Werth: You know what, Wise?
Wise: What's that, Werth?
Werth: I'd really like to thank the Acadamy.
Wise: Because they like you, they really like you?
Werth: No, because the Oscar telecast finally recognized Oscar losers. I'm not gonna say that host Seth MacFarlane and Kristin Chenoweth stole our idea, but we have mined this territory twice before.
Wise: It seems Mr. MacFarlane did a lot of things to ruffle people's feathers at the Oscars.
Werth: One person who must have been super ruffled was legendary film director, Steven Spielberg. His hugely successful bio-pic Lincoln lost Best Picture and, more surprisingly, Best Director.
Wise: And not just because historical bio-pics are usually a shoo-in at the Academy Awards.
Werth: But Spielberg might be used to losing Oscars on his slavery-themed movies. The Color Purple (1985) was famously nominated for 11 Oscars and lost every single one. But perhaps less remembered is Spielberg's cinematic treatment of a group of Africans who escape a slave ship in 1839, only to be put on trial here in America, Amistad (1997). The film was nominated for four Oscars and lost them all.
Wise:Most of the gold that year went to another film about an ill-fated ship.
Werth: Amistad is based on the true story of a group of Africans who are kidnapped and sent to Cuba before rising up against their captors, slaying them, and then trying to steer their boat home. Unfortunately they wind-up off Long Island, and are soon in shackles again for murder.
They become the center of an international property dispute that quickly leads to Presidential involvement due to the case's ramifications to American slavery. It's the sort of epic human issue canvas that Spielberg loves to paint on.
Wise: Munich, anyone?
Werth: The film veers between heavy-handedness, perceptive humor and stark, shocking realism, but the real joy in this film is to watch the performances. Morgan Freeman gives his typical charming and noble turn as freed slave Theodore Joadson, and Matthew McConaughey is spunky and eager as the defense attorney for the Africans, Roger Sherman Baldwin.
But the two standouts are Djimon Hounsou as Cinque and Anthony Hopkins as former president John Quincy Adams. Hounsou is a revelation, his imposing screen presence a mix of sheer physical size, vocal roar, and intensity.
Hopkins works magic by throwing himself whole hog into this addled and rickety, irascible and brilliant man. The scene where we first see Adams "napping" in Congress is textbook perfection of how to introduce a character with only a simple shot and one line of dialogue.
Hopkins lost the best Supporting Oscar to Robin Williams in Good Will Hunting and Spielberg wasn't even nominated. So my guess is Spielberg will avoid slavery flicks for a little while.
Wise: Perhaps there's no better example of an Oscar loser than Bette Davis in Of Human Bondage (1934). Based on the novel by W. Somerset Maugham, the film also stars Leslie Howard as Philip Carey, a club-footed aesthete who abandons his dream of studying art in Paris and returns to study medicine in London where he falls for cockney waitress Mildred (Davis). He lavishes attention on her, but she prefers the company of wealthier men who enjoy life's rowdier pleasures and aren't burdened by a dysfunctional leg.
Werth: I'm with ya' Mildred.
Wise: Mildred runs off with another man, but comes back destitute and pregnant. Philip takes her in, but just as she makes it back on her feet, she runs off again beginning a cycle that results in both spiraling out of control. Along the way, Philip finds comfort in the friendship he develops with a patient (Reginald Owen) and his daughter (Frances Dee).
Werth: But Mildred's more fun.
Wise: This was the picture that made Davis' career. She had been laboring in smaller films at Warner Bros., but when Bondage director John Cromwell caught of preview of one of Davis' performances, he insisted on borrowing her for the film. Legend has it that the Warner brass was happy to have the tempestuous actress off the lot for a few weeks, but were furious when their contract player was transformed into a star by another studio and quietly encouraged the Academy not to nominate Davis.
A furious write-in campaign erupted, but despite the best efforts of her peers, Davis still lost the Oscar to Claudette Colbert for It Happened One Night. Still, Davis is magnificent playing both the slatternly Mildred and Philip's fantasy vision of her: tender, compliant, virginal in softly-lit, frothy white dresses. She even gets an incredible breakdown scene where she rages at Philip's impotence and later almost destroys his chances of finishing medical school.
Werth: No actress has ever done as much with the line "Wipe my mouth."
Wise: It's really an amazing performance, full of vibrance, passion, and wit.
Werth: Which is more than I can say for this year's Oscars ceremony.
Wise: Perhaps next year we can host— but until then, check in next week for more Film Gab!
Werth: Happy New Year, Wise!
Wise: Is it January already?
Werth: It's Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and that means one thing—
Wise: Fasting and atoning?
Werth: Our favorite Jewish movies!
Wise: I'll break out the gefilte fish and my dancing shoes!
Werth: I may just be a poor white goy from the Midwest, but no Jewish holiday is complete without a viewing of Fiddler on the Roof (1971).
Wise: Or Bubby's challa.
Werth: Fresh from its record-breaking, Tony-winning run on Broadway, Jerome Robbins' Fiddler was left mostly intact by film director Norman Jewison (irony of ironies, he's not Jewish).
It tells the story of Tevye (Topol) a poor milkman in the village of Anatevka in turn of the century Russia. He is a gruff, but loving family patriarch who turns to God to deal with everything from a lame horse to marriage proposals for his daughters.
Wise: Better to turn to a crippled nag than to Patti Stanger.
Werth: What Fiddler does with such grace and beauty is align the changes that are happening in this man's family to changes happening in the bigger world where antisemitism in Tsarist Russia threatens to uproot their lives. Fiddler's success comes from how it universalizes the questions of faith in the face of change while at the same time celebrating this unique group of people. It also doesn't hurt that the score is full of eminently hummable songs like "Tradition," "If I Were A Rich Man," "Matchmaker, Matchmaker" and that wedding staple, "Sunrise, Sunset."
Wise: A score so good it makes you want to convert.
Werth: Oswald Morris' Oscar-winning cinematography turns the expansive Yugoslavian countryside into a work of art, making its bleakness beautiful. And the actors (many cast for their believability over their marquee status) are shot in muted tones and minimal makeup, eschewing the typical glamor shots that had defined the Hollywood musical for a simpler aesthetic.
At the 1972 Academy Awards, Fiddler lost the Best Picture prize to William Friedkin's The French Connection (tough competition that year with both A Clockwork Orange and The Last Picture Show in contention), but it remains a stunning example of the joy and the power of the American musical. What film flips your yarmulke, Wise?
Wise: Adapted by Alfred Uhry from his Pulitzer Prize winning play of the same name, Driving Miss Daisy (1989) stars Jessica Tandy as an aging Jewish widow whose son hires a chauffeur named Hoke (Morgan Freeman) after a series of traffic mishaps causes her to lose her license. Despite her original reluctance, Miss Daisy gradually begins to appreciate Hoke's talents and to recognize the limitations he has had to endure in the pre-Civil Rights era Atlanta.
Werth: The Help doesn't sound so original anymore.
Wise: Driving Miss Daisy is a little different, I think, because she remains a cantankerous character and never positions herself as a savior to oppressed people. Plus, this is a movie about two individuals recognizing their equality rather than a group of powerless servants getting a boost from a spunky gal with other goals on her mind.
Werth: Who knew driving to the Piggly Wiggly could be so trans-formative?
Wise: But it's certainly not all uplifting race drama. The movie is actually quite funny, especially in scenes with Dan Aykroyd playing Miss Daisy's son Boolie and Patti LuPone as his social climbing wife Florine. Determined to assimilate into Atlanta's Protestant bourgeoisie, Boolie and Florine throw an ostentatious Christmas party tricked out in the most garish display of red and green lights south of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.
Werth: Nothing gets you into the Protestant bourgeoisie like a color-themed holiday party.
Wise: Of course the main reason to see this film is the heartbreaking performances by Tandy and Freeman as they move from mutual distrust to grudging respect to deep affection. Tandy won an Oscar for her nuanced performance, and it's a shame that Freeman didn't also win a statuette for his equally fine depiction of a man battered by circumstance finally achieving his dignity.
Werth: Speaking of battered, is fried food kosher?
Wise: Let's find a rabbi and ask. Tune in next week for more religious experiences on Film Gab!
