2019 Academy Awards: Reflections on the Best Picture Nominees

By Mike Banka

Warning: SPOILERS Ahead

Of all the critical venom heaped on Joker, the best film of 2019 and the one honored with the most Academy Award nominations (eleven), the most absurd claim is that it steals from Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy. Paul Schrader, the screenwriter of Taxi Driver, once said, “No artist actually creates anything new.” His point was that it's acceptable for a filmmaker to pick and choose from other artists if ultimately what he creates feels like his.

Lest we forget, The King of Comedy “stole” from Taxi Driver. At the end, the celebrity kidnapper Rupert Pupkin is deified by the TV media just as the mass murderer Travis Bickle is lionized by the New York City press. But then Taxi Driver, too, as Schrader and Scorsese have acknowledged, owes its own debt: its solitary antihero and epistolary narrative are drawn from Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground. However, no one would mistake it for an adaptation of a Russian novel any more than someone would mistake Django Unchained for a rip-off of the 1966 spaghetti western, Django. Part of the pleasure of watching a film by Quentin Tarantino is his knack for putting a spin on familiar themes and situations to create something original even when it is an unabashed homage. If that makes him more of an imitateur than an auteur, then he may be the greatest imitateur ever.

Among this year’s other nominees for Best Picture, Bong Joon-ho’s searing, funny, one-of-a-kind Parasite (the less said of the plot the better) has the potential of being the first foreign-language film to take home the top prize. Ford v Ferrari and Jojo Rabbit are extreme longshots, not least because neither received a Best Director nomination. The other nominees—1917, The Irishman, Once Upon a Time In Hollywood, Marriage Story, Little Women and Joker—are considered more likely choices. Collectively, these six have me in a more reflective mood than many previous years' nominees because all of them, not just Joker, call to mind earlier films.

Marriage Story, with its dueling divorcees and head-butting lawyers, is Kramer vs. Kramer redux. The latter was a multiple Oscar winner (including Best Picture) in 1979 when divorce was considered a sexy topic to make a movie about. Where Kramer vs. Kramer was all sober seriousness, Marriage Story's leavening of drama with corrosive humor attests how today divorce can be a laughing matter for singles and married couples still lucky enough to be on the outside looking in.

Little Women is in the unenviable position of following upon Gillian Armstrong’s pitch-perfect 1994 version of the Louisa May Alcott novel starring a radiant and brilliant Winona Ryder. One of director Greta Gerwig's boldest moves was to sprinkle the film with scenes showing Jo March (not Alcott) as the author of Little Women struggling to get the book published. The hopping back and forth between the original story and this framing structure takes some getting used to. Another kind of hopping back and forth in the film—Jo and Laurie’s anachronistic Footloose dance at a party gathering—is a concession to modern tastes that disrupts the desired historical immersion. Although Little Women is nominated for six Oscars, Gerwig was surprisingly omitted from the Best Director category.

Like Howard Hawks's Rio Bravo-El Dorado-Rio Lobo trilogy, in which John Wayne ages eleven years while essentially playing the same character in the same drama, The Irishman is best viewed not as a stand-alone work but in the context of Scorsese’s previous films. Its most obvious antecedent is GoodFellas. Both are about the mob, and both star Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci. Both are also epics that span decades: The Irishman clocks in at 209 minutes and GoodFellas at 148.

GoodFellas is a young man’s movie that hums with brio and fury. It’s Scorsese’s take on the Hollywood musical with killing replacing dancing and a classic rock soundtrack standing in for Broadway showtunes. By contrast, The Irishman, despite its de-aging special effects, is manifestly an old man’s movie, a slow dance that takes a full hour longer than GoodFellas to get to where it wants to go. Scorsese’s signature fast-paced cuts are replaced by brooding, meditative long takes that complement the title character’s rueful misgivings told in flashback. The thrill-to-kill of GoodFellas is gone. Everyone in the audience knows Frank Sheeran doesn’t want to put the hit on Jimmy Hoffa. We don’t want him to, either. By the end, he practically pleads with Hoffa to come around to mobster Russell Bufalino’s view of things.

There’s a bittersweet end-of-an-era quality to watching Robert De Niro shoot Al Pacino. You almost don’t want to see it. It’s like the finish to a great epic novel: Scorsese’s Remembrance of Killings Past. Even when it ends, you don’t want the book to close. The Irishman is an elegy for the hotheads who gleefully run rampant through GoodFellas. What it’s saying is that gangsters young and old—not just oldsters like Godfather II’s Hyman Roth—don’t just fade away, they do die or get killed.

The most surprising thing about 1917, Sam Mendes’s World War I drama, is its restraint. I expected to be hit over the head with battlefield pyrotechnics a la Saving Private Ryan. Instead, Mendes gives us a measured, contemplative take on the Great War in which most of the fireworks are emotional rather than explosive.

The New York Times dismissed the film’s much-praised continuous single take as “preening showmanship.” What the Times and other naysayers fail to grasp is that this device (used famously but less effectively in Alfred Hitchcock's 1948 Rope) admirably suits the serpentine seek-and-find mission of the two British soldiers who set out to warn a British division about an impending German ambush. The uninterrupted shot ensures we are with them in real-time every step of the way. If Mendes had opted for the kinetic editing of many war films, he would have been false to the manners of a time and place bounded by trepidation and the rigorous necessity of survival. The continuous shot is never obtrusive enough to interfere with the flow of the narrative, and the apocalyptic no-man’s land that we watch the men traverse is as stark and barren as the desolate post-nuclear world of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. The difference is we’re always aware that this apocalypse actually happened.

Along the way, Mendes fills his canvas with many finely wrought details and affecting moments. In a scene notable for potent understatement, a war-blasted French girl reveals that the newborn she's struggling to keep alive doesn’t belong to her but a nameless absent mother whose fate we can only guess. One sentiment 1917 shares with Saving Private Ryan is that showing mercy to a seemingly defanged German soldier will get you killed.

At the beginning, Mendes’s camera prowls the muddy battle trenches like Stanley Kubrick’s in Paths of Glory, only more tremulously as befits the fear felt by the fresh-faced soldiers huddled against the sandbags. Another call-out to Paths of Glory is an interlude in a forest where a battalion of British soldiers listens rapt to a young recruit singing. It echoes the final scene in the Kubrick film where boisterous and whooping French soldiers in a bar urge a beautiful German hostage to sing. As they listen to her, they suddenly become ashamed of their behavior, struck dumb by the girl's sadness and vulnerability.

A companion piece to 1917 is Gallipoli, Peter Weir's account of the disastrous WWI battle where hundreds of Australians senselessly met their deaths when a hard-hearted British command insisted they go over the top to face a stream of Turkish machine-gun fire. It stars a pre-Road Warrior Mel Gibson as a reluctant recruit with Olympic-class speed who, in the finale, sprints and dodges enemy fire to deliver a message to ward off a suicidal attack. Weir elevates the sequence to an operatic level through tense editing, close-ups of scared young men about to go over the top and the use of Tomaso Albinoni’s Adagio in G Minor. 1917 ends with a dirgelike symphony of violins that concludes the film far less spectacularly but eloquently just the same.

Although 1917 misses being a great film—the continuous take has some built-in compromises that were probably unavoidable—it successfully refutes the contention that the Great War, by its barbarity and dimension, can’t be encompassed with justice to the drama of individual experience. The final pastoral image encapsulates the experience of the WWI fighting man perfectly. The Union Jack doesn't fly patriotically like the Stars and Stripes at the end of Saving Private Ryan. In this most senseless of wars, there could be no triumph, only exhaustion and disillusionment. 1917 and Saving Private Ryan are both paeans to lives lost, but Mendes's film is also a testament to lives tragically wasted.

Eponymously if in no other way, Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is a nod to Once Upon a Time in the West and Once Upon a Time in America. Both were directed by Sergio Leone, one of Tarantino’s favorite filmmakers. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is not top-tier Tarantino. Its intoxicating languor begins to wear thin at the two-hour mark. The dialogue doesn’t pop and sizzle the way it does in his other films. Yet it succeeds as a heartfelt valentine to 1960s Hollywood before movie brats like Scorsese, De Palma, Coppola, Altman and Friedkin took over with a near-total artistic freedom that held sway for a decade before collapsing with Michael Cimino’s ill-fated Heaven’s Gate.

There is one scene that is just about as good as a scene can be: Cliff Booth’s (Brad Pitt) visit to Spahn Ranch. After encountering George Spahn and Squeaky Fromme, Cliff is accosted by several Manson family members who gather amid swirling desert dust to give him a memorably chilling staredown.

True to the fanciful title and as he did with the Hitler-twist finale in Inglourious Basterds, Tarantino tinkers with history. Manson myrmidons Tex Watson, Susan Atkins and Patricia Krenwinkel don’t murder Sharon Tate and her friends. Instead, they descend on the home of her fictional neighbor, Cliff. With the help of his ferocious pitbull and Leonard DiCaprio’s flamethrower-wielding Rick Dalton, Cliff gives the Manson killers a much-overdue and extremely violent comeuppance.

Predictably, this twist ending sparked controversy. My own feeling is that if Tarantino wanted to reshoot history he missed a golden opportunity to make it really dramatic. Having the Manson clan invade Sharon’s house and then Cliff, Rick and the dog showing up to rescue the victims would not only have been more powerful but also more in the spirit of the fantasy films that both Rick and Cliff appeared in as actor and stuntman. What could be more Hollywood than two heroes saving the damsel in distress? As it is, Cliff’s over-the-top smashing of Krenwinkel’s face against a wall and countertop and Rick’s turning Atkins into toast is meant to be a wish-fulfillment catharsis for everyone unable to forget that terrible night on Cielo Drive. Cliff’s disproportionate violence is a false note, though. In the film, the Tate murders haven’t happened and so there isn’t anything for him to be so brutally vindictive about. On the other hand, if he had shown up at Sharon’s home when the killers were in the process of committing their heinous crimes, that would have been more than sufficient motivation.

Which brings us to Todd Phillips’s Joker. I say Todd Phillips’s because Joker is uniquely his, whatever its alleged borrowings. This mesmerizing take on the origin of Batman's arch nemesis says that Arthur Fleck was meant to be a good person. Unfortunately, he is thwarted every step of the way by incivility and cruelty, whether it’s a mom on a bus who berates him for making funny faces at her child or three Richie Riches who beat him up on the subway like the droogs in A Clockwork Orange. We watch as the media, so prone to knee-jerk exaggeration in our own time, distort Arthur’s killing of three men into a political hot potato, spinning it as a premeditated assault on the wealthy. Only the audience and Arthur know the truth: being well off had nothing to do with the young men getting killed; being nasty and cruel did. Phillips’s point is that wealth and privilege are no guarantee of civility any more than poverty ensures a life of crime.

Joker jerks the viewer’s emotions around with uncanny ease as Arthur is depicted as funny, sad, tragic, vindictive, murderous and, above all, sympathetic. How many times do you see a movie where you know something awful is about to happen but it is still suspenseful building up to it? If you buy into the notion that Joker owes a debt to The King of Comedy, is it a stretch to imagine De Niro’s talk-show host Murray Franklin as De Niro’s Rupert Pupkin finally getting his own TV show—and with it, at long last, his just deserts for kidnapping and threatening to kill Jerry Langford (Jerry Lewis)? There’s a terrifying what-goes-around-comes-around logic to everything that happens in Joker. In a movie filled with mirrors, Arthur is tormented by ghastly reflections both physical and psychological, but as Michael Moore and others have opined, what’s really being mirrored are the troubled times we live in.

Rex Reed got it right. Breaking ranks with the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, he admired the film, saying it “borders on genius—repellant, dark, terrifying, disgusting, brilliant and unforgettable.” I disagree with him on one point. He thought the playing of Frank Sinatra’s “Send in the Clowns” over the end-credits after Arthur slinks off down a cuckoo’s-nest hallway was funny. I found it mournful and full of regret. So this is what we’ve come to, the film seems to be saying.

Joker boasts a healthy cynicism which has been noticeably absent in American cinema since the ascent of the Marvel Universe. It's brazen, ugly, fierce, angry and, yes, original--the rare movie daring enough to welcome a detractor’s hate.