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

Red light, (Project) Greenlight

Producer Effie Brown, writer-director Jason Mann, and actor Bruce Davison on the set of The Leisure Class.

We have seen it all now – or at least, everything they are going to show us. Season 4 of HBO’s Project Greenlight ended Sunday, and the film it produced, The Leisure Class, debuted last night. If you are unfamiliar with the Matt Damon- and Ben Affleck-produced documentary series, it follows the journey of an untested director as he, always a “he” so far, attempts to make a film. This year’s “lucky” winner was Jason Mann, and for eight episodes this season, we watch as he navigates the world of Hollywood moviemaking.

Both as a film fan and an aspiring filmmaker, I find this show fascinating. It is a treat to step behind the curtain and really see the process of creating a movie. I think most of us are long past the stage where we imagine films or any other creative endeavor springing forth fully formed from the minds of brilliant artists. Like all other things in life, it is hard work, and it is likely we would all benefit from learning the hard work behind most people’s jobs. Honestly, for the impact they have on my life, I know next to nothing about the day-to-day lives of my grocer or postman.

Mann directs The Leisure Class for Project Greenlight.

This is about movies, though, and this season of Project Greenlight was an illuminating look at the gritty details of what makes movie magic work – or not work. In addition to Mann, the series stars producers Effie Brown and Marc Joubert, as well as co-writer and season 1 winner Pete Jones. Affleck, Damon, Peter and Bobby Farrelly, and HBO President Len Amato show up from time to time, but it is really about those four people.

The show has been in the news a bit during its run, primarily early on for some comments Damon made to Brown about diversity. Now that the show has ended, Brown has been the participant whose profile has risen the most, as opposed to the ostensible star of the show and director of the movie Mann. That heightened profile is hard won as Brown tries like hell to keep the whole enterprise from flying off the rails. Hers is a valiant effort, thwarted at almost every turn by Mann.

There is much agreement that money has been damaging to the art world and the film business in particular. No one is here to argue that point. The last thing we need is another superhero movie or big-budget shoot-’em-up or lowest-common-denominator comedy. When a genuinely talented writer, director, or producer shepherds something truly visionary to the screen, it is to be applauded.

After watching him on eight episodes of television and a feature film, it is apparent Mann is not one of those people. Throughout the series, Mann steadfastly refuses to put himself in a position to make a good film, and The Leisure Class turns out to be a bad, bad movie. He and Brown butt heads constantly over budget, shooting, and story issues, and the interesting thing is Mann almost always wins these battles.

He wants to shoot on film instead of digital. Brown tells him it will be too expensive, so he goes over her head and gets his way. He refuses to choose a location that does not match what he has in his head. He finally settles for a house he was shown early on but chooses so close to shooting it creates further problems. He claims he cannot shoot the script he is given, so he convinces HBO to let him make his own script. Time after time after time, he gets his way, and ultimately, this is the best thing that could have happened.

If he had relented in any of his battles or agreed to compromise his vision in some way, he could have claimed the end result was not his fault. As it is, he got everything he wanted and made a terrible movie. There is no one to blame but Mann. Though some viewers will disagree with this assessment, Brown did all she could to help Mann and prevent him from hurting himself, but at the end of the day, he could not collaborate. He was determined to live or die on his own. Creatively and artistically, he dies.

Ed Weeks and Tom Bell star in The Leisure Class.

At 86 minutes, The Leisure Class is either way too long or way too short. Perhaps its distressing lack of character development could have been addressed by giving the scenes room to breathe or providing some semblance of backstory. However, since the plot is utter nonsense to begin with, this film, adapted from a short Mann worked on, probably should have stayed a short. A group of talented, game actors, including Tom Bell, Ed Weeks, Bruce Davison, and Bridget Regan, is stranded by an underdeveloped script and amateur direction.

Cinema fans like you and I, we want to root for art and artists. It is our natural inclination to cheer on Mann as he fights the good fight against corporate giants (HBO) and their moneymen (Brown and Joubert). It can be painful, then, to realize: Sometimes the giants and their moneymen are right. No one gets into the film business because they want to make bad movies, though Mann seems suspect of any non-artist. These are people with experience, talent, and knowledge, particularly Brown and Joubert, and Mann willfully ignores them to put out the worst possible product. It would be wrong to cheer on such hubris.

The final episode contains two quotes that sum up what went wrong with The Leisure Class. As Mann is being given final edit notes by Amato, he says in a talking-head interview: “I would love it if I could make movies in the future where I don’t have to debate the logic of my opinion on how something should be. Ultimately, it should be kind of a personal art form.” This is perfectly in keeping with the Mann we have seen through Project Greenlight.

Amato, without meaning to, provides the rejoinder to Mann’s sentiment, saying in his own interview: “Jason’s not as open as he should be to different input from different people. If you try to do everything yourself and you’re not getting the input of all the other artists and craftspeople around you, you’re not really making as good of a film as you can make. That’s the lesson he hasn’t been able to learn yet.”

Ours is a culture that lionizes lone wolves and mavericks. We abhor group think and committee decision-making. This is what makes someone like Steve Jobs so popular. In reality, the genius of individuals is at best a myth. In filmmaking, especially, collaboration is essential. Through the failure of The Leisure Class and the success of Project Greenlight, this lesson is spelled out, for Mann’s benefit, in both celluloid and digital.

New movie review: The Martian

Matt Damon plays an astronaut stranded on Mars in director Ridley Scott's The Martian.

There is nothing quite as satisfying as seeing a talented person work. It really does not matter the craft. Watching a skilled carpenter build a table can be as pleasing as watching a concert pianist perform or a top chef prepare a delicious meal. It should not be terribly revolutionary to suggest competence is appealing. It is one of the reasons the spy genre is so durable. Spies are ceaselessly competent. They accomplish with ease tasks that would confound us mere mortals, and that is why they are so damned fun to watch.

There are no spies in The Martian, but there is competence to spare, and as a result, the film is a joyous exercise in smart, big-budget moviemaking. From director Ridley Scott and writer Drew Goddard, based on the novel by Andy Weir, The Martian is the story of astronaut Mark Watney (Matt Damon), who is marooned on Mars after a storm forces a speedy evacuation by the crew of the Ares III mission. Thinking Watney has died in the storm, the rest of the crew takes off and heads back to Earth.

When their error is discovered by mission control, an all-out rescue effort begins, and the film cuts back and forth between the frantic attempts by NASA to reach the stranded astronaut and Watney’s pragmatic, life-extending measures. The film settles into a rhythm early. Problems arise, and intelligent people solve them. Another problem demands another solution, and so on until either Watney is saved or a problem comes up that cannot be solved.

Mercifully, there is no villain in the film – no aliens, no shadowy government agencies, no one working at cross-purposes to the characters. The enemies are time and space. Watney has limited resources and infinite space. He must survive on his own long enough to allow the rescue mission to reach him. A botanist, he devises a way to farm potatoes on the once-barren planet. This will buy him some time. It is up to mission control back home to solve the space problem, which is that they have a lot of space to cover to get to Watney.

Kristen Wiig and Chiwetel Ejiofor in The Martian.

Populated by an appealingly eclectic and talented cast, including Chiwetel Ejiofor, Benedict Wong, Jeff Daniels, Donald Glover, and Kristen Wiig, the ground team at NASA gets to work. Under incredible pressure and with no margin for error, they propose to send an unmanned probe to Mars with supplies to keep Watney alive until the next planned manned mission arrives. When this fails, it falls to the crew of the Ares III, still on their way back to Earth, to decide if they will risk their lives to attempt a rescue of the man they left behind.

Perhaps surprisingly for someone who made his name writing intricate, puzzle-box-type stories such as Cabin in the Woods and the television show Lost, Goddard’s screenplay is straightforward and workmanlike. More Apollo 13 than 2001: A Space Odyssey, the script is less interested in the meaning of life than in the extension of it. For The Martian, the former approach works, and Goddard and Scott smartly give all the action set pieces and narrative developments room to breathe rather than overstuffing the spaces between with needless philosophizing.

Movies like this work best when allowed to bask in silence, and on Mars, silence is the one thing not in short supply. While the top-flight cast also includes Jessica Chastain, Michael Peña, and Kate Mara, among others, the film lives and dies with the lonely, life-and-death struggle of Watney and with Damon’s portrayal of the stranded astronaut. Long stretches of the film are inhabited by just Watney and the video diary he keeps, partially for the record and partially for his sanity. In these moments of quiet solitude, the audience is allowed to feel his grief and isolation but also his hope.

Recent comments in the press aside, Damon has a charming, everyman-like quality about him that makes you want to root for him. The character is witty and affable – two traits Damon has excelled at displaying in nearly all his roles – but the dire nature of his situation is never once out of mind. Damon’s well calibrated performance is a perfect balance of light and dark, playful and practical, which is the same tightrope the film itself walks so well.

Scott has fallen out of critical favor as a director in recent years, releasing a string of indifferently received films (A Good Year; American Gangster; Body of Lies; Robin Hood) followed by three highly divisive ones (Prometheus; The Counselor; Exodus: Gods and Kings). There was nothing necessarily wrong with these works – I happen to love Prometheus – but something was missing from most of them. With The Martian, Scott proves he is the same talented director who long ago brought us Alien and Blade Runner, as well as the relatively more recent Gladiator.

Here, Scott provides the same sense of awe-inspiring wonder that has marked his best work, but it is buoyed by an inspiring story of genuine human accomplishment. The Martian vistas are the kind of breathtaking visual achievement Scott can conjure on a whim, and this movie is full of beautiful images, but its greatest success is its people.

Working from Goddard’s script and Weir’s story, Scott astonishes with more than just visuals. Think how rare that is to see a big, effects-driven movie, which this clearly is, and to be amazed by something more than how pretty everything is. In The Martian, we are amazed simply to watch smart people confront impossible odds with determination and hope.

See it? Yes.

New movie review: Interstellar

Matthew McConaughey explores the nothing in Christopher Nolan's Interstellar.

The vast emptiness of space is an ideal setting for a contemplative exploration of humanity, loneliness, and the need for love and community. At the same time, the chaotic machinations of the universe mean there are galaxies full of stars and planets around which to base an epic science-fiction action-adventure movie. It is possible Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar would have been a good film if it had told a story about any of that. Alas, it is neither a good film nor very interested in storytelling.

Bloated, empty, and incoherent, Interstellar shows up at the theater with a bag full of tricks amounting to nothing more than smoke and mirrors. Having never been a convert to the cult of Nolan, maybe I am not the target audience for this film, but it is hard to imagine who would be. This is classic big-budget gimmickry, which wants so badly to pluck our heart strings, engage our minds, and overwhelm our senses but succeeds only in being cloying, pontificating, and very loud, often all at the same time.

Emotionally manipulative to its core, the film might have had a chance at drawing tears and inspiring empathy if we knew who any of these people were. Instead, Nolan looks down on his creation as a god might and observes the little ants running around on their corn farms and the wastelands of uncolonized planets. The question becomes: Why should any of us in the audience take a different view?

Late in the film, this thesis becomes clear when two characters – one of whom we have only just met – engage in a fistfight and roll around on the ground. Nolan pulls back to reveal the scope of the icy landscape on which they stand. The intent is to frame these petty people as small when compared to the backdrop of the universe and the scale of the problem they are trying to solve – to save the human race.

It almost works, except that we are meant to care about who wins the fight. By forcing us to want the “good guy” to win, the movie undercuts its message of human pettiness and frailty and encourages the audience to join in the squabbling. This is just one among many examples of the movie trying to have its philosophical cake and eat it, too.

Humanity is dying. A vaguely discussed famine has gripped the world, and as food supplies dwindle and dust storms rage, a small governmental organization – NASA – believes it has the answer. We will leave the planet. Missions are sent to explore the universe and find habitable worlds for us, while back on Earth, the destruction continues unabated.

The movie is at odds with itself almost from the very beginning. It wants the sci-fi spectacle of so many outer-space actioners, but it also wants the human emotion of a low-key drama. It delivers only one of these – the one with explosions. Splitting the film between an environmental disaster drama on Earth and the action of space exploration, Nolan and editor Lee Smith seem at loss for how to connect the two threads. Too often, they build to incredible climaxes at one location only to cut away to the other, but rather than build tension, these cuts destroy any momentum the story may have gathered.

None of this would be as problematic if the characters existed as anything beyond broad sketches, but somehow, in a nearly three-hour movie, the script forgets to give any of the characters even rudimentary reasons for their often-baffling decisions. Quite clearly, they are movie characters making choices that benefit no one and nothing but the plot.

As Nolan films are wont to do, Interstellar draws a superb cast for even its smallest roles. Leading the way are Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, and Jessica Chastain, supported by Casey Affleck, Wes Bentley, David Gyasi, Matt Damon, John Lithgow, and Nolan regular Michael Caine. They all give fine performances, taking into account the material with which they have to work, but apart from one or two strong moments from McConaughey, they are lost in the morass of sentiment and barrage of spectacle to which the film has committed.

The most ready comparison is to Nolan’s own Inception, with its puzzle-box plotting, lecture-hall pedantry, and larger-than-life visuals. Without wanting to start a debate on the merits of Inception, I hope we can agree the dream worlds of the film were somewhat lacking in imagination. In his latest, Nolan doubles down on beyond-the-stars blandness and delivers some of the least intriguing intergalactic worlds this side of an Arizona desert.

With infinite resources at their disposal, the filmmakers give us one planet that appears to be all shallow water and one that appears to be all ice. I have no doubt worlds such as these exist in one form or another, but to set a movie there seems a dubious prospect at best. In Interstellar, we visit both and find little of interest on either.

If you insist on seeing this movie, I would urge you to pay the IMAX surcharge – assuming you can find true IMAX in your area – as there are two bravura space-travel scenes worth the added price of admission. Even these are comparatively staid against something such as Stanley Kubrick’s “Beyond the Infinite” sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey, but they are the only moments where you might feel anything but bored while sitting in the theater.

This is the final and most egregious sin of Interstellar. As much as it wants us to think about our place in the universe, the way we treat our planet, and the connections we form with others, it simply fails to foster any interest in its ideas. By the third or fourth time a character advises others to “rage against the dying of the light,” it becomes clear this movie has no new ideas. The script is comprised only of shopworn pseudo-philosophies that might look good on a dorm-room poster, which is just as well, since a lot of college freshmen are going to be hanging this one on their walls.

Were one to look too closely – and I would discourage anyone from doing so – the only things to be found are dangerously destructive ideologies that espouse the supremacy of humanity and the human race’s right to seek and destroy. It is a literal scorched-earth policy writ large on the big screen and passed off as an intelligent take on our special place in existence. If this movie is correct and the universe is empty but for us, so much the better, and we have gotten what we earned. We are kings of nothing.

See it? No.