Wednesday, March 19, 2003

Achievement in directing

Rob Marshall, CHICAGO
It's often remarked that Martin Scorsese has an odd tendency to lose to actors-turned-directors. What's less often noted is his habit of losing to first-time directors – and Rob Marshall, whose experience is stage and the television version of Annie, qualifies.

It's also worth noting that Marshall won the Directors Guild prize this year, often a stepping stone to the Oscars. While the DGA gave Scorsese a lifetime achievement award this year, he's never won the Directors Guild award for a particular film. Why is this the case if Scorsese is "America's greatest living director"? (I happen to agree that he is, but his peers have never seen fit to honour him, while honouring Robert Redford, Kevin Costner and Mel Gibson.)

I know, I know. I'm supposed to be talking about Rob Marshall, but Scorsese's the elephant in the dining room this year. Marshall does a good job at reviving the musical here – the numbers are cleverly mounted, and he's had the decency to rethink the staging rather than relying on Bob Fosse's choreography.

On the other hand, some of us actually have the Fosse choreography imprinted on our minds and know exactly how the film might have looked had Fosse had the chance to make it – it would have looked like All That Jazz.

Martin Scorsese, GANGS OF NEW YORK
It's plain that Scorsese wants an Oscar. He's doing talk shows, for goodness sakes, and while Scorsese is a great and voluble talker on the subject of movies, you can be sure Jay Leno isn't going to ask him about, say, the influence of Italian cinema on Gangs Of New York, or about the films of Vincente Minnelli.

Watching Scorsese degrade himself for an award is painful, a final twist from Harvey Weinstein, who forced an abbreviated cut of Gangs on the director and now trots him around the promo circuit.

There's always a lot of talk about Scorsese getting robbed by the Academy – this is his fourth nomination, and he's previously lost to John G. Avildsen (Rocky), Redford (Ordinary People) and Costner (Dances With Wolves). As an admirer of Ordinary People, which beat Raging Bull, I'd say the greatest injustice in Scorsese's Oscar career was the Academy's failure to nominate him for The Age Of Innocence, which was a much better Merchant-Ivory picture than Remains Of The Day, which did get a nomination for James Ivory that year.

Gangs Of New York is magnificently directed, even if it's not a great film (at least, not in the Weinstein cut). But if Scorsese loses this year, the degree of injustice will depend on who wins.

Stephen Daldry, THE HOURS
How much credit do we give a director for great performances when he's got Nicole Kidman, Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore, Ed Harris, Jeff Daniels, Alison Janney, Claire Danes, Miranda Richardson and Toni Collette to work with? How much credit do we give a director for a film's complex time structure when it's a glitch-ridden version of the fluid time-shifting in the original novel.

Forgive me for not jumping on this film's critical bandwagon. I find it ploddingly literal and pretentiously literary in the worst way.

Odd thought: Stephen Daldry picked up a nomination for his first film, Billy Elliot, to which one of the most persistent reactions was, "You mean the kid isn't gay?" Is The Hours, a film where almost every major character is gay or heavily closeted, a response to that criticism?

Roman Polanski, THE PIANIST
Something to think about: Repulsion, Knife In The Water, Chinatown, Tess, Rosemary's Baby. And people think it's tragic that Scorsese's never won an Oscar?

OK, Scorsese's never made a movie as bad as Pirates, but Roman Polanski also tends to do a more honest job on straight commercial assignments like Frantic and The Ninth Gate than Scorsese does on films like Cape Fear and The Color Of Money.

That said – and they'll probably drum me out of FIPRESCI for it – Polanski is the most intriguing nominee here. With a Palme d'Or from the Cannes Film Festival already adorning The Pianist, the film puts the Academy in an interesting position.

There's a long history of Holocaust-themed films getting Academy nods (Steven Spielberg offered to produce Schindler's List if Polanski would direct), but The Pianist is a strange, oblique film that is in essence about one man's rejection of self in an effort to survive.

It's a sign of how much respect Pedro Almodóvar has in the writing and directing branches of the Academy that he pulls this double in a year when his film wasn't eligible for best foreign film. Again, this is perhaps an unpopular opinion, but as Almodóvar's skill and compassion have grown, his films have become less interesting – I'll happily take What Have I Done To Deserve This?, rough edges and all, over All About My Mother or Talk To Her. Honouring Almodóvar for his later "serious" films is rather like nominating Woody Allen as best director for Interiors, and even a group of status monkeys like the Academy never fell for that one. An unlikely winner, though.