Countdown to the Oscars: Best Actor

Leonardo DiCaprio is the frontrunner for Best Actor for his performance in The Revenant.

Welcome to Last Cinema Standing’s Countdown to the Oscars, our daily look at this year’s Academy Awards race. Be sure to check back every day this month for analysis of each of the Academy’s 24 categories.

Best Actor

The nominees are:

Bryan Cranston for Trumbo

Matt Damon for The Martian

Leonardo DiCaprio for The Revenant

Michael Fassbender for Steve Jobs

Eddie Redmayne for The Danish Girl

You cannot stop a moving train, especially when this particular train has been picking up steam for more than two years now. The world wants to see DiCaprio win an Oscar. The Internet certainly does, and for the first time, it seems like the Academy is coming around to that view as well. For the most part, this started two years ago when DiCaprio’s The Wolf of Wall Street performance lost out to Matthew McConaughey’s more traditional work in Dallas Buyers Club.

There are other exceptional performances this year – Fassbender and Cranston are particularly memorable – but there is no other narrative as strong as the one building up around DiCaprio. Damon and Redmayne have already won Oscars. Cranston is beloved, but he is a first-time nominee. Fassbender, like DiCaprio a generation-defining talent, will have other chances. No, the story is DiCaprio and his long-overdue recognition as one of the best in the business.

Leonardo DiCaprio for The Revenant – In reality, the obsession with DiCaprio winning an Oscar started long before The Wolf of Wall Street. DiCaprio has been one of the biggest stars in the world for nearly 20 years, but even before Titanic rocketed him to superstardom, he was an Oscar nominee for What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? Many felt he was snubbed for Titanic, and in some quarters, a narrative built up that Academy members might consider DiCaprio too much of a pretty boy whose success was derived from looks and youth more than talent.

However, DiCaprio made smart choice after smart choice, rarely faltering in the projects he championed and never turning in a bad performance. His nominated work on The Aviator and Blood Diamond, as well as The Departed and Shutter Island, showed an actor willing to dig into the psyches of his characters and deliver raw, visceral experiences onscreen. We associate “getting ugly” with Best Actress winners – such as Charlize Theron in Monster or Halle Berry in Monster’s Ball – but the phenomenon is just as real for Best Actor. Consider McConaughey, Forest Whitaker in The Last King of Scotland, and Adrian Brody in The Pianist.

Well, DiCaprio not only “gets ugly” in The Revenant, but he goes feral, eating raw bison liver and subjecting himself to the many hardships of the frontier all in order to bring the story of Hugh Glass to life. However, this is more than a physical stunt. It is a searing, emotional portrait of a man betrayed, adrift, and alone. DiCaprio has never been better, and no other leading actor this year was this good. He will win, and in at least one respect, all will seem right.

Michael Fassbender for Steve Jobs – Interestingly, the last time Fassbender was nominated, he lost Best Supporting Actor for his performance in 12 Years a Slave to McConaughey’s Dallas Buyers Club co-star Jared Leto. I would have gone the other way, but at least the Academy’s choice was defensible. What is not defensible is the fact that Fassbender is on just his second nomination after incomparable work in films such as Hunger, Shame, and Frank. Oh well, he is in the club now, and he will keep coming back because there is no other actor like him working today.

Director Danny Boyle’s Steve Jobs is a frustrating movie with a number of fine elements teetering on the edge but never tipping over into greatness because the whole exercise feels just a little too self-conscious. Fassbender, however, is scintillating as the title character, a business genius whose personal life is in shambles. He creates chaos everywhere he goes, but because he sits in the eye of the storm, everything seems perfectly clear to him. Fassbender brings out the frustration and rage of someone who believes he is better than everyone else and cannot tolerate playing down to their level.

Bryan Cranston for Trumbo – Speaking of frustration and rage, we also have Cranston’s blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo. A brilliant wordsmith, Trumbo was persecuted for his political beliefs, and rather than back down, he fought back with his typewriter. He refused to let the system shut him up and stood up to become a hero for freedom of expression. The great thing about Cranston’s performance is that he does not play Trumbo as a hero. Instead, he shows us a man annoyed by the stupidity and bigotry he must endure. He battles because it is in his nature to fight. He just happens to be fighting for a righteous cause.

Cranston is a beloved and respected figure in the industry. Though he is mostly known for his television work on Breaking Bad, for which he won four Emmys and a Golden Globe, Cranston has proven to be a popular character actor in films such as Drive, Argo, and Little Miss Sunshine. He is even the best part of the otherwise disposable Godzilla remake from 2014. In his first true leading film role, he knocks it out of the park. He will continue to be a force in this industry for as long as he wants, but this will not be the year he wins an Oscar.

Matt Damon for The Martian – Damon was the nominee about whom no one was really certain. There were a few other options hanging around the edges of the season such as Johnny Depp in Black Mass and Will Smith in Concussion, but ultimately, Damon prevailed. Looking back, it should not be that shocking – and if I can toot my own horn, this is the exact lineup I predicted in this category back at the beginning of December.

Damon carries The Martian on his shoulders entirely. The scenes back on Earth with the NASA team and everyone else are important to the plot of course, but the movie does not work without a tremendous actor playing Mark Watney, the man stranded on Mars. Damon is the perfect combination of brainy, funny, and sympathetic to pull off this role. Even in dire circumstances, he remains fun to watch because he gives the character a spark of mischievousness to counteract the seriousness of the situation. Everything we feel when watching The Martian is because Damon is able to bring those feelings out in us.

Eddie Redmayne for The Danish Girl – If Redmayne had not won this award just last year for The Theory of Everything, this awards race might have been a little closer. Indeed, some were positing that Redmayne could become the first back-to-back Best Actor winner since Tom Hanks in 1993-94 and just the third ever. Alas, The Danish Girl did not catch fire, either at the box office or with the industry, meaning Redmayne’s work does not have the necessary heat to make history at the Oscars.

The work is solid, and it is mesmerizing to watch Redmayne make the transition from portraying a confused man to a man becoming a woman and finally to the woman that man always was. Redmayne finds a number of subtle notes to play in the transformation, and with his guidance, the audience is never at a loss to understand the character. By the end, Redmayne simply becomes Lili, and it is as if that is how it was always meant to be.

The final analysis

There is not much else to say. Cranston and Fassbender each picked up some early critics’ awards, but that was before the locomotive that is DiCaprio in The Revenant pulled out of the station. Since then, DiCaprio has taken everything in sight – the Golden Globe, the Screen Actors Guild Award, and the BAFTA, among others. When he wins an Academy Award next Sunday, it will be one of my favorite moments in Oscar history, watching my favorite actor accept an award he richly deserves.

Will win: Leonardo DiCaprio for The Revenant

Should win: Leonardo DiCaprio for The Revenant

Should have been here: Tom Courtenay for 45 Years

Tomorrow: Best Documentary

New movie review: Trumbo

Bryan Cranston plays Dalton Trumbo in director Jay Roach's historical drama Trumbo.

The U.S. has suffered a few black eyes over the years, mostly its own doing and mostly revolving around unfounded persecution. Native populations, blacks, women, Japanese, a whole cross-section of Europeans, and practitioners of most major and minor non-Protestant Christian religions have all been on the receiving end of the distinctly American us-vs.-them treatment. In the harsh light of history, all of these cases have been rightly viewed as affronts to human dignity.

Among the more fascinating ages in this country’s short history is the mid-20th century, when we rabidly feared communist aggression and insidious socialist agendas. Not a decade removed from four terms of the most socialist president the U.S. is likely ever to have, congress swung the pendulum the other direction in a big way with the House Un-American Activities Committee and Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s legislative witch hunts.

Hollywood has gone to this well a few times, most recently and most successfully with George Clooney’s stellar Goodnight and Good Luck, about newsman Edward R. Murrow’s fight against McCarthy. Now comes director Jay Roach’s Trumbo, which looks at the role Hollywood itself played in discriminating against ideas deemed dangerous or subversive. Trumbo plays like a lighter companion piece to the Clooney film, neither as hard hitting nor as tightly crafted but not without merit.

Cranston in Trumbo.

Bryan Cranston, in his first major post-Breaking Bad screen appearance, plays Dalton Trumbo, a screenwriter and novelist at the top of the world. As the film begins, Trumbo’s books and movies are never more popular, he and his lovely family live on a massive estate, and he signs a deal to become the highest paid writer in Hollywood. Writer John McNamara, adapting the book Dalton Trumbo by Bruce Cook, spends the first half of his script stripping away everything Trumbo has spent his life building. The second half chronicles his fight against the system that tried to destroy him.

The plot kicks off with Congress becoming concerned with the messages being promoted by Hollywood films – an unsurprising and sadly still relevant turn of events. Showing a cowardice that had hurt it before and would hurt it again, the movie industry took steps to censor itself under the spurious logic that if anyone was going to harm the film business, it might as well be the studios themselves. In this way, the infamous blacklist was born.

The Hollywood Ten, which counted among its ranks Trumbo and Ring Lardner Jr., chose not to answer HUAC’s questions and were cited for contempt of Congress. They took their battle to the Supreme Court, where they lost, and most of them ended up in prison, except for one who turned against the group and cooperated with the investigation. When Trumbo gets out of prison, he finds himself to be a pariah, unable to work or support his family.

He and a number of other members of the Hollywood Ten began taking writing jobs from schlock movie producer Frank King (John Goodman) and producing scripts under aliases. This specific topic was tackled in the tremendous and tremendously underrated 1976 comedy The Front, directed by Martin Ritt. Trumbo certainly has elements of that earlier film but fills in the history around the edges for audiences who are another four decades removed from the era.

Roach, known mostly for comedies such as Meet the Parents and the Austin Powers series, is a bit out of his element directing a historical drama. There is an undercurrent of black comedy running through the film, but it is tempered by the gravity of the events being depicted. Traditionally comic performers such as Louis CK and Alan Tudyk deliver solid, measured performances in supporting roles, and even the most overtly comic character, King, benefits from committed, carefully crafted work by Goodman. It should be noted Diane Lane and Helen Mirren also provide sharp supporting performances in less well defined roles as the wife (Lane as Cleo Trumbo) and antagonist (Mirren as Hedda Hopper).

Helen Mirren and Cranston in Trumbo.

Where Roach gets in trouble is in the details. Namely, there are too many. Running more than two hours, the movie feels at least an hour longer and could easily have been a half-hour shorter. Roach and McNamara get bogged down in their step-by-step recounting of the trials of the Hollywood Ten early on and the writing of the King scripts later. There is something to be said for historical context and a desire to get the details right, but good filmmakers know when to trust the audience, and Trumbo too often feels as though it is holding the audience’s hand.

It is a shame because if ever there were a story that could breeze by on the strength of its emotional resonance, it is this one. The communist witch hunts and Hollywood blacklist are such a clear systemic failure that audiences need just a basic understanding of the events to become invested in the struggle of those facing persecution. Had the filmmakers stripped away some of the minutiae, they could have given the story much more room to breathe and cleared the way for Cranston’s towering central performance.

As with his famous portrayal of television anti-hero Walter White, Cranston absolutely commands the screen as Trumbo. He imbues his Trumbo with a brash, swaggering confidence and a palpable sense of righteous indignation. He has the maniacal single-mindedness of someone who believes there is a right and wrong answer to every question and also believes he always has the right answer.

The world according to Trumbo: Early in the film, his daughter asks him if she is a communist since he is. He proposes a scenario in which she has a sandwich and another child at school does not. Would she share her sandwich or tell the other kid to get a job and buy his own sandwich? Share, she says. Then, she is as much a communist as he is. The script occasionally buys into this highly simplified worldview, but Cranston never does. At all times, he is selling the nuances of a broken system that Trumbo refuses to let break him.

Cranston does not play Trumbo as a hero so much as an indignant rabble rouser who happens to be on the side of good. It is because of people like Trumbo, Murrow, the Hollywood Ten, and others that we are able to look back critically on times when ignorance and injustice threatened to destroy us from within – if only we could look at ourselves with the same critical lens, learn from our mistakes, and not repeat them. That world might be an okay place to live.

See it? Yes.

New movie review: Godzilla

Aaron Taylor-Johnson, as U.S. Navy Lt. Ford Brody, catches his first glimpse of one of the monsters in Gareth Edwards' Godzilla.

Ken Watanabe. Bryan Cranston. Juliette Binoche. David Strathairn. Elizabeth Olsen. Sally Hawkins. Aaron Taylor-Johnson. It is an A-list cast up and down the line. One simply wishes it had been given more to do. Instead, Godzilla asks these talented people to look stunned and dispense pseudoscience dialogue that is so ludicrous it almost makes you forget you are watching the latest entry in the “serious blockbuster” canon.

There have been serious blockbusters for as long as there have been blockbusters, but the most recent crop traces its lineage to Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight. These are morality tales about humankind’s inhumanity or its shabby treatment of nature or any other broadly defined, vaguely threatening concept. Many of these films are very good, laudable for their ability to astound the senses and engage the mind. Godzilla is not of their ilk – failing on the latter front and proving a mixed bag on the former.

One wishes not to be too harsh on this movie because it at least tries to create a knowing dialogue about science and nature, and director Gareth Edwards treats his viewers as intelligent, thinking people, whereas so many of these films ask you to leave your brain with the ticket-taker. These are admirable qualities, but at $12-15 for a movie ticket, more if you are seeing this in IMAX 3D, it does an audience no good to grade on a curve.

Edwards clearly is a talented director with an eye for unique visuals and, in the early going at least, a well-defined sense of authorship. Once the movie gets into its second and third acts, however, he falls into the trap these effects-laden films so often set: an over-reliance on set pieces in place of a story.

Name a world disaster in the last 15 years or so, and there is a good chance you will find an homage to it in this film. The inciting incident is meant as a stand-in for the Fukushima nuclear disaster, there is a monster-caused tsunami reminiscent of the devastating Indonesian earthquake and tsunami, and at least once, a plane hits a building behind a character at such an angle as to evoke the Sept. 11 World Trade Center attacks.

There is nothing inherently wrong with using real-world events to inform your action picture -- and the trope has been well employed throughout the lifespan of cinema – but it would have been nice for Edwards to put a more distinctive directorial stamp on these moments rather than asking historical associations to do the heavy lifting.

Where the enterprise falls apart, though, is on the page. Movie-goers are savvy people. They basically know what to expect from a big-budget monster movie. The Godzilla movies in particular have a rich cultural and political heritage, dating back to the 1954 original. At their best, these movies are almost always about the destruction of nature and more specifically the dangers of a nuclear society.

In the wake of Fukushima, an environmental message about the need for scientific caution and restraint is a welcome one, but when it comes to the science of monster movies, less is more. Instead, screenwriter Max Borenstein bogs down the early scenes by piling on expository dialogue that asks us to believe the creatures depicted are the result of a chain of improbable events and not plot convenience. As a general rule, it is best not to nitpick the science of these movies, and the problem here stems not from the science talk so much as from the time it takes away from building real characters.

Johnson plays Ford Brody, whose name is a possible homage to the protagonists of the Jaws films, and Edwards has stated his portrayal of Godzilla was inspired by Steven Spielberg’s depiction of the shark. Brody survived a Japanese nuclear plant disaster as a child. His father, who worked at he plant, is played by Cranston, in a yeoman performance. The elder Brody believes the meltdown was the result of something more nefarious than an earthquake.

Watanabe and Hawkins play scientists who are part of an apparently international coalition devoted to covering up what lies at the heart of the disaster and studying it. Watanabe is good, but the material he is given is not. Hawkins is criminally underused, as is Olsen as Johnson’s wife, and Binoche makes little more than a cameo as Cranston’s wife. This shunting of the female characters is problematic and sadly emblematic of the genre, but it might be more troublesome if any of the male characters were given anything much better. They are not.

For much of the second and third act, Brody, a U.S. Navy lieutenant, wanders from one destructive scene to the next in such a way that it seems the monsters may be following him. Scientists and high-ranking military officials try to figure out what to do as one major city after another comes under attack, though San Francisco gets the worst of it. For years, critics have complained New York City was suffering unfairly as the primary target for cinematic destruction, but add this to the new Star Trek and Planet of the Apes films, as well as X-Men: The Last Stand, and San Francisco may be making a comeback as blockbuster whipping boy.

At one point, a scientist offers this solution: Let the monsters fight it out themselves. It sounds like fanboy service as defense strategy, and as the buildings tumble, the movie collapses under the weight of its own unsustainable premise. If you want big action and big monsters, that is what you are going to get. If you want an intelligent, fully immersive e+xperience, look elsewhere.

See it? No.