Posted: Thu Mar 25, 2010 10:18 am
I agree with Magilla about the omission of Moore -- I think Prizewinner is her best post-Far fom Heaven performance. I like Allen well enough, and Kilcher; they'd have been superior to most of this drab slate. Bello, though, I think was fairly clearly supporting.
Of the selected:
Theron gives a bland, TV-movie performance in a laughably bad film. She benefitted from the "once you've won, you can be nominated anytime" precedent.
I think Dench is not only not impressive, I think her performance is fundamentally wrong-headed. For the first half, she's basically an Auntie Mame, flying past the uptight squares to get what she wants. But in the second half, her character makes no sense. There's a scene in the theatre where they're talking about wartime sacrifice, and she makes a comment so upper-class clueless it might have come out of Barbara Bush's mouth. This was the first moment in the film where I had any notion Mrs. Henderson was anything but a heroine. Soon after that, she essentially pimps one of the girls into a seemingly innocent soldier's bed -- only it turns out the soldier was no virgin, he was just looking for something on the side, and he leaves the girl knocked up (a plot development conveniently negated by a bombing raid). Yet Dench's Mrs. Henderson doesn't seem to register any of this. In her final outside-the-theatre oration, she's back to her "I just wanted our brave boys to see some titties before they died", and I fully expected she'd add "but life turned out more complicated than that". No dice; she ends up Auntie Mame again. I acknowledge much of the blame for this lies in the disappointing writing, but I don't think Dench does anything to make the character explicable. So, a big No on her.
Keira Knightley is fundamentally miscast. If Elizabeth Bennet is beautiful, Darcy would be an idiot not to snap her up. The whole point of pretty much every Austin vehicle is that the younger sister is the beauty, but that the more perceptive man will know to look beneath the surface and choose the brilliant sister. Knightley's inoffensive in the role, but she can't get past this road-block.
Felicity Huffman is respectable in an Oscar-bait role, but the script is mediocre and doesn't allow her to soar. Had she won, she'd have been one of the weaker choices of recent times (and yes, I know the surrounding context isn't exactly stellar).
I thought (along with the NY and National critics) that Witherspoon, while subsidiary to Phoenix, was clearly the best of this bunch. The movie lights up from her first scene with Phoenix at the diner. At every moment we see from Witherspoon the woman taught from childhood that pleasing an audience trumps everything -- even when the woman in the the store offers disapproval on Carter's life, Witherspoon is unfailingly polite to her. And, a really small moment: when they take the stage in the prison, Witherspoon, in background, isn't even fully in focus -- yet we see her audience-must-be-served 100-megawatt smile in the blur. This tells me she was utterly present at every moment of the film. No, she wouldn't have beat out most of my or the Academy's winners around her -- Staunton or Mirren, fuhgaeddaboutit. But in this pack, she shines brighly enough for the prize.
Of the selected:
Theron gives a bland, TV-movie performance in a laughably bad film. She benefitted from the "once you've won, you can be nominated anytime" precedent.
I think Dench is not only not impressive, I think her performance is fundamentally wrong-headed. For the first half, she's basically an Auntie Mame, flying past the uptight squares to get what she wants. But in the second half, her character makes no sense. There's a scene in the theatre where they're talking about wartime sacrifice, and she makes a comment so upper-class clueless it might have come out of Barbara Bush's mouth. This was the first moment in the film where I had any notion Mrs. Henderson was anything but a heroine. Soon after that, she essentially pimps one of the girls into a seemingly innocent soldier's bed -- only it turns out the soldier was no virgin, he was just looking for something on the side, and he leaves the girl knocked up (a plot development conveniently negated by a bombing raid). Yet Dench's Mrs. Henderson doesn't seem to register any of this. In her final outside-the-theatre oration, she's back to her "I just wanted our brave boys to see some titties before they died", and I fully expected she'd add "but life turned out more complicated than that". No dice; she ends up Auntie Mame again. I acknowledge much of the blame for this lies in the disappointing writing, but I don't think Dench does anything to make the character explicable. So, a big No on her.
Keira Knightley is fundamentally miscast. If Elizabeth Bennet is beautiful, Darcy would be an idiot not to snap her up. The whole point of pretty much every Austin vehicle is that the younger sister is the beauty, but that the more perceptive man will know to look beneath the surface and choose the brilliant sister. Knightley's inoffensive in the role, but she can't get past this road-block.
Felicity Huffman is respectable in an Oscar-bait role, but the script is mediocre and doesn't allow her to soar. Had she won, she'd have been one of the weaker choices of recent times (and yes, I know the surrounding context isn't exactly stellar).
I thought (along with the NY and National critics) that Witherspoon, while subsidiary to Phoenix, was clearly the best of this bunch. The movie lights up from her first scene with Phoenix at the diner. At every moment we see from Witherspoon the woman taught from childhood that pleasing an audience trumps everything -- even when the woman in the the store offers disapproval on Carter's life, Witherspoon is unfailingly polite to her. And, a really small moment: when they take the stage in the prison, Witherspoon, in background, isn't even fully in focus -- yet we see her audience-must-be-served 100-megawatt smile in the blur. This tells me she was utterly present at every moment of the film. No, she wouldn't have beat out most of my or the Academy's winners around her -- Staunton or Mirren, fuhgaeddaboutit. But in this pack, she shines brighly enough for the prize.