Oscar Bait: Nuremberg and Rental Family

 

This is likely to wind up being a series. We’re entering the season where prestige movies and big tentpole flicks vie for your attention and the Academy’s. These are not predictions, by the way. However, I wouldn’t and won’t be surprised if a number of titles and names show up on Oscar Night.

I should also add that “Oscar bait” doesn’t necessarily infer an unworthy or even bad film. It just serves to delineate some of the elements that AMPAS voters seem to reward movies for, often over and against other, better films or. performances.

For example, by no metric that I can think of is Nuremberg a bad or unworthy film. It’s actually quite good, if somewhat too prestige-y for its own good. It’s a tight film dealing with an important historical event - Herman Göring’s surrender to Allied forces and subsequent trial for war crimes at the Nuremberg trials, and subsequent suicide. The story unfolds via Göring’s psychological assessment by Army psychiatrist Douglas Kelly. Russell Crow as Göring, turns in a really good performance, particularly if you like to watch the guy chew scenery and masticate dialog like a steak. And I mean this as a compliment!

Crowe is not hammy here; he’s simply the largest character, physically and intellectually, on screen. He delivers his lines with gusto but doesn’t render Göring a caricature. Rami Malek, as Kelly, is fine, but I have a built in reaction to a lot of Malek’s work.  He’s a good actor, but he’s not equal to the task of holding our attention the way Crowe and elsewhere, Richard E. Grant, does. Even Michael Shannon comes off jn a register somewhere between Tom Hanks in Bridge of Spies and Bill Hader (in any number of things; I told my sister that I think they could play relatives, maybe even father and son, though I don’t think there’s that many years between them).

The set-up is smart; but the execution is too easy, too pat. Perhaps knowing how the story is going to end is a major spoiler, but the script itself isn’t curious enough. The conclusions are already baked into it; yes, the rise of fascism could happen in the U.S.; yes, it happened to Germany because the right guy came along, stoked national fervor in response to Germany’s impoverishment after the First World War, and we get a front-row seat at Arendt’s “banality of evil” without the attendant resonance it shoulld have.

The “Oscar bait” ingredient? A handsomely mounted, good-looking film (cinematography by Dariusz Wolski, whose work for Ridley Scott, Gore Verbiinski, Paul Greengrass, and others is impressive enough. Here, his composition and color choices underscore the gravity and importance of the situation, when characters meet in domestic scenes (for example, when Shannon as prosecutor Robert H. Jackson meets with Malek’s Kelley or Grant’s Sir David Maxwell Fyfe (and let me be clear; Grant effortlessly walks off with each scene he’s in), the interiors are warmly lit and by contrast, scenes with John Flattery’s Colonel Burton C. Andrus are almost as blue as the ones with Göring in his cell. It’s all very solid. The performances, the mise-en-scene, all of it. And it’s not, ultimately, very satisfying.

However, because the film reminds you of the enormity of the Nuremberg trials and what they accomplished (and that’s up for debate in the face of what they didn’t lead humanity to stop), you can’t help but get the feeling of your eyes rolling back in your head a little bit. Now, having said that, the film provides one very important function that I won’t belittle.

The filmmakers know that we’re at a similar inflection point. James Vanderbilt has written some very fine material in David Fincher’s Zodiac and even, Abigail. He’s also written the two Andrew Garfield Amazing Spider-Man films, the Independence Day sequel, White House Down, and other popcorn fodder, and as a director, he’s good. He knows the story he’s telling, he knows how it should look and he delivers. But he’s no Fincher. There’s no risk taking here, but there is a message; we are repeating history. And I would argue that this is the kind of movie that most Americans should watch because it might drive home more deeply than any written harangue, just how fragile democracy is, and how easily it’s given away. 

There’s a good chance that something this heavy-handed might land with an audience in a way that a more subtle film might not. 

If I were to guess noms? Maybe a “Best Picture” nod (believe me, it ticks off so much the Academy looks for), a Best Actor nom for Crowe, and possibly a Best Cinematography nomination. It is a handsome flick. 

By contrast, Rental Family has little to commend it beyond Brendan Fraser’s performance as an American actor who’s been living in Tokyo for seven years and whose biggest claim to fame is a toothpaste commercial, who falls into a gig taking the place of people in other people’s lives. He plays a groom to a lesbian fiancee, a magazine journalist interviewing an older, great Japanese film actor, and as a father to a biracial girl who needs a father to ensure her securing a place in an exclusive school.

The movie itself is cat-nip for the Oscar voter who wants to support small, indie films, but doesn’t want to alienate anyone by pushing for something more challenging. Like Nuremberg, Rental Family doesn’t interrogate its premise, doesn’t particularly ask much of the audience, and unlike Nuremberg, is less than engaging.

Hikari, who wrote and directed (and produced) 37 Seconds and directed three episode of Beef, handles her script with well-intended sincerity, I don’t doubt. But one of the problems is that script is woefully underwritten and hardly gives the actors much to work with. Fraser does the most with what he has because he, well, has to. The venerable and genuinely great Japanese actor Akira Emoto is the other pro doing the best he can and arguably, succeeds more because his screen time is shorter and more compact or charged. Fraser and he manage to make moments work here and there. 

To be sure, everyone else is fine, given what they have, but the film is a slog of episodic moments that don’t hold together or hold up under scrutiny. The issues of societal and existential loneliness are important, particularly in Japan, where there is an epidemic of isolation and elsewhere, even here in the U.S., where more people feel alone and silohed for a variety of reasons, but the cost of all this is hardly remarked on in the flick. It’s used as a primary mover for a plot device and we’re left to watch a toothless series of vignettes of barely sketched actors go through the motions of loss, anger, and feel-good redemption. All of it unearned.

There’s also the ethical matter of rental families as a Japanese innovation that is remarked on but, again, hardly given any insight or sense of questioning about what it means or how it informs the people’s lives who sign up for such a service. Sure, we see a mom who hires Fraser to play-act as her husband and her daughter’s father or we see the owner of the company use his own service, but we’re given no insight into the service itself; just that it exists and that should be enough.

Hikari may also be asking about the culture that gave rise to such a service by remarking on the scarcity of therapists in Japan and how this is marketed as a surrogate for therapy, but it’s superficial and not as interesting as it could be. If Fraser’s Philip is supposed to be the audience’s surrogate in navigating the phenomenon, he’s not given much of a pronounced sense of difference that would lend itself to some frisson, something - anything - of dramatic interest.

And yet, here we are. Why do I think it’s Oscar Bait? Because Brendan Fraser does deliver a sometimes affecting performance (he also executive produced, and I can see how he would have been drawn to the material, thin as it is), and the Academy loves Fraser enough, I think, to reward with him with a nod as a follow-up to his win for The Whale. 

What do I think will happen? I have no clue. It’s just that the Academy is so good at anointing middle-of-the-road pap and middlebrow prestige productions, that I can’t help but feel like one of these, if not both, may wind up with their title being read out loud after “and the envelope, please."