Thanksgiving can mean one thing to a child, another to a movie critic.
When I was young, growing up in the tiny village of Williams Bay on Lake Geneva, Wis., Thanksgiving was one of the most pleasurably old-fashioned and lovably cliched of holidays. Under the onslaught of increasing cold and approaching winter, our family members gathered around the dining room table sating themselves on all toothsome seasonal trimmings from cranberry sauce to my grandmother’s epochal biscuits and honey. It was the time of feasts and leftovers.
But now that I’m older, wiser (hopefully) and a movie critic as well–living in a city that, unlike mine back then, actually has indoor movie theaters–I see Thanksgiving differently. Not just as the day of culinary feasts, but also as the time when you can fill up, or fill up again, on the movies you’ve missed, the ones you’ve wondered about or, just possibly, might want to see once again.
Why? October and November mark the beginning of Oscar hopeful season, which means that, in contrast to the sometimes staggering intellectual poverty, genuine stupidity and unblushing artistic sellouts of much of the year’s big studio fare, all those “Scoo-by-Doos” and dipsy-doodles flung cynically at our wallets and purses, the big studios and their subsidiaries have begun to trot out films they honestly believe have a shot at big prizes rather than just big bucks.
“Ray,” “Kinsey,” “Finding Neverland,” “Sideways,” “The Polar Express,” “The Incredibles,” “Vera Drake,” “Being Julia” and even the controversial “Alexander” are in movie houses now, signifying that, once you’re all full of food, you can hit some multiplexes and start to assess how good, or overrated, you think these are.
If you are in an exploratory mood, I recommend you start with “Sideways,” “Vera Drake” and “Ray.”
Good as they all are, these pictures improve with each successive viewing. They are also movies with people that you simply enjoy meeting again: Jamie Foxx’s ebulliently recreated Ray Charles; Paul Giamatti’s and Thomas Haden Church’s hapless ex-college buddies Miles and Jack and their seemingly temporary inamoratas Maya and Stephanie (Virginia Madsen and Sandra Oh); Imelda Staunton’s cherubic-faced but increasingly frightened Vera and her amiable working-class London family.
If these movies and performers don’t wind up on a score of 10-best lists with at least a few prizes under their belts, then cinematic justice is as perishable as gravy and candied yams. I loved them all–after several encounters.
Take “Sideways.”
You might have to seek out this wonderful, rib-tickling, sometimes poignant movie. But “Sideways” to me was as filling and delicious as the best Thanksgiving feasts I’ve attended, as intoxicating as the fine wines that figure so prominently in its story.
“Sideways” began conquering movie critics at the Toronto Film Festival in October and has continued since. Directed and co-written by “Election’s” and “About Schmidt’s” Alexander Payne, based on the whimsical novel by Rex Pickett and starring the marvelous foursome of Giamatti (“American Splendor”), Church (“TV’s “Wings”), Madsen (“Creator”) and Oh (comedian and Mrs. Payne), it’s gotten reviews to die for.
And it deserves them. This is a picture full of humor and humanity, which not only kept me laughing and smiling throughout two separate screenings but continues to make me laugh just thinking about it or recalling the best scenes and lines with friends. Essentially, “Sideways” is an ironic, funny/sad look at a great American quest, a buddy movie and realistic romantic comedy gone outrageously but believably wrong. In the movie, ex-San Diego State college roommates Miles (the nerdy intellectual writer) and Jack (the sexually omnivorous actor) meet for one last bachelor fling though California’s Santa Ynez wine country, before Jack’s impending nuptials and submission to a probable business career with his rich in-laws.
What follows is the familiar tale of the male bond between a sexual “winner” and “loser” (a basic plot of American dramas such as “Hud” and of comedies from “A Girl in Every Port” to “Some Like it Hot” to “Swingers”) but done with such keen observation, comic relish and humane sympathy that, like Jack, it breaks down all resistance.
See “Sideways” once and you’ll probably laugh all the way through–before pulling up short at the stirring, profoundly ambivalent last scene. See it again and you’ll see how serious and observant it really is. My college best friend was pretty much like Jack, and I’ve never seen anybody play this type better than Church, or catch a writer’s anxiety and sexual insecurity better than Giamatti. Though some might faintly (and wrongly) damn “Sideways” as slight, next to some of the year’s more obviously serious fare, its humor works so well because it has that serious, deep, psychologically acute base. And though I’ve talked to a handful of people (one actually) who say it’s too dark and not all that funny, it strikes me as a true comic gem, an almost perfect movie.
“Ray,” a longtime labor of love by director Taylor Hackford, is something different, though it shares “Sideways'” canny ability to show us, simultaneously, a person’s good and bad sides: the late Ray Charles’ genius as singer-musician-composer juxtaposed with the legal scrapes and fixes that adultery and heroin addiction caused through much of his early life. It’s a fascinating story, and it’s a blessing to have as much of Ray Charles’ singing and music (much redone for the movie before his death) as we get here; few performers could wring your heart or lift your spirits as surely.
But it’s also a blessing to have, in “Ray,” a lead actor who gets as deeply into his subject’s skin as Foxx does here, catching the voice, the moves, the tics of the man. It’s hard to believe any other actor of 2004 will top this performance: both a magnificent impersonation and a heartfelt exploration of the man and his soul inside.
Another brilliant performance–in fact, a whole vibrant ensemble of them–is in “Vera Drake.” The renowned British classical stage actress Imelda Staunton, working for the improvisation-minded writer-director Mike Leigh (“Naked,” “Topsy-Turvy,” “Secrets & Lies”), is just as moving and brilliant as Foxx. As Vera, a dumpy, smiling ’50s London cleaning lady, she creates a stunning portrait of a genuinely kind woman caught in a moral trap: working, out of sympathy for pregnant unmarried girls, as an illegal abortionist.
Abortion is a major tinderbox social issue right now, and one in which people on either extreme seldom try to see the other side. But Leigh, son of a doctor in the working-class Salford neighborhood, is no lockstep ideologue. Without turning into easy villains either the police who arrest her, or the system that judges her, and without softening the pain, danger and bloodshed faced by her “clients,'” Leigh creates out of Vera’s plight a drama of deep sympathy and almost unbearable tension.
A second viewing brings out clearly the film’s clear-eyed, universal viewpoint. I think the general public as well as hard-liners on both sides should see “Vera Drake”: It’s a genuine drama, beautifully observed, with a strong point of view and the kind of superb acting a Leigh film always boasts.
What are some of the other Thanksgiving movie feasts and leftovers around? Johnny Depp’s magical performance as “Peter Pan” playwright James M. Barrie in “Finding Neverland.” The lively Pixar animation in “The Incredibles.” Annette Bening, Jeremy Irons and Michael Gambon savoring W. Somerset Maugham’s cynical perspective and witty lines in “Being Julia.” At The Music Box, the reconstruction and revelation of Sam Fuller’s great 1980 World War II epic, “The Big Red One,” with unsurpassable tough guy star Lee Marvin.
And if you’re in the mood for an epic Thanksgiving DVD, try this year’s three-film 20th Century Fox 1977-83 “Star Wars” release or New Line’s complete “Lord of the Rings.” Or, for devotees of purer film art, Criterion’s multiple-disc, extras-loaded release of two masterpieces: Luchino Visconti’s 1963 Italian period drama “The Leopard” (containing both the English-language and longer Italian-language versions) and Ingmar Bergman’s 1983 “Fanny and Alexander” (matching the Oscar-winning American theatrical version and the longer, better five-hour Swedish TV release).
As for Thanksgiving memories, I only wish you could have tasted my grandma’s biscuits. Still, for movie lovers, there are ample rewards (and more than a few turkeys) in the present.
