of money in 1933) with the local store owner that everyone in the Frake family will have a great time at the fair and everyone will reach the goals each has established for going to the fair. The film seems to ask if it is possible for everything to turn out the way you want it to, if you can always achieve what you set out to do, and the answer, apparently, is that it depends. Raising such a question means, of course, that there must be complications for each of the four main characters. For example, a significant portion of the plot—perhaps too much of the plot—is taken up with Blue Boy, Abel’s prize-worthy pig, who seems lethargic when at the fair. Abel even sleeps in the pen with the pig to make certain that it’s okay. It’s only when another pig, Esmerelda, appears that Blue Boy springs back to life. Can pigs fall in love? State Fair seems to suggest that they can; it certainly suggests that they can talk to each other. There are at least two lengthy passages involving these two pigs grunting, certainly some of the oddest “romantic” dialog to appear on film.

Rogers, one of the most famous personalities from the first half of the 20^th Century, is rather too “aw shucks, ma” in his performance. He’s not a particularly good actor, to be honest, often stumbling over his lines, but he does seem to be enjoying himself being around the fairgrounds, and there’s some cute interplay between him and Dresser in the second half of the film. Dresser’s storyline as Melissa Frake is rather simple, but she makes the most of the clichéd part of homemaker who wants recognition for her skills. Melissa faces some stiff competition from another woman who is apparently famous in Iowa for her pickles and mincemeat too. However, all it takes is some blue ribbons and a plaque for Melissa to state, without apparent irony, “I’ve got the most that any woman can get in life. There’s nothing left to come to the fair again for.” That suggests the kinds of limitations placed on women during the time period of the film. Little wonder then that her daughter might consider wanting more in life than a bit of blue ribbon and a statewide reputation for prize-winning pickles.

The most compelling thread in the plot involves Gaynor’s Margy. Her life seems out of her control; everyone expects her to marry Harry, but she doesn’t love him. Harry has always loved her, and he certainly seems devoted to her, but he represents a safe choice, a mundane future, a continuation of the existence she’s always known. You can tell from Gaynor’s facial expressions that Margy is a dreamer, someone who wants to have some excitement in her life. When she looks at the sky during the truck ride to the fair, it’s easy for the audience to comprehend just how more she wants out of life, more than perhaps even one week at the fair can provide. Margy meets a newspaperman played by Lew Ayres on a roller coaster, and they decide to have fun enjoying the fair together. No strings, no expectations—they just plan to see what the fair has to offer visitors. She admits that she has a boyfriend back home, and he confesses to having had several lovers in the past. You know that won’t prevent them from falling in love with each other, but one of the true joys of the film is watching a relationship develop between their young characters. Both Gaynor and Ayres (in one of his earlier film roles) are quite charming.

Meanwhile, the most shocking plotline involves Wayne. He won a cheap “pearl-handled” revolver the year before, and he takes full advantage of the opportunity to humiliate the carny running the hoop toss game. He’s gotten quite good at a rather useless skill, but the scene is really just designed to set up a burgeoning romance between Wayne and a trapeze artist. They have quite the sexual relationship throughout the duration of the fair, and the film, being made prior to the adoption of the Production Code, is rather daring in its depiction of what’s going on between Wayne and Emily. It’s quite a contrast between their relationship and the far more chaste one involving Margy and Ayres’ Pat. Margy and Pat, for example, seemingly only share kisses, nothing more. Wayne and Emily go much, much farther than that.

The existing print, at least the one shown periodically on Turner Classic Movies, is in pretty bad shape. There are numerous cuts and jumps that eliminate some dialog and some images. It makes for some rocky watching at times. The use of soft-focus cinematography in the farm scenes is also noteworthy. The edges are slightly out of focus in these scenes. Perhaps it’s an attempt to idealize the agrarian existence depicted in the film. The scenes at the fair so seem sharper or flatter.

The fair itself is an intriguing artifact here. We get to see the carnies putting up the tents, setting up the shows and games. These scenes are one of the few places that African-Americans appear in the film—well, and some blackface performers at the fair. There are also some melancholy shots of the empty fair after it has closed. Much of this atmospheric footage came from the 1932 Iowa State Fair, and these sequences serve as a realistic backdrop for the action involving the four main characters. For example, one of the best examples of how footage from the state fair is integrated into the film involves Pat and Margy attending the horse races. This is an exciting sequence with lots of energy, reminiscent in some ways of the chariot races in Ben-Hur.

Even though the film was nominated for a screenplay Oscar, some of the dialog is truly cringe-inducing. For example, on the way to the fair, Mrs. Frake encourages Margy to spread a blanket on the floor of the back of the truck, which she and her brother are sharing with Blue Boy (thankfully, caged). Margy, naturally, balks, only to have her father respond with “It ain’t everybody gets a chance to sleep alongside of a hog like that.” Probably not, but it depends upon whether you mean a literal “hog” or not, I suppose. The funniest dialog centers around Wayne’s claim that he’s seeing one of his male friends from the previous year’s fair when he’s really seeing Emily, the trapeze artist. This leads to some rather intriguing statements from his mother, several of which sound faintly homoerotic. For instance, when Margy gets upset that Wayne hasn’t accompanied her to the fair, Mrs. Frake says, “You know a boy has to go around and meet other fellows.” Indeed, some boys do just that at a fair. My favorite line, though, occurs when Wayne says he’s going to spend the night with this male friend on the final evening of the fair. Mrs. Frake’s assertion that “I bet you boys just fool around and don’t get a wink of sleep” is surprisingly on target for what’s been going on with Wayne and Emily, but can you imagine the implications of a mother saying that to a grown young man nowadays and not being the subject of some quizzical looks? Still, it’s this kind of dialog that makes even modern-day audiences laugh, just perhaps not in the way that audiences originally did in 1933.

Oscar Nominations: Best Picture, Best Writing (Adaptation)