Matt's Big Oscar Challenge Days 399-400: Winslet Wins It

We first met Kate Winslet back in the 1990s when she made her first impact on the Academy in Sense and Sensibility before wowing in the lead role of Titanic. Throughout the 2000s she was awarded with three more nominations and finally won the Oscar that had eluded her with her sixth nomination.

Before we look at that film we'll look back at some of the actress' other nominations as she followed on from Sense and Sensibility and Titanic with a Supporting nod for her role as a young Judi Dench in Iris. Three years later she was nominated for a Best Actress Oscar for her role in Michel Gondry's quirky romantic drama Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Although that film was overlooked in the Best Picture category, Winslet's other starring role that year was in a movie in contention for the main prize. That film was Finding Neverland, Marc Forster's film about the creation of Peter Pan in which Winslet played Sylvia Llewelyn Davies mother of the boys who would become the muses of author J.M. Barrie. In the role of Barrie, Johnny Depp brought his trademark innocence but also portrayed the Scottish playwright as quite immature. The film begins with the opening of one of Barrie's plays which ultimately ends in disaster and forces him to create a new production. At this time he also meets the Llewelyn Davies family with middle son Peter being the boy who intrigues Barrie the most. From there on David Magee's screenplay looks at the time Barrie spent with the family as well as his construction of the oddest play ever to grace the stage. Magee mixes fantasy sequences with real life drama as Barrie tries to bring out the boys' imagination whilst at the same time dealing with problems in his own marriage. As with any good Oscar film, Finding Neverland also features a character with an incurable disease with Sylvia passing away in one of the film's final scenes. However one of the film's strengths is that it never deals with death in a mawkish way and instead Sylvia's death makes way for a new chapter in her son's lives.

 I have an incredible soft spot for Finding Neverland and it's one of those films that just makes you feel warm inside. Whilst it wasn't Winslet's best film released that year, it's easy to see why the Academy lapped it up as much as they did. From Roberto Schaefer's brilliant cinematography to Jan A.P. Kaczmarek's Oscar-winning score everything about Finding Neverland was utterly joyous. Following on from his debut nomination the year before, Depp's second nod was arguably his most deserved as he played Barrie perfectly. Combining a childlike innocence with a knowing look, I felt that Depp led the film throughout and gave a thoroughly charming turn. As the young Peter, Freddie Highmore stayed on the right side of saccharine whilst Radha Mitchell gave a grounded portrayal of Barrie's naive wife. In supporting roles I found Julie Christie and Dustin Hoffman to add a bit of substance to the film with the latter popping us Barrie's financier. If there's one let down in the cast then it's Winslet herself who doesn't ever seem to have much to do. Her role is to almost act as the damsel in distress and the facilitator of Barrie's relationship with her sons. One of Finding Neverland's great assets is its fantasy sequences in which the boys and Barrie imagine various scenarios. My particular favourites would have to be the one in which Barrie turned his dog into a dancing bear and later when he let the boys believe they were on a pirate ship. Though Finding Neverland doesn't have any depth to speak of, I think it's an utterly beautiful piece of film-making with a story that's worth telling. With stories that speak to adults and children alike, I think that Finding Neverland is the perfect family film and was definitely worthy of its place in that year's Best Picture category.

Two years later, Winslet was nominated for another Best Actress Oscar this time for her role in suburban drama Little Children. She also appeared in an episode of Ricky Gervais' sitcom Extras in which she claimed that actors who play Nazis often go on to win Oscars. Someone somewhere was obviously watching this episode as, a couple of years later, Winslet was cast as former Auschwitz guard Hanna Schmitz in Stephen Daldry's The Reader. The film is mainly split into three parts as we follow the relationship between Hanna and the initially 15-year-old Michael Berg. The first act of the show sees the somewhat gawkish teenage Michael meeting Hanna for the first time as he experiences the onset of scarlet fever. Michael and the older Hanna spend a lot of time together with her demanding more of him and as a result alienating him from his friends. Eventually tiring of their liaisons, which involved sex and him reading to her, Michael ends things and subsequently goes to law school. Michael encounters Hanna once again when his law professor takes a group of students to learn from the war trials that are currently taking place in Berlin. It is here where Michael learns that Hanna was a guard in Auschwitz and also that she is illiterate hence her obsession with hearing others read. Winslet scored the Oscar-winning triumvirate, not only playing a Nazi but also one with a disability who physically ages on screen. This ageing process happens in the film's third act where the now married, and later divorced, Michael teaches Hanna to read using books from the library and a tape recorder. Michael, now played by Ralph Fiennes, encourages his former lover to finally own up to her mistakes and the two eventually meet up just before she's released. As The Reader never pretends to be a romantic film as such, Michael and Hanna aren't given their happy ending and instead he has to wrap the story up himself.

As the film divides itself into third acts, I will attempt to do the same with my review as I found The Reader to be three entirely different movies. At the start, The Reader feels like a film about forbidden romance as we follow Michael and Hanna's illicit trysts. For a film with so many sex scenes, I found The Reader to be incredibly passionless as there was never really any chemistry between Winslet and young actor David Kross. The second part of the film, involving the war trials, was more engaging and this to me was when Winslet's performance was at its strongest. The involvement of Bruno Ganz, as Michael's Holocaust surviving law professor, added to the quality of this segment as did David Hare's adapted screenplay. Moving on from the courtroom drama of the second act, the third part of The Reader almost felt like The Shawshank Redemption as Hanna finally overcame her illiteracy with Michael's outside help. After a strong second act, The Reader lost me once again as I felt that Daldry and Hare packed too much in to a short amount of screen time. Michael's marriage, the birth of his first child and his divorce were all skipped over at such a quick pace that nothing really had a chance to sink in. One of the brightest spots of these final scenes was Ralph Fiennes who was perfectly cast as the somewhat emotionless Michael. Fiennes and Winslet's only scene together was one of The Reader's strongest and I personally wished that they could've shared more screen time together. Alas this wasn't to be and after the end credits rolled I felt incredibly unaffected what I'd seen in the last two hours. It's very rare that a film leaves me so emotionless but, save Winslet's above average performance, there wasn't a lot to care about in the film. That's why I'm so surprised that it was nominated for Best Picture and I feel that Winslet's win came due to the fact that she was due a win. It's a shame that The Reader is the film that Winslet won her Oscar for as she's been so much stronger elsewhere and, due to the fact that the superior Revolutionary Road was released around the same time, Daldry's movie wasn't even the actress' best that year.

Next time we see the revival of a genre that has laid dormant since the early 1980s.

Matts' Big Oscar Challenge Day 234: There's No Beating Beatty

It's been a while but I'm back on the Oscar trail and determined to at least get to the end of the 1980s by the end of the year. The next four reviews are going to be hazy recollections as I watched them last autumn and stupidly didn't write anything down about them at the time.

The first of the four is Heaven Can Wait a remake, not of the 1940s film Heaven Can Wait, but rather then 1940s film Here Comes Mr Jordan both of which have previously been reviewed on this site. This remake sees Robert Montgomery's baseball player being replaced by Warren Beatty's quaterback Joe Pendleton whose motorcycle ends up colliding with a truck with the result being him taken up to heaven by an over-zealous Guardian Angel. As with the original 1940s film Mr Jordan, here played by James Mason, finds a new body for Joe in the form of billionaire Leo Farnsworth. Joe, as Farnsworth, surprises the current Mrs Farnsworth and the old man's business manager as the pair had recently finished killing him off. But Farnsworth's revival results in them ultimately being rumbled for the crime. Elsewhere Joe falls for environmentalist Betty Logan who has come to Farnsworth industries to complain about their unscrupulous activities. Despite the age difference, Betty soon falls for Farsnworth also buys Joe's old team and tries to make himself quarterback. Obviously, anybody who's seen one of the three versions of the film knows exactly how it will end, but I'm not going to spoil it for you here.

It's very rare in this day and age that a comedy makes its way into the Best Picture line-up and it was in the 1970s that the genre began to disappear altogether from the Academy Awards nominations. I personally feel that Heaven Can Wait got into the Best Picture list due to its star power rather than its comic ability. Alongside Beatty, who was actually pretty good throughout, the all-star cast included Julie Christie, James Mason and Charles Grodin. I do feel that Christie in particular was given little to do aside from standing around and playing the love interest. Though there were some changes made to the characters from the original film version, the pivotal parts of the plot remained the same. The question then has to be why remake it in the first place? The only reason I can possibly offer is that cinematic effects had moved on quite significantly since the early 1940s and, to be fair, the supernatural elements of the plot were more visually spectacular than they had been thirty years ago. The film received a shocking ten nominations at the awards as a whole but only picked up one, a slightly deserving nod for the grandiose art direction. Overall Heaven Can Wait is a decent enough comedy, but to me really didn't feel like one of the best five films from any year.

Next up we have two offerings from a director who is known for his sharp wit and ensemble casts.

Matt's Big Oscar Challenge Day 208: The Doctor Will See You Now

As we've seen throughout this journey, David Lean is a director who has grand vision and scope. With Bridge on the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia both giving a different perspective on the war film, Lean definitely excels in telling stories set around times of conflict. This is true of Doctor Zhivago, Lean's lavish adaptation of Boris Pasternak's novel, which starts in 1913 and takes in both World War I and the Russian Revolution. These events are seen through the eyes of Omar Sharif's Yuri Zhivago, a frustrated poet who becomes a doctor and therefore is witness to a lot of the bloodshed of the time. Initially Yuri is drawn to Tonya, the daughter of the couple who raised him, and they indeed have a child together. But later, Yuri meets Lara, a complicated girl who gets married to idealistic reformer Pasha Antipov. Though, Yuri and Lara serve together during the war, what happens later means he has to care for his family first. Ultimately Doctor Zhivago is set up as a love triangle with a bit of violence and revolution thrown in for good measure. Yuri's ending is a tragic one, some would say overly so, but there was a kind of a happy ending involving the supposed daughter of Yuri and Lara.

As with all of Lean's films, Doctor Zhivago is wonderfully shot and brilliantly scored. The film won five Oscars which included the prizes for Art Direction, Costume Design and Cinematography. I personally found a lot of the shots and set pieces to be first class, these include the shot of the train coming out of the tunnel following the intermission and Yuri's attempts to attract Lara's attentions for the last time. The vast expanse of sets used was amazing while the fact that Lean's team were able to transform Spain into Russia was astounding. Maurice Jarre's score also deserves a mention and in particular 'Lara's Theme' which is still an incredibly enchanting piece of film music. One of the elements that let Doctor Zhivago down was its running time, a regular bugbear of mine, as I felt the film meandered during its 200 minutes. I also wasn't a particular fan of the character of Yuri as he always seemed to be someone on the outskirts of society and somebody who could never commit to anything. This isn't anything against Sharif's performance though I do feel he lacked chemistry with both his female leads. Julie Christie was absolutely amazing as Lara and played a completely different role to her Oscar-winning turn in Darling. Similarly Rod Steiger's brutish portrayal of Komarvosky was a scene-stealing performance. However, the only acting nomination came for Tom Courtenay as the idealistic and later bloodthirsty Pasha. I found Courtenay utterly mesmerising as he played a man who truly had passion for his cause but later had lost all of this and had now realised that he was never to have a personal life.

Overall, while not one of my favourite of Lean's films, there's no denying that Doctor Zhivago is a visually spectacular piece with some interesting performances. Though I found heavy-going occasionally, Lean seemed to have a genuine love for his characters that shone through. I just wish that Doctor Zhivago's runtime had been shaved slightly as I felt this would have made a definite improvement.

Next time we come to the last 1960s film of our search.

Matt's Big Oscar Challenge Day 190: The Swingin' Sixties

One of the reasons for me conducting this project was to see how much the films of a certain decade drew influence from their surroundings. To me it seems that a lot of the movies from the 1960s go back to the past rather than deal with issues in the present. That's why I found Darling rather refreshing as it gave a portrait of the Swingin' Sixties era of London as seen through the eyes of its protagonist Diana Scott. When we first meet Scott she is a bored young model trapped in a loveless marriage. Luckily she soon meets journalist Robert Gould and the two begin an affair leading to them becoming a trendy couple. Robert and Diana are soon part of London's fashionable elite however nothing is ever enough for Diana and she soon ends up in the bed of advertising executive Miles Glass. As Miles helps Diana's career soar, Robert becomes increasingly jealous and leaves Diana after she returns from a trip to Paris with Miles. Robert's rejection results in Diana questioning her life and considers becoming more religious during a trip to Rome. As Diana's star rises she decides to abandon her career and move to Italy for good as she takes one character up on their offer of marriage. However it remains to be seen if Diana can truly ever be happy. 

I personally found Darling to be a great snapshot of life in London during the 1960s while Diana Scott was the perfect embodiment of that time. Here's a pretty girl who is often exploited by men and then wonders why she is never truly happy. In a lot of ways Darling felt a little bit like Alfie, as both are narrated by their lead characters and both end on a bit of a downer. The cinematography of Kenneth Higins and the editing of James Clark both contribute to portray a London where everything is constantly moving forward. Though the film is seemingly a collection of scenes, rather than a completed movie, I feel that John Schlesinger still packs in enough memorable moments to make the film stand out. However I feel Darling will mostly be remembered for the brilliant performance from Julie Christie who is able to portray a woman whose life is never as perfect as she makes out. Christie's Diana is someone who always believes that things will turn out okay and when they don't she wonders why. Christie, who won a Best Actress Award for her role, is ably supported by Dirk Bogarde as her loyal partner and Laurence Harvey as the smarmy advertising executive. While Darling is quite a light film I still enjoyed it thanks mostly to the lead performances and Schlesinger's assured direction. It also perfectly encapsulated the carefree mood of the 1960s and the dangers that lay beneath the surface.