All Quiet on the Western Front
Nominated Producer: Malte Grunert
Director: Edward Berger
Writers: Edward Berger, Lesley Paterson, Ian Stokell, (novel by Erich Maria Remarque)
Cast: Felix Kammerer, Albrecht Schuch, Devid Striesow, Andreas Döhler, Sebastian Hülk, Luc Feit, Michael Wittenborn, Anton von Lucke, Michael Pitthan, Aaron Hilmer, Moritz Klaus, Adrian Grünewald, Edin Hasanovic, Daniel Brühl, and others.
Plot: During World War I, young Paul Bäumer and his friends, driven by boyish dreams of military glory (encouraged by the establishment) enlist in the German army and soon find themselves in the trenches on the Western front. Life on the front is not what they expected. They’re chronically underfed, under supplied, and under enemy fire. Quickly, an older soldier they affectionately call Kat takes them under his wing. Meanwhile, writer and politician Matthias Erzberger begins to realize Germany cannot win the war and hopes to end the catastrophic loss of life and waste of resources through diplomacy, leading him to meet with French officials to sign an armistice.
Why It Should Win
When my daughter and I watched the 1930 All Quiet on the Western Front as part of our Best Picture Project, we kept wondering, “How can you possibly get anywhere using trench warfare?”
My husband offered at the time, “The idea is not to gain territory. It’s to hold territory.”
And I kept saying things like, “But it’s a war of conquest! If you trap yourself in a trench, you’re setting yourself up to be besieged.”
One thing both the 1930 film and this one show incredibly effectively (just in case there were any doubts) is the failings and overall inefficacy of trench warfare. You watch and think, “Wow. This just seems pointless like they’re not gaining any ground, and they’re setting themselves up to be starved and then murdered horribly.”
So my favorite part of this film comes at the very end in a written epilogue (a little post script on the screen) that tells the audience how little the Western front moved during World War I. (It’s such a ridiculously small distance. It’s like five inches! I’ll turn on the movie and check. “More than three million soldiers died here often while fighting to gain only a few hundred metres of ground.” So more than five inches, but still…)
This quiet little post script is my favorite thing about this film because it lets the audience know that yes, your impressions are correct. They are gaining no ground, making no significant progress. They’re just being starved and slaughtered. It’s horrible.
There’s a lot to love about this new German version of All Quiet on the Western Front. (The novel is German, of course, written by Erich Maria Remarque who had to flee to Switzerland and then the United States when the Nazi party didn’t approve of the book’s anti-war sentiment. Goebbels didn’t like it, which is not surprising. It’s blatant anti-war propaganda. It’s not subtle. Even my daughter could identify it as propaganda, so obviously Goebbels would know.)
James Friend’s cinematography is gorgeous (and nominated). So many stark images jump out at us, emphasizing the beauty of the natural landscape and the horrors that war brings there. The film is also Oscar nominated for International Feature Film, Makeup and Hairstyling, Score, Sound, Visual Effects, Adapted Screenplay and Production Design.
It’s quite different from the 1930 version. Back then, not surprisingly, the emphasis was largely on the non-threatening humanity of the German army. They were boys. They were just like us (and seemed even more so because the actors spoke English with American accents). They were starving, under-supplied, drastically different than the calculating, cunning, feasting German war machines audiences had just seen in movies like Wings. This version partially shifts focus to an issue that might seem more pressing to German audiences. Why in God’s name did German leaders agree to sign that notoriously punitive armistice? There’s a large subplot starring Daniel Brühl (who I always remember from the movie Rush) focused on this issue.
The acting style is more naturalistic (as opposed to the incredibly stagey, somewhat over-the-top classical acting of the 1930 film). Felix Kammerer gives a gripping lead performance as Paul. And Albrecht Schuch brings so much nuance, realism, and complexity to Kat. Some of the action sequences are incredibly gripping (maybe even gruesome!), gritty. They provide abundant food for thought. As I watched, I could not help but notice the piles of corpses, the gas attacks, the burning alive of some soldiers, the ripping of old names off uniforms, the way the men were viewed as interchangeable meat being sent off to die. I kept thinking, “Hmm. Imagine being a young man viewing this kind of casual carnage all around you. How might those experiences influence your thinking if you were ever put in a position of power?”
Why It Shouldn’t Win
I liked the 1930 film better, and so my daughter. She thought it was more special, more memorable. We’re both especially captivated by the scene when they visit Kemmerick in the infirmary, and he starts complaining about a deep pain in his foot. I can’t tell you the horror that thrilled through me. I wanted to beg him, “Don’t look! No need to check! Keep your eyes up there! Go to sleep!” There’s this horrible anticipation. These days, you’re more likely to get that kind of mounting dread in a horror movie. The scene is exceptionally well done. Neither of us has forgotten it. Now, in this version, something does happen in the infirmary that genuinely surprised me and made me cry out in horror, but I’m so impressed by the way that older film grabbed us by the soul despite its stagey acting and other limitations. Maybe aspects of the movie don’t seem entirely realistic, but Kemmerick’s horror and the dread it makes us feel does.
Initially, I thought this film was less on the nose with its anti-war propaganda, but the longer I watched, I realized it wasn’t. (To be clear, I’m not anti-anti-war. I’m just not a huge fan of propaganda, although I did love Mrs. Miniver. Hopefully that’s the only thing I have in common with Joseph Goebbels. He liked it, too. He thought it was very effective propaganda.)
Although the material about the armistice is interesting, I’m not sure I like the focus being pulled away from Paul and his cohort. Maybe on a second watch I would change my mind, though.
There’s also one death late in the film that I think is done completely wrong in this version. I find the randomness in the earlier version much more moving and horrifying. I will admit, though, that the way it’s done here makes a strong point about how violence affects young minds.
I don’t expect this film to win Best Picture, but I do expect it to win Best International Film. It would certainly be a worthy winner. And I’m glad we get the opportunity to see a German take on this German source material that somehow became immortalized as an American movie.
The Fabelmans
Nominated Producer(s): Kristie Macosko Krieger, Steven Spielberg, and Tony Kushner
Director: Steven Spielberg
Writers: Steven Spielberg, Tony Kushner
Cast: Gabriel LaBelle, Michelle Williams, Paul Dano, Seth Rogen, Judd Hirsch, Julia Butters, Keeley Karsten, Jeannie Berlin, Robin Bartlett, Sam Rechner, Chloe East, Oakes Fegley, Isabelle Kusman, Mateo Zoryan, Alina Brace, Birdie Boria, Jan Hoag, David Lynch, Crystal the Monkey, and others.
Plot: Young Sammy Fabelman discovers he loves the movies and wants to make movies of his own. But his love of filmmaking leads him to uncover an uncomfortable secret that could cause his close-knit family to unravel. The same love of filmmaking helps him to understand and survive this crisis.
Why It Should Win
I have a special place in my heart for The Fabelmans because the mother/son relationship reminds my daughter of her relationship with me. I find that both touching and flattering since Steven Spielberg obviously loves his mother and presents the fictional version of her with a loving eye despite her eccentricities and failings.
So of course, I like this movie. Thanks to my daughter’s fondness for it, we’ve seen it several times. And I’m sure see it we’ll many more in the future. We all like it.
But apart from that, I think the movie should be a serious contender for Best Picture, and I hope Spielberg wins Best Director. (I don’t see how Everything Everywhere All at Once can lose, but I do think Spielberg has a shot at Director.)
I know Steven Spielberg is not exactly an unknown talent who’s never gotten recognition, but here’s why I think the movie is so remarkable. It is the most beautiful, positive, uplifting, heartwarming, loving, and yet still honest movie I have ever seen about divorce.
There’s a profound tragedy at the center of this film. A family is broken. A boy’s heart is broken. His innocence is lost, in a way. His mother is overwhelmed with conflicting feelings and crushed with guilt (not to mention grief for her mother). His father is distraught. And yet, so much in this film is uplifting and joyous, and at the end of the movie we’re all just so happy. We feel as if we’ve seen a warm-hearted family comedy. But that’s not true. In this movie, we see divorce, betrayal, secrets, lies, anti-Semitism, bullying—a whole Gordian knot of seemingly unsolvable, complex family issues. And how do they get solved? Well, you make a movie! And everybody has such a good time watching it! (And you don’t put the horizon in the middle of the screen.)
I’ve seen some excellent, brutally honest films about divorce. But they certainly don’t make me feel like this movie did. Spielberg has such a kind eye. I aspire to be as honest and as kind myself in my own writing. It’s very tricky to find that balance, especially if you’re trying to recount events that actually happened and affected multiple people. I’m impressed and cheered by this movie.
So many moments have a potential for ugliness, but end up beautiful. Sammy’s girlfriend tells him that, of course, their relationship won’t last. (The “of course” part is because he’s Jewish. She’s obsessed with Christianity…in a somewhat surprising way. This character could be portrayed in such an ugly way, but instead she comes across as a sunny, bubbly sweetheart who gave him many happy memories.) I love the way that even though characters’ flaws are not masked, the audience totally understands why Sammy has fond feelings for them. (You know what else I like, a moment I love? Sammy’s grandma does not want that monkey in the house, but at the end of the fight at the table, she’s the one comforting the monkey. I just love that.)
Gabriel LaBelle is amazing in his role. If he acted the same way outside the movie, and you just happened to bump into him on the street, you’d say to yourself, “Why that kid reminds me of a young Steven Spielberg!”
And Michelle Williams could not possibly be bigger as Sammy’s mom. She sparkles and smiles and cries and fills the whole screen no matter what she’s doing. The two scenes related to the slap seem so grounded in painful realism, and it’s heart breaking to watch her watch the movie.
“The acting, the family dynamic, the costuming and set design,” raves my daughter. “This movie has it all! Plus, it’s Steven Spielberg!”
Why It Shouldn’t Win
Steven Spielberg didn’t win a competitive Oscar until 1994, so I’m not sure, “It’s Steven Spielberg,” makes quite the case for winning my daughter suggests. I remember watching him win for Schindler’s List and thinking, “Well finally!” (From my point of view as a high school freshman, Spielberg had made some of the most iconic movies of my lifetime. It took forever for him to win Best Director!) Spielberg is kind of like Meryl Streep. His films are usually acclaimed, and he gets nominated a lot, but he’s only won three competitive Oscars, and two of them are for Schindler’s List.
Maybe The Fabelmans should win. But will it? How can it?
At this point, I just can’t imagine anything beating Everything Everywhere All at Once (which would make a very worthy winner). To be honest, the film I like the most almost never wins Best Picture. I get more excited about the nominations for Best Picture than the winner. (Plus, by that time, everyone’s so tired of watching the Oscar broadcast, and everybody but me wants to go to bed.)
I like this movie because it takes traumatic material and makes it heart-warming and delightful. And Spielberg makes it look easy. This movie looks like it took no effort, like it just appeared out of a dream of childhood. (And that’s obviously not true. Making movies is a lot of work.) It’s also fun to watch because The Fabelmans feels like it’s full of Easter eggs—except that usually Easter eggs are for “true fans,” but these are all elements from incredibly famous Spielberg films that basically everyone in the world has seen a zillion times. (We also got really excited to see David Lynch. His inclusion felt timely to us because we’d just watched all of Twin Peaks and his Dune. It was like Steven Spielberg was thinking of us personally when he cast Lynch as John Ford.)
Surely many Academy members must be drawn to the way Sammy copes with adversity by discovering the magic of movies, the power of cinema. This is an edifying film that gave me insight into how to perfectly portray imperfect people. It actively, directly helped me in my real life since I’m working on both narrative non-ficiton and a novel with autobiographical components. It also boosted my mood because I constantly worry my own imperfections will make me a bad mother, and my daughter loved the imperfect mother in this film and said she was like me.
You may have noticed that these are just more reasons why I think The Fabelmans should win Best Picture. Truly, any complaints I have about it are overshadowed by how much my entire family liked it (except the seven-year-old who doesn’t like movies).
Everything Everywhere All at Once is more likely to win Best Picture, though.
Tár
Nominated Producer(s): Todd Field, Alexandra Milchan, and Scott Lambert
Director: Todd Field
Writer: Todd Field
Cast: Cate Blanchett, Noémie Merlant, Nina Hoss, Sophie Kauer, Mark Strong, Zethphan D. Smith-Gneist, Allan Corduner, Mila Bogojevic, Alma Löhr, Julian Glover, and others.
Plot: Lydia Tár is a gifted, celebrated musician, conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, but the way she’s conducting her own affairs is beginning to draw scrutiny and may cost her everything.
Why It Should Win
Tár is probably my favorite film this year. One of the first things I got truly excited about this Oscar season was the cinematography in Tár. My love of the shot composition in this film hit me hard. Every shot is so dynamic (not in the sense of dynamic range). I mean the shots seem alive with motion. The eye is drawn deeper and deeper into the scene. I was not expecting such exciting visuals in a film about music. We are actively looking at everything we see in this movie.
I remember telling my husband with rabid enthusiasm, “I lack the technical vocabulary to describe what Florian Hoffmeister is doing, but wow! It is working! Clearly he is doing it on purpose, and to great effect!” I was brimming over with excitement, but part of me didn’t trust myself. I kept thinking, “Is this just because our TV upstairs isn’t 4K?” (I have trouble with 4K sometimes.) Then I saw that the cinematography was receiving all kinds of nominations and felt reassured. In fact, when Hoffmeister’s was the last name called for an Oscar nomination in this category, and I felt this massive (unexpected) rush of relief and joy, I realized, “Oh, I do still care about the Oscars.” (The last time I felt that excited about a cinematography nomination was when Jarin Blashke got nominated for The Lighthouse.)
I’ve read a bit now about what Hoffmeister is attempting to do—making it appear that Lydia is always being watched, lighting her face in different ways to show the waxing and waning of her power and prestige. I could not have described to you in technical terms what he was doing to achieve the effect, but as an audience member, I felt the effect. It works so well.
And here’s the thing, Cate Blanchett is the perfect actor to drop into scenes like this. I’m not that interested in fashion and costumes, but I am when she’s wearing them because she wears them like it’s an activity. In so many scenes of Tár we watch her listening to music, and she lets us see that she hears it. She conducts and composes it (or is frustrated while attempting to compose it) with her entire body. It’s a surprisingly physical performance for a film that begins in such a misleadingly restrained way.
There’s a scene done as a long take. I did not even notice while I was watching that it was a long take, but I felt this horrible sense of, “Oh no! There’s no relief from this! She’s torturing him!” (And see, the movie is so unobtrusive about what it’s doing. It’s just working. Without considering the mechanics, I’m reacting to it properly.) That scene is so amazing that I had to pause the movie and start writing the review because I was so blown away by the power of that scene. Then I thought, “What are you doing? You can’t write the review before you’ve seen the movie!” I was so blindsided by my own excitement, though, because I was feeling rather depressed about movies like maybe watching them is a self-indulgent waste of time.
That is one of the film’s strongest scenes. You watch the student’s leg, shaking faster and faster. I thought, “If I were this student, I would try to learn from the person teaching this masterclass and have opinions on my own time, but if I were the teacher, I would not torture this student.” It’s a brilliant scene. It gives you the best and worst of Lydia Tár all in one long take (that I didn’t notice was a long take).
The other scene I loved also made me deeply uncomfortable. We learn that Lydia’s daughter has been bullied by another child, so Lydia approaches this child at the school and threatens her in an incredibly inappropriate way. (It’s so sinister. It’s like something that happens to naughty children in storybooks. Not nice storybooks. Things written by Roald Dahl or Neil Gaiman, children’s horror.) Immediately, I got this uncomfortable feeling and my body remembered, “This is exactly how I felt watching that awful scene in Little Children when Jackie Earle Haley’s character goes on that date. At the end?” Not until after I’d watched the film again with my husband and our older son and daughter did I suddenly notice that Todd Field directed both films. So maybe my brain wasn’t working so particularly well, but the scene is.
Cate Blanchett deserves another Oscar for this performance. I love characters like this. She’s so complicated. You watch and think, “Okay, well she’s a bit egotistical, but she does seem brilliant. I agree with her there. Yes, she likes to be in charge, but she’s a conductor, so that checks out. Yes, she’s popping pills all the time, but her life is stressful and busy. Her assistant seems to be in love with her or something, but that’s her proble…ohhhh.” There’s so much about her that is compelling and even praiseworthy, but there are these huge red flags that come more and more frequently the longer we spend with her. Some things are deeply problematic, like, “Why are you stealing your wife’s heart medication? That’s not nice,” especially because she’s able to acquire it herself through other means. That’s extremely selfish, to steal a medication your wife needs for her heart and leave the country without saying anything! She does seem to love her wife and child, though. But then we get that troubling incident at the school.
The supporting cast is great, too. I love one scene with Julian Glover who plays her retired mentor (whom she respects and treats well despite the fact that her fame and probably her talents surpass his). She’s fishing around asking vague questions about sexual impropriety (because she’s worried her behavior may destroy her career), and he’s immediately like, “Why?! What have you heard!?? I’m too old! They can’t do anything to me now!” that kind of vibe. It cracks me up.
That’s another great thing about the film. Initially, she’s asked about sexism, and she acts like it’s not real. And yet, when she behaves in ways she learned from her male mentor, people finally come for her in a way they never did for him. (Perhaps I should reword that, but I won’t.) The movie is filled with moral ambiguity, problems of ethics and pragmatism that force the audience to think through complex situations. It’s very fun to watch.
Plus, apparently, there was studio marketing that made many people believe Lydia Tár is a real person. (She is fictional.) There’s a moment in the film when she hears screams in the woods. The screams are taken from The Blair Witch Project. That’s pretty fun, don’t you think?
Why It Shouldn’t Win
Tár is my favorite film of the year, but it has a sinister edge that surely not everyone will appreciate. (In that way, it’s similar to another Todd Field movie, Little Children. That’s a great film. I love it. But it’s not for everyone. Some people will be very put off by the subject matter and unsettling moral ambiguity that keeps creeping in.)
When I showed the rest of my family Tár, they didn’t seem as blown away as I was. The Fabelmans is a movie that the whole family can enjoy. Everyone should like it. Despite the traumatic events at its center, the film is broadly pleasant and zips right along on a second or third watch. Tár is slower. It’s darker. It’s morally murkier (which is funny because both films highlight a woman’s problematic romantic relationship. Sort of.)
I am positive that some people will find the first ten minutes or so extremely, off-puttingly boring. I will also promise you that on a second watch (once you’ve seen the whole story unfold, seen the ending) the beginning of the film comes into sharper focus and does not seem one bit boring at all. But I’m positive this won’t be for everyone. Movies like The Fabelmans and Everything Everywhere All at Once are so accessible and fun. Even with a grittier, darker film like All Quiet on the Western Front, you know what you’re watching right away. In this film, the audience will probably need a few minutes to get acclimated.
There’s some mild scandal, too, because Lydia Tár is not a real person, and perhaps making a fictional film about a character some would deem an offensively, stereotypically predatory lesbian is a little sketchy. But praise for the movie seems more widespread than any scandal. I just can’t imagine a film like this winning in a year when we have Everything Everywhere All at Once and The Fabelmans, two films everyone can easily, readily enjoy.