On Film

Sniper hit home with bigger audience than winner Birdman

People get weird over movies.

I'm not complaining about this, because if people didn't get weird about movies then there'd probably be little call for someone like me to write about them. Still, it gets interesting, especially this time of year after the awards that mean nothing other than millions of dollars and impressions, when we get to find out what was the movie of the year and what wasn't.

This year the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences voted a movie called Birdman (Or the Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) the year's best, even though a lot more people went to see the Clint Eastwood movie American Sniper, which your Uncle Slayton, who hadn't seen a movie since Gran Torino, swears up and down is the best movie ever made and you are an un-American sissy if you don't agree with him.

Even though I hate to bring it up because there's apparently a huge contingent of self-identified sheepdogs with a very particular set of skills (unfortunately reading comprehension is not necessarily one of them) who can reach out and touch a body from a half-a-mile away if they wanted to (but they don't because you're not worth it what with the cost of very low-drag jacketed hollow points being what they are), I liked Mr. Eastwood's movie, and it wouldn't have bothered me one bit if it had won an Academy Award.

But I don't see American Sniper as anything but a workplace tragedy about an ordinary guy who could do a specialized job extraordinarily well and suffered because killing human beings, no matter what the justification, is not something most people can do without doing deep and permanent damage to themselves. That is, I contend, what the director and the actor want to say with the picture, and though like most blunt and heavy things the movie can be used as a hammer by anyone wishing to drive home some point, I don't think we can just impute to the filmmakers any motive we wish.

Of course, Eastwood and Bradley Cooper (who starred in the film) understood how the film could be interpreted, how it might serve Jane Fonda's and Sarah Palin's political purposes, but I don't hold that against them. My criticisms of the movie are largely technical. I wish it were more subtle, I wish it had given more context. But I have no problem with the way Chris Kyle is portrayed because I assume that the Kyle on the screen only means to evoke its real-world analog. That's one of the assumptions I take into the theater: I don't hold nondocumentary movies to any sort of journalistic standard. I figure it's incumbent upon the audience to understand what they're watching is in fact only a movie. Cooper's portrayal may or may not have been "accurate" -- I don't really care. What matters to me is the quality of connection the movie makes, how true it feels.

I'm sure Birdman director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu considered Michael Keaton's Batman background when casting the role of a washed-up Hollywood actor known primarily for his role as a superhero two decades earlier, but it's simplistic to conflate Keaton with Riggan Thompson. Keaton's past may lend a certain texture to the character, just as Cooper is said to have incorporated superficial bits of the real Kyle's manner into his portrayal, but we don't need movies to conform to journalistic standards. We just need them to tell us stories.

That's not to say that movies, especially movies that purport to be "based on" or "inspired by" actual events and personalities, don't sometimes run into problems when they diverge from "the truth." I don't like the way Mike Leigh misrepresents the art critic John Ruskin in his otherwise splendid Mr. Turner, but I don't particularly mind how Ava DuVernay portrays Lyndon Johnson in Selma. In part, that's because Leigh's treatment of Ruskin feels unfair in a way that DuVernay's depiction of Johnson does not: Leigh reduces the serious and important Ruskin to an inane fop, while Selma portrays LBJ as the pragmatist he no doubt was.

And while I have my doubts that the real Stephen Hawking is always a delight to be around, my problems with The Theory of Everything have nothing to do with the performances of Best Actor Oscar winner Eddie Redmayne. I just think the movie hit all the obvious, dull bio-pic beats. It's sentimental, meant to appeal to people who'd prefer not to think about the harsher implications of the reality of the circumstances it depicts. (Not that there's anything fundamentally wrong with that. You ask most people what they want from the movies, they'll say something like "escape." )

Anyway, I'm OK with Birdman being the bigger winner, but I would have been just as OK with Birdman or Boyhood or The Grand Budapest Hotel or American Sniper. (Of the nominees, I preferred Whiplash.) I thought The Imitation Game was better than The Theory of Everything, and both of them were well-executed minor movies, but I wouldn't have complained about them either.

The truth is the Oscars matter less to most Americans now than they have in a while; they cater to a self-selected elite who still affect to care about movies. Far more people saw American Sniper in a theater in the weeks leading up to the Oscar telecast than will ever see Birdman. American Sniper is projected to earn $340 million before its theatrical run is finished. Birdman is one of the lowest-grossing Best Picture winners ever; if it gets a good bounce from its award it might clear $45 million. (Tellingly, my favorite, Whiplash, has earned less than $12 million at the box office.)

But if the Oscars are out of step with public tastes (and they are, with blockbusters like Gone Girl and Interstellar conspicuously absent from the Best Picture category and the bizarre exclusion of The Lego Movie from the animated nominees), they might be even more out of step with the most dedicated moviegoers. But then I don't expect the Oscars to reflect my tastes; I see 250 or more movies a year, and most of them are kind of formulaic and sentimental. I don't expect the films that resonate most with me, like Under the Skin or Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter (which will finally get a theatrical release next month), to win Oscars.

I expect the Oscars to honor middlebrow crowd-pleasers -- that's the purpose of the awards. To make a big noise over the best movies that everyone has heard of, not arty little indies. That was why, back in 2009, the Academy increased the field of Best Picture nominees from five to a maximum of 10 to make room for big Hollywood movies such as The Dark Knight. The Oscars only make sense when most of the winning films are popular movies.

As someone with little stake in the game -- I've often said that I'm for anything that erodes Hollywood's hegemony over the movies -- I admit I've been a little amused that the strategy has backfired and actually made it easier for smaller movies to win nominations and awards. (Whiplash certainly wouldn't have been nominated under the pre-2009 rules; Birdman might not have been.)

On the other hand, the stupid machine isn't working. And when fewer people care about the Oscars, fewer people get weird about the movies.

Which is why I wish American Sniper had won Best Picture.

Email:

pmartin@arkansasonline.com

www.blooddirtangels.com

MovieStyle on 02/27/2015

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