Get your weep on
Social-issue drama sells in Oscar season
BY Chris Eng
Illustration by David Anderson
Get ready for drama. Crazy drama. Crazy, heart-rending, hope-filling drama that, like Santa, comes just once a year—around the same time—and usually involves actors trying to broaden the scope of their repertoires. Get ready for Oscar season.
The movies that populate Oscar season are not simply dramatic. They bypass normal levels of drama by inserting socially conscious subtext (which, when compared to other subtextual elements in our culture, might be more properly identified as “text”) into heavy-handed melodramas teeming with actors either desperate to prove themselves as serious craftsmen and women or desperate to maintain the image as serious craftsmen and women that they have painstakingly cultivated.
By releasing these movies in the two or three months before the end of the year, studios have the chance to keep their socially relevant masterpieces foremost in the minds of the only people who matter: the other members of the Academy who will vote for their favourite sob-fest come January.
To demonstrate ideal Oscar fodder, one need look no farther than this year’s preeminent example: Robert Redford’s Lions for Lambs. It’s probably not actually necessary to say more than that—Redford movies are traditionally breeding grounds for messages that “mean something”—but one look at the cast list should convince you that the director’s latest outing is something special. Yes, Redford himself is in it, but that’s not too surprising. Nor is the wise choice of putting Meryl Streep in one of the leads; she is almost always an Oscar-contender in her roles. No, Redford’s surprise casting coup was Tom Cruise.
Five years ago, the choice would have barely caused a blip, but it’s been a busy half-decade for Cruise, who’s spent far more time on tabloid covers than the silver screen. He isn’t a serious actor anymore ... or is he?! By appearing in Lions for Lambs—a serious and socially arresting look at why North America’s militaristic involvement in Afghanistan is wrong (in case you were on the fence about that)—both Cruise and Redford are asserting that Cruise is still an acting force to be reckoned with, one who can make you think and feel about serious social issues.
Another actor who enjoys making us think and feel at Oscar season is George Clooney, who has previously done so in Syriana and Good Night and Good Luck. This year, he will be making his appearance as the title character in Michael Clayton, the story of a corporate law firm’s “fixer” who suddenly finds himself with a moral and ethical dilemma ... that may get him killed. Also appearing in Michael Clayton is Sydney Pollack. Directors appearing in movies is often a sign that the final product will be very dramatic indeed.
Still, no matter how weepily/dramatically over-the-top some of 2007’s offerings may be, at least we haven’t reached the post-Christmas season yet. Post-Christmas (predominantly February, but leaking into both January and March as well) is when all of the movies that the studios aren’t sure why they funded (or perhaps can’t quite justify sending straight out to DVD) are ghettoed. This year you can look forward (in the same way you might “look forward” to extreme dental surgery) to John Rambo (Rambo in Burma!), Vince Vaughn’s Wild West Comedy Show (competing with the Blue Collar Comedy Tour), and Roland Emmerich’s 10,000 B.C. (essentially a big-budget Quest for Fire).
So, what should you do, then? Well, cry if you want to. Pull out your hankies and get your weep on, because even if some of the Oscar offerings have the unmistakable odour of cheese lingering on them, others are legitimately good films. And if you can manage it, keep crying until May, when Indiana Jones 4 and Iron Man can distract you and bring your mind back to the films that really matter—the ones with the biggest explosions in them.
