Sure, The Acting Is Great, But Is 'I, Tonya' A Serious Oscars Contender?

i, tonya

In a key, comic moment in I, Tonya, stranger-than-fiction truth becomes satirical cinematic homage, as the training montage to end all training montages —Sly Stallone going back to basics in Rocky IV— is recast with this flick’s infamous subject, ice-skater Tonya Harding, the one now with heart on fire and strong desire. Margot Robbie, playing Harding, flips over logs, runs with water-jugs strapped to her back, skips rope in the woods. It feels like a moment in which director Craig Gillespie is printing the legend, that the facts of reality are being fudged for cinematic in-jokery. But, then, coach Julianne Nicholson turns to the camera and pronounces, sagely, “this actually happened”, fourth wall broken for both comic effect and in-built repudiation of those tedious ‘fact check’ columns that await every based-on-a-true-tale Oscar contender.

The very notion of the ‘true story’ is something I, Tonya gladly plays with. It opens boasting that its story has been cobbled together from “irony-free, totally-contradictory” testimonies, and closes with Robbie intoning that “there’s no such thing as the truth”. It features its principle cast —Robbie, Allison Janney, Sebastian Stan, Paul Walter Hauser, Bobby Cannavale, Nicholson— in mock video-interviews, sat down to talk to-camera in square format. They waffle their way through the story with profanity, idiosyncrasy, and folksiness etched into their words; not to mention abuse, violence, gunfire, and endless evocations of “white trash”. It’s a pointed, blackly-comic riff on the familiar athlete tale, this girl-from-the-wrong-side-of-the-tracks-who-makes-the-Olympics dragged into to one of the great sports-media scandals of the 1990s.

Here, the plan to throw off Harding’s chief rival via nefarious skulduggery has the small-timer idiocy of Fargo, Gillespie ironically depicting hapless, hopeless attempts at pulling off a criminal job with Scorsese-esque slickness, all stitched-together one-shots and booming soundtrack placements. There’s plenty of directorial ambition at play —especially in CGI-aided scenes of ice-skating competition, but also in a memorable shot pulling away from Stan’s left-behind abusive-husband— but I, Tonya really succeeds because of its acting (Janney is incredible), and its eye for character.

The craziness of these humans, and their terrible choices, is both comic and dramatic gift for the film; a story this lurid, hilarious, and tragic not something you could make up. Whether the result hews closer to fact or fiction is beside the point; the relative merits of ‘truth’, in cinema, matters less than what these truths are employed for.

the shape of water

How do you feel about interspecies love? About getting your fuck on with a creature? Possibly one from the Black Lagoon? What if I tell you, in The Shape Of Water, that when Sally Hawkins sleeps with the fishes, she’s not dead, nor even napping?

The 10th film for Guillermo del Toro is a monster-movie, but not quite as you’ve seen it before. Instead, the Méxican director cross-breeds the genre with something resembling an old-fashioned technicolour melodrama, the results having more in common with a film like Todd Haynes’ retro-soap Far From Heaven than old del Toro genre romps like Cronos or Mimic.

Here, del Toro delivers a “fairytale” set against the Cold War of the early-’60s, even daring to end with an evocation of “happily ever after”. It’s a story about “the princess without voice”, a tale of love and loss and a monster set against the shabby port city of Baltimore. Well, at least that’s how the opening narration, spoken by the great character-actor Richard Jenkins, puts it. Jenkins plays a queer, toupéed, closeted artist who makes a living drawing happy-family illustrations for advertisers. He lives next door to a mute cleaning-woman, played by Hawkins, an almost Amélie-esque figure of directorial projection and whimsy. They live above a cinema, drawing this fairy-tale into the realm of meta-movie-magic.

Enter: “amphibian man”, del Toro’s new-millennial rewrite of “Gill-man” from Creature From The Black Lagoon. Hawkins —whose life is one of repetitious daily routines: masturbating in the bath to an egg-timer, polishing her shoes, windowshopping for fancy heels, riding the bus to work— spends the night-shift cleaning a top-secret government laboratory. There she does the rounds alongside garrulous Octavia Spencer, whose endless chit-chat fills all the silences Hawkins leaves. Also having plenty to say is Michael Shannon’s overseeing government agent, male-entitlement manifest as a figure full of unwanted advice, unwanted sexual advances, and unwanted soliloquys delivered whilst pissing.

Things get randy in the workplace when Hawkins discovers that Shannon’s arrived in the lab to oversee the latest top-secret “asset” being housed. It’s a creature “dragged out of the rivermuck of South America”, a gilled, bioluminescent, freak-getting-on merman, who local Amazonian tribes worshipped as a deity, and who has powers beyond that of mere mortal men (or, um, y’know, fish). To Shannon, this amphibian fella is a horrible freak of nature; yet another ugly beast which God bestowed mankind dominion over. To Michael Stuhlbarg’s kindly, Soviet-double-agent scientist, it’s an evolutionary miracle, something to be treated with due care and reverence. To Hawkins, he’s the man she’s been waiting for, someone whose amphibian junk she’s keen to see in action.

The two lovers are twin spirits. As an orphaned infant, she was found in the water, and the scars on her neck match the gills on his. They’re both mute, and she teaches him to communicate via simple sign language. They connect on an intuitive level, dance to Benny Goodman records. And they both partake in far-and-away the grossest foodstuff of all: hard-boiled eggs. After the pair bond in the lab, she comes up with an emancipation plan, out to help this noble, especially attractive creature escape its fate as laboratory-curiosity, due for eventual post-mortem butchery.

Del Toro fashions all this with far more of a sense of genuine romance than he’s ever shown. After a pretty dire decade (Hellboy II, Pacific Rimjob, Crimson Peak) whose highlight was obviously his Simpsons Halloween Episode opening credits, here, the director makes his most successful, most acclaimed film since Pan’s Labyrinth. It’s a cry for tolerance, empathy, and science-over-religion, the forbidden passions at its centre an easy allegory for any kind of love crossing lines of societal moralising. Here, del Toro daringly literalises the subtext of many monster movies, in which wild beasts could be tamed, and understood, only by women pure; and, even modernises the lust, making Hawkins a veritable agent of desire, not just an object of the monster’s desires.

It all works, largely, but any Oscar-season coronation of it as some masterpiece is —just as it was with Pan’s Labyrinth — overplayed. In depicting his vision of Atomic Age America, del Toro deals in cod-Coen-Bros cutesiness; like when David Hewlett says “Oh Heavens to Betsy! We’re in such a pickle!”, or when the flick takes a detour into pre-fab Suburbia, or with the oddball characters who populate the Soviet-double-agent subplot.

Even moreso, the Coens are renowned for using the colour green in their films, and, in turn, del Toro employs a colour palette so soaked in green it’s too cute by half. There’s a green thermos, a turquoise bathroom, a teal Cadillac. Deserts —key lime pie, “gelatine parfait”— are lurid slabs of translucent emerald; the kind of thing The Wizard Of Oz would likely eat. The lab is painted various shades of smashed avocado, its bathrooms boast pea-green tiles and stall doors and hand-soap, and its employees clock in with mint-coloured punch-chards whilst wearing their green uniforms. Hawkins is wardrobed in various shades thereof: olive blouse, khaki cardigan, jade slip. Except, of course, after she gets down to some underwater merman bangin’, on comes the red: the princess now trussed in scarlet shoes, cardigan, lipstick, headband; and walking through red neon lights, which verily glow with passion.

It’s the kind of showy, first-year-film-student stuff that del Toro pulled with Crimson Peak, where Mia Wasikowska flounced about in a bright yellow flock to openly, all-too-obviously evoke the symbolic yellow butterflies of the story. This means that, for all its imagination, daring, and hyper-stylisation, The Shape Of Water feels way too on-the-nose. If there’s one lesson to truly take away from the film, it’s spoken by Jenkins, who, when thinking of what advice he’d give his 18-year-old self, offers: “take better care of your teeth, and fuck a lot more”. This is, indeed, the best advice; a sure way for kids-these-days to combat future regrets. But if you’re going to take that advice to heart, best not try the latter with an actual real-world amphibian. Consent would be an issue.

faces places

Jean-Luc Godard is a jerk. For certain cinephiles, that’ll be the not-particularly-surprising take-away from Faces Places. Godard and Agnès Varda, co-director of this film, are peers and pals; old icons of the nouvelle vague who continue to work into their twilight years. Varda’s 1962 masterpiece Cléo Fom 5-7 is a classic —in its use of real-time, not to mention as a landmark film by a female director— but, this century, she’s become best known as the grand dame of wandering documentary travelogues; the dear old dot making passing cars disappear into her fingers in The Gleaners & I.

Faces Places, Varda’s first film since 2008’s self-reflexive cine-memoir The Beaches Of Agnès, finds her collaborating with French artist JR, whose work employs giant photos in street-art scenarios (he recently found further fame with works straddling the US/Mexico border. He travels about with his Inside Out Project, in which a mobile photobooth in the back of a truck takes pictures of ordinary folk, and prints them out at giant size. From there, they’re pasted onto walls; transforming often-rundown urban buildings, and elevating the kind of people oft-overlooked by society, imbuing them both with a sense of grandeur and grace.

Together, this original-odd-couple —the nearly-90 oddball and the 30-something hipster— hook up to travel the French countryside, making public artworks, and chronicling the whole process on film. It’s crowdpleasing, G-rated, warm-hearted stuff; but also a film whose themes —community, solidarity, the psychology of spaces, aging and gentrification— run deceptively deep.

Late in the Faces Places, once we’ve been touched by acts of artistry where goats are granted nobility and factories are blessed with both honour and whimsy, there’s a planned rendezvous with Godard; old friend of Varda, and hero of JR. But when the hour comes, and they pop-in at JLG’s pad, there’s no one home; the reclusive curmudgeon pointedly, painfully absent. It’s a symbolic cinematic moment: where Godard has spent this century retreating ever-further into his cryptic, arch-philosophical cine-experiments (and/or, perhaps, a certain orifice), here Varda, making possibly her final film, is at her most accessible, winsome, wonderful, delivering a picture full of warm humanity.