Welcome to 5 Favorites. Each week, I will put together a list of my 5 favorites (films, performances, whatever strikes my fancy) along with commentary on a given topic each week, usually in relation to a specific film releasing that week.
This week, William H. Macy, Susan Sarandon, Richard Gere, and Diane Keaton star in a romantic comedy that looks like it won’t be worth wasting your time on. That said, since Keaton I’ve done before, I thought I’d tackle William H. Macy this week as he had a really strong string of films in the late 1990s plus a few others worth mentioning. Macy’s a strong actor, but most of his best work has been part of ensemble casts where he doesn’t need to stand out to be effective. The Academy has only singled him out for one film, his supporting performance in Fargo. While his performance is solid, the film is on my list of highly overrated films, so I am not inclined to include it.
The Academy might not find places to honor him, but television is another story. To date, he’s received 15 Emmy nominations. One was as a producer, one as a writer, and the remainder were for his performances, 6 for his leading role in the acclaimed series Shameless, and two Emmys came his way for writing and starring in Door to Door. This is, however, a film blog, so I rarely tackle television work on the list. While the Oscars only found him worthy of nomination once, the Globes nominated him for a different film, Seabiscuit (and not for Fargo at all), and the Screen Actors Guild has recognized him with a nomination 12 times, five times for film, four of them as part of an ensemble (two of the films below plus Seabiscuit and Bobby). He won four of his total twelve nominations, but all of them were for television.
Boogie Nights (1997)
Paul Thomas Anderson was on only his second film as a director when he turned in this tremendous masterpiece of a film. Set within the porn industry, it follows Eddie Adams (Mark Wahlberg) as a young wannabe who becomes porn superstar Dirk Diggler, rising to prominence in an industry full of facades, not terribly unlike Hollywood itself. He’s aided along the way by Amber Waves (Julianne Moore), an experienced porn actress who acts as a stage mother to the burgeoning performer.
This star-studded cast also included Burt Reynolds, Don Cheadle, John C. Reilly, Macy, Heather Graham, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Luis Guzman, and Philip Baker Hall among others. It was a sensational cast with a career best performance from Reynolds, a star-making turn by Wahlberg, and one of Moore’s greatest performances. Reynolds and Moore should have won Oscars for their work as should the film, one of the best in Anderson’s illustrious career.
Wag the Dog (1997)
Journeyman filmmaker Barry Levinson had delivered a handful of bombs when he joined this David Mamet/Hilary Henkin adaptation of Larry Beinhart’s 1993 novel American Hero. It tells the story of a spin doctor (Robert De Niro) called in to deflect from a political scandal with the president caught making advances on an underage girl in the Oval Office shortly before the election. With the help of a Hollywood producer (Dustin Hoffman), they invent a fictional war to sell the president to the “audience” of the American public and drown out the sexual improprieties. Things don’t go entirely to plan, which helps make this comedy work.
The film released the year before the Monica Lewinsky scandal, so while it has some compelling foreshadowing, it was intended as a suppositional novel to question George H.W. Bush’s motives in starting Operation Desert Storm so close to the 1992 election. It also starred Anne Heche, Denis Leary, Willie Nelson, Andrea Martin, Kirsten Dunst, Macy, Craig T. Nelson, George Gaines, and other prominent actors. While it’s not the return to prominence his 2001 Bandits was, it proved Levinson still had the capability of delivering solid satire with plenty of entertainment value.
Pleasantville (1998)
Screenwriter Gary Ross made his directorial debut with this compelling film, which looks at the notion of existing outside the strictures of a “normal” society. It follows Tobey Maguire and Reese Witherspoon who are zapped into a black-and-white TV series set in the 1950s. It’s an idyllic setting with no escape. The town is built on strictures of the era, requiring the characters confirm to certain social mores. The film is about stepping out of the confined box we all live in and exploring forbidden notions that exist being the narrow definitions of society.
The cast is wonderful with Maguire and Witherspoon performing tremendously alongside Jeff Daniels as the local soda jerk, Joan Allen and Macy as Maguire and Witherspoon’s parents, and J.T. Walsh as the indignant mayor wanting to stamp out subversive thought and discriminate against those who don’t adhere to his strict code of conduct. Ross hasn’t made many films in the intervening years, but this is both one of his best directorial efforts as well as one of his best screenplays with plenty of layers to decode and unpack. John Lindley’s crisp photography and the shifts from black-and-white to color are handled incredibly well making this a delightful, if underrecognized gem of the late 1990s.
No original review available.
Magnolia (1999)
While we just talked about Paul Thomas Anderson’s second film, Boogie Nights, his third film also makes the film. Magnolia was a modern story of several interrelated characters trying to find meaning in the San Fernando Valley. Few directors have been so good at corralling such a large group of actors and eliciting from them their best work. This particular cast includes Anderson regulars Luis Guzman, Philip Baker Hall, Philip Seymour Hoffman, John C. Reilly, and Melora Walters. Macy makes his second appearance for Anderson, but this would be the only other film he worked with the actor. Julianne Moore and Alfred Molina also make repeat apperances. The film also features Tom Cruise and Jason Robards among others.
Magnolia didn’t perform nearly as well with audiences or critics as Boogie Nights did. Nor did it earn as many Oscar nominations. It only earned three, winning none of them. This was one of Cruise’s best performances and it earned him an Oscar nomination in Best Supporting Actor and he should have won then. Moore was deserving of another Oscar nomination, but she was overlooked. The film was a step down from Boogie Nights, but no less fascinating. It’s a tightly constructed script that takes time to coalesce around a single event, which somehow helps make sense out of the struggles of the characters in the film. While it might not appeal to a lot of audiences, it is no less important, especially for Anderson completists.
Thank You for Smoking (2006)
Based on the satirical novel of the same name by Christopher Buckley, Jason Reitman, son of legendary comedy director Ivan Reitman, made his directorial debut. He wrote the screenplay himself and cast a slew of terrific actors in the picture including Aaron Eckhart, Katie Holmes, Maria Bello, Macy, Robert Duvall, J.K. Simmons, Rob Lowe, Sam Elliott, and several other actors. In it, Eckhart plays Nick Naylor, a spokesman for The Academy of Tobacco Studies, a lobbying firm that spins scientific studies to justify using tobacco products. He’s also trying to act as a role model for his teenage son (Cameron Bright).
The film allows Reitman to showcase his directorial credentials, getting strong performances from the entire cast, including Eckhart, who should have been nominated for an Oscar for his performance. The film was largely ignored by awards-giving organizations in spite of its critical acclaim and while it came out at a time when the world was already familiar with the sleazy tactics tobacco manufacturers used to sell their cancer-causing products, it nevertheless exposed the very real tactics employed by them to avoid culpability for the hundreds of thousands of deaths they have helped facilitate. Sometimes satire is the best way to roast the industry for its tactics and Thank You for Smoking does a tremendous job on that front.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.