Yesterday, I watched two movies that are said to be likely Oscar nominees for best picture: Nomadland and News of the World.
The first is an interesting education in an uncommon American lifestyle. People for varying reasons depart from the common road in life--a family, a regular job, a home--and take to the road, some because they have no other option due to economic hard times, unemployment and such-like, and some because they are simply uncomfortable with the common scheme in life and desire what would seem, I suppose, freedom, from ties, from obligations, from that familiar old rut. Some see themselves as being involved in a sort of ideological experiment, a rebellion against a system that seems to require endless debt and struggle. Some just don't fit in very well with the general society. Some have been injured by their pasts and have been unable to recover, to rejoin. All take to the road in motor homes or in vans and migrate from camp to camp, picking up odd jobs along the way, outfitting their movable motor paradises with the bare essentials. In each sitting, temporary communities are formed wherein on the one hand residents are faithfully committed to one another while on the other making it understood that they are each, if nothing else, impermanent, in the sense that leaving is as easy as starting one's engine and rolling away.
It's an engaging film for its educative value--but is it an appropriate choice for the best picture category? I think not. Documentary, yes. But the problem is that in Nomadland there is not much of any story to speak of. It is a depiction, not a drama, and in that sense more like a still photo than a movie. It is well acted in the main roles, but then again many of the people in the movie are just the real people playing themselves. Again, in the form of a documentary. In short, while I would say that Nomadland is worth watching, it is misplaced in the role of the best picture category.
News of the World, on the other hand, is much easier to judge. It is simply bad. What would it be doing in the best picture category? Well, I can only guess that it is there because Tom Hanks stars in the picture, and it would be impossible for Hanks to be involved in anything short of Oscar material right? No, apparently wrong. Dead wrong. In fact, he should have known better than to make this picture because it is so glaringly bad, a B western at best, and not even good for a B western at that.
The story is set in 1870 Texas, only five years after the end of the Civil War, and Hanks plays an ex-Confederate captain who travels about the wild Texan plains "reading the news of the world" to curious town folk who either don't have the time to read or don't know how to read. One day, he comes upon a little white girl who is wandering about in the forest. She had been captured and spirited away in infancy by Indians who had slaughtered her family and so speaks no English. Hanks seeks to help the waif, who resists with violent ferocity (of course she's violent, she's an Indian). Well, the point is that Hanks now, being a good man (of course, being as he is Tom Hanks) must return the child to her natural society--specifically to German relatives living somewhere in south Texas. The remainder of the movie concerns a hilariously hazardous journey through the various levels of hell (otherwise known as Texas in those days)--a gauntlet of cartoonish bad guys, runaway horses, natural disasters, and evils at every bend in the road that ultimately had me giggling uncontrollably.
Hanks himself, as it seems to me, rather bluntly sleepwalks through the entirety of the movie, really portraying no individual character at all other than himself, and not even doing very well at that, for he seems quite hopelessly out of place in this setting and in this plot. It is a wholly disappointing, laughable, terrible film and certainly more meritorious for most likely to disappear than for best picture of the year.
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