Film Vérité
Once upon a time, we went to the movies solely to escape from reality for a few hours, entertained by charming musicals set in far off worlds, historical dramas, sad and happy love stories, war narratives that always had the right side win and romantic comedies in which the virginal heroine took two hours to figure out that Mr. Right, as he was aptly called, was the guy right in front of her nose. Well, that world is long gone, and the films and performers that will be announced as the official nominees for the Academy Awards on January 23 surely will reflect how much that world has changed.
2023 was a banner year for the movie industry as many returned to the theaters in person for the first time since Covid, drawn by two of the most unlikely films that ever opened on the same day: the story of the man who created the atomic bomb and the other about an iconic doll that has been a big part of girls’ lives, for better or worse, since its creation in 1959.
Other notable films that will receive the Academy’s attention include one about the complicated sex life of perhaps America’s greatest composer (Maestro), a courtroom drama from France about a successful writer who either did or did not kill her less successful husband (Anatomy of a Fall), a story of a misanthropic teacher who learns that his students are as human as he is (The Holdovers), a Frankenstein-like female creation who possesses an overwrought sexual appetite (Poor Things), the story of a Black intellectual writer who only finds commercial success when he makes his books more ghetto Black (American Fiction), and finally yet another example of America’s not always so noble past where greedy whites systematically murder members of the Osage tribe (even those they had married) to gain their unlikely and ultimately cursed oil wealth (Killers of the Flower Moon).
Thematically, none of these films have much in common except in their reflections of the complexity of human nature. I can’t predict which ones will be the big winners, but the early awards shows seem to predict great things for Oppenheimer, the story of a complicated man who is ostensibly punished for his early political views, but, more likely, for his attempts to manage some human control over the spread of his terrible creation.
None of these movies have the predictably happy endings of the old days, but they all contain elements of who we are, even Barbie, with its blatant criticism of the patriarchal society, reflects a certain real political bent. And, while Killers once more reflects truly disturbing events of our country’s past, it says all too much about the hatred that continues to drive so much of our irrational relationship to The Other.
In terms of expressing mankind’s inexorable inclination to exterminate itself, however, whether through war, violence, and other forms of conflict or, in the most existential sense, by our systematic destruction of the planet itself, Oppenheimer rings truest in its depiction of the creation of the ultimate weapon, one that will forever loom as a cloud over our very existence. You can’t get more real than that.
