This year’s crop of Academy Award-nominated live-action short subjects is impressively robust.
The animated nominees are … impressively uneven.
Let’s start with the live-action entries, all of which (no surprise) are variations on the themes of racism and tolerance.
But his immediate problem — where to sleep — fades due to a chance encounter with Artie (Robert Tarango), an amiable deaf-blind man who needs an assist in finding the correct bus to take him home. (Why such a vulnerable individual would be wandering New York’s mean streets alone, late at night, is something we can’t worry about; this is a parable.)
As Roland develops this heartwarming tale, we’re reminded anew that — often — the best way to help yourself, is to help somebody else.
High-profile casting is the first thing noticed about writer/director Elvira Lind’s The Letter Room. Oscar Isaac — one of our newest Star Wars champions, among many other roles — stars as Richard, an empathetic corrections officer recently transferred to the mail room in a maximum security prison.
All incoming and outgoing letters must be scanned and scrutinized. Richard, who lives alone, soon becomes captivated by the warm and sensitive letters written by a woman (Alia Shawkat) to one of the prisoners on Death Row … who never writes her back. This seems grievously unfair to Richard, particularly since another of the Death Row prisoners pines for letters he never receives.
Isaac’s performance is a masterpiece of subtlety and silence, as this inherently kind and uncomplicated man struggles to make peace with his new role.
Israeli writer/director Tomer Shushan’s White Eye is harder to fathom. Omer (Daniel Gad) finds his stolen white bicycle locked outside the entrance to a back-street meat-packing plant. He attempts to get police help; they insist he must wait until the “thief” shows up, so that details can be compared. Yunes (Dawit Tekelaeb) soon comes outside and claims that he’s the actual owner, having purchased the bicycle from a third party.
With the police now taking an active interest, Omer realizes — too late — that he has put something much larger into motion, because Yunes and his fellow workers are illegal Eritrean migrants.
The conclusion, however — Omer’s ultimate act — is bewildering.
It should be noted, as a sidebar, that Shushan and cinematographer Saar Mizrahi meticulously choreographed this 21-minute playlet to unfold in a single, long-running camera shot. That certainly makes the viewing experience technically impressive, but doesn’t clarify the narrative.
Two Distant Strangers, from co-directors Travon Free and Martin Desmond Roe, is by far the most brutal of these five candidates. It’s also the least original, borrowing its trapped-in-a-time-loop premise from several recent films and, most particularly, 2019’s See You Yesterday and “Replay,” an early first-season episode in Jordan Peele’s re-booted Twilight Zone.
Carter (Joey Bada$$) wakens from a lovely night spent with potential new girlfriend Perri (Zaria). He passes on breakfast, wanting to get home to take care of his patient dog. Upon hitting the street, he’s targeted — for no reason — by a viciously racist street cop (Andrew Howard, a true nightmare as Officer Merk). The confrontation goes very badly awry.
Then Carter wakens from a lovely night spent with Perri, troubled by an awful nightmare. And it happens again. And again. And again and again. Carter can alter minor details, but nothing changes the eventual outcome.
Although it’s tempting to wonder why the universe is picking on Carter, that would be missing the point; he’s a metaphor for a social condition. He can’t change the outcome, because American society won’t change the outcome. This becomes clear when the film concludes with a text crawl of 65 names ripped from recent headlines: all Black citizens guilty of nothing but leading their own lives.
Of course — of course — the message is crucially important, but the strident tone is off-putting. And the story’s climax, frankly, leaves us to assume that there is no hope: that the Officer Merks are omnipotent and unchanging. That’s pretty damn depressing; I’d much rather cling to the more optimistic take-away from Feeling Through.
On its face, the story is simple: Yousef (Saleh Bakri) wishes to surprise his wife (Mariam Basha) with an extravagant present for their anniversary. He and their young daughter Yasmine (Mariam Kanj, such a marvelous presence) therefore embark on a shopping expedition.
But they’re Palestinian, and this “simple” task involves navigating an Israeli checkpoint — actually Checkpoint 300, just outside Bethlehem — where condescending, taunting, deliberately cruel Israeli soldiers go out of their way to harass Yousef. He accepts this calmly — Bakri blending genial patience with smiles and humor, not entirely concealing a lifetime’s worth of similar humiliation — knowing that it’s important to show Yasmine how one must behave.
This 25-minute film is by turns mesmerizing, unsettling, heartbreaking and hold-your-breath suspenseful. Nabulsi frames most events from the little girl’s point of view, and her emotional shift — as she comes to grips with their lot in life — is silently tragic.
And yet Nabulsi concludes this saga with one of the most perfect resolutions I’ve ever seen. Not a dry eye in the house.
Moving to the animated entries, I’m once again impressed by the fact that all five tell their stories without spoken dialogue (aside from occasional grunts and whistles). I love the universality of this approach, and the notion that people all over the world can derive the same message from each story.
Assuming there is a message. Let’s quickly dispense with two nominees that suggest Academy voters may have been smoking too many funny cigarettes.
French director Adrien Merigeau’s Genius Loci is 16 butt-numbing minutes of random animated anarchy, with shapes, images and vaguely human figures sliding, dissolving and wafting in and out of each other. The press notes explain it thusly: “One night Reine, a young loner, sees among the urban chaos a moving oneness that seems alive, like some sort of guide.”
Yeah, right.
Korean director Erick Oh’s meticulously detailed Opera is breathtakingly impressive to look at — truly stunning — but any attempt to derive “story” is doomed to failure. The camera begins at the apex of a massive triangle filled, as we move slowly downward, with (I’m guessing) the totality of the human experience. As we eventually reach the bottom, everybody apparently goes to war; an uppermost clock re-sets, and the cycle begins anew.
Yeah, right.
Message to the Academy: Incomprehensibility is not, by itself, artistically remarkable.
Icelandic director Gísli Darri Halldórsson’s Yes-People is frivolous fun: a droll look at three sets of folks living in an apartment complex. The exaggerated animation style — particularly everybody’s long, triangular noses — is hilarious by itself; their whimsical interactions, recognizably mundane, are the icing on the cake.
We meet a cheerfully giddy music teacher whose teenage son sleeps through class, because he stays up all night playing video games; the neglected wife of a rotund businessman, who — while he’s at work each day — smokes and drinks too much; and the libidinous wife of the caretaker, who dutifully spends hours shoveling the snow away from the entrance.
There’s no message here: just ordinary people being their silly selves behind closed doors.
We’ve all come to expect that this category wouldn’t be complete without something from Pixar. Madeline Sharafian’s Burrow is the charming saga of a young rabbit embarking on the ambitious task of building the burrow of her dreams, despite having no idea how to proceed.
Between accidentally disturbing other underground neighbors, along with other excavational mishaps, the poor little rabbit digs herself deeper and deeper into trouble … before finally learning one of life’s most important lessons: There’s no shame in asking for help.
Sometimes, though, people feel that they’ve sunk beyond salvation.
Our initial impression is of a couple having fallen out of love, but no; the story goes deeper. Their unseen souls — their spirits — appear above them: angular black shadows arguing, pleading, raging at each other. These phantasms also illustrate unspoken desires and memories; it quickly becomes clear that this is a parable on grief, and the path forward.
But grief over what?
The answer is delivered with impressive emotional sensitivity and animated nuance. Brace yourself, because this one’s very hard to watch. It also deserves to win the Oscar.
These road-show packages — live action entries in one program, animation a separate ticket — open today at participating movie theaters. Beginning April 20, they’ll also be available via iTunes, Amazon Prime and other video-on-demand outlets.
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