The past definitely wasn’t past for directors like Quentin Tarantino, Martin Scorsese and Taika Waititi. Each found a way to rewrite history, though some versions were less palatable than others.
It’s Oscar time, which means everything new is old again. The New York Times chief film critics, Manohla Dargis and A.O. Scott, look back on a year of movie nostalgia, uneasy gender relations and Quentin Tarantino’s alt-history. Our critics also have some questions: Why are the men so sad? Why are the women so scarce? Who’s afraid of Jojo Rabbit?
MANOHLA DARGIS First, my usual disclaimer: The Oscars are irrelevant, empty, dispiriting, maddening and invariably wrong, unless “Moonlight” wins. That all said, I am curious whether the academy, when it announces its nominees on Jan. 13, is just going to affirm yet again that as far as the industry is concerned, big men always trump little women. An early warning sign came when the Screen Actors Guild Award nominations didn’t include some of the best-received movies directed by women, notably “The Farewell” and “Little Women.”
Actors constitute the academy’s largest voting branch, so the SAG nominations could forecast who the academy might smile on. The Hollywood Foreign Press Association, the group behind the even more idiotic Golden Globes, didn’t nominate any women for best director (no female-directed movies are contention in “drama” or in “musical or comedy”). I wish we didn’t have to think about any of this — the work is the thing! But these awards sideshows can affect careers, and they have clearly become another battleground in the continuing culture wars. Because the shabby treatment of female moviemakers isn’t about quality or box office or seriousness or relevance: it’s simply about women.
A.O. SCOTT In “Little Women,” Jo March — Louise May Alcott’s alter ego and also to some extent that of Greta Gerwig, the director of the latest adaptation — comes up against a 19th-century version of this prejudice. Jo’s editors are happy to have sensational tales about women that end in either marriage or death, but her impulse to make literature out of “domestic struggle” seems either radical or preposterous. Gerwig’s ingenuity, which mirrors Jo’s, is to find a space for this radicalism within the conventions of popular culture.
That’s the kind of achievement that the Oscars, in principle, exist to honor. But Hollywood remains committed to granting the presumption of gravitas almost exclusively to stories about men. The empty nihilism of “Joker” and the empty Anglo-sentimentalism of “1917,” Sam Mendes’s Oscar-thirsty war picture, are mistaken for profundity. An unfortunate consequence of this bias is that genuinely interesting movies about men sometimes fall under a cloud of ideological suspicion. Which may be my way of trying to justify my stubborn affection for “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood” and “The Irishman” on semi-feminist grounds.
DARGIS The presumption of gravitas is a matter of both subject and swagger. The only other reason we’re talking about “Joker” is that it’s visually impressive, even if it owes much of its look to Christopher Nolan’s “Dark Knight” movies. Industry folks are suckers for a certain kind of soothing visual showmanship, for attractive surfaces that have been created with genuine technical skill and flourish. Both “1917” and “Joker” have been polished to a high gleam, which strengthens the illusion that they have something meaningful to say about the culturally venerated subject of men and violence. “Little Women” also looks beautiful, but it’s about women and it doesn’t swagger.
Academy voters sometimes use technical virtuosity — as well as genre and “seriousness” — to rationalize their choices. Genre was invoked as one reason in 2018 more voters didn’t enthusiastically embrace “Get Out,” a discomforting, great horror movie about race in America. (It won best original screenplay.) The next year, the academy gave best picture to “Green Book,” a mediocre movie that sentimentalizes race relations. “Green Book” won because it delivers what Brecht called a mounted messenger, which “guarantees you a truly undisturbed appreciation of even the most intolerable conditions.” That sums up “Jojo Rabbit” too, Taika Waititi’s ostensibly feel-good World War II movie about cute, funny Nazis and this year’s candidate for the academy’s perennial “Life Is Beautiful” slot.
SCOTT I was recently at an event, attended mainly by well-off New Yorkers of a certain age, where nearly everyone who approached me wanted to talk about “Jojo Rabbit” — either to scold me for not liking it enough or to tell me how much they did. They were less enthusiastic about the biting Korean tale “Parasite” (too grim at the end) or Martin Scorsese’s mob drama “The Irishman” (too slow), and the experience made me think I should bet some money on “Jojo” for best picture. Because a warm, comical, reassuring movie about Hitler seems like the logical sequel to a warm, comical, reassuring movie about Jim Crow.
Not that I’m against popular art that dispenses comfort and flatters an audience’s sense of its own decency. There are worse things that movies can do, even as there are more interesting ways that movies can revise history. For example, there’s Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood,” a film that doesn’t just rewrite the past, but boldly erases a piece of it. Somehow, this doesn’t come across either as counter-factualism or denialism, but as a kind of magic. It’s been six months: Can we talk about that ending?
DARGIS By all means, given that it’s our job to ruin people’s happiness. So here goes: the ending of “Once Upon a Time” is both one of the film’s most deeply satisfying parts and one of the worst. On the one hand, the two heroes played by Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt get to save Sharon Tate, a.k.a. this fairy tale’s damsel (a.k.a. Margot Robbie), thereby gratifyingly rewriting history. It’s very touching to think of a world in which Tate (the actress killed by the Manson family in 1969) had been granted the happily ever after that Tarantino wistfully provides her, instead of dying in a murderous frenzy of violence. The what-ifs the film offers are so painful: What if she had had her baby and made more films, perhaps with her husband, the director Roman Polanski? His life might have been different too.
Yet while I love the alternative reality that Tarantino provides, it’s disappointing that he ends this otherwise supple, easygoing, beautifully observed film in a gleefully crude spasm of annihilating violence. That violence is just too easy, too grindingly obvious and familiar; it’s also unnecessarily ugly. The problem isn’t that the male heroes kill female attackers: Charles Manson sent three women and one man that night. But when Leonardo DiCaprio’s character, an actor, uses a flamethrower to burn one of those women to death — becoming the hero he has always played onscreen with a fiery spew — Tarantino is exulting in an unmistakably phallic form of brutal triumphalism.
I prefer the ending of Mary Harron’s underseen “Charlie Says,” about the Manson family from the point of view of some of its female cultists. The movie doesn’t ask us to forgive the women who murder, but it does ask us to consider them politically, not just reactively, as Tarantino does. In “Charlie Says,” women surrender themselves to a misogynistic abuser, and along the way, they lose themselves. The movie thoughtfully considers female agency and free will, exploring how sexism encourages — and forces — women to collaborate in their own subjugation and in the abuse of others. It’s tough on women, who finally need to save themselves, which isn’t how Hollywood likes it.
SCOTT The ending of “Once Upon a Time” brought me back to the end of “Pulp Fiction,” when John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson walk out into the sunshine after Jackson’s character has defused a potentially lethal situation in a diner. The mood is calm and mellow even though we have already witnessed Travolta’s violent death. By scrambling the chronology within the movie, Tarantino produces an emotional effect that has no real-world correlative. The character’s death isn’t just postponed; it’s effectively undone.
In “Once Upon a Time,” as in “Inglourious Basterds,” Tarantino extends this kind of fantasy into historical time, practicing a weird, ethically tricky form of movie magic. The extremity of the violence is connected to the anti-realism somehow, to the extravagant movie-ness of what’s happening. It’s necessary in “Basterds” to kill Hitler twice because you can’t actually bring him to justice or expunge him from history. Similarly, the annihilation of Sharon Tate’s would-be killers has to be at least as brutal as what they themselves were contemplating. Then you get a quiet denouement that reminds you that you’ve been dwelling in someone else’s dream.
The interpretation of that dream is an ongoing project. And the dream itself isn’t only Tarantino’s. “Once Upon a Time” seems to me connected to both “The Irishman” and “Ford v Ferrari.” Three movies largely about male friendship, with women in symbolic or supportive roles, all taking place within a few years — 1966, 1969 and 1975, going by the main event in each narrative — and all either hostile or indifferent to what we often think of as “the ’60s.” Is this nostalgia? Denial? A sign of the (end) times?
DARGIS Nostalgia makes me queasy, because one person’s misty good old days are always another person’s nightmare. But “The Irishman” seems to me about as nostalgic as an autopsy, which is another reason to admire it. As for “Ford v Ferrari,” part of its nostalgia is for an earlier era when people (well, men!) worked with their hands — fixing cars, making films — which necessitate lost skills and competencies. The recent “Star Wars,” by contrast, clearly doesn’t need either; it’s just software and branding. “Star Wars” traffics in nostalgia, but only about itself, its mythology. And if Tarantino is nostalgic in “Once Upon a Time,” I think it’s mostly about himself, his mythology.
That kind of mythology can be a burden and I assume it’s partly why he busted out the flamethrower for the finale of “Once Upon a Time,” which he doubtless thought was cool. Obliterating violence has become one of his auteurist signatures, never mind that excitedly turning a villain into BBQ meat doesn’t really add anything to the film. That conflagration makes a sharp contrast with the closing eerie quiet of “The Irishman,” where all that remains is an old man’s loneliness. It’s harrowing. It is also of a piece with Scorsese’s independence, including his lack of interest in dividing the world between heroes and villains, and his very non-Hollywood way with endings.
The violence that brings Bong Joon Ho’s “Parasite” to a close is equally disturbing. One reason is that Bong doesn’t also give us boilerplate heroes and villains, but flawed characters whom you figuratively move in with, laugh at, recoil from and feel deeply about, partly because they hold up an unsettling mirror to the audience. (I keep wondering how its class war sits with cosseted academy voters.) As its title promises, “Parasite” gets under your skin. And, unlike Tarantino, Scorsese and some other American male directors this year who have clearly been thinking — and anguishing — about men and masculinity, Bong incorporates women throughout his movie.
SCOTT The world according to Bong is a cruel place, but it’s also a place of family cohesion. His wild imagination has room for a realistic assessment of how men and women interact, especially as spouses or siblings. It’s startling how seldom you see that kind of realism in American movies, which are more comfortable with separate spheres and with a cautiously sentimental view of heterosexual domesticity. On the guy side, we get “The Irishman,” “Ford v Ferrari” and “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood,” about friendships and rivalries between men, with the women smiling, seething or smoking cigarettes, mostly in silence. The counterparts to those films are the likes of “Little Women,” “Hustlers” and “Booksmart,” which are mainly about the bonds among women. As you noted in a recent essay, the men seem to be suffering. The women, in spite of everything, might be having a little more fun.
As you also observed, movies that try to give equal weight to male and female characters have been scarce. One of the few this year was Noah Baumbach’s “Marriage Story,” which is precisely about how hard it is for a man and a woman to share center stage. Another, now that I think of it, was “The Rise of Skywalker,” in which Rey and Kylo underwent parallel identity crises, negotiating a relationship that was more political than romantic. Maybe casting Adam Driver in everything — which seems to be happening anyway — is the solution to Hollywood’s gender troubles.