Oscar night, in all its pallid, elephantine glory, is upon us, and the best picture race appears to be a tight one between The Revenant, Spotlight and The Big Short. Whichever one wins, it’ll have beaten a superior contender in Brooklyn (Lionsgate, 12), John Crowley and Nick Hornby’s gleaming, full-hearted adaptation of the Colm Tóibín novel, a deceptively simple story of physical and psychological resettlement that musters up uncommon generosity toward almost every character. None more so, of course, than Saoirse Ronan’s Eilis, a young Irish immigrant quietly carving her place in the Big Apple, buffeted between that reality and the promise of more complacent happiness back home.
It’s not a matter of life and death, but the torn life-and-life drama here is no less urgent and moving: this lovely film understands the weight and consequence of practical and romantic decisions we’re forced into when we perhaps haven’t lived enough to make them. Ronan may not win on Sunday, yet this is the besotted showcase her alabaster silent-film features have been waiting for: Eilis’s every thought, her every fear, is written into that extraordinary face.
There was no Oscar attention – nor even a UK cinema release – for James White (Soda, 15), and Josh Mond’s superb, tough and tender fractured family study can consider itself cheated on both counts. Certainly the extraordinary, pain-riven performances of Christopher Abbott and Cynthia Nixon, as a self-destructive slacker and his lovingly frustrated, cancer-stricken mother, have few equals among tonight’s nominees: it’s one of the most exactingly performed observations of the ways in which parents and children hurt one another, inadvertently and otherwise, we’ve seen of late. Yet this isn’t lugubrious misery porn: Mond’s film has euphoric surges of human honesty and hot, angry feeling that twists its way into hope.
I rather wish I was writing that last sentence about Sarah Gavron and Abi Morgan’s Suffragette (Fox, 12), a film that certainly arrived on screens with ambitious designs on awards glory, and has been conspicuously absent from the conversation ever since. The rise of the Women’s Social and Political Union certainly should have made for a rousing, large-canvas chunk of prestige history, yet the film takes a markedly timid, confined approach to a story of revolution and liberation. Only Carey Mulligan, as the audience’s fictional window on to the movement, provides flashes of steel that cut through the tasteful hessian upholstery of it all; otherwise, it’s a drably missed opportunity.
As is He Named Me Malala (Fox, PG), another would-be inspirational portrait of a genuinely inspiring female activist: the preternatural intelligence and initiative of teen Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai go without saying, but Davis Guggenheim’s flatly fawning documentary dutifully recaps her virtues anyway, rarely reaching beneath the surface to tell us anything we might not know.
Still, both films boast more feminist gumption than Nancy Meyers’s limp The Intern (Warner, 12), a workplace comedy with mangled inklings of a contemporary social agenda. Anne Hathaway’s go-getting fashion entrepreneur and family woman gets to have it all, but only with the twinkly assistance of a benevolent PA played by – pay attention, for this is its one joke – Robert De Niro. How the white alpha male has fallen! And yet what wisdom he still has to impart to capable young women! Meyers has long established a reputation for lineny upmarket wish fulfilment; it’s yielded its cushiony comforts in the past, but has never seemed quite this blinkered.
As far as lightweight tales of privileged professional strain go, I have more time for John Wells’s widely derided Burnt (EIV, 15), in which Bradley Cooper’s bad-boy culinary wonder hits the London haute cuisine scene, only to find his swagger tamed by Sienna Miller’s right-minded sous chef and single mum. It’s at least as silly as it sounds, but made palatable by gold-plated production values and Cooper’s increasingly impressive knack for exposing the bristly self-loathing beneath the glib all-American princes he plays.
“Palatable”, meanwhile, is perhaps not the word for Aussie one-off The Smuggler (Trinity, 15), the suspense of which hinges on the resilient digestive system of a hapless heroin mule caught at the airport – and held in custody until the swallowed goods emerge. The blend of gross-out comedy escapade and, well, tightly clenched endurance thriller is most peculiar, but it’s a good-humoured novelty.
Back to the Oscars, where for anyone displeased with the outcome of Sunday’s awards, Mubi is currently streaming a welcome reminder of the Academy’s occasional, elusive ability to get it right. One of the most purely pleasurable films ever to be burdened with best picture prize, Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night honestly looks as fresh and frisky today as it did back in 1934: that pinballing, peppermint-crisp dialogue, with its fast undercurrent of sexual and gender politics, so lithely lobbed between Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert, makes most Hollywood romantic comedies look dimly retrograde by comparison. If you’ve never seen it before, watch, marvel and try not to avoid the nagging thought that its springy joys would surely be trampled by the macho gurnings of The Revenant in a modern-day awards race.
