I could probably write a full post for both of these movies, but I'm keen to get through the Oscar contender glut, and there are a lot more titles coming.
Bradley Cooper's biopic of Leonard Berstein - well, it's not the movie that I was hoping for. It's certainly not a bad attempt. There's some wonderful cinematography and lovely bits of dialogue, and Carey Mulligan is just impeccable. However, I went into this movie not knowing very much about the great American composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein, and I came out not knowing much more. I'm starting to feel tired of biopics like "Maestro" and "The Theory of Everything" that decide the best way to tell the story of a famous man's life is to tell the story of that man's marriage, while haphazardly jamming his better known accomplishments around the margins.
Bernstein (Cooper) is a bisexual man who we first see with a boyfriend, David Oppenheim (Matt Bomer), at the start of his career in the 1940s. However, he's soon wooing the actress Felicia Montealegre (Mulligan), who he marries and has three children with. As his fame grows, so do Bernstein's substance abuse problems and the risk of scandal due to his continuing infidelities. The marriage becomes strained, but endures over the decades. Cooper, who directed and co-wrote the movie, uses black and white for the older sections of the film and color for the more recent sections, with a brief documentary framing device. It's a gorgeous film to look at, thanks to cinematographer Matthew Libatique, and the biggest thing I was worried about - Bradley Cooper's performance - is perfectly adequate. Even the much discussed prosthetic nose plays.
Unfortunately, the movie never feels like it's about Leonard Bernstein. I'm mostly only aware of Bernstein through his media appearances in the 1970s and '80s,and I wonder if the movie would have worked better for me if I knew more about his earlier work. Cooper includes a few sequences of him conducting and teaching in "Maestro," and Bernstein's compositions appear on the film's soundtrack, but there's almost no depiction of Bernstein's relationship to music - not the creation, not the interpretation, nothing. There are parts of the film meant to be understood in the context of Bernstein's career, but offer no commentary on the career itself. So "Maestro" is a perfectly fine melodrama about a bisexual man navigating his intimate relationships in a specific cultural milieu, but I couldn't recognize that man as Leonard Bernstein, and his musical career seemed to be a totally arbitrary circumstance. I hate to draw comparisons to "Tár," because these are very different movies, but I have to say it achieved a significantly better depiction of a composer and conductor than this one.
Now on to "Society of the Snow," a dramatization of the 1972 Andes disaster where an Uruguayan plane carrying 40 passengers, including a rugby team, crashed in the snowbound, inaccessible Andes mountain range. The survivors had to endure months of exposure and starvation until two of them managed to hike out of the mountains and find help. The film is told from the perspective of a group of crash survivors, including Numa Turcatti (Enzo Vogrincic Roldán), Roberto Canessa (Matías Recalt), and Nando Parrado (Agustín Pardella), covering the entire ordeal from the doomed flight to the eventual rescue. A great deal of emphasis is placed on the spiritual struggle of the survivors, many of them Catholic, especially their reluctance to resort to cannibalism in order to stay alive.
"Society of the Snow" was directed by Juan Antonio Bayona, who has some experience with disaster movies. He made the excellent tsunami film, "The Impossible," in 2012. "Society of the Snow" is a much larger and more ambitious project, one that hews much closer to historical fact. There is a day by day accounting of events, including the rising tally of deaths - all identified by name onscreen. I'm impressed with the grim realism that Bayona committed to, and that Netflix committed significant resources to making sure this was done right. The plane crash alone is a difficult watch, with several deaths and grievous injuries shown onscreen. The sound design is almost worse than the visuals, complete with terrified screams and snapping bones. Subsequently there's a horrific avalanche that kills more people, other accidents and injuries, and close-up looks and the effects of frostbite, exposure, and starvation. I have no idea how some of the effects work was achieved, and I'm a little afraid to find out. It certainly looks like they shot the whole thing on the breathtakingly beautiful, frozen mountainside, where the accident took place, and recklessly endangered all the cast and crew involved.
Roger Ebert famously remarked that he wasn't sure that there was any way to properly tell the story of the Andes disaster on film, after Hollywood tried in 1993 with "Alive." I've never seen "Alive," but I feel that Bayona got about as close as anyone could have with "Society of the Snow." The harrowing voiceover narration and the constant memorials to the dead set a somber tone, eschewing any sensationalism. The actors are strong, but the focus is on the survival of the group rather than any individual. There is heroism and triumph, especially at the end of the film, but it's mostly overshadowed by reverence and awe for the larger forces of nature and God. Maybe it's simply that the disaster is now over half a century in the past, and the filmmakers' urge to preserve the memory of the event is that much stronger. In any case, this is a rare disaster film from a rare director, and I'm very glad to have seen it.
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