#10: The Other Night I Drifted Nice, Continental Drift Divide, Mountains Sit In A Line, LEONARD BERNSTEIN
Okay so remember how I said there were nine really good movies nominated this year? Yeah well there’s also Maestro.
There is talent involved in this movie, too much to ignore. Bradley Cooper is an actor I almost always enjoy, even if I prefer him in goofy action/comedy movies and he wants to do Serious Oscar Movies now. Carey Mulligan is also delivering an excellent performance as Bernstein’s wife, as she usually does. There are some touching moments between Cooper and Matt Bomer as Bernstein’s former lover. There are moments and scenes that are directed in dynamic and fascinating ways, including a non-diegetic dance sequence, that show Cooper has some true skill behind the camera. The early scenes are shot in black and white in an old-timey aspect ratio and everyone’s talking like they’re in a 30s screwball romantic comedy, which… it’s neat, it’s very neat, but is it saying something? Or are we just trying to apply some stylistic touches to cover up that this is a basic bitch musician biopic with nothing more to say than John Mulaney’s father trying to give him the sex talk.
Okay since I appear to have slid from mild praise into criticism, I will say that while I can picture a reason Bernstein’s Chilean wife might be talking in a Katherine Hepburn transatlantic accent even when alone with Leonard, since she’s played by the decidedly not Chilean Carey Mulligan I don’t know that the movie has reached the same logic, and so this whitewashed character is just talking like it’s 40s Hollywood as a bit and that’s… it’s a little weird.
There came a point when I couldn’t resist taking a quick peek at the runtime so far. I saw that we were 75 minutes in with neatly an hour left.
I was inconsolable.
The idea that we were barely over halfway through was crushing to me. The movie never won me back, no matter how much Cooper threw himself into replicating Bernstein’s conducting style or how hard Mulligan was acting as Mrs. Bernstein succumbed to cancer. Which is another thing, I think this movie is trying to center Felicia Montealegre, the actress who marries Bernstein, to the point that Carey Mulligan is top-billed in a movie Bradley Cooper wrote and directed, but… it doesn’t get there. I don’t feel I learned anything about her other than “Wife, mother, annoyed that sometimes her bisexual husband needed a dick in his mouth.”
The fact is, as hard as Cooper’s trying, it’s not even his best movie of 2023. I laughed with, cried for, and cared about Rocket Raccoon so much more than I did Leonard Bernstein.
Would I have watched it without being nominated? No, biopics are Oscar season’s waste products.
Am I glad I did? I am not.
Films of 2023 Ranking: I’ve been rank ordering every movie from 2023 I’ve watched, and at time of writing Maestro is dead last at 44, under The Meg 2: The Trench, because that one managed to get more interesting in the back half. Don’t worry, Maestro, I’m sure you’ll rank over The Nun 2 when I get around to that one.
#9. Misty Water-Coloured Memories of the Way We Weren’t
“I’m grieving the relationship I thought I’d have with a bunch of different people. That’s a lot of little griefs.”
Kimia Behpoornia, Make Some Noise
There are people I follow who would consider it sacrilege to rank this one ninth out of ten, but that’s the shortlist this year, it’s a game of inches and also Maestro.
Nora and Hae, two childhood friends in South Korea, are just about old enough to start thinking “Hey wouldn’t it be neat to be more than friends” when Nora’s family emigrates to Toronto. They get one sweet chaperoned date and then have to say goodbye, possibly forever. Years later, the advent of Facebook lets them reconnect, but Nora (now in university in New York) fears how much their Skype calls are taking over their lives and cuts it off. More years pass, and Hae comes to New York, where he comes face to face with Nora in person for the first time in 24 years… and meets her husband, the chillest, most understanding dude you’ll ever see.
It’s a quiet, nuanced examination of the dull ache that forms when What Might Be becomes What Never Will, learning to accept that your relationships with certain people can never be all you thought or hoped they might be. Greta Lee and Teo Yoo give haunting performances, trying to keep a hidden longing at bay to varying extents. And it is an interesting story, the way the life you have is haunted not by the life you used to have, but by the life that could have been. It’s a quiet and very relatable sadness.
I said “quiet” a bunch, huh. Yeah, that’s because this movie lives in silences and longing looks maybe a little more than it should. And maybe that’s why this one comes ninth… not because it didn’t work, but because other stories worked for me more.
Would I have watched it without being nominated? A few people I follow on TikTok sure love this movie and love it a lot, but that hasn’t gotten me to watch Saltburn, All of Us Strangers, or Decision to Leave yet, so who knows.
Am I glad I did? Yeah, kinda, even if I’m not in a rush to watch it again.
Films of 2023 Ranking: It’s way up at 23, under some very fun murdering of Nazis in Sisu and over the animated (partial) reunion flick, Babylon 5: The Road Home.
#8. No Witnesses For The Prosecution
This movie sent me down a rabbit hole of whether burden of proof is even a thing in the French court system. I still don’t know. ‘Cause brother, it sure doesn’t seem so.
Sandra, her husband Vincent, and their vision impaired son Daniel live in a remote house in the French mountains. One day while Daniel is on a walk, Vincent falls to his death. But did he fall? Jump? Or was he pushed? The police sure are curious and the more they look into it, the more questions they have for Sandra. Soon she’s on trial as the prosecutor interrogates her claims Vincent was suicidal, while Daniel becomes consumed with a need to find the truth.
Sandra Hüller is good enough in this movie that my opinion of her character wasn’t even a little bit coloured by having seen her play the First Lady of Auschwitz a week earlier. I can understand why there are so many Hüller fans are determined to believe that Best Actress isn’t the two-horse race between Emma Stone and Lily Gladstone that it seemingly obviously is. (It’s very sweet how Stone and Gladstone have become legit friends over the campaign, I saw the SAG Awards, Emma looked legit thrilled for Lily when her name was read) The kid playing Daniel is also excellent, and completely sells the climax where Daniel must choose what he believes happened.
And by the way, we never know for sure. We don’t see Vincent fall. We see the, for lack of a better term, “evidence” the prosecution has gathered…
…and we can see how it sure doesn’t always make Sandra look good, although we also get effective counter arguments so it’s never fully damning. But there’s no third act twist with a surprise witness who saw Vincent jump, Daniel doesn’t find the hypothetical murder weapon the prosecution’s blood splatter expert claims existed hidden in some bushes, we like Daniel have to decide what we believe happened. Which is the true heart of the movie: Daniel’s need to know for sure if his mother killed his father, the fact that he can never know that for sure, and his choice of how to move forward.
My one issue is that I do not know enough about the French court system not to be thrown by what the prosecutor (who is also very well played, a sea of low-key aggression against Sandra) gets away with. I’ve watched too many US lawyer shows, I kept waiting for Sandra’s friend/lawyer to topple the house of cards the prosecutor was building, where excerpts from Sandra’s fictional novels in which a character muses on how nice it would be to kill her husband are presented as though they were literal confessions. Or an argument Vincent recorded the day before the fall, which shows how unhappy the marriage was and does make it look like maybe Sandra’s more capable of violence than she’d been claiming. I kept waiting for a Boston Legal-style James Spader speech about how convenient it was that, given there were no other clandestinely recorded fights, Vincent happened to choose to record a fight with Sandra one day before his death, and that in that fight Vincent presented a full laundry list of every grievance he’d had over the past decade of marriage, almost as if he wanted all of this on the record to make Sandra look bad in the event of his death. But again. I don’t know the French court system. As they say in Paris, je ne suis pas un avocat d’une grande ville.
But I did find that mildly distracting, so, eighth. There are some still wondering if Anatomy of a Fall can pull an upset and sweep the Oscars, a notion I find only slightly more plausible than Snyder Bros’ belief that they are on the verge of convincing Netflix to make those Justice League sequels.
Would I have watched it without being nominated? Maybe? This is also one I kept hearing about.
Am I glad I did? Yeah, for one of the longer nominees (third longest?), it’s a good watch.
Films of 2023 Ranking: It’s at 21, over the previously mentioned Sisu and under our next entry.
#7. Maybe Sometimes a Commute Isn’t the Worst Idea
Rudolph and his wife Hedwig are trying to build their dream country home, a place outside the bustle of the city where they can raise their kids, conveniently right next to Rudolph’s work. This is threatened when Rudolph receives a transfer to a position in Berlin, and his career threatens his family life. A simple pastoral tale of family dynamics, put into a terrifying context as Rudolph is Rudolph Höss, his workplace is Auschwitz, and his career is streamlining the mass murder of millions of people.
Off the bat, if this doesn’t/didn’t win Best Sound, the category has no meaning. No film in 2023 did more with soundscape to tell a story than The Zone of Interest. We never enter the camp. We never see what’s happening right over the wall from Hedwig’s intricate gardens. But we always, always hear it. Muffled screams, random gunfire, and the constant, constant hum of the furnaces. An unthinkable atrocity is constantly happening right out of view, at the edge of our hearing, while the Höss family throws garden parties and plays hide-and-seek and yells at their Polish servants about messes on the floor.
The mundanity of the family life is the point, that life continues so normally and basically while something unbelievably horrific is happening in the background. It’s an examination of how evil isn’t as cartoonish as we think, that you can commit the worst acts of cruelty possible then go home, bang your mistress, and read your kids a bedtime story like it’s nothing. This doesn’t diminish the evil of the camp: Hedwig’s mother moves out in the middle of the night (to Hedwig’s annoyance) because she can’t deal with being that close to mass murder 24/7. In the films closing minutes, Rudolph admits to Hedwig that he can’t enjoy a party in Berlin because he can’t stop thinking about how to gas everyone to death, saying in a matter of fact tone “The high ceilings are the challenge.”
It’s chilling. And there’s a flash forward, where it’s implied Rudolph is given a vision of his legacy, in which we see Auschwitz today, a museum to evil and atrocity, but a museum where someone still has to vacuum every morning. Those display cases of abandoned luggage and the shoes worn by new arrivals that never walked out still need to be cleaned before the gates open. There is always a frightening mundanity to evil. And in a world where refugee camps are bombed while half a world away people are casually watching the Superbowl, including ads purchased by the bombers, maybe the threat of evil becoming everyday background noise needs to be examined.
Would I have watched it without being nominated? I rarely, if ever, choose to make myself this uncomfortable recreationally. It’s why I didn’t even make it halfway through Uncut Gems.
Am I glad I did? I appreciate having watched it. Although I wish I’d watched it two weeks earlier. In the wake of this movie, maybe Jason Statham doing bee-themed revenge murders on tech bros is the exact thing I needed as a palate cleanser, but I’d just seen that. Sisu didn’t quite do it, no matter how many Nazis that grizzled prospector dispatched I kept thinking “Too little, too late.”
Films of 2023 Ranking: It’s at 20, right over Anatomy of a Fall but just under the nearly dialogue-free thrill ride of No One Will Save You. Look sometimes I like it when movies are fun and good even if they’re not hard-hitting looks at the Holocaust.
#6. The Cimarron In-Law Massacre
In the Osage nation, the Reign of Terror refers to a series of murders and suspicious deaths that took place between 1918 and 1931, mostly between 1921 and 1926, in which the newly oil-rich Osage natives suddenly started dying and a bunch of white people somehow ended up profiting. At least 60, maybe hundreds of Osage were killed through open homicides and subtler poisonings as greedy white folk tried to massacre their way to all that oil money, until a law was finally passed saying that headrights, a person’s share of the oil money, could not be inherited by anyone of less than 50% Osage ancestry. Decency, morality, and actually prosecuting some of the architects weren’t enough to protect the Osage from white greed, it took making it full-stop illegal for white folks to have that oil money.
Yancey Cravat would have put a stop to this. Shame that by the 1920s he’d forsaken Oklahoma for new frontiers that maybe could be the better world he imagined.
When this story has been told in the past, if it was, it was as the origin story of the FBI, as the federal government finally noticed how wide-spread the carnage had become and how very few fucks local sheriffs had about it, and willed a new law enforcement agency into existence to sort it out (and then put J. Edgar Hoover in charge, who was absolutely a net loss to the concept of “justice” in America, cops gonna cop).
And this would have been the movie Martin Scorsese made, but he and fellow producer Leonardo DiCaprio talked with modern day Osage leaders while production was paused for the pandemic and decided the focus needed to be on the victims, not the white boys who came down from Washington to deliver only a morsel of justice. As such DiCaprio went from playing the head federal agent to Ernest Burkhart, one of the central figures in the conspiracy. The agent is now played by Jesse Plemons and doesn’t show up until late enough in the movie to have watched eight out of ten of the others on this list.
Of course as good and heartbreaking as Lily Gladstone is as Mollie Kyle, who marries Burkhart and is our POV character for the Osage’s plight, this is still as much if not moreso Burkhart’s story, a man lured into a murderous conspiracy by his domineering uncle William King. And I have to give Scorsese and DiCaprio credit for not glamourizing Burkhart like they did Jordan Belfort in The Wolf of Wall Street, but instead playing him as a gormless dummy who likes money and is easy to manipulate into doing terrible things to get it, and can’t even see how ultimately expendable his uncle considers him (I, myself, might have had some concerns about being asked to sign a document saying my uncle that I know does murders for profit gets my share of the oil money if I should happen to die before him, Ernest is not that smart).
It is a lot of movie and the majority of it is very clever, ending with a Golden Age of Radio equivalent of a true crime podcast summing up what happened (or failed to happen) to the key players, ending with Scorsese himself stepping up to subtly indicate that nothing in history, not even this movie, has truly done justice to the dead.
I haven’t said a lot about the quality of this one, have I. I really haven’t. Look. It’s Martin Scorsese, who’s been one of our most celebrated filmmakers for decades. It’s an incredibly talented cast, from Gladstone and De Niro and, yes, DiCaprio, who’s toned it down a little now that he has an Oscar, to late-game appearances by Plemons, John Lithgow, and Brendan Fraser. Obviously it’s good. It’s just a lot. It’s as long as Past Lives and Zone of Interest combined and a lot of it is bleak. I refused to miss any of it to use the bathroom (which I really kinda wanted to do at the two hour mark), so it’s quality, but know what you’re getting into.
Would I have watched it without being nominated? I have other things to do with my day, Marty, get there. That said, maybe. I’ve missed so many Scorsese movies, it itches at me.
Am I glad I did? I saw this in a theatre so I’d stay off the internet and give it my full attention, something I couldn’t offer to Uncut Gems or even my recent rewatch of Jaws, and I stand by that decision.
Films of 2023 Ranking: It’s currently at 11, pushed out of the top ten by the next page, over Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem but just under the underrated Blackberry, which for the biography of a product really works.
Next Page: The Top Five
