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Monday, February 29, 2016
THE MASSACHUSETTS DAILY COLLEGIAN
DailyCollegian.com
AWA R D S C E R E M O N Y
Representation the main concern at 87th Oscars By NathaN FroNtiero Collegian Staff
After a montage of clips from 2015’s biggest hits – featuring plenty of material not up for just recognition – actor and comedian Chris Rock took the stage to kick off the 87th Annual Academy Awards. Rock quickly addressed the glaringly white elephant in the room, acknowledging the fact that for the second year in a row, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has failed to nominate a single non-white actor or actress. He welcomed the audience to the ceremony, the “White People’s Choice Awards,” as he jokingly referred. “If (The Academy) nominated hosts, I wouldn’t even get this job!” Rock said. In a confident opening monologue, he gave a sharp – if not entirely intersectional – critique of the lack of diversity in the Oscar nomination pool. “If you’re a black actor, just getting the opportunity to be in a movie can be difficult,” Rock said. The cameras cut to a prepared parody reel of scenes from several Best Picture nominees, edited to include major black characters. Whoopi Goldberg played a frustrated janitor mopping who berates Jennifer Lawrence’s title character in “Joy.” As Joy struggles to present her Miracle Mop during an advertising shoot, Goldberg’s character says, “It’s not rocket science, it’s a mop.” In another satirical clip, Leslie Jones took over roughhousing duties from the infamous bear that tore Hugh Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio) to frontiersman shreds in “The Revenant.” And Chris Rock himself replaced Matt
Damon’s character in a sendup of “The Martian.” He played a character that Kristen Wiig and Jeff Daniels’ characters referred to only as “black astronaut,” before they began debating the merits of spending “millions of white dollars” to save him. A subsequent scene of Tracy Morgan as the star of “The Danish Girl” struck a murkier note. The original film stands in questionable territory for its casting of Eddie Redmayne – a cisgender man – as the transgender woman Lili Elbe. It was unclear to me whether the clip was meant to spoof both the lack of racial and gender representation among the night’s potential winners. Another notable bit of critique saw Angela Basset narrate a “Black History Month Minute” about an actor who had “broken barriers” and been “an inspiration to his people” at the Oscars, only to end the segment by recognizing Jack Black. And Rock led a later pre-filmed bit in which he asked mostly black moviegoers outside of a Compton, CA movie theater for their opinions on the whitewashed Best Picture, Actor and Actress nominee lists. The ceremony made plenty of jabs like these at the lack of representation of black actors among those awarded at the Oscars. But the limitation on that focus is misguided. The issue of industry representation – especially within The Academy – is more nuanced than black and white. Hollywood has more comprehensive work to do to ensure that black, Latino, Asian and Native American actors and actresses all receive the same level of acknowledg-
ment as their white peers. April Reign’s #OscarsSoWhite hashtag, after all, refers to the dearth of all people of color in the Academy’s recognition. Kevin Hart also took a minute as he presented one of the night’s awards to focus on the overlooked performances actors and actresses of color gave in the past year. “Let’s not let this negative issue of diversity best us. Let’s do what we do best and work hard.” The night’s winners provided both surprises and disappointments. Mark Rylance won Best Supporting Actor for his charming, if underwhelming performance in “Bridge of Spies,” an upset in a moment that would have given Mark Ruffalo well-deserved recognition for his compelling work in “Spotlight.” Alicia Vikander won her first Oscar for her performance in “The Danish Girl,” but I would have much rather seen her nominated and awarded for her chilling lead performance in last April’s sci-fi thriller “Ex Machina,” which got the gold for Best Visual Effects. Brie Larson won her first Best Actress Oscar for “Room,” which was an exceptional performance in the most harrowing film I saw within the last year. The equally wrenching “Amy,” about the tremendous and gone-too-soon singer Amy Winehouse, took home the award for Best Documentary feature. “Mad Max: Fury Road” mostly cleaned the house in the creatively technical categories, walking away from the wasteland with six awards: Best Film Editing, Best Costume Design, Best Makeup and Hairstyling, Best Production Design, Best Sound Editing
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Leonardo DiCaprio earned his first Academy Award victory for ‘The Revenant,’ which lost Best Picture to ‘Spotlight.’ and Best Sound Mixing. The thrilling film, however, was shut out of major wins. Charles Randolph and Adam McKay won Best Adapted Screenplay for angry big bank sendup “The Big Short.” Best Original Screenplay went to “Spotlight,” the deeply affecting Boston Globe journalismcentered film that also won Best Picture. Alejandro González Iñárritu took home Best Director for “The Revenant,” and Leonardo DiCaprio’s performance landed his long-awaited first gold statuette from The Academy. Emmanuel Lubezki’s work on the film earned him his third consecutive Oscar for Best Cinematography. Vice President Joe Biden delivered an introduction to Lady Gaga’s performance of “Til It Happens to You,” her Best Original Song nominee
from sexual assault-focused documentary “The Hunting Ground.” He urged the audience to “take the pledge” to be active bystanders – an important message perhaps, but the true promise to end rape culture should be on individuals to not assail people. Iñárritu and DiCaprio used their acceptance speeches to also offer some pressing messages. The director quoted a line from “The Revenant” to make a point about the continued need to push for racial equality. “They don’t listen to you. They just see the color of your skin.” He noted that the importance of this opportunity “to really liberate ourselves from all prejudice… and make sure for once and forever that the color of our skin becomes as irrelevant as the length of our hair.” DiCaprio gave an impassioned acceptance speech in which he noted the necessi-
ty to combat climate change seriously, since the damage wrought by it poses a threat to all and disproportionately affects those already marginalized. Cheryl Boone Isaacs, the Academy president, gave an important message regarding the necessity to enact real change in the industry. She called on the entire audience to work toward bringing an accurate reflection of the diverse world to Hollywood and beyond. That call couldn’t be more important. The Academy has rapidly approached irrelevance, and the night’s ceremony only reinforced the reputation that the Oscars are an archaic, self-important institution in dire need of revolution. Nathan Frontiero can be reached at nfrontiero@umass.edu and followed on Twitter @NathanFrontiero.
FILM REVIEW
‘Son of Saul’ brutal, gripping ‘The Witch’ spellbinding Holocaust drama pulls no punches By Nate taskiN Collegian Staff
“Son of Saul” may be one of the most brutal films in recent memory. In his first feature as director, László Nemes throws the audience directly into the headspace of one the Holocaust’s many millions of victims and forces them to behold its unremitting horror head on. Viewers too easily grow complacent with the hideous atrocities and dehumanization from the past and present. “Son of Saul,” in its uncompromising cruelty and hopelessness, exists to remind us of the barbarity of humanity and how we should ensure that such evil will never again walk this earth. From its opening sequence, “Son of Saul” makes it clear it has no intentions to sugarcoat history. The titular Saul, a Hungarian Jew, acts as a Sonderkommando in Auschwitz. His “job” – one that would result in a swift execution had he refused – forces him to dispose of the bodies of prisoners after they had been gassed to death. Treated like cattle, Sonderkommandos are turned against their people under the dim promise of survival, a hope that proves futile, as they are disposed of as soon as they outlive their usefulness. After another average day at work (as average as being a tool for genocide gets, I suppose), Saul (Géza Röhrig) finds a boy gasping for air as he cleans the chambers. With his body desecrated by Zyklon B, any faint glimmer of hope gets snuffed out as a Nazi doctor suffocates the last trace of life from him. Saul becomes convinced that this boy is his son after he
is ordered to throw the body into the furnace along with the others. He seeks to find a rabbi to perform a proper Jewish burial. In the eye of a maelstrom, he pursues at least some semblance of sanctuary. On a sheer technical level, the film’s style of cinematography is both excellent and unprecedented. For the movie’s entirety, except for the devastating final shot, Nemes places his camera over Saul’s shoulder and follows him through his day-to-day activities in Auschwitz. It’s a superb example of how master filmmaking can reflect a character’s mindset. All sense of space and environment is cut off and a heavy sense of claustrophobia sets in. We understand the horror that surrounds Saul, yet never for a moment does it feel exploitative. The camera does not linger on the staggering piles of corpses. We do not revel in the carnage, we shrink away with terror and nausea. Kept out of focus and sequestered off into the back of his mind, Saul has to tune out these horrors if he is to function and survive within the barbed wire. A deep, overwhelming suffocation takes hold of the audience and Nemes accomplishes the impossible: he grants us at least some inkling of how it feels to be a prisoner of a concentration camp. Our heads are kept low and our eyes study the content of the walls. The monstrosities around us begin to blur as we move forward, too focused on the task at hand to let our mind linger and too fearful to appreciate any additional second spent alive. We feel like vermin. If I could find one flaw in the presentation of Saul’s isolation, it’s the use of subtitles. Hungarian, Yiddish, German and Polish are all languages spoken in the film, yet Saul
is not fluent in all four. At several moments, SS officers bark commands to Saul in German and he has to use his wits to figure out what they want from him, lest it cost him a bullet to the head. Perhaps a difference of color-coding or font choice could have distinguished each language, or better yet, one could dispense altogether with the use of subtitles for any language that Saul does not understand. Not only must Saul (along with millions of Jews, Romani, queer people and other marginalized people with him) walk through hell, he must walk through a hell whose words are foreign to him. Much like American slavery in “12 Years a Slave,” “Son of Saul” cracks its knuckles and lays bear this horrible stain on human history. As much as I love “Schindler’s List” and “The Pianist,” these films scrub these chapters clean so audiences may find messages of empowerment and uplift at the end. But the vast majority of Jews in Europe were not Wladek Szpilman from “The Pianist,” they were Saul. One scene – which devastates just as much as any scene with a gas chamber – contains no bloodshed. It simply consists of a humiliated Saul forced to “dance for his shekels” as a group of Nazis jeer at him. How many times have you seen that same joke on a YouTube comment chain or heard it in a classroom? I know I heard it when a group of skinheads threw me in a dumpster in middle school. Anti-Semitism is alive and well and shouldn’t be laughed off. Bear this information in mind the next time a swastika pops up on the University of Massachusetts campus. Nate Taskin can be reached at ntaskin@umass.edu.
A terrifying ‘New England Folktale’ By NathaN FroNtiero Collegian Staff
Be patient with “The Witch.” That might seem like a tall order at first – the movie is often slow – but it’s worthwhile to sit tight. Writerdirector Robert Eggers focuses more on an unsettling mood than on bombastic scares, although there’s no shortage of disturbing imagery in his feature debut. “The Witch” masterfully blends religious zealotry, psychological drama and supernatural horror – all in one gradually paced but inevitable descent into hell. The New Hampshire-born Eggers subtitled his film “A New-England Folktale,” and its narrative feels crafted from the regional lore. A closing title card notes much of the archaic dialogue was sampled from period documents, and Eggers shot the film in rural Canada to simulate the once-untamed backcountry of early New England. Natural lighting and careful costume and set design authentically evoke the bygone era. It’s as if a documentary crew stepped into a time machine, stepped out 60 years before the Salem witch trials and convinced a group of Puritans to play house while they recorded. It’s the year 1630. An English farmer named William (Ralph Ineson) is banished with his family from a colonial plantation for vaguely defined religious reasons. They pack up in a lone horse-drawn carriage and settle on the outskirts of a sprawling forest. The plot isn’t as simple as it appears. Sure, there’s something evil lurking in these woods – take a wild guess – but “The
Witch” intrigued me for the ways it introduces a sinister side to the seemingly harmless. Eggers keeps the details sparse so that we empathize with this family’s frightened confusion when the bad things start to happen. There was little exposition to help me find clarity, so I felt violently immersed in the events onscreen. Effective camerawork accomplishes much of the disorientation. Eggers and cinematographer Jarin Blaschke linger on more subtly strange subjects – like the unblinking yellow eyes of a mysterious hare or goat. They track close behind characters as they walk through the dense woods, which Louise Ford’s deliberately scattered editing transforms into a haunting maze of jagged bushes and skyscraping pines. The film earns many of its nightmarish moments by matching unassuming images with unnerving musical cues. In one notable scene, as the family settles into their new home, wailing violins escalate into choral screams as Eggers pans over the otherwise innocuous green of the forest before them. Mark Korven’s original score fittingly accompanies the film’s rustic aesthetic and off-kilter aura. It spells doom for these characters before we ever see any witchcraft. Eggers posits teenaged Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy) as the film’s narrative and technical focus, an affecting audience proxy for her family’s Puritan fears. She’s beginning to embrace her womanhood, an observation that scares her parents just as much as the witch’s devilry. Burgeoning and powerful femininity poses an apparently large threat to these traditional folk. The camera catches Thomasin’s younger brother Caleb (Harvey
Scrimshaw) each time he sneaks a peek at her hint of cleavage, his guilty lust highlighted early on as a danger to his holy purity. Later, as the stress mounts in Thomasin’s relationship with her father and mother, they reveal their own deadly sins – his pride, hers a weakness of faith. Taylor-Joy carries her lead role with finesse, keeping Thomasin maddeningly on the fence between trustworthy and suspicious. Ralph Ineson brings compelling God-fearing pathos to William, delivering his lines with the rumbling croak of a man rattled by life. And Ellie Grainger and Lucas Dawson give uncommonly excellent child performances as fraternal twins Mercy and Jonas – I found their characters equally infuriating and disquieting. “The Witch” evokes the chillingly seductive voyeurism that pervaded Alfred Hitchcock’s work. Eggers tightly frames private conversations and stolen glances. He also spills blood sparingly, which makes grisly shots of a gored dog or a crushed chicken stand out. In his hands, these gruesome stabs feel just as intimate as the gentler sequences. The effect entranced me so much I nearly forgot this was fiction. “We will conquer this wilderness,” William tells his son in one of the film’s first scenes. “It will not consume us.” It’s here that Eggers lays out the contract for his film – to prove that no level of devotion to God can protect those targeted by true malevolence. He knows the wilderness and wickedness consume us. So “The Witch,” a marathon that ends too soon, leaves us begging for another delicious plummet into the dark. Nathan Frontiero can be reached at nfrontiero@umass.edu and followed on Twitter @NathanFrontiero.