Michelle Williams and the Ellipses of Wendy and Lucy

In the melancholy world of Wendy and Lucy, meaning is conveyed more through looks and gestures than words.

That’s key, given the plot turns on the relationship between down-on-her-luck Wendy, subtly portrayed by Michelle Williams, and Lucy, a lean and tan mutt with soulful brown eyes.

We can’t know the full story between the two, but their affection is palatable.

The simple narrative offers only hints at who Wendy is. Like the mysterious bandage she wears around her ankle, we don’t know what’s underneath it or how she got it, just as we don’t really know how Wendy got to this moment in her life, or where she’ll end up. Like life and the character, the bandage is complicated.

“It’s sort of like Wendy herself,” Williams says. “It’s the physical manifestation of something that’s never really revealed—like a question on top of a question.”

Williams, 28, prompts us to seek answers as she taps into the soul of Wendy and her wounds in a remarkable performance.

Wendy and Lucy is based on Jon Raymond’s short story “Train Choir,” which he and director Kelly Reichardt adapted for the screen. It follows Wendy as she journeys to Alaska for work with her one true friend, Lucy. After her car breaks down in Portland, Oregon, she’s faced with deteriorating finances and the erosion of her emotional spirit when her canine companion—one of the few anchors that still connect her to the world—is lost. For most of the film she searches for Lucy, crossing paths with strangers who are sometimes sympathetic, but often indifferent to her plight. The film opens tomorrow on a limited basis.

Williams’ career has included various roles: from a troubled teen on the television series “Dawson’s Creek,” to films like The Station Agent, I’m Not There and Brokeback Mountain. She received an Academy Award nomination for the latter, in which she plays the wife of closeted cowboy Heath Ledger, who she became involved with off-screen. His tragic death last January has led to unfortunate tabloid attention for the actress and the couple’s young daughter.

With her hair dyed brown, Williams is nearly unrecognizable in Wendy and Lucy. She didn’t wash those dyed locks during the shoot (she notes that she did shower), but I think she looks beautiful, natural—and even a bit ethereal in the film. The portrayal is getting wide acclaim, and recently earned Williams a Spirit Award nomination for Best Female Lead.

In our phone interview, Williams comes off as quiet and self-effacing. When I tell her how I was too shy to approach her at a recent reception for the film, she can relate. “I understand being too shy,” she says, laughing. “I totally understand.”

She calls Wendy a “perfect collaboration” between herself and Reichardt and says she became interested in working with the director through mutual friends.

“They all encouraged me to spend some time with her and thought we would get along really quickly and really easily, and we did,” she says. She was also intrigued by Raymond’s short story, which she read before seeing the script. “It really captured my imagination with its descriptive quality,” she says.

Williams took an organic approach to the role and working with Reichardt, whose earlier feature Old Joy (also co-written by Raymond) is similar to Wendy and Lucy in its contemplative tone. “I knew what Kelly responded to in films and photos and in music,” she says. “I knew the mood of her taste and so I feel like I just tried to saturate myself in that as much as possible.”

She also turned to Reichardt to help fill in the blanks of Wendy’s biography. “I was just like a shotgun that came at her so hard with so many questions, because I was curious as an audience member and as a reader. What happened to this girl? I thought it was so challenging that it’s never really revealed,” Williams says.

Reichardt shared what she and Raymond had been thinking when they wrote the screenplay and asked Williams to make it her own. Part of the process involved improvisation, where the actress would show up for work, get the bones of the scene—like a moment where Wendy stands in line to drop off some recycling—and then had to flesh it out by interacting with the other performers, sometimes non-actors.

Williams’ ability to improvise was also tested by working with Lucy the dog. “There’s a certain amount of improvisation that’s required, especially with untrained animals, because they don’t always do what they’re told,” she says.

The mutt is Reichardt’s real life pet, rescued by her in Coney Island, Brooklyn.

Despite—or perhaps because—the dog kept Williams on her toes, she says Lucy was a good scene partner. “The great thing about working with a dog and it’s true, even though it sounds like a joke, is they’re always in the moment—they don’t have a moment of untruth,” she says. “Also dogs and kids are very unpredictable about who they’re going to take to—you can’t really sway their affections, they’ve kind of got this eerie assessment thing.”

The audience may not know what’s really going on inside Wendy’s head, but like Lucy, we feel a kind of instinctive trust and kinship towards her. That’s because Williams invests the character with a kind of honesty—and humanity—that’s universal. Even in her darkest hours, living out of her car, she takes the time to do things—like wash up and care for herself and Lucy—that remind us how fragile our existence is, how easily we could become Wendy.

That’s something that resonates in today’s tough economic times. “There are more people on the fringes and there’s an everyday threat of sort of slipping through the cracks,” Williams says. “Even though it was made a year ago it’s somehow more relevant now.”

In the end, Wendy’s path remains unclear. Williams has her own ideas about it, but she’s not sharing them, except to say that it isn’t as simple as “it’s going to turn out good or turn out bad.” Sort of like life.

As for her own path, it appears headed in a decidedly more hopeful direction. In addition to Wendy and Lucy, she also appears in Synecdoche, New York this fall and finished filming Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island this past summer.

Even with roles in more high-profile projects, she’ll continue to make more intimate films. “They’re the movies I like to see, they’re the movies I love to make. I’m not looking to trade up. I’m pretty pleased with the work I get to do,” she says.

She’s also humbled by the accolades, including recent praise in Variety from her Synecdoche co-star Catherine Keener, who called Williams’ performance as Wendy “intimate, extremely personal and soul-baring.”

“It makes me feel like quitting,” Williams says, laughing with a tinge of emotion in her voice. “Because I just feel like I’ve gotten as much as I ever wanted.”

*Originally published on Awards Daily.

Doubt's Beautiful Ambiguity

At a recent SAG screening of Doubt, writer/director John Patrick Shanley said the film—based on his Pulitzer Prize-winning play—is about “the pain and experience of being alive, and that you can’t be certain and yet you have to live.” No doubt about it.

The story takes place in 1964 at Catholic school in the Bronx, where a nun grows suspicious that a charismatic priest has developed an inappropriate relationship with a student.

Beyond the plot machinations of his story, Shanley said the setting—which he experienced first-hand during his youth—was about a feeling he had, going back to that time, that the world of that Bronx Catholic school was disappearing. “A real impetus for writing the play was to celebrate and mourn—I had a moment of beautiful pain about this world,” he said.

Those of you who are unfamiliar with the source material should stop reading here if you want to be completely spoiler-free.

The crux of the film is that Doubt never reveals whether Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Father Flynn is as guilty as Meryl Streep’s Sister Aloysius presumes. She’s “certain” that his unconventional bond with a young African American student (Joseph Foster) has crossed the line. The audience may not agree with her methods, but it’s easy for us to draw similar conclusions. Yet Hoffman’s non-traditional man of the cloth may be just that—non-traditional, but not criminal.

Streep’s performance is tightly wound, making the glimpses into her less-than-certain soul revelatory. The actress—who appeared at the SAG screening in New York with Shanley and her co-stars—was relaxed in person, slyly noting that she “already knew the answer,” to the film’s central mystery when she began the project.

The film plays on assumptions we make and leads us to question them. It got me thinking about how uncertainty isn’t just part of real life; it can make art more interesting. We really can’t know or understand the whole truth, and when we see that reflected on film it resonates deeply.

Viola Davis—in a small but impressive turn as the student’s mother, Mrs. Muller—further tests our preconceived beliefs. The actress said one of the biggest challenges in playing the role was remembering the restrictions of the 1960s time period the African American character lived in. Mrs. Muller is a woman who knows something terrible may be happening to her son, but is willing to let it happen if it protects him from threats she perceives as even greater (like his being a scapegoat for Father Flynn’s behavior and suffering the wrath of his own father). Rather than her instinct to play it aggressive, Davis said Shanley advised her to remember the character’s etiquette. She said the approach was difficult, but paid off, especially during a remarkable onscreen confrontation with Streep. “To approach it politely gave it a whole different dimension and humanity,” Davis said.

All of the performers—including Amy Adams as the more optimistic but anxious Sister James—manage to keep the real themes just below the surface. That’s challenging in a work that’s brilliantly written, but also teeters near the edge of obviousness. It is in maintaining the doubt—while teasing us with the answer to its central mystery—that Doubt has power.

In contrast, the French film I’ve Loved You So Long—an exquisite character study starring Kristin Scott Thomas—cedes some of its power by offering up an explanation. In the film, Scott Thomas’s character has recently been released after serving more than a decade in prison for a terrible crime. The film follows her adjustment back into the world, and into the lives of her sister (Elsa Zylberstein) and her family. At first I wanted to know her motives, but through the course of the story the “why” became irrelevant. Getting the answer was like receiving a disappointing gift. It’s still a near-great film, but the irony is that it isn’t what’s missing that keeps it from greatness, it’s what’s provided.

Doubt provides a different kind of gift for viewers. One we must open on our own.


*This article originally appeared at Awards Daily.

The Poscars Ceremony

The “big night” has come and gone. No, not that “big night,” the other “big night.” Last Saturday I presented the Poscars at an exclusive, invite-only soiree on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

For the five of you sitting on the edge of your seats awaiting the results, I present the first ever “PoscarCast Semi-Live Blog.”

Saturday, Feb. 17, 2008, 5:45 PM: Let the cheap beer, one-pound Sumo Burgers and milkshakes flow as I wait for the nominees to stroll up the “Cold Concrete” and into Big Nick’s famed burger joint.

My carefully planned Poscar look is inspired by two finalists: a bath towel to honor clothing nominee “Viggo Mortensen’s Bath Towel” and an Anton “Chigurh-Chic” hairdo.

6:00 PM: Nobody has arrived yet, but I’ll give out a few awards and the first Honorary Poscar to kick off the festivities.

First up, Favorite Picture. The nominees are Atonement, Ratatouille, No Country for Old Men, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.

And the Poscar goes to…

No Country for Old Men: It reflects our violent times, yet I don’t see it as a completely hopeless commentary. If that were the case, nobody would question the darkness. The world is cold and unyielding, but the real horror comes when we stop asking why.

The second category of the night is Favorite Performance by a Prop. The nominees are the McLovin ID from Superbad, Coins from No Country for Old Men, Home Pregnancy Tests from Juno/Knocked Up and Razor Blades from Sweeney Todd.

And the Poscar goes to…

The McLovin ID: The funniest thing in a very funny film, the ID also managed to cross over into pop culture to the point of silly government complaints. Reportedly, Wal-Mart removed copies of the special edition Superbad DVD from Hawaii stores after Honolulu’s mayor complained about the inclusion of the fake driver’s license.

I seriously doubt an underage Hawaiian would attempt to use the McLovin ID, but you never know—smart people make mistakes, like the finalists for Dumbest Behavior by a Character Who Should Know Better. The nominees are Josh Brolin in No Country for Old Men, when he decides to return to the standoff scene in the middle of the night, Emile Hirsch, when he goes into the wild in Into the Wild and everyone in Before the Devil Knows Your Dead.

And the Poscar goes to…

Josh Brolin: Definitely not a smart move, but I think his decision here—and later when he stays in the hotel room to await Chigurh—is related to the film’s fatalistic and dreamlike quality. It’s telling that Brolin wakes up at the beginning of both scenes. The problem is that once things are set in motion, he can’t awake from the nightmare.

The first Honorary Poscar of the night is The Christopher Walken Award for Outstanding Performance in an Otherwise Bad Movie. This year’s winner is Thomas Haden Church for his lackluster-film-defying portrayal of Sandman/Flint Marko in Spider-Man 3. He can’t save the movie, but he definitely makes it more bearable.

6:45 PM: The waitress is starting to give me attitude since I’m taking up the entire back section of this fine establishment. I offer up several categories—starting with Favorite Director—and the promise of a good tip to keep her from seating other customers. The nominees are Brad Bird for Ratatouille, Joel and Ethan Coen for No Country for Old Men, Julian Schnabel for The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Tim Burton for Sweeney Todd and Joe Wright for Atonement.

And the Poscar goes to…

The Coen Brothers: Everything about the film is sublime and whether they did it themselves or shaped the work of others, each scene is a testament to their brilliance. I’m not sure I’d call it a peak, because they’ve been doing amazing, memorable work for years, but it’s definitely a showcase.

For Favorite Actress in a Supporting Role, the nominees are Saoirse Ronan in Atonement, Jennifer Jason Leigh in Margot at the Wedding, Jennifer Garner in Juno and Tabu in The Namesake.

And the Poscar goes to…

Saoirse Ronan: Innocent, bossy and dangerously adamant in her skewed vision, she can’t see beyond or comprehend her own mixed-up-pent-up desires. I admired all of these actresses, but was riveted by Ronan as young Briony.

For Favorite Actor in a Supporting Role, the nominees are Javier Bardem and Tommy Lee Jones, both in No Country for Old Men, Irfan Kahn in The Namesake, Michael Biehn in the “Planet Terror” half of Grindhouse and James Marsden in Enchanted.

And the Poscar goes to…

Tommy Lee Jones: A touchstone for an audience that feels as lost and resigned as his character. That’s a lot to ask of an actor and Jones delivers in every way.

7:23 PM: The first guest has arrived! It’s my boyfriend, wearing his “Cate Blanchett as Bob Dylan” ensemble and a fetching Dylanesque sneer. He’s just in time for Favorite Performance by an Animated Character. The nominees are Peter O’Toole in Ratatouille and Danielle Darrieux in Persepolis.

And the Poscar goes to…

Peter O’Toole: His vocal performance as food critic Anton Ego is complimented with wonderful character touches, like the portrait of Ego looking blasé and the name of the publication he writes for: The Grim Eater.

The second Honorary Poscar of the night is The Queen Elizabeth Award for Outstanding Achievement in Mimicking a Real Person. This year’s winner is Cate Blanchett, who took on Queen Elizabeth I and Bob Dylan. And of course she earned her first Oscar as Katharine Hepburn in The Aviator.

7:45 PM: Still waiting for the nominees to show up, but my curly fries are getting cold, so I better move on to the acting awards. For Favorite Actor the nominees are Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood, Viggo Mortensen in Eastern Promises, Johnny Depp in Sweeney Todd, Mathieu Amalric in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and James McAvoy in Atonement.

And the Poscar goes to…

Viggo Mortensen: I’m an admitted Viggomanic, but this was the toughest category for me to choose. Mortensen gives an incredibly layered and enigmatic performance. He nails the Russian accent and we see him raw, bloodied, beaten and in the buff… Hmmmmmm. Sorry, momentary lapse into “Nude Viggo” fantasy land… Anyway, his finest moments are in his face. No, really. The humor that underlies each expression, his observations of others: it’s all there. He creates a real and compelling character out of what another actor may have turned into caricature.

7:55 PM: Alone again, as the boyfriend was miffed at my glazed over Viggo-induced trance. Time for Favorite Actress. The nominees are Laura Linney in The Savages, Ellen Page in Juno, Marion Cotillard in La Vie en Rose, Angelina Jolie in A Mighty Heart and Amy Adams in Enchanted.

And the Poscar goes to…

Amy Adams: Commenter Silencio helped clarify my feelings about the performance, writing, “I love how she darkens while retreating from [Patrick Dempsey’s] chest…she bumps into the arm of the chair as she sits down. No more floating and fluttering. She isn’t a fairy tale princess anymore…she’s a woman.” I couldn’t agree more. It isn’t just that Adams is able to earnestly create a “Disney Cartoon.” Like Giselle, she comes to life.

1:50 AM: As you can see from the timestamp I’ve run into a slight snag. Turns out a few of Big Nick’s other patrons claimed my very classy towel look constituted “indecent exposure.” I’ve spent the last several hours “being processed” and have finally convinced a friendly officer to return my laptop so I can share the last two awards of the night.

The nominees for Favorite Performance by an Article of Clothing are the Chef’s Hat in Ratatouille, the Spartan Uniform in 300 and Viggo Mortensen’s bath towel in Eastern Promises.

And the Poscar goes to…

The Chef’s Hat: According to Brad Bird, the hat’s most important feature—that Remy can see through it, but that nobody can see him under it—came about during the filmmaking process. Originally he was supposed to peak out, which never would have worked. A film about a rat chef still stretches credulity well beyond its limits, but within the universe of Ratatouille, the hat does the trick.

Finally, the last award of the night: The Anthony Michael Hall Geek of the Year. While there were plenty of geeky performances to choose from, the real life video game enthusiasts in Donkey Kong documentary The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, impressively proved that even the best actors can’t fake true, epic geekiness.

And with that we’ve reached the “Kill Screen” for this year’s Second Annual Poscars. Here’s to all of this year’s great films and performances. And here’s hoping that at least one of my nominees will show up and bail me out.

Kazakhstan Gets its Glory with Mongol

A year ago, British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen’s Oscar-nominated Borat made Kazakhstan the butt of a massive joke. The “glorious nation” was not amused.

In true cinematic fashion, this year’s Oscars offer a chance for redemption. For the first time ever, the country has a Best Foreign Language nominee with Mongol.

Russian director Sergei Bodrov says he personally liked Cohen’s film—which skewers pretty much everyone who gets in the way, but Kazakhs didn’t appreciate the joke.

“People in Kazakhstan were very upset, they took it really personally, they couldn’t believe how it was possible to make this kind of movie,” he says. Among the character sins committed against them, the film portrays Kazakhs as urine-drinking, incestuous racists. Borat put the country on the map, but not in a positive way.

“For them [Mongol getting the Oscar nomination] is a big deal. It’s good for the Kazakhstan film industry and for the country,” Bodrov says.

Fittingly, the film offers up its own kind of historical redemption, as Bodrov tracks the early years of Temudgin, the Mongolian who would become the conqueror Genghis Khan—perceived by many to be a raping, pillaging and murdering brute. To Mongolians he’s a larger-than-life hero and the father of their nation—literally. A February 2003 study published by the American Journal of Human Genetics estimated that he has more than 17 million descendants living today.

“Genghis Khan wasn’t really a bad guy,” said former Mongolian Prime Minister Elbegdorj Tsahkia in a 2005 interview. “He just had bad press.”

That bad press has been generated by those on the losing side of his military victories, such as China, India, Iran, and Russia. According to estimates, Khan and his followers killed 40 million people across Asia and Europe.

Bodrov’s film—at least the first part in a planned trilogy—takes a sympathetic view. Temudgin defends himself, his family, his woman and his people—not necessarily in that order. He’s very much in touch with nature and the spiritual world (in fact, his armies get divine assistance during a key battle). If some history books have painted him as a genocidal maniac, Mongol turns him into a respectful Jedi Master.

The script (co-written by Arif Aliyev, who also collaborated with Bodrov on the Academy Award nominated Prisoner of the Mountains) highlights the relationship between Temudgin, ably played by Japanese actor Tadanobu Asano and his wife Borte, played by sturdy newcomer Khulan Chuluun, a Mongolian student discovered by the filmmakers.

Their love story begins when they are children and Temudgin chooses her for his future bride, going against the wishes of his father. The film makes much of their bond. As portrayed in the film, Borte’s the ultimate supportive badass wife, at one point sacrificing her own freedom to save him. While the Mongol custom would be to forget about her and take a new wife (or two), Temudgin is determined to rescue her. He seeks the help of his blood brother and eventual rival Jamukha (Chinese actor Honglei Sun) and the episode culminates with one of the film’s visceral battle sequences.

Bodrov says these scenes included real stunts. They’re an impressive feat, with bloody poetry on display.

The film uses CGI to enhance the scope, but he drew visual inspiration from legendary Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa. Mongol comes close to that high standard, giving these epic scenes the gritty realism Bodrov intended.

The entire shoot lasted about 25 weeks and was shot in two segments. The initial leg, which showed Temudgin’s childhood and a few years into adulthood, was shot by Dutch director of photography Rogier Stoffers. When he was unavailable for the second part, Bodrov turned to Russian cinematographer Sergey Trofimov.

“We were shooting for two years for two seasons and of course it’s difficult for a cinematographer to be available, but they were great. It worked out,” Bodrov says.

Even as he borrowed visual cues for the battles and had books to provide some of the historical background, there were gaps in the story. Rather than fearing these, the director says he found it an interesting challenge to fill them in.

One example is a period of about 10 years when Temudgin’s life is suddenly off the charts. Bodrov followed the lead of Russian historian Lev Gumilev, who theorized that maybe he had been captured and imprisoned. As a result, the film shows the warrior sold into slavery, and locked away in a Tangut prison.

Bodrov’s take on the man who would be Khan was not without its detractors on both sides of the “hero or villain” debate.

Early on a group of Mongolian academics reportedly accused the filmmakers of “profaning and humiliating the national pride of the Mongolian people.”

“There was resistance, but you have to understand in Mongolia he’s a God, and how do you make a movie about a God,” Bodrov explains.

One way the production—shot in remote areas of Mongolia, China and Kazakhstan—deflected criticism was through its multinational crew that included representation from those countries.

“It was really important to do my best and I was working with people who knew the culture in their bones,” he says.

Bodrov and production designer Dashi Namdakov even visited with and got the blessing to make the film from one of Mongolia’s chief shamans.

On the other side, Bodrov says some of his countrymen questioned his decision to make a film about a civilization that had ruled over Russians.

“My answer was good or bad, it’s a part of our history,” he says.

In the end, he says the film has been well received in both countries. Now it’s up to Oscar to decide.

This article first ran on Awards Daily.

The Second Annual Poscars

By Susan Thea Posnock

Even as the fate of this year’s Oscar ceremony hangs in the balance between the glitzy and the clips-y, fans of the former can breathe a deep sigh of relief: The Second Annual Poscars will take place as scheduled.

For those of you who don’t know, the Poscars are the Oscars’ more prestigious and self-indulgent, “father’s brother’s nephew’s cousin’s former roommate.” An “expert panel of judges” gives them out. (Translation: Me and me alone, displaying my omniscient power.)

I’d also like to note that Sasha Stone graciously allows me to present my views at her site, but the rumor that she and I are the same person is completely untrue—though I’m flattered by any confusion!

I make the rules and therefore can bend them to my will. Last year I nominated three contenders in each category, but this time I’ve widened the field to include as many as five. This year I’ve also added several “Honorary Poscars” to ensure the “Poscarcast” runs the requisite three and a half hours.

Individual nominees are invited to join me for beers and burgers (the veggie kind if necessary) at Big Nick’s Burger Joint (pictured above) on the Upper West Side of Manhattan on Feb. 17. Afterward, James McAvoy and Viggo Mortensen are invited back to my place to “discuss politics.”

And the Finalists are:

Favorite Picture:

Atonement: It captured me from the first notes of its exquisite score and the steady tap of Briony’s typewriter. Everything that follows is just as beautiful—the images, the performances (and yes, the performers). Disguised as an epic romance, its take on storytelling—and its power to obscure and redeem—stayed with me after the lights went up.

No Country for Old Men: The three compelling characters who make up its core—Josh Brolin’s Llewelyn Moss, Tommy Lee Jones’ Ed Tom Bell and Javier Bardem’s Anton Chigurh—would be enough to make this a very good movie. But the nearly flawless bit players who surround them (from Garret Dillahunt’s hilariously observant deputy Wendell to Kathy Lamkin’s sassy trailer park manager) push the film into greatness.

Ratatouille: The epitome of film magic. Not only does it transform rats into cute critters (and believe me, if you’ve ever seen a real one, you know they’re NOT), but it’s a clever meditation on art and how even the most cynical critics yearn to be moved.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly: Just because you’ve got a great “triumph over diversity” story doesn’t mean you can make it work. But director Julian Schnabel’s film traps us inside that silent and suffocating diving bell, and lifts us up when we become the butterfly.

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street: A dark and bloody tale of vengeance that’s flavored with melancholy.

Favorite Performance by a Prop:

The McLovin ID in Superbad: “The guy’s either going think ‘here’s another guy with a fake ID’, or here’s McLovin, 25 year old Hawaiian organ donor.” A great gag, that’s supported by the wonderful Christopher Mintz-Plasse. By the end of the film, he’s earned the McLovin moniker.

Home Pregnancy Tests in Juno and Knocked Up: Now, if only condoms had been a more prominent prop.

Coins in No Country for Old Men: “Call it.” A central element in two of the film’s best scenes, made all the more powerful because they’re so different.

Razor blades in Sweeney Todd: “At last, my arm is complete again!” That’s good news for Mrs. Lovett’s pie shop, bad news for everyone else.

Favorite Actor in a Lead Role:

Mathieu Amalric as Jean-Dominique Bauby in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly: From his sardonic humor to every deep sigh of frustration, you feel the pain of this trapped but brilliant mind.

Daniel Day-Lewis as Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood: Somehow manages to make his hateful self-loathing palatable.

Viggo Mortensen as Nikolai in Eastern Promises: Disappears into the role, much as Nikolai drowns into the world of Russian mobsters that lurk in the London underworld.

Johnny Depp as Sweeney Todd in Sweeney Todd: What he lacks in technical ability as a singer is more than compensated for by his gravitas as an actor.

James McAvoy as Robbie Turner in Atonement: The film’s main story thread focuses on Briony’s lifelong betrayal, regret and redemption, but McAvoy’s object of youthful desire sets it all in motion.

Favorite Actress in a Lead Role:

Laura Linney as Wendy Savage in The Savages: Selfish and self-delusional, yet Linney still manages to make you care.

Ellen Page as Juno MacGuff in Juno: The first 30 minutes or so are all distancing cool, but slowly and effectively, Page reveals the cracks in Juno’s Daria-like façade.

Marion Cotillard as Edith Piaf in La Vie en Rose: Like Forest Whitaker last year, it’s more possession than performance.

Angelina Jolie as Mariane Pearl in A Mighty Heart: I dreaded seeing this film, having vividly remembered Daniel Pearl’s tragic story. But I think Jolie’s touching portrayal honors his memory.

Amy Adams as Giselle in Enchanted: It’s like she swapped brains with a 5-year-old who dreams of being a Disney Princess. The end result is uncanny and very funny.

Favorite Performance by an Animated Character:

Peter O’Toole as Anton Ego in Ratatouille: Oh the glorious snobbery. The film’s best moment doesn’t work without him.

Danielle Darrieux as Marjane’s Grandmother in Persepolis: The perfect balance of love and firmness, and I’m not talking about the trick she uses to keep her boobs from sagging—but that’s also classic.

Favorite Actor in a Supporting Role:

Javier Bardem as Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men: One friend called his villainy here “one note,” but despite his purely evil ways, I think Bardem layers the performance with Chigurh’s twisted logic.

Tommy Lee Jones as Ed Tom Bell in No Country for Old Men: I don’t think the film would be bearable without his steady presence.

Irfan Kahn as Ashoke Ganguli in The Namesake: Quiet and impressive as he conveys a father’s wisdom, hesitancy, and regret.

Michael Biehn as Sheriff Hague in the “Planet Terror” half of Grindhouse: I fully admit to a certain amount of 1980s-crush bias here, but Biehn is hilarious as he tries to save the world and his own ass.

James Marsden as Prince Edward in Enchanted: His excessively charming prince is pitched perfectly: The broad, brilliant smile, the twinkle in his eye. Parodies are hit or miss, but here the sincerity makes it work.

Favorite Actress in a Supporting Role:

Saoirse Ronan as Briony Tallis, aged 13, in Atonement: I was going to cheat here and present a three-way tie that also included Romola Garai and Vanessa Redgrave, but in the end it’s Ronan’s performance I can’t shake.

Jennifer Jason Leigh as Pauline in Margot at the Wedding: Nails that persistent and nagging need for approval from a sibling, seasoning it with a strong dose of resentment.

Jennifer Garner as Vanessa Loring in Juno: Isn’t teen pregnancy funny? Yes, in this movie it manages to be. But Garner grounds the jokes with real emotion.

Tabu as Ashima Ganguli in The Namesake: Delicate and bold, whether she’s trying on the shoes of her future husband—a man she’s about to meet for the first time—or returning to her homeland to re-find her voice.

Favorite Director:

Brad Bird for Ratatouille: Continues to create works that shouldn’t be relegated to the Academy’s animation ghetto. Original director Jan Pinkava—who came up with the initial concept—also deserves mention.

Joel and Ethan Coen for No Country for Old Men: Film renaissance men at their finest.

Julian Schnabel for The Diving Bell and the Butterfly: Makes the “un-filmable” soar off the screen.

Joe Wright for Atonement: Creates a beautiful and complex tapestry. The Dunkirk retreat in particular is a tour de force.

Tim Burton for Sweeney Todd: Returns to the form of his best works, maintaining a tone that keeps the gore (and the less than stellar singing) from overwhelming the beautiful bleakness of Todd’s tale.

Favorite Performance by an Article of Clothing:

The Chef’s Hat in Ratatouille: The plot device that makes it all work.

The Spartan Uniform (or lack-thereof) in 300: Yeah, this one is all about man candy.

Viggo Mortensen’s bath towel in Eastern Promises: Effectively (and realistically) disappears.

Dumbest behavior by a character that should know better:

Josh Brolin as Llewelyn Moss in No Country, when he decides to return to the standoff scene—in the middle of the night—with “agua.” And while we’re at it, when he discovers the moneybag has a tracking device, why not just ditch it and get out of the room before Chigurh can blast the door in?

Emile Hirsch as Chris McCandless, when he decides to go into the wild in Into the Wild. (And yes, I realize that it’s a true story—still dumb and all the more tragic.)

Everyone in Before the Devil Knows Your Dead: From the mom’s Rambo-act during the jewelry store robbery to Philip Seymour Hoffman’s decision to go to a fence that could recognize him, they make the wrong choices at every turn.

Honorary Poscars

I’ve already picked my favorites—which I’ll reveal during the “official” ceremony—but feel free to share your choices in the following honorary categories:

The Queen Elizabeth Award for Outstanding Achievement in Mimicking a Real Person

The Christopher Walken Award for Outstanding Performance in an Otherwise Bad Movie

The Anthony Michael Hall Geek of the Year Award

So there you have it. Overall, I’d say 2007 was a very strong year for cinema. Keep in mind that these are personal favorites—I admired a number of other films and performances, these simply registered the most for me. Please feel free to join the Poscar celebration by sharing your own choices (and honorary awards) in the comments.

*First posted on Awards Daily.

In Search of a Masterpiece

By Susan Thea Posnock

Once upon a time in the far off and whimsical land of Jersey—the “New” version—a young girl dreamed movie dreams and begged her parents to take her to see Rocky as often as they could stand it. She and her older brother would listen to Bill Conti’s glorious theme and reenact the final, tear-jerking moments, complete with a gut-wrenching yelp of “Adriaaaaaaaaaaaaaan!!!!!” It was, in her 6-year-old opinion, the BEST MOVIE EVER.

A year later, she changed her mind, having been introduced to a new man—we’ll call him “Han” for short—and Star Wars ruled the day.

Years have gone by. The young girl is in her thirties and has loved many films and performances since those heady days of cheering for the contender. But her affection for him (and Han) lingers.

Of course, I’m referring to myself. And as I observe the debates over this year’s five Academy Award Best Picture nominees, I think it’s important for all of us to remember that inner film geek and how we got here in the first place. I’d guess a lot of us have “first film loves” that we cling to, even as our tastes have matured. I know that the Oscars are all about rewarding the “best” NOW, but I also think that whatever the film, it’s important to understand that our perceptions and feelings aren’t static. Despite this, most film reviews are the artistic version of a phone call to a friend after a first date. It’s all about snap judgments—over praise or dismissal in an instant.


I’ve certainly gone overboard for a film before, and not just when I was six. Yet I’ve tried not to confuse my personal longing for movie greatness, with something I just can’t have yet: Time. It’s very possible that in 10, 20, 30 years, I’ll look back on films that I love today and wonder: “What was I thinking?” Many will be forgotten and perhaps some I don’t appreciate right now will stand out in my mind as shining examples of the medium.

A more critically and commercially successful film has a better chance of being remembered—but it’s no guarantee. Regardless of their success (or failure) at the time they were released, the lasting masterpieces, cultural milestones, cult phenomenons and crowd pleasers are measured by the years. Something about them touches a nerve—intellectual, emotional, comic—that metaphorically keeps their images in Technicolor even as others inevitably fade to black.

One such film is The Searchers. When it was released in 1956 it garnered no Oscar nominations and not much critical notice, despite the fact that director John Ford and lead actor John Wayne were both legends. Ford did receive a Directors Guild of America nomination, but other than that… nothing.

The film was both ahead of its time and of its time, as it explored topics including racism, identity and America. I won’t argue that it aged perfectly—but it would be hard to deny its overall power.

This past year was a very impressive one for cinema. But are we ready to say what kind of impact No Country for Old Men, Michael Clayton, Juno, There Will Be Blood, or Atonement will have 50 years from now?

No Country for Old Men is my personal favorite. It even has more than one visual and verbal nod to The Searchers, like when Kelly Macdonald’s character throws out a blasé “That’ll be the Day,” a refrain of Wayne’s from the 1956 film.

I admired There Will Be Blood for its Icarus-like attempts to reach the sun—even if it left me cold emotionally. Like No Country, it has a quality that transcends the modern—and not just because of its period setting.

Juno’s comic quirkiness—so much a product of the now—may not translate over the years. But we react to comedies in a very personal way and Juno’s passionate fans could keep it alive with the sort of cult-like devotion one sees for movies like Caddyshack.

The picturesque Atonement is being marketed as an epic romance, but to me its merits are found in its exploration of truth, loss and redemption. The green dress worn by Keira Knightley is lovely, but I hope it’s not all that’s remembered.

Michael Clayton is my least favorite. Even so, I can’t underestimate the charismatic turn by George Clooney. He makes ethical dilemmas look gorgeous. That undeniable star wattage could give the film the kind of staying power I’d associate with a top-notch thriller like The Fugitive.

Overall, in comparison to other recent Best Picture line-ups, it’s a pretty noteworthy list—top to bottom.

The full bloom of each film’s greatness will come with, as Wayne said in The Searchers: “The turning of the earth.”

*Originally posted at Awards Daily.

STP Talks!

Recently, I had a chance to TALK film online versus just writing about it when my friend Nathaniel at The Film Experience asked me to participate in an Oscar nominations discussion as part of his new podast feature. Joe Reid of Low Resolution also pitches in.

The segment follows an interview Nat conducted with 12-time sound Oscar nominee Greg P. Russell, who is up for another sound Oscar this year for the Transformers.

Download the conversation here.

Marisa Tomei Shares Pieces of a Part

By Susan Thea Posnock

A performance is in many ways a collection of fragments: Take one versus take five; an edit here or there; a close-up versus a long shot. The filmmakers decide what the audience will see onscreen. Yet elements that don’t reach the final cut can still inform it.

For actress Marisa Tomei, some of her personal pieces in this process are literally collecting dust. That’s because with each role, she keeps a black-and-white composition notebook. It’s her way of finding time to “daydream” about the person she must become.

“I’ll have ideas or images or the timeline of the character’s personal history, or just questions [in the notebook],” she says.

Once she moves on to the next persona, she throws the books down into her basement. Who knows, maybe that’s one reason Tomei, who turned 43 in December, looks so damn good. Perhaps those notebooks are a kind of “Picture of Dorian Gray.” In addition to the immortality offered by movies, her filmography lives on, discarded but not destroyed in those books.

There’s her portrayal of spunky mob daughter Lisa Provolone, which turned the gangster spoof Oscar into a guilty pleasure. As pregnant reporter Martha Hackett in The Paper, she nailed the nagging persistence that drives daily reporters to get the story. And in her Academy Award-winning turn as Mona Lisa Vito in My Cousin Vinny, she created a memorable character with every stomp stomp stomp of her stiletto heels.

I felt an instant kinship with Brooklyn-born Tomei when she told me about those composition books. My own tendency to hang on to notes and papers often threatens to overtake my small studio apartment. I was glad to hear she’s kept each one, even if she’s never opened them again.

“I ask myself why am I keeping these,” she says, her own laugh track a constant presence as she speaks. “It’s like I’m superstitious or something.”

I wonder aloud if they’re a part of her experience she doesn’t want to get rid of completely.

“Yeah, exactly,” she says. “It’s also ephemeral like, ‘okay I did something.’ I didn’t build a bridge, but I did something that year.”

This year she added several new pads to the pile, most notably the part of Gina Hanson in director Sidney Lumet’s bleak morality melodrama, Before the Devil Knows Your Dead. Caught between her husband Andy (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and her lover, his hapless brother Hank (Ethan Hawke), her specter lingers despite only a few scenes. She’s a catalyst for both men in the non-sequential story that offers different perspectives of a jewelry heist-gone-wrong as it morphs into family tragedy. The film also features Albert Finney and was written by Kelly Masterson.

Filling in the Blanks

Tomei was thrilled by the notion of working with her co-stars and the legendary Lumet, but had some concerns about the part. She says the intensive two-week rehearsal sessions prior to production (which the 83-year-old director is known for) proved invaluable.

The sessions took place in a large Ukrainian dance hall.

“It was almost like the old live TV sets where you roll from one set to the next in the same space. Each set would be mapped out on the floor. You’d walk from one scene then across the room to the next scene, all within the same giant space,” she says. “It’s great because the film is out of order, but we got to do it in order to really understand where our characters were before it became dismantled.”

In some ways, she says the process raised more questions.

Some of Gina’s motivation is clear—the power struggle with her husband and the way in which his brother’s love impacts her self-worth—but other aspects are outside the text. “Her energy is very integral to the motivation of the guys, but there’s not a lot of screen time to find out what she’s about,” she says. “Sometimes she seems to know what’s going on and sometimes she doesn’t. It all adds to the mystery of the film, which is great, but what does it mean for her? Who is she?”

Part of the answer was that Gina’s more like a leaf in the wind than someone standing on solid ground. “She’s in the moment and she’s where she is at any given time without a lot of forethought or afterthought,” Tomei explains.

Playing a part like that was a little scary, she says, because she wasn’t sure it would add up.

Addressing those gaps—or perhaps accepting them—was a lesson she took from the rehearsals. “One thing that I always have to remind myself when I’m working on a piece is that life is so untidy and we never really know ourselves,” she says.

Despite narrative ellipses, what wasn’t hidden was the character’s body, with nearly every inch before the camera’s gaze. While Tomei had some reservations when she read the script, she came to realize this was also an integral part of Gina.

“I think the impact of the nudity visually says a lot more than I realized it was going to say,” she says. “Seeing it you get ideas about her self worth [how comfortable she is] or what makes her tick or what turns her on. Just because of the starkness and boldness it says more in terms of how she relates to both men and in terms of who she is.”

Oscar’s Blessings

Tomei left Boston University for a gig on the soap As the World Turns and did time on Cosby spin-off A Different World before her big film breakthrough. Winning an Oscar early on was a defining moment.

“It let me begin to do what I really wanted to do,” she says.

Like any performer her career has had its ups-and-downs, but Tomei has proven her longevity and that the award for supporting actress—while considered a surprise at the time—was no fluke. Despite no runaway hits, her work over the years has included effective turns in films like Welcome to Sarajevo and Slums of Beverly Hills. She was nominated for her second supporting actress Oscar for 2001’s In the Bedroom. This year her Oscar fate is unknown, but she’s up for an Independent Spirit Award.

While she’s shown her dramatic abilities among her most recent attention-grabbing roles, it would be great to see Tomei get a plumb comic part again. She says that’s easier wished for than done.

“Really great comedy with intelligence and some wit is hard to find and it’s also hard to find directors who understand it and know how to shoot it,” she says.

There are plenty of good comedies written for men, but she says the parts for women are usually less interesting.

That’s why she thinks audiences respond so strongly to exceptions like Leslie Mann in Knocked Up and Ellen Page in Juno.

“Give her a mouthful to say and it’s fantastic, but it’s rarely written,” Tomei says.

Regardless of the type of role, she says she tries to align her spirit to that of the character. “One of my favorite things about acting is that you’re forced to see that you actually can transform. You can transform your mindset, you can transform your mood, you can transform your outlook,” she says.

Staying Busy on Stage and Screen

Tomei has a full schedule this year. First, she’s in the new Darren Aronofsky film The Wrestler (which starts shooting in February). She says the film, which stars Mickey Rourke, is about a man whose love and livelihood come from his body and what happens when he can no longer depend on it. She plays a dancer who serves as a parallel to the main character.

Then beginning in April, she’ll appear in the Manhattan Theatre Club’s Broadway production of Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls. The play features an all-female cast and focuses on the role of women in the modern working world.

Tomei returns to theater frequently, having recently finished a well-received run Off Broadway in playwright Will Eno’s Oh, the Humanity.

Performing live offers a palpable experience she can’t get in movies. “Even though [the audience] can be really quiet, I’m hearing every little laugh or move and there’s a dialogue that we have,” she says. “There’s something sacred about that to me.”

*This article first appeared on Awards Daily.

Lovemadness, Puerto Rican Style

By Susan Thea Posnock

Early on in Maldeamores (Lovesickness) I realized I wasn’t watching a conventional take on romance. In place of bright-eyed, beautiful protagonists who have a “meet cute” and then pretend to hate each other for an hour, the film—which is the official Oscar foreign language entry for Puerto Rico—features stalkers, adulterers and most compelling and surprising of all, old folks.

It was written by Carlitos Ruiz Ruiz and Jorge Gonzales. Ruiz co-directed with his wife, Mariem Perez Riera and his brother Luillo Ruiz is the producer. It features an ensemble led by Luis Guzman, who plays a cheating husband, a part that was written for him. Actor Benicio Del Toro served as an executive producer and it was one of the first independent films to receive funding from the Puerto Rico Film Commission’s new incentive law.

This isn’t a Sleepless in Seattle version of “love in a movie,” but a messy, heightened mixture of love, sex, and hate—blended together with a strong dose of humor. It shows how the onset of these emotions can afflict people of all ages, but it was the septuagenarian love triangle I found most intriguing.

The introduction of two of these elderly performers, shown slurping soup in a loud duet amidst a series of close-ups, initially grossed me out. But as the story develops between Flora (Silvia Brito), Cirilo (Chavito Marrero) and interloper Pellin (Miguel Angel Alvarez) my squeamishness evolved into enchanted amusement. Flora and Cirilo are a divorced couple that have been living together for nearly 30 years. The rhythm of their soup slurping is suddenly interrupted when Pellin, Flora’s first husband, returns to live out his final years with his love from long ago. This may not be the pretty portrayal of romance I’m used to, but it felt lived in and authentic, if not “realistic.” The actors—Brito in particular—are wonderful.

“Silvia Brito the 80-year-old actress that plays Flora is a charm and a woman with such a character that by the end of the story you look at her as a sexy mama,” says Ruiz, who answered a series of questions I sent to him and actor Guzman via email.

He says the response to the older triangle has been uniformly positive and it was a plotline he felt was essential in giving a fully rounded view of love in all its irrational glory. “We know that generally love and sex among older people are not included in films and that’s why we wanted so badly to make the audience watch a love triangle between old people,” he says. “We wanted to show love in every stage of life—childhood, adulthood, elderly. We felt that sometimes in the elderly stage of life love is mistaken with compassion and the fear of being alone, but there is only the need of a spark to start a fire. So it was important for us to show how our grandmothers never lose passion and the need to feel.”

It’s an interesting idea, but the possibility of it makes me feel slightly confounded. It would be just a little comforting to think that lovesickness is something that we get too wise to fall for in our golden years. Not likely.

Ruiz says the material came out of his obsession with the “absurd idea of perfect love” that’s seen in the majority of films. “When I met Mariem Perez, my partner in crime, we decided to make a film showing the real face of love as the egoist, obsessive and masochistic feeling that moves this world,” he explains. “The stories in the film are very close to us because they come from real events of our friends and our families.”

Rather than perfectionism, Maldeamores shows the perverse side of love, with what Ruiz calls flawed characters and absurdist situations. He says he and Perez frame these with dark humor and cynicism.

One of those flawed characters is Ismael, a man who cheats on his wife with her cousin, brought to comic life by Guzman.

“Ismael’s are all over the place,” the actor says. “How many guys have cheated on their wives with other family members…I put myself in that position and went for it…”

Guzman says Puerto Rico has great storytellers with a lust for passion. “Whether it’s through comedy or drama, we have an incredible pool of talent,” he says. It was the effectiveness of the screenplay that attracted him to the project. “I really dug the three story lines and how they paralleled life and its realities. It was funny, smart, witty and clever,” he says.

The actor—perhaps best known for his work with Steven Soderbergh and Paul Thomas Anderson—grew up in Puerto Rico, so the fact that the film was shot there was also a big plus. “I showed up a week before shooting and played a lot of dominoes, downed a few pina coladas and I was good to go,” he says.

The popularity of Latin American films in general and the film commission’s new incentive law for filmmakers are helping to turn Puerto Rico into an island movie paradise. Prior to the incentive law, Ruiz says there really wasn’t a film industry. “It was really hard for young filmmakers like us to even dream about making films in Puerto Rico,” he says.

In the past, he says a movie would get made once every six years. Last year eight films were produced because of the fund, with 80 percent of financing coming from the government. “Because of its small size [Puerto Rico] constantly emanates a feeling of confinement and claustrophobia,” he notes. “This gives us the perfect setting to explore, throughout the film, the traumas and foibles of our collective madness.”

While a perfect setting to film Maldeamores some believed that pressure and confined space would challenge the marriage of Ruiz and Perez—who had fallen in love after they returned from studying filmmaking abroad, in Chicago and Cuba respectively.

“People were concerned if our relationship would last through the film. You know it is intense to work for two years with your partner in a film about bad love,” he says. “But it was a piece of cake for us. We share the same sensibility and taste for storytelling. We were in love with the characters and the stories and we felt privileged to be able to work every day in something we loved so much,” he says.

He says their next project—they’ve signed as directors with Creative Artists Agency (CAA) and have been reading scripts—will likely be a dark comedy shot in English. They are also working on a new screenplay that deals with youth in Puerto Rico.

He says Del Toro, who recently filmed The Argentine with Soderbergh in Puerto Rico, has called movies the next national sport for the island. It’s a sentiment shared by Ruiz.

“There is a new breed of young filmmakers that are competing to put their voice out there,” he says. “This is the starting point of the developing of an industry that is growing fast and steady.”

*This article first appeared on Awards Daily.