The Father
Nominated Producers: David Parfitt, Jean-Louis Livi, and Philippe Carcassonne
Director: Florian Zeller
Writers: Christopher Hampton, Florian Zeller (from his stage play)
Cast: Anthony Hopkins, Olivia Colman, Rufus Sewell, Imogen Poots, Olivia Williams, Mark Gatiss, Ayesha Dharker
Plot: Something funny is going on. Anne thinks that her aging father Anthony can’t live on his own anymore, and she’s worried because she won’t be there to check on him every day. She’s met someone. She’s fallen in love. She’s moving to Paris. (What nonsense! Paris! They don’t even speak English there!) Anne says that if Anthony keeps fighting with his live-in nurses, causing them to quit, then she’ll have to find a more drastic solution. For his part, Anthony is suspicious and resentful. What is his daughter up to? How does she expect him to get along with people who steal from him? He’s perfectly capable of living on his own! He’s dressed, isn’t he! He’s wearing his watch…isn’t he? (Where is his watch?) But when strange people start turning up his flat (with the audacity to suggest that it’s not his flat), Anthony begins to realize that more is wrong than simply Anne’s attitude. It’s some kind of conspiracy. It must be. And why do people keep taking his watch? Where is his watch, anyway? Something funny is going on.
Why It Should Win:
Anthony Hopkins gives the best performance of his career in The Father. Maybe that sounds too extreme. Sarah, you’ll protest, what about The Silence of the Lambs? I’ll readily grant that Hannibal Lecter is the most iconic character Hopkins has ever played, and that the character became iconic because of Hopkins’s intense and memorable interpretation of him. But Darth Vader is similarly iconic. I ask you, was that James Earl Jones’s greatest performance? (He was awfully good as King Lear. I hear that Hopkins was, too, more recently, but I haven’t seen his Lear yet.)
How about this? Anthony Hopkins gives the best performance of the year (this past year, 2020) in The Father. Honestly the performance seems even greater because of the painful knowledge that it can’t be rewarded by the Academy. (Hopkins is nominated in the same category as Chadwick Boseman, also giving one of the most outstanding performances of the year and the best performance of his career. Boseman will, of course, win the Oscar for Best Actor. He has to win because he died so tragically young, and the Academy will never have another chance to reward him. Don’t get me wrong. Though I’ve just praised Hopkins so highly, even I believe Chadwick Boseman deserves the Oscar, and I will be personally disappointed if Boseman doesn’t win. I love Chadwick Boseman. But Hopkins is doing such fantastic work! The whole situation is heartbreaking. I’d much prefer a world where Boseman was still alive and the two were neck-in-neck racing toward Oscar night.)
With this tremendous lead performance, Hopkins carries The Father, though Olivia Colman also must be there to react to him, both to lend poignancy to the emotions he generates and as a reliable point of reference for the audience. Colman is marvelous, too, by the way, and thoroughly deserves her nomination for Best Supporting Actress. (If she somehow wins, it will be awfully sad for Glenn Close, so I half dread that outcome, but Colman would be a deserving winner.) Her performance touched me deeply. It’s so easy for me to empathize with her character, Anne, the daughter in torment because she can never do enough to take care of her ailing father who is by turns cruel to her, grateful to her, enraged at her, and simply helpless in his almost child-like longing for her.
The Father is cleverly written and reminds me a bit of another film I loved in 2020, a movie that the Academy chose not to recognize. (For a while, I hoped vainly that the Academy might give it a screenplay nomination. If I tell you that film’s name, I might spoil it for you since I’ve said it’s quite similar to The Father, so if you want to watch that movie, happy hunting!) Director Florian Zeller hired Christopher Hampton to adapt his acclaimed French stage play (Le Pere) into an English-language movie. All the time, Zeller envisioned Hopkins in the lead role and no one else, so he named the protagonist Anthony, gave him Hopkins’s own birthdate, and hoped for the best. Fortunately for audiences (whose experience will be greatly enhanced by his presence), Hopkins agreed to take the role.
The film is also nominated in Best Adapted Screenplay and could win there (though smart money is on Chloé Zhao for Nomadland). And the screenplay definitely deserves acclaim. Zeller (and Hampton) take the unusual approach of showing us the life of an elderly man with dementia from his own point of view. (As I’ve said, there is another 2020 release that works with a similar concept. I do wonder now if it was also partially inspired by Zeller’s stage play, though it’s fully possible (even likely) that the projects were written independently, with neither writer influenced by the other.) Both the eerie vibe and the energized performance of Hopkins transform a topic that younger audiences might otherwise avoid into a captivating story that they would watch with breathless curiosity. As a result of the novel approach, instead of a weepy drama, we get a crackling thriller that occasionally dissolves into heart-rending tragedy.
Olivia Williams, Rufus Sewell, Imogen Poots, Mark Gatiss, and Ayesha Dharker round out the small but effective cast.
The film is also nominated for Best Production Design which I honestly hope it wins because the carefully constructed physical setting is so significant to the story and the effectiveness of the film overall.
Why It Shouldn’t Win:
Despite how exciting this film is to experience, I find it so hard to imagine enough Academy members voting for a movie about an eighty-something man with dementia for Best Picture of the year. For one thing, it might be kind of a bad look. Think of all of the fascinating, widely embraced films that didn’t make the cut. So many people were hoping for Best Picture nominations for Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, One Night in Miami, Da 5 Bloods. (Obviously these are all films with black directors and mostly black casts. But I’m not simply saying that black audiences hoped they would be nominated. I hoped they would be nominated.) And given the way last summer played out, it’s not hard to see why a film about black history would make a fitting Best Picture nominee in 2021. Academy voters also could have nominated a (quasi)blockbuster that actually debuted in theaters, a real Hollywood movie designed as a big screen experience and starring Tom Hanks, News of the World. They didn’t. They also blew off hits that actually released early in 2020 before theaters closed like The Invisible Man.
So voters might worry about seeming out of touch if Best Picture turns out to be a quiet film about an elderly white man suffering from dementia adapted from a French play. And I really, truly believe voters do think about factors like that because for the past several years, the press has brutally excoriated the Academy after every single announcement of nominees and winners.
The Father is an excellent film, but is it the very best film of 2020? Is it a film that is particularly representative of 2020? (True, we were all stuck rattling around our houses, and everyone was worried about our worsening health.) Still, The Father doesn’t really fit the bill of being the Best Picture most representative of the disastrous (and occasionally enlightening) year we all just experienced.
Judas and the Black Messiah
Nominated Producers: Shaka King, Charles D. King, and Ryan Coogler
Director: Shaka King
Writers: Will Berson, Shaka King
Cast: Daniel Kaluuya, LaKeith Stanfield, Dominique Fishback, Jesse Plemmons, Lil Rel Howery, Dominique Thorne, Ashton Sanders, Algee Smith, Darrell Britt-Gibson, Robert Longstreet, Martin Sheen, and others.
Plot: Bill O’Neal can’t catch a break. Just when he’s figured out a great way to steal cars—by impersonating an FBI agent—the police catch him, and he’s handed over to the real FBI. The good news is, the bureau offers O’Neal a deal. They’ll forget all about his crimes if he actually does some work for them. The bad news is they want him to infiltrate the Black Panther Party’s Chicago chapter, focusing specifically on the activities of charismatic leader Chairman Fred Hampton, a man whose nefarious agenda includes feeding breakfast to school children (and, to be fair, indoctrinating them in the Party’s ideals). The longer Bill works with Chairman Fred, the more he becomes aware of all the good the man is trying to do. But he also finds out what the Party does to traitors, not to mention what the FBI will do if he fails to fulfill his obligations to them. So now instead of using a fake FBI badge to steal cars, Bill uses a real FBI badge to facilitate the murder of a man who works to help the oppressed.
Why It Should Win:
You can’t possibly get lost in this movie. You would have to try to misunderstand. The title gives us a roadmap and helps shape our experience of the film before the action even starts. Most people in the United States (Christian or not) know what to expect when they hear a title like Judas and the Black Messiah. They know this will be a story of betrayal, of a group of powerful people who want to destroy a man not for his vices but because of his virtues, of a tormented person who betrays a friend for promise of a reward.
We meet our Judas first, Bill O’Neal (Best Supporting Actor nominee LaKeith Stanfield). I’m not sure why Stanfield is nominated for Best Supporting Actor when he clearly plays the film’s protagonist, and Stanfield doesn’t know either. But I am glad to see him Oscar nominated for an incredibly powerful, emotionally resonant performance. You have no idea how intensely I wanted this poor man to escape the snare that a conniving government and his own poor decisions had set for him. (It becomes a bit funny because you keep wanting to yell, “Get out! Get out!” at the actor who yelled, “Get out!” in Get Out.) I’ve been a fan of Stanfield’s work for a long time, so I don’t care what the Academy nominates him for as long as he gets recognition. (For me, Stanfield’s nomination was both the most baffling shock and the most pleasant surprise of Oscar season this year.) His excellent lead performance and the carefully crafted (nominated) screenplay (which teases out as much meaning and structure from the title allusion as humanly possible) make the film more than worthy of a Best Picture nomination.
But Judas and the Black Messiah has still more to offer. For one thing, the film nabbed a much-deserved Cinematography nomination for Sean Bobbitt’s eye-catching, exquisitely composed shots. One thing I particularly love about the film’s visuals is the energy that each image conveys. Also fabulous is the visual symbolism of some moments. (And you would expect that from a film that makes such free use of figurative language in its title.) Probably the best of these moments comes early when Bill is trapped in the car he is trying to steal, beset by equal threat of danger on all sides. No matter what he does now, Bill is trapped, and there’s no way out. That’s pretty much the movie.
The film also features excellent supporting performances, most conspicuously by Dominique Fishback (nominated at the BAFTAs) and Jessie Plemmons as a conflicted (but disappointingly resolute) FBI agent.
I’ve saved the best for last, of course. There couldn’t be a Judas without a Messiah. Fred Hampton is brought to life by a magnificent Daniel Kaluuya who seems like the clear frontrunner for Best Supporting Actor. (I’d give him an Oscar just for the compelling way he says, “the Black Panther Party.”) Kaluuya’s performance is so good because he gives Chairman Fred a distinctive look and sound, makes him a larger-than-life character, but he also coaxes out subtle nuances of his personality, hopes, convictions, and fears as a real, three-dimensional, human man. Kaluuya will probably win the Oscar.
Why It Shouldn’t Win:
Remember last summer—riots and protests, brutality and “accidents,” plans to dismantle the police, Black Lives Matter, Blue Lives Matter, the murder of George Floyd? Remember, too, how people said, “How can it be okay to protest when we’re supposed to stay in our homes to avoid spreading the virus? How can we gather when we’re supposed to be in quarantine? Why can George Floyd have a funeral when my dead friend and/or relative can’t?” Any of this ringing a bell?
Wouldn’t it make sense if the Best Picture winner representative of this time period told the story of corrupt law enforcement killing a righteous black man from the point of view of someone stuck between a rock and a hard place with no good options, only choices that might destroy him on all sides?
Not surprisingly given the recent political climate, 2020 brought us a whole crop of excellent movies specifically about black history and how black characters were harmed by a hostile government or trapped into a system in which they ended up turning on each other. Judas and the Black Messiah is the only one of these films honored with a Best Picture nomination. The only one. So if you want to vote for a movie that dramatizes these issues (highly relevant today) then Judas and the Black Messiah is the only option. (To be fair, The Trial of the Chicago 7 touches on this subject, too, but only as one of its many themes.)
Judas and the Black Messiah stands out in another way, too. In this group of eight nominees, it is one of the very few films that seems like a real, good, old fashioned movie. It looks designed to fill a big screen. It’s full of action. The protagonists are made incredibly appealing to us, and we can identify the true antagonists with similar ease.
If you’re trying to vote on the very best movie of 2020, Judas and the Black Messiah screams both movie and 2020. You’ll notice that I’m not actually giving reasons why it couldn’t win here. That’s because I believe it’s a serious dark horse in this race and a genuine threat to Nomadland and The Trial of the Chicago 7, the frontrunners for the moment.
If you ask me, the one true obstacle to its victory might be that some Academy members may still view the Black Panthers in a negative light. The propaganda campaign against them was, after all, pretty pervasive. And in fairness, the Panthers were activists, not saints. Plus, although this film does show some Panthers committing acts of extreme violence (albeit with added context that the general public didn’t always get at the time), the movie does pretty much set up the Panthers as the good guys and the FBI as absolute, mustache-twirling villains. In terms of the movie’s own title, if Chairman Fred is the Black Messiah and Bill is Judas, then the FBI is all the officials who conspired to crucify Jesus. The problem here is that some voters might view American history a bit differently (or at least with more nuance). A one-phrase metaphor doesn’t allow much room for nuance, but it attributes just about the greatest level of villainy possible to the United States government. Some voters may not feel the government deserves that. It is worth noting, too, that throughout history, blaming groups for killing Jesus has led to horrifically great evil. So it’s a pretty dangerous metaphor they’re playing with in that title.
Still, this is one of the few films that I believe has an actual chance of winning Best Picture this year.
Mank
Nominated Producers: Ceán Chaffin, Eric Roth and Douglas Urbanski
Director: David Fincher
Writers: Jack Fincher
Cast: Gary Oldman, Amanda Seyfried, Lily Collins, Arliss Howard, Ferdinand Kingsley, Tuppence Middleton, Tom Pelphrey, Sam Troughton, Monika Gossmann, Tom Burke, Joseph Cross, Jamie McShane, Bill Nye (the Science Guy), Charles Dance, and others.
Plot: Hollywood, 1940. Witty, cynical screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz is washed up. Is his problem that he drank too much, talked too much…cared too much? At any rate, the car accident didn’t help. Now he’s lying in bed at the mercy of Orson Welles, the new young genius in town who has permission to make any movie exactly as he wants for RKO Studios, and Orson wants Mank to write the screenplay. The film will tell the story of a powerful man in decline. In the screenplay, he’s Charles Foster Kane, but everybody in Hollywood knows that Mank is actually writing about wealthy publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst. In better days, Mank was a frequent dinner guest at Hearst Castle in San Simeon where he often sat at the right hand of the great man himself who enjoyed his witty quips. A close friend of Hearst’s mistress, film star Marion Davies, Mank found himself in the total embrace of a select social circle. So what has made him turn against them?
Why It Should Win:
Even if you don’t find the plot of Mank captivating, there are plenty of reasons to enjoy the experience of this movie about the writing of what some say is the greatest film of all time, Citizen Kane. The captivating (and nominated) black-and-white cinematography of Erik Messerschmidt and the almost overwhelming score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross (also nominated), plus the (nominated) period costume design, and the arresting (and nominated) make-up and hairstyling all work together to recreate an immersive version of the fabled Hollywood of yesterday (back when the sign still said Hollywoodland). As you watch, you feel like you’re there—oh, not actually in 1930s Hollywood, no, but in some dazzling hyper-real dream of it (like the pervasive, multisensory theming you might experience at Disneyland).
The performances in Mank are also extremely captivating. I dare you to resist the charming, pleasant, wheezy way Gary Oldman tosses off quips and sad comic observations as lead character, screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz. Honestly, the movie is worth watching just to get two hours of Oldman’s easy-on-the-ears vocalizations as the highly witty Citizen Kane scribe.
Possibly even better—because of the way she makes such an impression with much less screentime—is Amanda Seyfried as Marion Davies, the big-eyed, wiser-than-she-seems, smiling MGM starlet and longtime mistress of William Randolph Hearst, well known as the inspiration for Mank’s greatest screenplay Citizen Kane.
Charles Dance plays Hearst and adds a welcome hint of menace and grandeur to the film. Also excellent in small but key supporting roles are Arliss Howard as Louis B. Mayor, Ferdinand Kingsley as Irving Thalberg, Lilly Collins as Mank’s eventually devoted British secretary, and Tuppence Middleton as Mank’s longsuffering wife (who is sick and tired of being called Poor Sara (in a joking reference, which is never explained, to a nineteenth century novel called Poor Sarah, or The Indian Woman, about the plight of Native Americans). (This film expects you to do your own research about who is who and what they’re talking about.)
If you’re a huge fan of Citizen Kane, then you might like Mank. Even if you’re a bit underwhelmed by Citizen Kane (like me), you may find quite a bit to enjoy in this film. (Just the fact that Fincher is using a screenplay written by his late father is draw enough for me.) (Please don’t hate me for not loving Citizen Kane. I intend to watch the film again soon. Maybe I’ll revise my opinion.)
Why It Shouldn’t Win:
Mank has ten Oscar nominations this year, considerably more than any other film, and yet nobody expects it to win much of anything. Apparently, nobody likes Mank. (I like Mank, but I’m not anybody much, so I guess that checks out.)
Some critics (and general viewers) have called the film a disappointment. They expected something more from Fincher, something different. Mank is slow and anticlimactic (which for me are two fairly consistent hallmarks of Fincher’s work. His films are always as slow and drawn out as humanly possible, and he only throws in enormous climactic moments when the material demands them. In my experience with Fincher, he allows suspense to build and build and build and build until it reaches such a ridiculous pitch that I’m about to vomit in terror. And then nothing much happens, but for some reason, I feel afraid, shaken. Quite often, for Fincher, the suspense is its own payoff.)
I will grant that Mank is far less suspenseful than most other Fincher films. But it still involves a good bit of terror (existential terror, granted). A man is reflecting on the ruin of his life. Who has ruined it? He has ruined it himself. But how did he ruin it? He knows how he ruined it. But why did he ruin it?
The difference between most men who have made mistakes and ruined their own lives and writers is that writers can take their own worst mistakes and turn them into their greatest triumphs. It’s like a super power writers have (and, in fact, probably the only super power writers have). Hearst is the one who is supposed to have said, “You furnish the pictures, and I’ll furnish the [Spanish American] war.” He derives his power by controlling the national narrative. But Mank steals this power from him by telling Hearst’s own story. And Hearst is powerless to stop him.
I just can’t resist Mank’s metadramatic charm. I mean, yes, obviously, its scenes contain visual and thematic echoes of Citizen Kane. I’ve seen others acknowledge this but then go on to argue that these echoes are empty (no, they’re not!), that they don’t mean anything (yes, they do!).
Here’s what I see in Mank’s story. This writer, Herman J. Mankiewicz, feels that the studio (financed by Hearst) has stolen his own ideas and used them against him, making him complicit in not only a distasteful political propaganda campaign but also the death of a personal friend. Tormented by this, Mank feels that he himself has done evil by not being more careful with his words, so he’ll be more careful with them from now on. First he uses them to secure his own ruin (just as his words contributed to the ruin of a political campaign he believed in and the life of a friend who respected him).
I maintain that Mank deliberately makes a fool of himself (along with Hearst) during his drunken tirade at the dinner party, in just the same way that he deliberately doubled his debt to the studio on election night because he didn’t want to benefit from an idea he had that caused a worthy candidate to lose. But wrecking the dinner party and his own reputation is only part one of Mank’s revenge. In the story, Mank tells as he blusters around the dinner table, a Hearst figure uses propaganda to destroy a politician because the man reminded him of his own failures and his worst, weakest self. This story serves a double purpose. It is, to a degree, a nascent idea for the plot of Citizen Kane. It is also a blueprint for the way Mank plans to destroy Hearst, the man who forced Mank to acknowledge his own failures and his worst, weakest self. Mank plans to use Hearst’s own tactics against him. He will use propaganda to bring Hearst down. He (Mank) will write Hearst’s story, controlling the narrative, shaping Hearst’s public image and legacy. (He may not be aware that he’s going to do that yet, but a deep, dark part of him is cooking it up, I assure you. The story is sloshing around inside him.)
So for me, Mank is about a man who is willing to destroy his life (utterly!) for the purpose of destroying another man’s life (and thereby, perhaps, doing his best work, creating his own legacy, and saving his own soul). It’s another form of his obsessive gambling. Essentially, he’s betting against himself in order to secure a big win. In the process of doing this, of course, he hurts a woman (Marion Davies) who has been a true friend to him and who has never done one thing to deserve having her public image dragged through the mud by him. To make matters more tantalizing, Marion forgives him because she understands. I don’t mean simply that she’s being understanding, tolerant. I mean that she’s seen the darkest parts of Mank, shares some of them, and she knows what he is doing.
It’s a very chilling story if you think of it that way. What’s even more interesting is that Mank may not even be doing some of these things entirely consciously. It’s like he’s driven by impulses he can’t fight. The dark parts of him (his alcoholism, his gambling, his creativity) keep leaking out. He can’t stop them.
But apparently a lot of people think the movie is slow, boring. Also, the part about Mank’s personal investment in the campaign of Upton Sinclair may not be exactly true. (It seems there is more an absence of proof that it is true, than an abundance of proof that it is not. Clearly Fincher’s father took some artistic license writing that screenplay.) For me, the film works as art. No film is ever a substitute for reading the actual history of something. Plus a cautionary tale about the dangers of propaganda in politics seems highly relevant to our own time. (And if what Mank is telling us about the particulars of Mank’s story is untrue, then the movie makes its point about how media can deceive us even more effectively!) Still I sense a general lack of enthusiasm for this film and doubt it will win Best Picture.
Minari
Nominated Producers: Christina Oh
Director: Lee Isaac Chung
Writers: Lee Isaac Chung
Cast: Steven Yeun, Yeri Han, Alan S. Kim, Yuh-Jung Youn, Noel Cho, Will Patton, Esther Moon, Darryl Cox, and others.
Plot: By day, Jacob is an expert chicken sexer. He separates male chicks from females far more quickly than most people. The female chicks will eventually be eaten. The males are instantly discarded (i.e. thrown into the fire) because no one wants to eat them. They don’t taste good. They are useless. Jacob doesn’t want to be a useless male, his life consumed by pointless work that ends in fire and destruction. He wants his life to mean something. He wants to be useful, to feed people. That’s why he’s moved his family from California to Arkansas to start a farm (perhaps an unlikely choice for a Korean family in the 1980s). The rest of the family isn’t quite sold on farming in Arkansas. Jacob’s wife Monica, in particular, is unsettled by the way things are going. To ease Monica’s distress, Jacob invites her mother, Soonja, to come live with them in their humble house on wheels. At first, the children have a hard time getting used to Grandma’s presence, particularly young David. He’s highly skeptical of Grandma’s strange ways and kooky personality. Over time however, the two of them form a strong and special bond. Grandma even shows David how to plant minari (Korean water celery) by the side of the creek. Minari can flourish anywhere, after all, even when it’s trying to put down roots in a strange new place. But just when things on the farm and in the family seem to be heading in the right direction, multiple tragedies strike at once. Can the transplanted family and the tested farm survive under such harsh conditions?
Why It Should Win:
I sort of hope Minari does win. It’s superbly acted, featuring compelling, likeable characters, whose sympathetic charms help to make the story moving. It also has gorgeous, memorable cinematography and a haunting, melodic score. But I’m a writer with a background in reading and analyzing literature, so my favorite aspect, personally, is the brilliant writing.
If Minari were not a film, in fact, it could also succeed fabulously as a short story. Every character is on his or her own journey. Jacob (Best Actor nominee Steven Yeun) wants to succeed as a farmer growing Korean vegetables on his own land. Every day, he goes to work at a thankless day job where he is ceaselessly reminded that males who fail to be useful are routinely destroyed in fire. On his breaks, he smokes his cigarette, stares at that larger plume of smoke (created by the burning of the worthless male chicks), and ponders his fate.
Meanwhile, his wife, Monica (Yeri Han), hates their situation, but worst of all, she feels herself growing to resent her husband and his crazy dreams that have brought them to this undesirable life. She doesn’t think she respects him anymore. She worries she’s lost faith in him. If Jacob were to die tomorrow, would she even care?
Then we have David (Alan S. Kim), a young American child frustrated by the intrusion of his weird Korean grandmother who wants him to drink nasty tea instead of his favorite Mountain Dew. Nobody ever asked him if he wanted his grandmother to move in with him! How can he get rid of this annoying woman? How can he ever accept the idea of sharing his room with her?
And Soonja (Best Supporting Actress nominee Yuh-jung Youn), the grandmother, who has spent her life struggling to provide for her daughter as a single parent after losing her husband in the Korean war. All her life, she has thought of her daughter, and she still contributes as much as she can to her daughter’s family, giving money and helping with chores. If she were unable to contribute, would she have any place in the family at all, would anyone even want her?
Don’t forget Anne (like everyone else does!), David’s much put-upon older sister (played by Noel Cho). While her parents are busy, Anne always has to take care of David and manage the household chores (so tedious and simple that anyone could do them!). Why is Anne tasked with all these pointless, mundane tasks, keeping up with her brother and her grandmother and taking care of the trash? Will she ever get to do anything that actually matters?
And finally, of course, there’s the minari, a Korean plant that can flourish anywhere, provided that it takes root in a place that will nourish it.
These various storylines come together in an extraordinarily effective final act when one big event brings clarity, helping everyone to see their own story in sharper focus.
Minari is also full of warmth, humor, and a lovely lesson that despite what Jacob learns as an expert chicken sexer, we can’t simply look at human beings (or their efforts) for two seconds and effectively judge their worth. People (and places) can surprise you. Will Patton also shines in a supporting role as Paul, a man who is certainly not worthless no matter what other people in town may think of him.
Maybe the best thing about Minari is the seeming universality of a story grounded in such tantalizing specifics. Though I’m not Korean, and I never lived on a farm in Arkansas, I was a child in the 1980s, too, and I found I could relate to so many elements of this story that at times I felt like I was watching a movie about my own life.
Minari is a wonderful film.
Why It Shouldn’t Win:
Minari is an excellent film, my second favorite of the year. On the basis of its own merits, there is no reason it shouldn’t win. But I can think of a reason that it probably won’t win all the same.
Last year a film that was practically a love letter to the Best Picture category, the Sam Mendes, long-take, World War I drama 1917 failed to take home the big prize of the night. The Oscar also didn’t go to Quentin Tarantino’s love letter to the town where movies were born and the Academy gives out its awards, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. What did win the Oscar for Best Picture last year? Parasite, a South Korean Hitchcockian genre-bending class drama about a family in a house.
Now, I will grant you, Minari is about a very different family in a very different house. (The Parasite house has a creepy basement. The Minari house has wheels that make it fun!) In fact, as works of art, the two films have little in common. (I was going to say that they have nothing in common, but both do feature a young boy with a health problem, a marriage in crisis because the wife is losing confidence in her husband, and struggles related to class and income equality.) Tonally, though, Minari and Parasite are incredibly different films. If both were made by an American movie studio (starring mainly white actors), chances are that nobody would associate them at all.
But they aren’t. Both Minari and Parasite star mainly Korean actors and were made by Korean filmmakers. Granted, Bong Joon-ho is South Korean, and Lee Isaac Chung is Korean American. (In fact, his film is semi-autobiographical. Chung grew up on a farm in Arkansas and is the real-life David, though his story is fictionalized for the screen.) People who watch Minari should notice that it’s an extremely American story. It’s about the American dream, and what it means to be an American. But will every voter watch Minari?
It shouldn’t matter that both Minari and Parasite were made by ethnically Korean directors and feature ethnically Korean actors. But it probably will. I just have a feeling that Oscar voters will say, “The Korean film just won Best Picture last year. This year, I’m voting for something else.” Now, granted, Academy membership is shifting all the time, and members (on the whole) are becoming younger and more diverse. But I still think some voters will link Minari and Parasite in their minds and vote for another film, enough voters to deny Minari a Best Picture win this year (especially when you consider that some people simply might not like Minari as much as one of the other nominees).
Still, of this group of nominated films, I’d say that Minari is most likely to win Best Picture. But watch out for Judas and the Black Messiah.