No politics please, we're Oscar contenders
This season’s lineup of awards contenders has much to offer: it may be the best crop of hopefuls for a decade. Fine direction, acting, sound, design and technical innovation deliver a feast for the eye, ear, heart and soul. But for the brain? Not so much.
Leading the race, according to the bookies, for the biggest prize of both Baftas and Oscars is 1917. It is a great film, but it reflects a current big-screen aversion to engaging with the issues that determine our fate. It restricts itself so entirely to the felt experience of its principals that we are left knowing nothing, not just of the vast conflict of which their story forms part, but even of what brought them into it.
Only thus, you may be told, can we really get to feel what war is like, but the first world war’s extensive celluloid canon suggests otherwise. In 1931, the Academy’s best picture award went toAll Quiet on the Western Front. Whether or not this film is more or less harrowing than 1917 can be debated, but its claim to being the greatest-ever anti-war film rests on more than its depiction of the frontline experience. It finds room to explore the ideology behind warfare; its soldiers discuss the causes of war as well as its impact on them. It deals in attitudes displayed in training camps and on the home front as well as on the battlefield.
It is good to see For Sama making Bafta’s best British and documentaries list. Waad al-Kateab has done as much for civilians as a vast swathe of celluloid has done for warriors. Sama will be in no doubt about what her mother went through. But when she grows up, she may also wonder why Syria’s fate was sealed in the way it was. She will learn what the rebels did, but not whether they should have done it, how they might have succeeded or who is to blame for their failure. “Will you blame me for staying here or blame me for leaving?” asks Waad, but the film does not equip her daughter to decide. She will have to look elsewhere.
The big beasts of the awards jungle, such as Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and The Irishman, entertain us from worlds safely removed from matters of real current concern. Joker might have engaged properly with mental illness, but instead opts for vacuous horrifics. Jojo Rabbit sounds as if it might be serious, but is not, weird and wonderful though it may be.
Marriage Story studiously avoids any discussion of the rights and wrongs, or the explanations and implications of the interactions it so meticulously depicts. Instead, it invites us simply to share the protagonists’ feelings. The Personal History of David Copperfield strips Dickens’s tale of the author’s social commentary and concentrates on the laughs.
In the nomination lists, you can find films that enact debate. The Two Popes elegantly explores a real argument, but it is not one that need cost you sleep unless you are a cardinal. Bait is a thoroughly impressive portrait of authentic social strife but, unless you are Cornish, you don’t have to take sides. Not that there aren’t films that do connect with today’s urgent issues. The trouble is, they don’t invite you to think these issues through. On the contrary, mostly, they press you to do the opposite. Their aim is to reinforce approved prejudices rather than to open minds.
Ken Loach’s otherwise under-appreciated Sorry We Missed You deserves its place on Bafta’s British list. It is less eager to ram its message down your throat than some of his previous offerings. Still, you would not expect to come out of the cinema shocked to discover that the gig economy might have a positive side.
Little Women, Wild Rose, Frozen II and Judy are keen to assure you that women are full-blooded, feisty achievers, and not the weedy sissies you may have thought them. Harriet brings us the news that this is even more the case if they are women of colour. OK, but didn’t we get the memo on this a while back? Bombshell dares to open the lid on harassment in the workplace. Yet Harvey Weinstein no longer poses a threat: he is on trial. #MeToo no longer needs to be promoted; perhaps it is instead time to interrogate the phenomenon.
To find genuinely thought-provoking contenders, we need to turn to Asia. We think it is we British who know about class; yet it has fallen to Korea to turn social caste into awards fodder. Unthinkably for a foreign-language film, Parasite has made the cut for both top-picture shortlists. It has achieved this not just by wit, charm and verve, but by subtle social analysis.
Bong Joon-ho’s film is no Loachlike diatribe, vilifying the rich and sanctifying the poor. It tries to present an authentic portrait of both sides of the cultural and economic divide. The plot is absurdly comical, but emerges from genuine social observation. The privileged and the disadvantaged are convincingly attractive and persuasively flawed. Consequently, we are forced to question our preconceptions and reappraise the makeup of our world.
Another gem directed by an Asian actor is even more tellingly illuminating. Though comprehensively snubbed by Oscar voters, Lulu Wang’s The Farewell has crawled on to Bafta’s foreign-language list. Its tale seems simple enough. A New York-based Chinese-American called Billi returns to the land of her birth to join her relatives in saying goodbye to her grandmother, who has terminal lung cancer. Billi discovers that, in keeping with ancient custom, the family intend to withhold the truth from the patient. They will stage a fake wedding to explain the clan reunion. Billi protests, she is overruled, accepts the ruling and goes home. And her grandmother lives on. That’s pretty much it.
The film has been regarded as a family comedy. As it doesn’t have many laughs, that perhaps explains why it has not broken through. But from its simple domestic dynamics, it manages to wring a message of deep import. The refusal to inform the grandmother turns out to reflect an outlook that wholly separates China from America. Billi believes her grandmother’s humanity entitles her to control of her fate; her family believe that suppressing her autonomy for the communal good will make everyone happier.
Whether the Chinese are like westerners or different from them is a key question of our time. Are we all the same under the skin, aspiring to live the same kind of lives? We need to know to determine how to approach Huawei, Hong Kong, the Uighurs, epidemiology and climate policy, not to speak of a looming geopolitical showdown.
And the answer, according to The Farewell, is no, the Chinese are different and will not become like us just because we expect them to. Our individualism and their collectivism are intrinsic. Expressed through family life, rather than the formal data of politics, this finding comes with a force only cinema could give it.
Nowadays, however, few films provide us with such insights into the issues of the day. The rise of populism has yielded no equivalent of Chaplin’s The Great Dictator. Our crisis of capitalism has yet to produce its Metropolis. Fear of artificial intelligence has not delivered a 2001. Even the likes of The Truman Show, Thank You for Smoking, Lincoln, Children of Men, Blade Runner, The Matrix, District 9, Her and Arrival seem to have dried up.
Perhaps the explanation lies in the new McCarthyism that has seized the film world. To address controversial questions, you have to be prepared to challenge the prevailing orthodoxy. Nowadays, however, all must pledge allegiance to the implacable dictates of the progressive creed. In 2008, the best original screenplay Oscar and Bafta went to Jason Reitman’s Juno, a romcom that explored the pros and cons of abortion. The film’s eponymous heroine decided against termination and gave up her baby for adoption. How would the Academy view that outcome today? Or the Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri’s redemption of a racist?
Our age has no shortage of issues to grapple with, but our film-makers seem to want to avoid them. Instead, they worry that overpaid female actors may not be quite as overpaid as their male counterparts. Whether films have enough actors of the right ethnicity or directors of the right gender matters more than whether they have anything to say. Never mind significance: escapism and glamour, agitprop and amusement, thrills and feelgood will just have to do. It’s a pity.