Wow…. Just Wow. That’s the first impression that I got from Schindler’s List. I saw Schindler’s List in the theater when it first came out, and I remember being so emotionally browbeaten that I never had the desire to put myself through that again. Even then, I recognized that it was not only a great film, but an important one as well, but you can’t watch Schindler’s List without recognizing the fact that these things really happened to people whose only crime was being Jewish. This is the type of film that stirs up an emotional storm inside the viewer, and many of those emotions are negative right up until the very end. However, what I realized in watching it again last night for the first time in more than 20 years is that the overriding emotion is hope.

Let’s start off stating that Schindler’s List is about humanity. Humanity is the spine of this story. It’s about how we treat each other as human beings, how we value (or don’t value) other’s lives and what we do to preserve our humanity. It points out that the Nazis didn’t consider Jews to be full human beings, and that was how they were able to morally justify attempting to exterminate them.

The personification of this theme resides in the character of Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson). When we first meet him, he is a charming scam artist, an opportunist, a war profiteer, and an adulterous womanizer. He understands that the war will be a long one and he sees in it the opportunity to make a lot of money. Once the Jews of Krakow have been sent to the ghetto, he further understands that he can make even more money by exploiting them for slave labor. One of the things that makes Schindler’s personal journey so effective is the fact that it starts out so organically. He starts out the film as a charming scoundrel and through the devices of the story, he slowly develops into a caring individual who is able to use his powers of persuasion to help people other than himself.

He has no money of his own at the start of the story, so he enlists the aid of Itzhak Stern (Ben Kingsley), a former accountant at a local factory to recruit local Jewish businessmen so that he can use their money to start his operation of making pots and pans. He will pay them with goods, since they aren’t allowed to have money in the ghetto. Stern is then able to forge papers to make it look as though some people from the ghetto are deemed as “essential workers” to prevent them from being moved to concentration camps.

Meanwhile Schindler is playing both sides of the deck. He treats the workers well, although at first doesn’t really want to accept their thanks or even acknowledge the good he’s doing. He sees himself as a business man and hiring the Jews is good for his business. He also is in bed with the Nazis because he knows where his bread is buttered and he can’t continue to use them as workers unless the Nazis either have faith in him, or he continues to bribe them.

After witnessing the clearing of the ghetto and the absolute brutality endured by these people that he’s started to care for, does he fully understand the scope of their persecution. He isn’t yet ready to look at the Nazi’s as the bad guys, but honestly believes that the chaos of war is making basically good people do bad things. But shortly thereafter he starts to hear stories of the camp commandant Amon Goeth (Ralph Feinnes), and the sadistic satisfaction he seems to get from killing, sometimes indiscriminately, sometimes with a terrifying purpose.

I’m not going to go too much further into the plot, other than to give examples of how the characters of Schindler and Goeth demonstrate the different directions in how people value humanity. As the film moves on and Goeth continues to demonstrate that he values the lives of Jews on the same level as the life of an insect, Schindler sees them as people who are suffering. And as the story continues on even further, we see the great variance in the levels of humanity within Schindler and Goeth. The most striking example is a scene where a train filled with Jews is waiting by the platform. It’s a hot day and the people inside the train are suffering greatly from the heat. Goeth and his minions ignore their suffering, but Schindler shows up and convinces Goeth to let him spray the train cars with a firehose as a means of cooling them off. At first, Goeth and his company laugh at the effort that Schindler shows in having a soldier spray the cars, and the determination that Schindler shows in making sure that all of the cars get cooled off. He even points out how cruel Schindler is being by even giving them hope. But then Goeth starts to understand what Schindler is really doing. He’s trying to give these people some small semblance of mercy and compassion that Goeth would never even consider they deserved. And he’s not happy about it.

There are two great scenes that leads to a sequences demonstrating Goeth’s lack of humanity is the scene where Schindler tries to tell Goeth what real power is. Killing a person for doing wrong is not power, he says. It’s justice. He then tells Goeth that true power resides in having the ability and the right to kill someone, but not doing it. He then tells him a story of an emperor who pardoned a citizen he by right could have had killed, and that was a greater demonstration of his power than the killing would have been. Goeth then tries in the ensuing scenes to live by this philosophy. People who in earlier scenes would have been shot for the smallest of transgressions are pardoned. But the frustration builds in him until he returns to his villa and his house boy hasn’t been able to remove the stains from his bathtub and lies about how hard he was trying. He tells the boy to leave, but as he sits there thinking about it, his frustration grows until he shoots the boy. Goeth is incapable of showing any humanity towards these people.

The other scene occurs between Schindler and Helen, Goeth’s house maid. She confesses to Schindler that Goeth beat her terribly her first day there. When she asked him why she was beating her, he responded that he was beating her because he asked her why. Since then, she’s been afraid that he will one day just decide to shoot her. Schindler tells him not to worry about that because he cares for her too much. The others that he killed meant nothing to him, so killing them meant nothing to him. Then a little later on, Goeth confesses to Helen that he’s attracted to her, but she only stands there, petrified. Goeth then talks to her and works out the reasoning to himself why he can’t sleep with her, even saying that Jews “aren’t human in the strictest sense of the word”. He then savagely beats her, having talked himself into the belief that she was trying to tempt him.

Ultimately what Schindler’s List is saying about humanity is that you get what you give. Oskar Schindler showed humanity towards his fellow man and his growth as a character went from uncaring profiteer to empathetic hero who, with the help of Stern, comes up with a list of more than 1100 people that he keeps out of Auschwitz, and most assuredly saved their lives. Meanwhile, Goeth shows no humanity towards those who need it most, and he becomes a monster.

Another thing that separates Schindler’s List from other is that it takes the time to dramatically show how the Nazis systematically attempted to not just marginalize and discriminate against Jews, but actually attempted to exterminate them. They started out by forcing all Jews to register. Then they didn’t allow them to own businesses. Then they rounded them all up and forced them to live in the ghetto. Finally, they cleared the ghetto and sent them all to labor camps before they would ultimately be sent to concentration camps. It was a sinister process that can only be described as evil, and it really happened. Director Steven Spielberg, who had come up short in his four previous nominations (Jaws, Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T., and The Color Purple) finally broke through by dramatically showing the meticulous and systematic measures that the Nazis took in this planned genocide that turned into the Holocaust.

I also should mention that there are a surprising number of laughs in this film. Don’t get me wrong, this film is as serious as they get and is an important and serious film. But one thing that Spielberg is very good at is manipulating emotions. He did the same thing in The Color Purple, which is also a very serious film. He knew that he’d lose his audience if there was not at least a small range in the emotional meter of the film. In Schindler’s List, while it clearly isn’t a comedy, Spielberg new that he was going to need to lighten the mood at least occasionally to keep the audience engaged, and again to show that there was some humanity here. A lot of the laugh inducing moments come from Schindler himself, and that serves the dual purpose of making him likable as a character as well. It’s just one more example of how this is a very well-crafted film.

Speaking of Spielberg, he has become somewhat of a polarizing director. I look at Schindler’s List as arguably his best film (although Jaws is right there as well), and this film is probably the most un-Spielberg like film that he’s ever made. He as a well-deserved reputation of being overly sentimental in his work, and even though he should be considered to be one of the great directors in the history of cinema, I don’t get the sense that he gets the respect of some of his contemporaries, like Martin Scorsese or Stanley Kubrick or any other number of directors. Personally, I feel like when Spielberg is on, there are few directors that do it better. But when he is off (A.I., Minority Report, War of the Worlds) his films can be very disappointing. In fact, I was watching Hook with my kids the other night, and that film is a great example of how sentimental he can be as a film maker and sometimes that amount of sentimentality can actually diminish the emotional investment that people make in a film. Schindler’s List does get a tad sentimental at the end, although I love the scene where Schindler laments the fact that he could have saved one more life had he just sold his gold Nazi Party pin. The fact that we’ve been taken on such a brutal journey where sentiment has been replaced by humanity, shows the breadth and the depth of his particular film.

Did the Academy get it right?

While this might have been one of the biggest no-brainers in Oscar history, it’s not like Schindler’s List was nominated against a bunch of films you’ve never heard of. While The Fugitive is a terrific film, I always felt that it was a bit of a head scratcher that it got nominated for Best Picture. I like that film a lot, but I don’t consider it to be of Best Picture quality. However In the Name of the Father is a very powerful film starring Daniel Day-Lewis (who would star in another Spielberg Best Picture nominee in Lincoln two decades later) about a father and son who are wrongfully sent to prison over an IRA bombing and try for years to clear their names. It’s a film you should see if you haven’t. The Piano was a moving picture about a woman in a loveless marriage who makes an arrangement to have her piano returned to her, but must give up her body in order to do so. It’s a film that examines how far we would go for the things and the people that we love. Finally, The Remains of the Day was another World War II-era film in which Anthony Hopkins was the head butler of an English manor who is tempted by the love of a new housekeeper. It’s a film about misplaced loyalty and unrequited love that is heartbreaking and moving. Any of the latter three films could have been worthy winners in nearly any other year, but the scope and importance and quality of Schindler’s List made it the clear choice for Best Picture in 1993.

For the first time since Cimarron in 1930/31, a Western would claim the Academy’s highest honor. Certainly, Dances With Wolves could be considered a Western, but I look at that film more as an historical drama/action film. Unforgiven, 1992’s Best Picture winner is a full on, no-holds-bard, full-fledged Western movie that starred and was directed by Clint Eastwood, one of the legends of the Western genre. In fact, the case could be made that this was Eastwood’s finest effort in any Western, which include the Man with No Name trilogy of Spaghetti Westerns directed by Sergio Leone, as well as his own High Planes Drifter, Pale Rider and my personal favorite, The Outlaw Josie Wales. Eastwood’s earlier Westerns were often about solitary figures who lived outside the law due to some tragedy or series of tragedies, and were then, over the course of the film, forced to reenter society and simultaneously avenge what they had lost. In Unforgiven, Eastwood took it a step further by presenting us with an aged and reformed outlaw who is tempted to come back outside the law after his wife had passed away and he needed the money to take care of his children.

From a thematic standpoint, Unforgiven is probably Eastwood’s strongest Western, although the messages that he’s trying to get across are very much on the nose. There isn’t a ton of subtext in this film. It’s a unique Western in that it has a clear message of anti-violence and that you cannot end violence with violence. It also speaks of temperance and forgiveness and how anyone is capable of receiving redemption as long as they’re willing to look for it. The film is fairly clear about what is right and what is wrong, but the characters don’t always have an easy time distinguishing between the two, and for that reason they often make the wrong choices. While that is sometimes bad for the characters in the story, it’s great for the audience because it helps stoke the drama and allows for a more dramatic storyline and provides depth for the characters.

The other thing that is unique in this film as it pertains to other Westerns is that there is ambiguity among the characters. In fact, I could probably spend this entire blog just on the complexities of all of the characters in this film. The way it is in Westerns is that we have good guys and bad guys and more often than not the audience will know who is who. In Unforgiven there are no good guys or bad guys. William Munny (Eastwood) is the protagonist of the story and Little Bill (Gene Hackman) is the antagonist, but which of them honestly is the hero and which is the villain? William Munny is an aging outlaw who was reformed of violence and alcohol by his late wife. For all appearances he seemed willing to live out his days on his pig farm with his children, even though he clearly was not a farmer. When we first meet him, he is approached by The Schofield Kid with an offer to collect half of the bounty on a couple of cowboys who cut up the face of a prostitute. Claiming to be a veteran killer and the nephew of one of Munny’s old riding buddies, the Schofield Kid provides Munny with the archetypal Call to Adventure to help him kill the two cowboys, which in archetypal fashion, Munny Refuses, claiming that he isn’t like that anymore. However as several of his hogs come down with fever, Munny senses that he might not be able to provide for his children by being a farmer, and he reluctantly calls on his friend Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman) to partner up with him one more time. As though trying to convince himself, Munny continually tells Ned that he’s not like that anymore. He’s sworn off whiskey and has no desire for women and he has forsaken violence. And yet, here he is on his way to commit murder on a man who roughed up a prostitute.

Meanwhile, Little Bill Daggett is the sheriff of Big Whiskey, and he’s trying to keep the peace in town by not allowing anyone to carry firearms. Once he hears that the prostitutes have taken a bounty out on the cowboys that cut up Delilah, he figures that he’s going to have to make examples of anyone who comes to town looking to collect on that bounty. The first opportunity he has is when English Bob (Richard Harris) arrives in town. There is history between these two men, and English Bob is an elegant, sophisticated and debonair man who espouses the virtues of kings and queens over presidents (President Garfield has recently been shot, and English Bob opines that the mere presence of royalty would stifle a would-be assassin’s desire to do them harm, but “why not shoot a president?”) When English Bob initially denies that he’s carrying a gun, Little Bill proceeds to beat the hell out of him before throwing him in to jail. He then proceeds to regale W.W. Beauchamp (Saul Rubinek), the biographer accompanying English Bob on his adventures, the true (and less sensational) stories that were English Bob’s actual exploits.

But here’s the thing about Little Bill. He’s a very likable character. In his spare time, he’s building himself a house outside of town, and he’s a terrible carpenter. What’s more is that he knows he’s a terrible carpenter, and yet is insulted when anyone else points that out. He has a big and gregarious personality, and is still an intimidating presence to those around him. That is because he too has a past that is a lot more notorious than his present and English Bob experiences first-hand what that past was like.

William Munny experiences it as well. After he and Ned and the Schofield Kid have been riding through the rain, they arrive at the saloon where the prostitutes work. Ned and Kid leave Munny, shivering and sick downstairs while they go upstairs to negotiate the bounty as well as some other “business”. In what is this film’s archetypal Supreme Ordeal, Little Bill is told of Munny’s presence and arrives at the saloon demanding that Munny turn over his guns. When Munny denies having any, he gets the same treatment that English Bob got, only Little Bill allows him to crawl out of the bar like a beaten dog, humiliated and near death. The Kid and Ned sneak out through a window and manage to get Munny to the safety of a barn outside of town where he can eventually be nursed back to health.

So on the one hand we have William Munny, a man who used to be a cold-blooded drunken killer who is clearly now uncomfortable in his own skin and has no idea who he is or what he wants other than to kill two men he’s never met and who have never wronged him so that he can collect on the bounty. And this is the protagonist of the story. Then on the other hand we have Little Bill Daggett, a gregarious, yet hot tempered man who is trying to keep the peace in his town and is indeed a metaphor for western expansion in that he’s building a home and trying to bring law to a lawless place. Yet, he is the film’s antagonist.

But this film is loaded with that type of duality. The film opens with one of the cowboys having sex with a prostitute and they stop when they hear screaming coming from the next room. They run in to see the other cowboy cutting up Delilah’s face. Skinny Dubois, the owner of the brothel breaks it up and while the prostitutes want the cowboys to hang, Skinny is more inclined to be compensated for his damaged property in Delilah. Little Bill brokers a deal that the cowboys will come back in the spring and give up some of their new ponies to Skinny, and they agree, much to the outrage of the prostitutes, especially their leader Strawberry Alice (Frances Fisher). When they return the following spring Delilah is still scarred, and one of the cowboys tries to make amends by offering the best pony that they have to Delilah. Strawberry Alice thanks him by throwing mud in his face. So we have this duality again. This cowboy isn’t a bad guy. His partner was the one who cut Delilah’s face, and yet he’s trying to make amends, and the whole thing could have ended right there. He certainly doesn’t deserve to die. In fact, Delilah looks touched by the gesture. Unfortunately Strawberry Alice and the others don’t even give her the chance to accept his offer, and their lust for revenge causes them to jump in to a world that they thought they could handle but then find out that they were not anywhere near ready for.

Then when that cowboy is killed, Ned has his own epiphany. Ned, while not enthusiastic at first about the job, looked like he was taking to it a lot better than Munny was. At least he was taken with the prostitutes. Being the best shot with the rifle, Ned took the first shot but it hit that cowboy’s horse, which landed on top of him and broke his leg. Realizing the gravity of what he’s doing, Ned is unable to finish the job and Munny has to take the shots before the cowboy can crawl to the rocks and get cover. Munny is unable to kill him right off, however, but does mortally wound the cowboy, and they have to listen to him call out in pain and suffer before he finally succumbs to his wounds. Not wanting anything more to do with this, Ned leaves the group before they can kill the second cowboy and rides south towards his home. Ned’s reward for doing the right thing is getting caught by the cowboy’s friends and brought the Little Bill for justice.

The second cowboy’s death leads to the second most powerful scene in the film. Munny and the Kid stake him out and wait for him to go unattended to the outhouse. The Kid, who we’ve discovered earlier in the film can’t see more the 50 yards away, runs up so that he can shoot him at close range. He opens up the door and hesitates for a moment while the cowboy puts up his hands and shouts, “No!” The the Kid shoots him and they get away in a hail of bullets.

Waiting by the lone tree out on the prairie for their payment, the Kid admits to Munny that he’d never in fact killed anyone before. He takes swig after swig of whiskey trying to numb the pain. Munny looks at this scared kid who has now faced mortality and sees the faces of everyone that he’s ever hurt before, and yet, he finally looks comfortable in his own skin. He’s back in his element and he’s doing something that he knows how to do, and he imparts what wisdom he can on the Kid. He tells him, “It’s a hell of thing killing a man. You take away all he’s got and everything he’s ever gonna have.” When the Kid replies that they had it coming, Munny replies with the best line of the film, and one of my favorite lines in cinema with, “We all have it comin, Kid.” What a powerful moment that is, and here is a link to it if you’d like to see it for yourself.

Little Sue then arrives with the bounty and tells them that Little Bill killed Ned. Munny doesn’t believe her at first, but then when she explains in detail, Munny takes the whiskey bottle from the Kid and starts to drink. He goes into town and confronts Little Bill in a scene that is filled with tension and drama, and ends with the film’s great conundrum when Little Bill tells Munny, “I don’t deserve to die like this. I was building a house!” That’s a great example of how the villain is always the hero in his own story, and in this film especially, who is the villain and who is the hero is ambiguous at best.

For me what truly makes this a great film is that you can realize how good it is when you’re watching it, but then you realize its greatness on reflection. Westerns are sometimes looked down by cinema connoisseurs as shallow popcorn flicks that were essentially the action films of their day. However a deeper look at Westerns reveals that they’re usually films that are filled with pathos, heavy themes and complex life lessons. Unforgiven is such a film. It’s a film that makes you think and it’s a film that leaves you thinking about it long after you see it. It’s a violent film that preaches an anti-violent message. It’s a film where people who are both good and bad do things that are both good and bad, and yet we still root for or against them because we’re able to relate to them on an emotional and human level.

Overall this is an outstanding film, and I highly recommend a viewing if you haven’t seen it recently.

Did the Academy get it right?

This was a year for thematically strong films that tackled important issues, sometimes with characters with ambiguous intentions. The Crying Game was a powerful and shocking film that had a twist at the end that had everyone talking. It’s a terrific film with a strong and clear message, but I think it falls behind Unforgiven because its characters aren’t as relatable or as complex. Howard’s End was also one of the most critically acclaimed films of the year, and I’m a little surprised that it didn’t win, as this is the type of film that the Academy usually favors, especially over Westerns. I don’t think it’s as good as Unforgiven for similar reasons as The Crying Game in that this is a film about relationships but the characters aren’t as complex or as engaging as the characters in Unforgiven, so I think that separated those films as well. Scent of a Woman was one of the most popular films of the year and was also driven by a relationship, namely the relationship between the curmudgeonly Lt. Col. Frank Slade and the young and timid Charlie Simms. To be brutally honest, this isn’t a great film to me, and what saves it is that it has possibly one of the best endings a film ever had when Slade goes to Charlie’s boarding school and puts them all in their respective places. Actually, my favorite film of 1992 was A Few Good Men. This is an outstanding, dramatic and riveting film with incredible performances by Tom Cruise, Jack Nicholson and Demi Moore, among many others like Kevin Bacon and Keifer Sutherland. The problem from the Academy’s point of view is that it’s a courtroom drama, and if you’ve been following this blog for a while, then here is the familiar refrain that courtroom dramas are mostly bridesmaids and rarely brides. It’s unfortunate because I think that A Few Good Men was quite worthy of winning the award, with its entertaining story and brilliant screenplay. That said, I think that the Academy did get it right in 1992 with Unforgiven. It’s a brilliant film with some of the most complex and best developed characters that I’ve ever seen, and it is also one of the strongest films that I know from a thematic standpoint. It’s hard to argue that Unforgiven was the best film of 1992.

I’m going to start out by saying that, in a vacuum, I don’t feel strongly about The Silence of the Lambs one way or the other. It’s not a bad film, but neither is it a great one. I liked it, but I did not love it. I thought Jody Foster was great, and I thought Anthony Hopkins was superb. They deservedly won Best Actress and Best Actor respectively for their roles in this picture. I thought that it was a fine piece of film making, and Jonathan Demme also would win Best Director, so this film swept all of the top awards on Oscar Night for 1991. I think that the problem for me was that I could never get emotionally engaged in the film or with the characters. It’s definitely creepy and it’s definitely scary in parts, and I think that the film makers honestly tried to create an emotional bridge between Clarice and the audience, but I just couldn’t find it.

I believe that what ultimately made The Silence of the Lambs such a commercial and critical success was that for its time it was a relatively shocking piece of film making. It finished the year as the #4 film at the box office and it has a 95% Certified Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. It was regarded as a Thriller, but it skirts the line with Horror as well, and was the first film of either genre to break through and win Best Picture, even though similar films like The Exorcist and Fatal Attraction had been nominated in previous years. The subject matter was not very main stream and much of the film’s success relied on its shock value.

That to me is the main reason that I found it underwhelming. I had seen it when it first came out, and I wasn’t a huge fan of it then because I’m not a huge fan of the Horror genre. I remembered very little about it, so for all intents and purposes this was just like seeing it for the first time. This was a film that was meant to be shocking to an early 1990’s audience, and now 24 years on, whether due to our desensitization or just the passage of time, that shock value is no longer there and that’s why this film doesn’t really hold up. With the shock value gone, the thrill has been taken out of the thriller. If you think about it, the subject matter isn’t that much different than anything that you can see these days on CSI or SVU or any other number of cop shows that you can see five nights a week on network television. That means that it’s up to the performances of Hopkins and Foster to carry the film, and while they’re both great, the story isn’t as strong as the actors’ performances and the passage of time has really caused this film to lose its edge.

However we do not live in a vacuum, so the point could be made that without The Silence of the Lambs, we wouldn’t even have those shows to begin with and that is a totally valid argument with which I would 100% agree. The influence of The Silence of the Lambs was felt right away with other films like Se7en and then later with the aforementioned television detective shows. Indeed, a very strong case could be made that The Silence of the Lambs is one of the most influential films in the history of cinema and that influence has stood the test of time.

Unfortunately the diminished, or even lost, shock value, leaves behind a story that, while compelling, isn’t as strong as it could be. A better and more engaging story might have allowed this film to age better, but that’s not the case. Don’t get me wrong, I like the story. I thought it was solid, but it’s just not the type of extraordinary and emotional story that I’d like to see from a Best Picture winner. The problem was that they tried to get us to care about Clarice (Foster) by giving us her back story through her interrogation at the hands of Hannibal Lecter (Hopkins). While Hopkins performance is sinister in his exploitation of Clarice’s childhood memories, we learn too much back story through dialogue. I know it can be difficult, but I would have liked to see a little more care given to Clarice’s development so that it wasn’t so on the nose. I think back to the development of a litany of characters throughout the history of cinema whose back stories were revealed as the film went along within the context of the story because their back stories affected how they responded to what was going on in the present.

A perfect example is the scene where Clarice is remembering moving to a relative’s farm in Montana after her father was murdered. It was a sheep and horse ranch and one night she ran away because she couldn’t handle listening to the lambs scream anymore when they were slaughtered. She snatched one up and ran away but was later picked up by the police and then was sent to live in an orphanage. Then Lecter says to her, “You still wake up sometimes, don’t you? Wake up in the dark. You hear the screaming of the lamb… And you think if you save poor Catherine, you can make them stop, don’t you. You think if Catherine lives, you won’t wake up in the dark ever again. With that awful screaming of the lambs.” A few sentences is all it takes to encapsulate Clarice’s inner motivation, and the exchange between Lecter and Clarice is one of the great moments of the film, and yet it leaves me somewhat hollow because all of this information is told to us. They use some flashback scenes to show is the trauma of the death of Clarice’s father and the scars that she still has over it at other points in the film, so I wish they had taken a similar approach to this scene. There could have been a great moment of tension if we had seen the young Clarice entering the barn filled with screaming lambs. How disturbing would that combination of visuals and sound been? Then while we’re still hearing the lambs screaming, perhaps a couple of shots of her waking up in the night with a start. Finally having Lecter sum it all up with his professional, yet psychotic diagnosis of her mental state might have been even more chilling and the whole scene would have been more engaging for having watched it rather than having it told to us.

Here is a link to the scene on Youtube, and you’ll see that Hopkins’ performance especially carries the scene and the movie.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fd7e1fXYIuM

While I was watching The Silence of the Lambs, I couldn’t help but come back to the thought that this is a cop movie. There are certainly aspects of the Thriller and aspects of Horror, but the only really scary scene is when she’s looking for Buffalo Bill in the dark and we see her from his POV through the night vision goggles. He could kill her at any moment and the tension in that scene is almost unbearable. There are also some scenes that, at the time would have been quite gory, but feel very tame by today’s standards. The scene I’m thinking about mostly is the one where Lecter escapes and kills the two guards. I remember really being sickened by that scene in 1991, but barely batting an eyelash when I watched it the other night.

There is one other thing I’d like to mention about The Silence of the Lambs and that is the fact that AFI named Hannibal Lecter as the #1 villain of all time. That’s certainly a subjective opinion, but an easy one to defend, and it again comes down to the sheer power of Anthony Hopkins’ performance. Certainly there was great dialogue written in the script and the basis of his character came out of the story, but this character is so memorable precisely because Hopkins made him so.

Overall The Silence of the Lambs is a very good film, but I would challenge anyone who hasn’t seen it in a long time to watch it again with an open mind and determine if it really has held up and stood the test of time. It’s my opinion that the film itself has been outlasted by its influence. It continues to influence film making, television and popular culture, but it has been left behind by the need for heightened levels of shock in order to really affect audiences.

Did the Academy get it right?

Oof. It’s hard to argue that on Oscar night, they probably did get it right. Even though no thriller/horror film had ever won Best Picture, The Silence of the Lambs was probably the one to break through that glass ceiling. As mentioned above, it was one of the highest grossing and most critically acclaimed films of the year. It’s also ranked #65 on the original list of AFI’s top 100 films of all time. No other film that was nominated year made the list. The Prince of Tides, directed by Barbara Streisand was a gripping and sometimes disturbing love story between a man and the psychiatrist of his sister as they go through his family’s past and try to determine why she attempted suicide. JFK was another controversial film from Oliver Stone, and it painted a number of possible conspiracy theories behind the assassination of John F. Kennedy. It was a controversial film, but also had an all-star cast including Kevin Costner, Tommy Lee Jones, Gary Oldman, and Sissy Spacek, among many, many others. Bugsy was a biographical mob picture starring Warren Beaty and Annette Benning about how Bugsy Seigel started Las Vegas. All of those were fine films, but imperfect films as well. To be bluntly honest, my favorite film of 1991 was Beauty and the Beast. Now for the sake of full disclosure, I’m an animation guy. I’ve worked in the animation industry for 15 years and got my degree in animation from USC. But before you scoff at the notion that it could be Best Picture over The Silence of the Lambs, consider that it was the #3 film at the box office for the year and Rotten Tomatoes has it at 93% certified fresh, so the films are comparable to each other from a numbers standpoint. I would also challenge people to watch that film (the original version, and NOT the re-release with the “Human Again” sequence) with an open mind and appreciate the character arcs and complete story structure and development within the film. It is a remarkable film that was well-deserving of Oscar consideration. However with all that said, I can’t say that the Academy made the wrong decision, especially when you consider what that film meant in its own contemporary time. In a vacuum, it was the right winner for Best Picture of 1991.

Dances with Wolves was the movie event of 1990. I remember when it came out and it was the movie that everyone was talking about. Personally, I remember seeing it the year it came out and being underwhelmed. Perhaps it was because I had heard too much hype over it. Perhaps it was because I saw it at the drive in, and that’s rarely a recipe for a good theater-going experience, at least as far as actually seeing the movie goes. It also didn’t help that in the ensuing years Kevin Costner would star in and produce a series of films like Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and Waterworld that demonstrated his lack of acting chops and poor taste in creating his own material. The near universal derision for those and other Costner projects only reinforced my belief that I did not need to go out of my way for a second viewing of Dances with Wolves, especially with its 3-hour running time.

Then I was forced to watch it this past weekend because it was next in line as a Best Picture winner, and I was not looking forward to it in the least. “Why, oh why couldn’t I be watching Goodfellas this weekend?” I lamented. Then I finally sat down and actually started watching Dances with Wolves. To say that it was better than I remembered would be an understatement. This is an outstanding and exceptional film that reminds me that there are still some stories that are best told through cinema, and that there was an art and a craft to cinematic storytelling prior to CG and digital effects. From its iconic buffalo hunt scene to its deep thematic positions on humanity and prejudice, this is a film that has a loud voice, and that voice needs to be heard today just as loudly as it did 25 years ago.

The film is about John Dunbar (Costner), a Lieutenant in the Union army during the Civil War. The film opens with him severely wounded, and the only thing that keeps the surgeon from amputating his foot is the lack of ether and time. In an attempt to kill himself, he mounts a horse and rides in front of the Confederate line daring them to shoot him. They all take shots, but none of them hit him. As a Confederate sharp-shooter lines up a shot, Dunbar’s men start shooting and take the Confederate position that had been stalemated for several days. A general overseeing the battle promises his personal surgeon to Dunbar in order to save his foot, and then offers Dunbar any assignment he would like. Wanting to see the Frontier “before it’s gone” he volunteers for a post out west.

Dunbar’s guide brings him to an abandoned fort. On the trek there, Dunbar asks him about Indians, and the guide responds that they’re nothing but beggars and thieves and he should do his best to avoid them. As Dunbar brings the fort back to a livable state he befriends a wolf with two white front paws that he affectionately names Two Socks. He then makes contact with a local Sioux tribe when Kicking Bird (Graham Greene) shows up at the fort and tries to steal his horse while Dunbar bathes in a nearby pond. Dunbar startles Kicking Bird by charging him, still naked, and Kicking Bird runs away on his own horse. Kicking Bird alerts his tribe to Dunbar’s presence and other members of the tribe start showing up at the fort to harass Dunbar and try to steal his horse. The final time this happens, Dunbar is confronted angrily by one of the Native Americans who shouts at Dunbar in his own language, “I am Wind In His Hair! And I do not fear you!” Wind In His Hair shouts this at Dunbar a couple of times before angrily riding away.

Narrating as though writing in his journal, Dunbar decides at this point that he must go and meet with the tribe, as he believes that he has become a target. He would like to negotiate some sort of peaceful settlement with them, and on his way he comes across a woman who appears to be injured. She passes out and he carries her on his horse to the tribal village where Wind In His Hair angrily pulls her off of the horse and tells him that he is not welcome. Then members of the tribe go out to see Dunbar, and he starts to communicate with them by pantomiming a buffalo. Kicking Bird figures out what he’s doing and a dialogue slowly starts to develop.

Over the course of the ensuing months, Dunbar slowly becomes acquainted with the tribe and with their traditions. He writes in his journal that the Indians are nothing like he was lead to believe. They are a warm, caring and good-humored people who live rich and deep lives and are connected in a deep way to the environment that surrounds them. He also finds out that the woman he saved is named Stands With A Fist (Mary McDonnell), and she’s a white woman who has been living with the tribe since Kicking Bird saved her after her family was killed by marauding Pawnee when she was a little girl. She has been in mourning since the death of her husband who was good friends with Wind In His Hair, but she is attracted to Dunbar after initially being afraid that he would take her away, and he is attracted to her as well.

Dunbar begins to assimilate to the Sioux culture and accompanies them on a buffalo hunt. He eventually befriends Wind In His Hair and becomes a trusted member of the tribe. He learns their traditions and then he arms them with rifles from the camp to defend them from the Pawnee. Ultimately Kicking Bird tells Stands With A Fist that she no longer needs to mourn and that opens the door for her to marry Dunbar, who the tribe has now named Dances With Wolves due to his relationship with Two Socks.

Finally Dunbar has completely assimilated into the tribe and is going to move with them to their winter camp. Remembering that he left his journal at the camp and that the journal could serve as a road map to wherever the tribe goes, he convinces Stands With A Fist, Wind In His Hair and Kicking Bird that he’ll return to the fort, retrieve the journal and catch up with them. However, he arrives to the fort to discover that a regiment of Union soldiers has arrived. Mistaking him for an Indian, they attack him and take him into custody. When he refuses to tell them where the tribe is going and starts speaking in the Sioux language, they brand him a traitor and arrange for him to be shipped to headquarters. On the ride back, Wind In His Hair and others from the tribe attack and kill the soldiers, freeing Dunbar. Then, in what might be the ultimate MacGuffin, the journal floats down a river, dropped by one of the dead soldiers who had found it and had been tearing out the pages to use as toilet paper because he could not read.

Back at the winter camp, Dunbar tells the chief and Kicking Bird that the soldiers will be searching for him and he has to go away so that they won’t find the tribe as well. He and Stands With A Fist walk away from the tribe as Wind In His Hair Yells, “Dances With Wolves! I am Wind In His Hair! Do you see that I am your friend? Can you see that you will always be my friend?” it is one of the most powerful and emotionally gripping endings to a film that I have ever seen.

The thing that struck me hard about this film is how strong it is thematically. Now, it is very on the nose, there’s no question about that. However this is such a compelling film because, like Platoon a few years earlier with the Vietnam War, Dances With Wolves forces us to take a hard look at a period of our history about which we should be less than proud. While it doesn’t sugar coat the Native American lifestyle, it does show them living a balanced existence with the environment and as a people who couldn’t have been more misunderstood by the Americans who ventured westward.

Director Kevin Costner and screenwriter Michael Blake managed to get the film to force us to take that look by crafting a story arc that started out as a fish-out-of-water story and transitioned to one of acceptance and bridge building. One man was able to overcome his prejudices and create an atmosphere where mutual understanding as well as learning could not only be possible, but could thrive. What Dunbar ends up finding out is that the Native Americans are human beings. Not only that, but they were consistently some of the finest human beings that he had ever had the pleasure to know. He tries to explain this to the other whites when he arrives at the fort, but he’s only met with ignorance and derision.

This is a transitional film. As such it has a duality of emotions that adds to its richness and depth. As we’re rooting for Dunbar to live a peaceful life with the Sioux we simultaneously know that any peaceful life with them will be impossible because we know that this entire way of life is only a few short years from being completely eliminated. There is a lot of cruel irony in this film, and that overarching theme is one of the examples of that. Another example is when they find out that the Pawnee are going to attack the village while the warriors are away. Dunbar races back to the fort and gets rifles to arm the Sioux so that they can defend themselves. Using modern weapons, the Sioux beat back the Pawnee and win a great victory. However, Costner and Blake did an outstanding job of presenting the feeling that the victory was a hollow one because by accepting modernity the tribe has lost something that, while intangible, was very valuable. That is outstanding storytelling, and any aspiring screenwriter could learn a lot from watching this film.

Not only is this film an example of excellent storytelling, but it is also an example of outstanding filmmaking technique. Similar to previous Best Picture Winners Lawrence of Arabia, Gandhi and Out of Africa, this film was shot in a way to make people looks small in a vast landscape. I felt that Costner and Director of Photography Dean Semler did a great job of infusing those shots into the story in a similar way to Lawrence of Arabia. The landscape almost became a character rather than a backdrop.

Finally I have to mention something about the buffalo hunt scene. In a lot of ways, this scene reminded me of the chariot race in Ben Hur. I remember watching that for the first time, having seen clips of the chariot race before, but not having any real context for it. Then seeing it in the greater context of the entire film made it one of the most breathtaking and exciting scenes ever committed to film. I believe the same idea applies to the buffalo hunt scene in Dances With Wolves. It’s become somewhat iconic over the years and it’s the scene that people show when talking about his film. However when taken in the context of the entire film, this is an amazing scene. The way it plays out, the way it’s shot and the dramatic purpose it serves in the story really make it, in my opinion, one of the great scenes in the history of cinema.

We’ve learned in a previous scene that the tribe is concerned that they’ve not yet seen any buffalo and they’re worried about it. Then they come across some buffalo carcasses that have been skinned and left to rot by white hunters. Then they finally come across the herd and the hunt has to be seen in order to be fully appreciated. It is this scene where Dunbar really proves his worth to the tribe and where his assimilation begins. In the context of the Hero’s Journey, the buffalo hunt is the Ordeal, and sets the story in a different direction where Dunbar has now become a part of the tribe and now wants to protect it.

One other sad irony of seeing this film was that the day I was watching it, Michael Blake passed away, succumbing to a long illness. He wrote the novel and then adapted it into the screenplay that Costner would direct and produce. His screenplay would also win the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay, and it is a fine screenplay indeed. It has a clear Hero’s Journey and it is filled with subtext, thematic elements and emotion that make it a dramatic story that is a story very well-told.

Did the Academy get it right?

Believe it or not, this is actually a tough one for me because 1990 also saw the release of a little film called Goodfellas. In fact, 1990 had a very strong group of Best Picture nominees. Awakenings was a dramatic and emotional story starring Robin Williams as a doctor trying desperately to come up with a cure for a disease that was debilitating a character played by Robert De Niro. The Godfather Part III was also released that year, but did not remotely hold up to the quality of its predecessors in the series, and became the only film in the series not to win the Academy’s highest honor, and rightly so. One of the most popular films of the year was Ghost, and it was a fine film, to be sure. It also produced its own moments that would become iconic ones in the pantheon of American cinema, but Dances With Wolves and Goodfellas were two films that were on an entirely different level. Which one was better and more deserving of Best Picture? If you had asked me a couple of days ago, I would have said Goodfellas hands down. Then I saw Dances With Wolves, and I was certain that it was the best film of the year. However, having not seen Goodfellas for quite a while, I watched it the following night, and my honest answer now is that it’s a coin flip. Either one of these films could have won, and there would be no controversy. If forced to make a choice, I would actually give Dances With Wolves a slight edge due to the fact that I think it’s stronger thematically, elicits more of an emotional response and is crafted in a way that is pure cinema. Goodfellas is a well-crafted film, but it’s a signature Martin Scorsese film. It has many of the conventions and techniques that became almost as unique as his fingerprints when it comes to identifiable traits in making a film. With all that said, and while I don’t think it was a slam dunk, I do believe that the Academy got it right in 1990 with Dances With Wolves.

The 1980’s went out with a whimper as far as the Academy was concerned when they bestowed their highest honor on Driving Miss Daisy. Not unlike earlier winners from the decade like Ordinary People and Terms of Endearment, Driving Miss Daisy is a nice film with a lot of emotion but very little actual drama. The plot just meanders and misses every dramatic opportunity with which it presents itself. It is primarily a character-driven film and the performances by Morgan Freeman and Jessica Tandy are what make this film as good as it is. However this is not a great film.

The inciting incident for Driving Miss Daisy happens when the elderly Daisy Werthan (Tandy) tells her maid Idella (Esther Rolle) that she’s leaving for the market. She starts backing the car out of the driveway but becomes confused and pushes the gas pedal instead of the brake and crashes the car over the neighbors’ rock wall. Realizing his mother is too old to now to drive, Boolie Werthan (Dan Aykroyd) hires Hoke Colburn (Freeman) to be her driver. Daisy is a headstrong and stubborn woman who would rather just take the bus than have anyone driver her around, but Hoke proves to be just as persistent, and he eventually is able to at least get her in to the car.

That is essentially where the film moves into the second act and what follows is over an hour of chronicling their lives together as Hoke grows old and Daisy grows older. Daisy has a nice character arc as she goes from stubborn and hot-headed to (slightly) more open and compassionate, finally declaring to Hoke as Dementia is starting to set in, that he’s her best friend. Screenwriter Alfred Uhry wrote the script based on his own stage play and he did a marvelous job of developing Daisy as a character. She has a lot of depth and she certainly comes across as a real person. There are quite a few people who can relate to Boolie, as Daisy is as demanding a mother as anyone could have, and Boolie often, but not always succumbs to her demands, much to the chagrin of his own wife Florine.

As mentioned, Daisy herself is stubborn, hot-headed and often times just downright mean. But Uhry did a great job of making her likable by giving her depth. She may be all of the things that I just mentioned, but she’s also determined to maintain her own independence, and underneath her harsh exterior is a heart of gold. It also cannot be ignored how magnificent of a performance Tandy gave this role. For her efforts, she would not only win Best Actress in a Leading Role, but at the age of 80, she would become the oldest woman ever to claim that honor. And this was no sympathy vote or lifetime achievement vote either. She rightly deserved that award because she gave a powerful and emotional performance that helped to carry the film.

Equally as engaging, and no less deserving of an Oscar (if it hadn’t been for Daniel Day-Lewis) was Morgan Freeman playing the part of Hoke. For his part, Hoke doesn’t really experience a whole lot of growth during the film, but instead acts as the catalyst for Daisy’s development. I feel like Freeman’s performance of the jovial and wise Hoke was as fine a performance as Freeman could have given, but the character wasn’t as well-developed as was Daisy’s character. While he has a likable and affable personality, Hoke doesn’t seem to have any real flaws or skeletons in his closet. At one point he tells the story of the lynching of his friend’s father when he was a kid, but there’s never any reconciliation as to how that event has shaped who he’s become as a man today. The majority of this film takes place in the segregated South and while there is one scene where Hoke has to pull over to urinate because the bathrooms at their last stop were white only. However, there is never any real discussion or plot movement or character growth due to that occurrence.

For me, this is where the film ultimately doesn’t succeed as well as it could have. There is a small amount of bigotry in Daisy at the beginning of the film, although she claims more than once over the course of the film that she’s not prejudiced. The closest that Uhry and Director Bruce Beresford come is when Daisy thinks that Hoke stole a can of salmon from her pantry. Before that happens, however, Daisy believes that she has discovered the means by which to fire this man whom she never wanted around in the first place. She calls Boolie over to show him that the can has been stolen and makes a couple of generalized statements about how dishonest “they” are and how you can’t trust “them.” Hoke did in fact take it, but before Boolie can fire him, Hoke honestly confesses to taking the can and he has stopped by the store on the way to work to get a replacement can that he hands over to Daisy. This is an important moment in the film because this is the moment where Daisy starts to feel more accepting of Hoke, but the filmmakers missed an opportunity for some serious drama and tension.

Another such moment occurs later in the film when Hoke is driving Daisy to a family gathering in Mississippi. As they’re pulled over to the side of the road for a rest, a couple of state troopers approach them and demand to see Hoke’s driver’s license and they ask him where he got the car. Daisy tells the officers that the car is hers and that Hoke is her driver. After inspecting the license, the officers allow them to move on, only staying behind to lament the fact that an old Jewish woman and an old black man are traveling together than there’s nothing they can do about it. This is another missed opportunity for drama and tension.

The filmmakers also missed a more globally dramatic opportunity within the script. I believe that Daisy needed to start out the film much more bigoted than she was, and spending time with Hoke would have allowed her to grow and learn that African-American people are just as human and just as deserving of respect and dignity as anyone else is, regardless of color. Then the story of the lynching as well as the run-in with the police and many other scenes throughout the film would have benefitted greatly from that small change in the dynamic of their relationship. Also, making Hoke more sensitive to racial discrimination would have added tension to their relationship, and I believe this could have been done without taking away his gregarious nature. Nor would it have taken anything away from what the film ultimately became, but for my money it would have added an element of drama that would have pushed it from being merely a good film to a film that truly would have been worthy of winning Best Picture.

The other aspect that I didn’t particularly care for with Driving Miss Daisy was the overall storyline. This was a film that chronicled their lives over several decades, so there wasn’t a traditional narrative in the sense that it was about a character that had a particular goal. While there is a clear 3-Act structure in the film, the plot points didn’t really increase the drama the way they would in a more traditional 3-Act story. As mentioned, Uhry adapted the screenplay from his own stage play and the movie has more of a feeling of a stage play in its plot. To be honest, the plot is not very cinematic, and, as it’s chronicling their lives over several years with no clear goal for the main characters, it feels very similar to Terms of Endearment, in that it has a very disjointed and lacks the type of rising drama and tension that happens throughout the second act of a more cinematic film. Again, I really believe that adding overcoming bigotry as a more significant thematic element would have added a more dramatic feeling to the film. Also one of the strengths of the film is that there are a lot of humorous moments organically placed within the script, so I believe that the type of drama that adding overcoming bigotry would have added wouldn’t necessarily have darkened the film’s tone. It certainly would have made the film more interesting and engaging, however. Ultimately, this is a nice film. To quote Dom DeLuise as Emperor Nero in History of the World Part I, it’s “nice. Not thrilling. But nice…”

Did the Academy get it right?

No (Born on the Fourth of July). No (Dead Poets Society). No (Field of Dreams). No (My Left Foot). All four of those films were superior to Driving Miss Daisy and each would have been a more deserving winner. Personally I would have voted for Dead Poets Society as that was my favorite film of that year and a film that took greater advantage of the opportunities for drama and tension that it set up for itself. Born on the Fourth of July was obviously a very powerful and dramatic film that continued to show that Tom Cruise could be more than just a pretty boy as an actor. I’m a sucker for baseball movies, and Field of Dreams with its iconic “If you build it, he will come” is one of the best baseball movies to ever come out. Then what can be said about My Left Foot. It’s an amazing film and Daniel Day-Lewis delivers one of the great acting performances in the history of cinema as Christy Brown, the writer afflicted with cerebral palsy. I would also go so far as to say that Driving Miss Daisy probably should not even have been nominated for an Oscar and that the Academy whiffed in not nominating Do the Right Thing, Spike Lee’s breakthrough film that nailed the racial inequality themes that Driving Miss Daisy missed. Along those same lines, Glory is another film that came out that year that was more deserving of a Best Picture nomination as well.

In Rain Man, the Academy bestowed its highest award for 1988 to a film that would become one of the most popular and most iconic films, not only of the decade, but in the history of American cinema. That statement might sound hyperbolic, but I do not believe that it is. Raymond Babbitt is an oft-quoted character, and many of his signature lines from Rain Man have become a part of the vernacular of popular culture. Another thing that Rain Man did was simultaneously bring awareness to autism while also expanding some of the condition’s misconceptions. Raymond Babbitt was based on a real person who was an autistic savant, however the vast majority of people on the autism spectrum are not savants, which some erroneously believed was the case on the heels of this film’s release. Fortunately, however, this film at the very least made people more aware of the condition and helped set the stage for its proper diagnosis, and today there is much more awareness of autism and much more compassion for people who live with it.

As for the film itself, it’s a marvelous one. It’s a story about personal growth and it’s about redemption and forgiveness. It’s about a young, cocky and arrogant yuppie living in Los Angeles named Charlie Babbitt (Tom Cruise) who imports Lamborghini’s, but is short on cash at the moment and is having a hard time paying back a loan and is in danger of losing the cars before he can complete their sale and becoming indebted to his clients. In the midst of all of this chaos he finds out that his father has passed away in Cincinnati. Charlie tells his girlfriend Susanna (Valeria Golino) the story about how he stole his father’s car, a Buick Roadmaster convertible, one night when he was 16 and his father let him spend 2 nights in jail over it, and that was the impetus for Charlie to leave the house and he hadn’t seen or spoken to his father since. At the reading of the will Charlie finds out that he’s receiving that very car as well as his father’s rose bushes, but the bulk of the estate, $3,000,000 worth, will be going to an unnamed beneficiary.

Charlie finds out that the trustee of the estate, Dr. Bruner, is chief psychiatrist at a local institution. Charlie meets him there, but Bruner is less than forthcoming with information. Charlie leaves the meeting frustrated and finds Raymond (Dustin Hoffman) sitting in his car, and Raymond knows everything about it. Raymond knows Charlie’s father and knows the exact date when his mother died. Dr. Bruner witnesses the exchange and admits to Charlie that Raymond is his brother and the beneficiary of the $3,000,000. He also tells him that Raymond is an autistic savant, and that means that he has no grasp on certain things that most people take for granted, and he cannot function on his own in society. However, he has certain abilities like an incredible memory and ability with numbers that give him an element of genius as well. Determined to find a way to get his hands on that money that he so desperately needs, Charlie takes Raymond from the institution to bring him to Los Angeles and ransoming Raymond to Dr. Bruner for his half of the estate.

At that point they go on the road because Raymond refuses to fly, citing at least one plane crash from every airline except Qantus. Charlie discovers that dealing with Raymond is like dealing with a small child who can’t express himself. These issues are incredibly hard for Charlie to deal with because he is so self-centered and emotionally bankrupt that he lacks the empathy to really give Raymond the care that he needs. Dr. Bruner has told Charlie that Raymond relies on stability and he gets very agitated when things go out of the norm. It’s easy to tell when Raymond is agitated because he recites the old Abbot and Costello routine Who’s On First. Charlie gets introduced to Raymond’s neuroses when they’re in a coffee shop and Raymond is worried because today is pancake-day and there’s no maple syrup on the table because maple syrup is always on the table before the pancakes get there. Frustrated, Charlie violently grabs Raymond by the back of the neck to quiet him, but it only agitates Raymond further.

And that is an example of beautiful storytelling from a screenwriting and character development perspective. It’s always important to give your characters depth because depth in character is what makes them feel like real people. In other words, you don’t what your hero to be 100% good, because then he’ll be uninteresting and the audience won’t be able to relate to him. You need to give your hero some sort of flaw in order to make him relatable. Likewise, you don’t want your villain to be 100% bad because then he just turns into a monster. You want the villain to be the hero of his own story so that he too feels like a real person with relatable motivations. What Director Barry Levinson and Screenwriters Ronald Bass and Barry Morrow did was they created a protagonist in Charlie who was impatient, petulant and arrogant and lived a life that required that he fly by the seat of his pants. He actually starts out the film more unlikable than likable. They then paired him up with an antagonist in Raymond who must have everything in an orderly way and must be surrounded by patient people who understand his needs. So they took a person with no patience and put him in charge of a person who requires an extraordinary amount of patience and that created a very dramatic scenario that forced Charlie to grow as a person and examine what type of person he had become.

If you are an aspiring screenwriter and trying to build a dynamic and dramatic relationship between your main character and another character in the story, then Rain Man is a script you should read and it’s a film that you should reference. It is the job of the screenwriter to make life as difficult as possible on the main character, and Bass and Morrow did just that with Charlie Babbitt. Before Charlie even meets Raymond, he’s in a world of trouble with his clients and with his debtors and even with his girlfriend. Then after Charlie meets Raymond and the adventure begins, they had Raymond act as an obstacle at almost every turn, so the very person that Charlie thinks he needs to solve his problem is also the person that’s preventing him from doing just that. If you can create a scenario by which that is going on in your own screenplay, then you are well on your way to being a successful writer.

I would also like to mention something about Tom Cruise, who played Charlie Babbitt, the main character and the hero of this journey. No one can play a petulant, arrogant little shit like Tom Cruise and he was at his best in this film. I remember when this film came out and there was concern on the part of some over casting Tom Cruise opposite Dustin Hoffman. Hoffman was already not only an established star, but a growing legend in Hollywood. He won Best Actor for Rain Man and had previously own Best Actor for Kramer Vs. Kramer. Not only that, but he had also nominated for Best Actor four other times at that point, and he had starred in some of the great films of the previous 20 years like The Graduate, Midnight Cowboy and All the President’s Men. I’ll discuss Hoffman a little later as well, but many felt that Cruise was fighting way above his weight class in being cast opposite Hoffman. To the surprise of many, Cruise held his own. To that point he was known primarily for Risky Business and top Gun, but this role showed that he could be a serious actor, and it opened doors for him to have much more serious roles later in his career. This was not the first nor the last time that Cruise would be underrated as an actor, and this film was truly a defining moment for Cruise and his career.

Dustin Hoffman would join the likes of Clark Gable, Talia Shire and Diane Keaton as an actor to star in three Best Picture winners, having previously starred in the aforementioned Midnight Cowboy (1969), and Kramer vs. Kramer (1979). An interesting note is that the previous members of this club all were in movies that won within the same decade, and Hoffman’s winners were all a decade apart from each other. Already a legend, Rain Man cemented Dustin Hoffman as one of the great actors of the 20^th Century.

One other thing that I find extraordinary about Rain Man is that it’s a road movie that I like. Personally I’m not a fan of road movies, and Rain Man, which primarily is a road movie, is probably the only road movie that I can think of off the top of my head that I really like a lot. For me what makes Rain Man work where other road movies don’t is that it’s not episodic. In too many road movies the hero goes from one point in the story to the next with each stage representing a different challenge that needs to be overcome. Too often in road movies these stages and challenges are self-contained events that have little or nothing to do with any other points in the story. You could easily replace any of these events with something else and it would have no affect at all on anything else that happens in the story or the film. That’s what makes road movies episodic, and I am generally not a fan of their disjointed nature.

Rain Man is different, however, in that while there are somewhat disparate pieces to their journey, they all do tie together as the journey moves along, and the lessons that Charlie learns with each stage are applied to events in the film’s third act. What lessens the episodic nature of the film is that events and situations that are planted in Act II are paid off in Act III. That planting and payoff not only ties the story together, but it also helps show growth in the characters and growth in the relationships. For example, early on their journey, when they’re at the coffee shop Raymond needs toothpicks to be able to eat. The Waitress (Bonnie Hunt) accidentally spills them, and Raymond is almost instantly able to tell exactly how many fell on the floor by looking at the pile. This combined with another incident that show Raymond’s ability with numbers leads Charlie to take Raymond to Las Vegas where Raymond is able to count cards at the Blackjack table and they’re able to win the money that Charlie needs to pay his debtors. This incident will also be used against Charlie when he’s trying to keep Raymond from having to go back to the institution.

Also in the original diner scene, Raymond makes a big deal about having syrup on the table. After they’ve arrived in Los Angeles, they’re at another diner and Charlie makes a point to show Raymond that they syrup is there, and an emotional connection is made between the two of them. That leads me to another really strong component to this film, and that is the character growth of Charlie Babbitt. He starts out the film as a selfish prick, and in the climax of the movie he sees that, as much as he now wants Raymond in his life, Raymond needs to go back to the institution. Charlie has to act in a manner that is selfless in order to do what’s right for Raymond.

There is one more bit of planting and payoff that helps to connect two otherwise distinct scenes in the film. It’s very subtly done, but has an incredible emotional impact. In the first coffee shop scene when Raymond starts to get upset and Charlie grabs him by the back of the neck, he leans his head in towards Raymond in a very aggressive way and angrily tells him to shut up. At the end of the film when Raymond has to leave, they’re sitting on opposite sides from before, Charlie gently pats Raymond’s back and they gently and affectionately put their heads together. The juxtaposition of these shots shows how far they’ve come on their journey and it helps to tie the whole film together.

Rain Man is a simple story but a complex film with a wide mix of emotions. It’s film that was meticulously, almost lovingly well-crafted. It’s one of the best films of the decade and is truly a film that aspiring screenwriters and filmmakers should study.

Did the Academy get it right?

Yes they did. Rain Man is one of the top five films of the decade and certainly the best film of 1988, although there was some stiff competition. The Accidental Tourist is a critically acclaimed and dramatic film about putting your life back together and sometimes that happens in unexpected ways. It’s a heavy film, but ends on an up note. That said, it’s not quite on the same level as Rain Man. Dangerous Liaisons is one of the better known films of that year, and it was also critically acclaimed and has become something of an iconic film in its own right. Aside from the production design, art direction and costume design, I find it to be an overrated film, as none of the characters are likable and the story itself is boring and uninspired. Mississippi Burning is the opposite of that. It’s an intense film and based on the true story about the investigation of the murder of three civil rights workers in Mississippi in 1964. Gene Hackman and Willem Defoe are awesome in this film and the whole movie is intense and dramatic. To me this is an underrated film, but I still wouldn’t have voted for it in 1988 because I don’t think it’s as complete a film as Rain Man. Finally Working Girl was the other nominee about a secretary who poses as her boss after she gets injured in a skiing accident. It’s a wonderful film and surely its feel-good nature garnered it some Academy support, but it’s primarily a fairy tale and not on the same level as Rain Man. The thing about Rain Man to me is that it’s a complete film. It has a well-crafted dramatic story, it has top-notch performances from all of the actors, and it’s a compelling film that people could relate to and feel good about what happens to the characters without it being contrived. It’s a wonderful film and clearly the best film of 1988.

I must say that getting through The Last Emperor was a lot like work. Don’t get me wrong. This isn’t my least favorite Best Picture winner, but it isn’t close to my favorite either. It’s a beautiful film and there are aspects to it that are very engaging and very entertaining. Perhaps the problem was that the only version that was available to me was the Extended Director’s Cut, which comes in at a whopping 218 minutes. That running time of nearly four hours was just too long, and I would be interested in finding a theatrical version of the film to see if I felt differently about it at 2 hours and 50 minutes rather than 3 hours and 50 minutes.

What did I like about The Last Emperor?

First of all, and no pun intended, I enjoyed the sheer majesty of it. This is an epic film in its scope and what Director Bernardo Bertolucci was attempting to accomplish. The film takes place over a half a century and Bertolucci jumped around the time line showing us the various stages of the life of Pu Yi. All of those stages of the story were depicted in a manner worthy of the seriousness of the content. This is a “big” film that is also self-aware. Bertolucci knew that this was going to be a grand showcase and he and the other filmmakers gave it the respect that it was due.

No one can argue against the fact that this is a beautiful film. In fact, this might be one of the most beautiful pre-digital films I’ve ever seen. What is so amazing about this film is the absolute control that Bertolucci and Oscar-winning Art Directors Ferdinando Scarfiotti, Bruno Casari and Osvaldo Desideri had over the color palette in this film. While this film is beautiful, it isn’t just beautiful for beauty’s sake. The color palette was kept under that much control in order to help tell the story and define the characters. Certain colors always symbolize certain aspects in the film and help to subconsciously guide what the viewers are seeing. Oscar-winning Cinematographer Victorio Storaro explained it thusly:

“Red is the color of the Beginning. When the Emperor cuts his veins he sees Red Blood that reminds him of his first color experience as a newborn Emperor. Orange is the color of family. It is the color of the Forbidden City which the Emperor associates with Warmth and maternal embrace. Yellow is the color of Identity. It represents Imperial Status in the mind of the young emperor. Yellow symbolizes the Sun itself. Green is the color of knowledge. We see green for the first time when tutor comes to the Forbidden City. Color Green symbolizes Knowledge that is to empower the young emperor.” 1

Looking back on the film, the filmmakers painstakingly controlled every aspect of the color so that the proper colors were used in each scene in order to convey the proper story component or emotion. Certainly there have been many, many films throughout the history of cinema that have used color in this way. The Last Emperor is merely one of the best examples of taking total control of the color palette in order to make your point.

Clearly this is an incredibly well-crafted film from a technical and visual standpoint. Among the nine Academy Awards it took home on Oscar night along with Best Picture and Best Director were Best Cinematography, Best Art Direction-Set Direction, Best Costume Design, and Best Film Editing. Clearly this was a film in which all of the people involved worked very hard to craft a visually impressive film and their results were nothing short of stunning.

I also felt that The Last Emperor was very strong thematically. Bertolucci switched back and forth between Pu Yi’s life in prison and his life in Peking and then later Manchuria. What is ironic is that even when he was living in the Forbidden City as the Emperor, he was still technically a prisoner since he wasn’t allowed to leave. He was the stereotypical bird in a golden cage. His only real taste of freedom came after he was deposed and exiled to his ancestral homeland of Manchuria, where he thinks he is the ruler, but is in actuality merely a puppet for the Japanese in the early stages of World War II. In fact, the reason why he is later arrested and sent to prison is because the Chinese Communists accused him of conspiring with the Japanese during the war.

This irony of prison being prison no matter what it looks like is played throughout the film as Pu Yi struggles with the idea that he is the supreme leader of all of China, but is not allowed to leave his own home. All of that makes the final scene of the movie that much more touching, when as an old man living as a gardener in Peking, he goes to the Forbidden City, which is now a tourist attraction. He steps over a velvet rope and goes to sit on his former throne when a young boy tells him he’s not allowed. What’s interesting in this scene is that Pu Yi actually looks and acts happier than we’ve ever seen him. He seemingly lost everything, but when you think about it, he never had anything to lose in the first place. Now he is a simple man living a simple life and it’s satisfying enough for him.

Finally, I liked Peter O’Toole in this film. Starring in his first Best Picture winner since Lawrence of Arabia more than two decades earlier, O’Toole plays the tutor Reginald “R.J.” Johnston who attempts to teach Pu Yi not only basic academics, but what life is like in the twentieth Century, since tradition and heritage are keeping the Emperor locked in the past. R.J. is the archetypal mentor who gives knowledge and fantastical gifts to the Hero. In the case of The Last Emperor, that gift is a bicycle, which is shown to be the most exotic thing that Pu Yi has ever seen to that point. O’Toole played the role of R.J. with a debonair sophistication that came so naturally to him, you couldn’t tell that he was acting. He played the role with an impartial balance, but his subtle emotions were always clear, and we could feel his heartbreak when the Revolution forced him to leave the Emperor behind. Peter O’Toole was a remarkable actor, and I would highly recommend seeing as many of his films as you can.

What did I not like about The Last Emperor?

This film is long. I mean it is really, really long. And there are long stretches where it is boring. It’s not the pacing that makes it boring. I can handle films that have slower than normal pacing, but something at least has to be happening, or I need to feel like we’re moving towards something happening. There are several stretches through The Last Emperor, especially in the first half of the film when he’s primarily still a child, where nothing is happening. We see a lot of beautiful scenery and ornate interiors and fantastic costumes, but we don’t get very much story. To me the story doesn’t really get interesting until he’s an adult and has to confront his changing world.

Again, this is the director’s cut and not the version that won the Oscar, and I do feel like cutting that hour out would probably have made a huge difference in my enjoyment of the film. Yes, I’m sure that I would have missed out on some amazing shots, but the story really needed to be tighter.

I was not a huge fan of Pu Yi as a character. I understand that he was raised as an entitled royal, but it was difficult to empathize with him or to feel any kind of sympathy for him. As he grew up I felt bad that he was locked in the Forbidden City, but he was such a petulant little shit that it was hard to hold onto those feelings of sympathy. He does become more likable after R.J. enters the film and starts to teach him to be more independent and less reliant on tradition and heritage. It seems like there is an opportunity to build some sympathy when he finally does attain some semblance of what he thinks is freedom when he moves to Manchuria and claims himself ruler of that land. The problem is that he becomes a stooge and puppet of the Japanese and everyone sees it but him.

Even in the prison when he’s being interrogated, it’s hard to feel any compassion for Pu Yi because he still carries himself as an Emperor. We see this as those loyal to him continue to take care of his needs, like getting him dressed and tying his shoes.

Finally, I didn’t care for the overall way in which the story was told. I felt like the scenes in the prison were much more interesting because there was palpable tension in them and there were also allies from unexpected places and betrayals from equally unexpected places. Too much time was spent on Pu Yi as a child, and not enough of an effort was made to allow the audience to relate to him as a human being.

Overall this is a difficult film for me to critique. What is does well, it does very well. What it doesn’t do well, struggles mightily to hold my interest. This film is as beautiful as any film I’ve ever seen, but it fails to hold my attention for long stretches due to the convoluted and self-indulgent manner in which the story is presented. I may be in the minority here, but I feel that The Last Emperor is overall overrated as a film. I think the best way to sum up my opinion on this film is to quote the Critics Consensus on Rotten Tomatoes: “While decidedly imperfect, Bernardo Bertolucci’s epic is still a feast for the eyes.” 2

Did the Academy get it right?

I will give it a reluctant yes, but the only reason for that is due to the meticulous craftsmanship and artistry of its visuals. The Last Emperor is a work of fine art from a visual standpoint, not unlike Amadeus. But unlike that film, the title character is not nearly as accessible to us so we are not able to emotionally engage with him and the whole story suffers because of that. Plus the films that it was nominated against, while exceptional for the most part, weren’t really the types of films that would be considered Best Picture-worthy, especially when held against the scale of The Last Emperor. Broadcast News, for example, had an all-star cast and was charming and funny and cute. While it was more entertaining, charming and funny and cute rarely win you an Oscar. Fatal Attraction was perhaps the most iconic film of the year, and it finished the year as the #2 film at the box office. But it was primarily a suspense/horror film, and we were still a few years away from that genre breaking through the Best Picture wall. I’ve not seen Hope and Glory, but it was also a foreign film, and foreign films might be the only thing that gets less Academy love than courtroom dramas or science fiction. Then there was Moonstruck, a romantic comedy starring Cher and Nicholas Cage, and who can forget Cher’s outfit from that Oscar night. Also a top box office performer in 1987, as a Romantic Comedy, it really didn’t stand a chance against The Last Emperor. I don’t think that I would have voted for any of those pictures over The Last Emperor. There is one other point I would like to make, and that is the fact that there were two movies that were not even nominated that should have been. Good Morning Vietnam deserved some Oscar love, as did The Untouchables. I could also make the case that Full Metal Jacket and Wall Street could have been nominated as well. From my standpoint, the fact that none of those films were even nominated for Best Picture was the biggest mistake the Academy made in 1987.

1. Cinematography Workshops – Light Extreme; Cinematic Expression – Color in Film. http://lightextreme.com/ColorInFilm.html
2. Rotten Tomatoes: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/last_emperor/?search=the%20last%20emp

If 1984’s Amadeus was the best film of the 80’s, then 1986’s Platoon was certainly the most intense. I would seriously have to consider ranking Platoon as the #2 film of the decade, or at worst the #3 film behind Amadeus and Raging Bull. Platoon is a powerful film that demands to be noticed, but is expertly crafted and it’s easy to forget how well-made a film it is due to the hype and notoriety that surrounds it and it’s writer/director Oliver Stone.

Oliver Stone was already a known commodity in Hollywood by the mid-80’s having written the screenplays for such successful films as Midnight Express, Conan the Barbarian and Scarface. He had already directed a couple of features as well, but Platoon, a film based on Stone’s own experiences as a soldier in Vietnam, launched him immediately to the top of Hollywood’s upper echelon of film makers and he would also spend the next decade and a half as one of the more polarizing figures in the entertainment industry. Stone was a film maker who had a definite political point of view, and his films that would follow Platoon, most notably, Wall Street, Born on the Fourth of July, JFK, Natural Born Killers, and Nixon demonstrated that he had a progressive, if not slightly paranoid vision of our society and the world in general. That he was so comfortable and confident in putting out what, at the time, were somewhat controversial points of view, helped to make Stone such a polarizing figure. With all of that being said, and his politics notwithstanding, Oliver Stone is an exceptional film maker and Platoon demonstrated his skills very effectively.

I would also like to point out that Stone at least deconstructed his own paranoid image with a cameo in the film Dave where he’s being interviewed by Larry King and he’s the only one who suspects that a conspiracy is afoot and that Dave is not the real president. Here is a link to that clip.

Let’s get back to Platoon. This is an extraordinary film on several levels, as it has incredible characters, a compelling story and was shot in such a way as to heighten the drama and the tension to nearly unbearable levels. I was actually discussing with a friend of mine how expertly Stone was able to create scenarios in which nothing seemed to be happening and yet the tension would ratchet up with each cut and with each passing moment. There is a scene where they are out on patrol and they come across a network of bunkers. By this time we’ve met everyone in the platoon and we feel like we know each of them pretty well (more on that in a bit). A couple of the men search inside the bunkers, while others look around the outside and others still patrol the perimeter. There’s a little bit of dialogue and no music. The only sound is the ambient sound from the environment and the sparse dialogue the characters speak. But the tension is palpable. Stone does an amazing job of setting up the scene so that it’s possible the North Vietnamese troops could be close by. As the main character, Chris (Charlie Sheen) patrols ahead with Manny, we are just waiting for something bad to happen. This goes on for what seems like an eternity. For several minutes we watch knowing that the longer they stay in this position, the more likely it is that something bad is going to happen to them.

Sure enough, something bad does happen, but not what we’re expecting, which makes the scene so effective. The two troops looking through maps and other articles left behind had initially been very careful to look for booby traps. Finding none, they continue their search. Thinking they’ve found a trove of maps and other valuable information, one of them picks up the box and it explodes, blowing off both of his arms. Still no music, and only ambient sound and the acting of the character as he numbly stumbles out, falls and dies. Chris comes back to the platoon, but no one can find Manny. Eventually they do find him, and he’s been killed by the VC and strung up on a pole. This causes much anger among the surviving members of the platoon, especially Sgt. Barnes (Tom Berenger), who takes his frustrations out on the local residents of a village they’ve been dispatched to in order to find weapons and Vietcong sympathizers. While interrogating the village elder, he shoots the elder’s wife for no other reason than she was an annoyance and then threatens to kill the man’s daughter if he doesn’t talk.

This is where the film starts to make the viewer angry, and is another example of how Stone is such an effective film maker. He elicits emotions out of the audience, and not all of those emotions are comfortable. The scene in the village is a perfect example of that. In this scene we have American soldiers, the same soldiers that we were so concerned about just moments before, and they’re terribly mistreating these villagers. It’s a high-tension scene and characters that we’ve generally liked and rooted for are acting in a way that we’re ashamed of. You almost want to shout at the screen for them to stop and to get a hold of themselves and stop acting like animals. Finally Sgt. Elias (Willem Dafoe) shows up to bring some sort of sanity back to the situation. Then, after acting like a deranged lunatic himself for a moment, Chris comes to his senses and stops some of the other platoon members from raping a couple of the young girls from the village. That bit of sanity in a completely insane moment allows us to empathize with Chris and with Elias and shows us that these are clearly the men we’re going to be rooting for over the rest of the film.

That leads me to the characters. Stone did a great job of introducing us to the characters in the platoon and the different factions within it, led by the respective sergeants. Sgt. Elias leads the side of the platoon who are more light-hearted and rebellious. They smoke weed and listen to psychedelic music when they’re on leave and take a more nuanced look at life. They also are primarily African Americans and Hispanics. The other side of the platoon is led by Sgt. Barnes, and they’re mostly white, primarily Southern and are heavy drinkers of beer and Jack Daniels. They don’t smoke weed and there is an arrogance about them that can certainly help them survive but also gives them a moral relativism that allows them to commit atrocities that you wouldn’t imagine doing under normal circumstances. The one thing they all have in common is that they’re all poor or come from poor backgrounds, other than Chris, who dropped out of college to volunteer for the army because he didn’t think that it was right that only the poor and disadvantaged were being sent off to fight.

We’re initially introduced to the platoon when Chris is sent out on his first ambush with them, and none of them come across as sympathetic to him or to us. Chris is being initiated right away into this special world and if he can’t handle the initiation he has no chance to survive. A little later on, Chris befriends King, who introduces him to the members of Elias’ faction, and he fits right in with them. After being introduced to Elias team and their pot smoking and rock music, we are introduced to Barnes’ team and their heavy drinking, their country music and more gung-ho military style.

One thing that I found very interesting, and Chris mentions this in his narration when he says, “we were fighting ourselves”, is that this division amongst the members of the platoon is symbolic of the divisions the nation was experiencing at the time. It reminded me a little of a scene from Titanic, which we’ll get to in a couple of months, where we see the people in steerage class who dance and sing and live life to its fullest even through they’re poor juxtaposed to the upper class who sit quietly and dignified while the smoke their cigars and discuss world events in a setting that couldn’t be more boring. The differences in Platoon aren’t as stark, but are still there and still noticeable. It sets the stage for the inevitable conflict to come, and helps build the drama of the story.

One of the reasons I tend to prefer Amadeus to Platoon is that the former has a lot more subtext. It’s a much more thoughtful film that uses more film making motifs to create a more complete experience. Platoon, while not necessarily on the nose, is much more straight forward. While Amadeus is a thinking person’s film, Platoon does make you think, but in a different way. Platoon forces you to confront our nation and our way of life in a manner that makes you question its supposed superiority. Platoon forces you to ask if we really are the great nation that we’ve always been told we are, and it does it in a straight forward and brutal fashion that leaves no room for nuance. Platoon is a film that you have to think about in order to attain its full affect, but it forces a different, more internally targeted type of thinking. Again, that’s the duality of Oliver Stone. He is a terrific film maker, and one of the things that makes him so terrific is that he forces you to rethink your preconceived notions, and that isn’t always comfortable for people. So the very thing that makes him a great film maker also makes him controversial and turns some people off to him.

One other quick thing I’d like to point out is the number of men in this film who would go on to have solid to stellar careers in Hollywood. Go to IMDB to look up any of these names, and you’ll find some very successful careers: Charlie Sheen, Tom Berenger, Willem Dafoe, Keith David, Forest Whitaker, Kevin Dillon, John C. McGinley, Mark Moses, Johnny Depp. Most of these guys had had some success in Hollywood already, but this film helped to launch many of their careers to the next level.

Finally, I would like to say this. I had not seen Platoon since I saw it in the theater the year it came out. I was so affected by it from an emotional standpoint that I couldn’t bear to put myself through it again until now. If you are like me and haven’t seen Platoon for a long time or if you’ve never seen it, it’s worth watching. IT is a powerful film and an important film, and it deserves to be seen and thought about.

Did the Academy get it right?

Yes they did. There were some other good films nominated in 1986. Hannah and Her Sisters is considered by some people to be Woody Allen’s best film, but fortunately the Academy didn’t repeat the same mistake it did nine years earlier when Annie Hall beat Star Wars, because Hannah and Her Sisters isn’t close to being on the same level as Platoon. The Mission is another powerful film that forces us to look at our past and how many of our forefathers left behind a legacy that deserves another look. A Room With a View and Children of a Lesser God were both romantic dramas that were fine films, but were also not on the same level as Platoon, which I should add is also ranked 83^rd on AFI’s original list of the 100 greatest films of all time. It was one of the top two or three films of the entire decade and the only real choice for Best Picture of 1986.