home / art / theater / travel / books
The Academy Awards The Academy Awards celebrated its eightieth birthday a few weeks ago and pundits throughout the country, following a hardly less vaunted tradition, wasted little time informing us of how dull the proceedings had been. Movie stars in million-dollar dresses, surprise winners gushing about the angels in Los Angeles or delivering effusive thanks—in Spanish—to their mothers; countless movie clips, hilariously bad production numbers, and a smattering of jokes ranging from inspired to tasteless. Ho-Hum. Although all the awards shows are in a swoon—Grammys, Emmys, Tonys—the 2008 Oscars were by some accounts the least-watched ever. A mere 29 million people tuned in. (Better than my twelfth birthday party, when I though I was on top of the world. But that's another story.) One commentator remarked, "It used to be that Madonna or Michael Jackson was going to be on the music award show or Barbra Streisand was going to sing at the Academy Awards. Those (entertainers) are going to draw huge numbers." In other words, who cares about movies? I enjoyed the show, as usual. John Steward is no match for Bob Hope, Johnny Carson, or Billy Crystal, but he did just fine. And as far as I'm concerned, the more film clips they show, the better. The replay of all the “Best Film” winners gave me an opportunity to count how many I'd seen, using my fingers. Of the eighty winners, I've seen fifty-one. (How did I count that on my fingers? Using base five!) The Bourne Ultimatum won its three categories—editing, sound editing, and sound mixing—as if to underscore what an exciting film it was. And the win of Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova of the Irish band The Frames, for best song, (usually a rather dumb category) provided an opportunity for a bit of honest appreciation. “What are we doing here? This is mad,” Hansard said, recounting the production history of “Once.” “It took us three weeks to make. We made it for a hundred-grand. We never thought we'd come into a room like this and be in front of all you people.” More power to ‘em. Though the 80th Oscar ceremony was the most international ever, with all four acting categories going to foreigners, it was perhaps equally unusual in that four Oscars went to individuals from that strange state, almost a foreign country itself, of Minnesota. The Coen brothers, who won three awards, are Minnesotans, and so (by some accounts) is the screenwriter Diablo Cody, who won the Oscar for best original screenplay. Strangely absent from the festivities was yet another Minnesotan, Bill Pohlad, who was one of the producers of what I consider to be the best film of 2007, Into the Wild. Into the Wild Everyone must know by now that Into the Wild is based on the true story of a young man named Christopher McClandliss who decided to get away from it all and live the simple life in the wilds of Alaska. The book on which the film is based was a best-seller in the early 1990s. (The author, Jon Krakauer, went on to write an even more popular true story of wild adventure and mishap, Into Thin Air.)
Considering the degree of wildness and solitude that these remarks suggest, Sean Penn's film version has enormous quantities of sociability, energy, and uplift circulating through it. I would guess that only a fifth of the film takes place in Alaska. (If you want to see Alaskan scenery, let me recommend Alaska (1996), a very conventional Disney-esque film with a cute polar bear and lots of spectacular mountains.) And it would be a mistake to imagine that the film's central character is a misanthropic loser. (If you want a film about a mentally unstable loner marching off into the Alaskan brush for months at a time, Grizzly Man would be a better choice.) On the contrary, Emile Hirsch, who stars as McClandiss, manages to sustain a realistic balance between a youthful revolt against the deceit, consumerism, and domestic discord of his wealthy parents, and a naive wanderlust that draws inspiration from the outdoors—mostly the desert regions of southern California. He presents the central character as both idealistic and naive, but never mean-spirited, vindictive, reclusive, or unduly preachy. Let me give you an example. At one point Hirsch is showing his bare-bones desert campsite to an old man (Hal Holbrook) who has given him a lift. “Why are you living out here in the dirt?” Holbrook asks, less disgusted than simply dumfounded. “You should be getting an education. Starting a career.” “I think careers are a twentieth-century invention,” Hirsch replies with kindly matter-of-factness, “and I don't want one.” This may sound like hippie nonsense as it appears on the printed page, but I was reminded of a recent book by Yale professor Anthony Kronman, Education's End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life. In that book Kronman suggests that “careerism that distracts from life as a whole” is a menace to society. He advocates a return to the study of books such as the ones Hirsch has been reading—Thoreau, Tolstoy, Jack London, Primo Levi— “to restore the wonder which those who have glimpsed the human condition have always felt...” In the course of his cross-country ramblings Hirsch makes contact time and again with individuals who don't quite know what he's talking about, but who sense that he's a good kid. Thus the presence of Vince Vaughn as the North Dakota grain-harvester, Catherine Keener as the hippy-wife whose son has disappeared, and Holbrook as the aged leather-worker living out his last years in the desert, all offer differing points of perspective to Hirsh's quest to escape to something more pure and meaningful than the bourgeois life he's known. Nor will the zany German couple camping on the banks of the rapids be soon forgotten by anyone who sees the film. Even the eccentric sculptor with his gigantic mud-and-metal monument to love somehow comes off as the genuine article. Into the Wild is above all else a road movie, and it captures the spirit of that impulse as well as any movie I've seen. Critics who refer to the film as “cheaply lyrical” ought to get out of the city more often. The film is a paean to both the American landscape and the importance of family connections, while also celebrating a dimension of the human soul that resists the compromises of civilized living, choosing to cultivate instead a zone of beauty, purity, and exuberance that springs largely from within itself. As the protagonist comes to realize, that zone isn't everything, but it is certainly something important, and watching the film reminds us what that something looks and feels like.
|
|---|
