2019 was not a vintage year for Hollywood, and the Oscars made sure we will not forget this fact any time soon.

The nominations for Best Picture this year were the winner, “Green Book”, an entertaining enough “BlacKkKlansman”, cringe-fest “Bohemian Rhapsody” which hung on the lead’s brilliant impression of Freddy Mercury, blockbuster “Black Panther”, the earnest “A Star is Born”, European costume drama “The Favourite” and “Roma” which could never win in this category as it was Mexican, a Netflix film and the best film of the year.

The top three of these were not Hollywood productions and therefore outsiders, of those left many were surprised to see Green Book walk away with the much coveted little gold statuette. But why?

This ‘based on a true story’ tale, like any good TV movie, is that of a chapter of Dr Don Shirley’s life. Having been invited to study in the elite Leningrad Conservatory in the Soviet Union, the first black person to do so, we find this piano virtuoso embarking on a tour of the ‘deep south’. His record label employ a minder (Frank Vellelonga, or Tony Lip as his largely Mafiosi friends and acquaintances call him) whose duty it is to drive him from one engagement to the next, and to ensure that he is not way-laid by southern racists with the help of the ‘Green Book’- a guide for black drivers in the segregated south.

​Little about this film stands out as being unworthy of Oscar greatness- the premise has won before: an ‘interracial’ pair drove through the southern states in Driving Miss Daisy, 1989, making similar racial harmony pit stops along the injustice highlighted freeway. There is even a similar ‘driver stops to take a pee, much to the passenger’s horror’ scene. This may well become a trope.

My consternation in this pick lies in the sheer lack of quality. This is a middle of the road excursion. It never slips into the intellectual fast lane, nor does it stop to admire the scenery. It just pootles along introducing a number of lazily constructed stereotypes as characters (Italian immigrants built around the “Forgeddaboudit” persona of the mafia heyday, with no other angle explored). The Italian community featured could well have been on day release from a comedy sketch (Key & Peele have one that comes to mind). There are no events of note, nothing unexpected happens (not even the discovery that Dr Shirley has sexual experiences with men really raises an eyebrow, telegraphed as it was by the occasional pursing of the lips by Mahershala Ali in the role of the good doctor).

The film is even shot in such a disappointingly perfunctory way that I couldn't describe it as shoot by numbers. Tony writes home to his wife “I never knew how very beautiful this country was”, and his droning voiceover is accompanied by a shot of a pretty average looking pasture. No depth, no scope, no beauty. This could not have been hard to do, surely? The viewer wonders what inspired Tony to write those words and why the filmmakers neglected to use the medium of film to share such a visual feast.

​Most disappointing of all was the simplistic way the film dealt with the central issue of prejudice is about as safe and by-the-book as it can possibly be. While travelling through Kentucky, our Italian American driver spots a Kentucky fried chicken: “IN KENTUCKY! When’s that ever gonna happen?!”. Dr Don Shirley, when faced with the culinary experience in question asserts, nonplussed, “I have never had fried chicken in my life.” The first effect is the obvious: The audience watches Tony’s surprise and is encouraged to shake heads and chuckle at his absurd generalisation that “You people love the fried chicken, the grits and the collared greens…”
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“Oh Tony” (the viewer declares), “if only you could see yourself through my 21st century eyes.” The racist assumption of “what THEY eat” is ridiculed. Fair enough, but it is not exactly breaking the surface. Just ten viewing minutes later the two of them are presented with a meal by the white southern gentlefolk who “whipped up a special menu in honour of our guest… home cooked fried chicken!”. We are once again invited to roll our eyes.

I have to say, this is the most disappointing of all the Oscar winners I have yet seen. A winner should highlight some kind of achievement in a film, of ANY description, and quite honestly I am baffled as to what about this film might have stood out to anyone.

Meh.

 
I had just seen a celebrated movie which despite its undeniable beauty and technical accomplishment left me cold. There was no substance to it, no ambiguity, no call for any real involvement on my part. Then I strolled into “Three Billboards”.

What I found in this film was a nuanced experience, one that offered you a tale that takes place in the aftermath of a killing, just after the dust had settled in this small rural community. The events that unfold are  instigated by, and told from the perspective of, the mother of the victim: you are beside her as she fights to ensure that justice is served on behalf of her daughter.

​When a character's motives are self-evident but it is unclear how far they are willing to go we arrive in places like Ebbing, Missouri, in the presence of Mildred.

An interesting thing happens when an underdog refuses to abide by societal norms for behaviour: it is disarming. It becomes her superpower. In the hands a great actor giving an unfalteringly great performance this unpredictability has a magical effect on both the people of her town and of the audience. Neither is left unchallenged.

Mildred has been let down by the men in her life (played by Woody Harrelson, Sam Rockwell & John Hawkes) and the town just wants to quietly forget that such barbarity could occur. McDormand delivers Mildred, in her last ditch efforts, with as much humour as intensity and this wholly wins us over. We're behind her, beside her as she ploughs a furrow, but never able to quite keep up enough to see where she might turn next. We root for her far and beyond the point at which we would normally question our devotion, but after what she has been through who can blame us.

It is hard to resist the temptation to jump to comparisons with Ripley (Sigourney Weaver in Aliens) or Susan Sarandon (Louise in Thelma & Louise), but the truth is that this only tells half the story: they are just two other well written roles for women who feature a rounded character who happens to be realistic portrayal of woman at the end of her tether (and largely driven there by men). All the comparison serves to do is highlight how few and far between these roles are in mainstream American Cinema. Do we honestly think this is a proportional representation of reality or even of our interest in this aspect of reality?

​It must be hard for an actor like Frances McDormand- there is no doubt that she has the ability to rival any other in the trade, but alas, she is a woman. Roles for male leads come along often enough that a man at the top of his game will be able to pick from a host of juicy well financed films, all varied in their demands but handsomely rewarded. He will often have studios writing films with him in mind for the lead.

A woman at the same heights will still have to bide her time, waiting for a project like this to come her way. Since 2008 McDormand has had one other lead role. This is most likely down to being in a position where she can pick and choose her roles now and how much time she wants to devote to acting. She works when there's good enough material to work with. This actor won the Oscar for best actress in 1997 (Fargo) and 2018 (Three Billboards) and has been nominated by the academy 5 times. Why would you NOT write roles for her? She reflects that she is cast as an outsider in both life and art (there's a more in depth take on it in this interview: https://bit.ly/2HhbRF4). My take is that she's right and male writers don't quite know what to do with her (just 14% of writers in the top 500 films were women). And it still took a man to write Three Billboards.

​I don't think that there is an audience that would not enjoy this picture. It has a taste of everything anyone could ask for. Aside from a taste of the aforementioned Ridley Scott masterpieces it even has a little sprinkling of Death Wish (1974). That's pretty broad. The acting is superb from top to bottom, the world taught and real, the writing exemplary in how to produce for the masses without dumbing or talking down.

​It feels that although little about this film is new, the Writer/Director (Martin McDonagh) has discovered a rich seam in a long tradition of straight talking storytelling. I for one hope that he continues to mine it as thoughtfully and successfully as he has here and that its honesty and power continue to capture audiences as they do in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. 

First off, I should come clean and declare my undying love for almost everything that Guillermo del Toro, the director, does. I also hold a belief that Sally Hawkins can do no wrong. Would it help if I hereby half-heartedly swear that I will not allow this bias to affect this piece? 

The Shape of Water is set in an artificial early 1960s which has been so well constructed that initially the experience is reminiscent of watching Edward Scissorhands, in which there was a similar use of americana. But here no one is pretending they live in a perfect world, in fact quite the opposite: every character is unhappy with their existence and would like change. The homes are in need of repairs, cluttered and dark. With few exceptions, exteriors are always a grey or night-time cityscape. The use of swearing in a setting so often used to imply wholesomeness is unsurprisingly jarring, and rams home that this is no idyll.

Opening in an underwater dream sequence and never dropping a sometimes overbearing blue, green and turquoise theme, this undersea effect is tied together very early on and never quite leaves you. Bizarrely, I only recently pulled a horrific, mismatched, avocado bathroom suite from the same period out of my home- the colours and preponderance of tiles in every scene kept taking me back to that experience. Odd, but it inadvertently highlighted to me just how many rooms were tiled in this film... a nod, no doubt, to how each of the two main characters worlds reflected one another. This is made express a little later in a speech from Elisa on how the river god sees her for who she is, not what she is.

So far so good. A beautifully constructed backdrop, finely crafted to highlight subplot and themes that are hinted at early and later exposed fully. Characters from minorities lead (which we have all been clamouring for) whose ethnicity / minority status is incidental rather than integral to their reason for being in the film. An immersive (pun intended) overall experience.

So why do I come away from this film feeling hugely let down?

The Shape of Water was nominated for the best screenplay Oscar, but this stamp of approval baffles me. The plot was fairly standard- Mute cleaner in military facility meets mistreated prisoner (who happens to be an amazonian river god), they fall in love, she finds out that the malevolent authorities want to vivisect him in order to better understand his anatomy, she helps him escape with the help of a work colleague and her neighbour. Nothing more complex than that. Fine.

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There are supernova sized holes in this reality which make it difficult to follow the logic of the film. The problem is not that fantastical things are happening in a fantasy film: the problem is that in order for a fantasy film to work you have to believe in the world created. Whether sci-fi, superhero or other there has to be an explanation for the rules that it has itself established to be broken. Also, you have to be able to relate to a character's decisions and reactions. Elisa reveals to Zelda that she is having sex with the creature they freed the night before with a smirk and a glance. How Zelda interpreted that glance as "I had sex with the fish man" I don't know. But, they had to keep the plot moving and so that's the way the scene played out. In such a meticulously constructed reality (visually) we are confronted with such leaps of logic in the story that our connection with the characters is loosened, and long before the end I no longer cared to see how they reached their clearly pre-ordained fate. No amount of sense would stop it getting there.

The purpose of this blog is largely to revisit older movies and ask 'how does this film look to a contemporary audience?'. For instance is it politically or socially justifiable to have stereotypes if a 1930's western is REALLY good, despite them? Is this even possible? Sadly, and perhaps surprisingly, the 2018 addition to the list of best picture winners has some glaring issues which cannot be ignored:
The minority characters are a male gay artist (played by a straight white male) and a hispanic cleaner (played by a white English woman). 
This troubles me. Why did the cleaner have to be hispanic? If she had to be hispanic, why choose a white English woman to play her? There was a huge fuss recently about the new Hellboy film in which a white actor (Ed Skrein) turned down a key role when he was alerted to the original comic material which depicted his character as an asian dude. He was naturally commended for doing so. How is Sally Hawkins playing Elisa Esposito any different? This, and having the stereotypes of a hispanic and African-American cleaners reinforcing the idea that this is where 'these people' belong on the big screen was uncomfortable. Del Toro co-wrote the script for the film, why not just either change her background or cast a hispanic actress?

Really, the fundamental flaws lie in the writing of the characters. When it is written into the script that the level of reaction from a jaded cleaner on hearing that her best mate is having interspecies sex with a hitherto unknown humanoid species is "Oh, how exactly did that happen? Did he have a wiener?", and the delivery is on a par with the reaction someone might give on hearing their tinder date likes messy food play, there is something seriously wrong. I can't relate. If it were set in a galaxy far far away it would make sense. But we were told this was earth, nineteen sixty something...

Some speak of how this film has beautifully interwoven references to previous films while I spoke of a message laden aesthetic created for a glutton of subtext,  but in the end I struggled to get past the unrealistic responses to situations the characters found themselves in just to keep the plot moving towards its inevitable conclusion.

Motivations and actions must be justifiable and here they were not. I could not help feeling that if they had paid as much attention to ensuring the characters actions made sense as they did to the films aesthetic then we would have had another masterpiece. ​