I hadn’t seen The English Patient since it came out in 1996, but I do remember feeling underwhelmed by it at the time, with the exception that Ralph Fiennes gave an exceptional performance as Count Laszlo de Almasy, the film’s main character and protagonist. Almasy was a brooding, seemingly unhappy man in his youth and a wounded and tormented man on his deathbed. I kind of had the same feeling after watching it this weekend. This is a fine film, but far from a perfect one. Along with Feinnes there are some extraordinary actors in it like Kristin Scott Thomas, Colin Firth, Willem Defoe, and Juliette Binoche, who incidentally won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for her work in this film, and indeed all of the actors in this film were at the top of their respective games. The English Patient harkens back to Lawrence of Arabia with its stunning desert cinematography in a way that we see how small the people are in a great big pre-World War II world that is on the verge of exploding.

But for me the story of this film is very disjointed due to the manner in which it was told, and it’s difficult, especially in the first half of the film, to really engage in the story or with the characters in a meaningful way. The meat of the story is told primarily through flashbacks as the dying Almasy relates his story to his nurse Hana (Binoche) as well as David Caravaggio (Dafoe), who believes that Almasy is responsible for his interrogation and torture at the hands of the Nazis. Meanwhile, there is the parallel story of Hana dealing with the deaths of those close to her in the waning days of the war as she cares for Almasy in an abandoned Italian villa and tries to ease his passing as much as possible. Meanwhile, she falls in love with Kip (Naveen Andrews), a Sikh munitions expert who makes his living disarming bombs and land mines.

The film was based on a novel and adapting novels into screenplays is always tricky, especially if the source material follows a different story structure than the traditional 3-act structure of filmmaking. However the biggest challenge in adapting a novel in to a film is, knowing what to leave in and what to take out. It’s a rare and particularly short novel that allows for a straight and complete adaptation. For the vast majority of novels, they would be made into films of seven or eight hours if the entire story were to be told, so much of the material needs to be condensed or even omitted in order to get it to an acceptable screen time, and The English Patient is even pushing the boundaries of that, coming in at two hours and forty minutes.

For example, as great as Defoe’s performance is, his character wasn’t terribly necessary to the story that they were trying to tell. Yes, the consequence of Almasy’s actions led to his torture and mutilation, and he shows up at the villa looking for revenge, and instead finds redemption. There is also a point where his prodding eventually gets Almasy to recall what happened to Katherine and why he’s in his present situation, but it wasn’t necessary for Caravaggio to be the one to do that. In fact, in watching the film this past weekend, I kept asking myself what the purpose of Caravaggio’s character was in the narrative. Did he want to get revenge on Almasy by killing him? If so, why didn’t he? He certainly had ample opportunity to do so. Did he want to know why Almasy gave that information to the Germans? If so, to what end? It seems to me that there are a lot of loose ends to Caravaggio’s character that either needed to be sewn up, or they should have tried to make the movie without his storyline because it just feels tacked on as it is, and not an integral component of the narrative.

The love story between Almasy and Katherine Clifton (Thomas) is obviously the storyline that drives the action of the film. Almasy has already been in the North African desert for some time working with others for the Royal Geographical Society to try and design reliable maps for the area, when Katherine arrives with her husband Geoffrey (Firth). Almasy is at first resentful over these intruders, feeling they’ll get in the way more than anything, but he is infatuated with Katherine almost from the first moment that he sees her. She tries to repress her own attraction to Almasy, but that only intensifies the passion once they finally do consummate their feelings for each other. This is clearly a story about forbidden love and the lengths to which one will go to attain that love and to preserve it as well.

That is one thing that writer/director Anthony Minghella very well. He drove home the thematic element of what people will do for love as well as what sometimes has to be sacrificed for love. In the parallel story involving Hana’s caring for the badly burned and dying Almasy, Hana believes that everyone whom she loves dies. She’s afraid to love anyone because of that until she finds Kip and he survives a near-death experience on the last day of the war. She achieves that redemption, and that allows her to end Almasy’s suffering at his request, despite the sadness that it causes her.

I will also say that the film’s storytelling really picks up and becomes far more effective in the second half of the film than it had been in the first half. That leads to the film having a very strong and emotionally powerful ending, and I think that may have helped this film in the minds of some Oscar voters, and as I’ve written before, a strong ending can really elevate the perceived quality of a film. That’s the great conundrum for me in evaluating and thinking about The English Patient. I like the film, but didn’t love it. However, I did like the characters very much, and that is what makes the ending of this film so absolutely heartbreaking. I wasn’t prepared to be as emotionally impacted as I was at the end, but the performances of Feinnes and Binoche brought that emotion out.

It’s interesting to me that Minghella seemingly attempted to create tension throughout the film, whether it was with the threatening appearance of Caravaggio, or the fear of Almasy and Katherine being discovered in their affair, or even with Kit being killed doing his duty. None of those aspects of the film reach the level of tension that Minghella was going for, but the sequence in which Almasy is trying to get back to Katherine as she lies wounded in the cave after Geoffrey tried to kill them all by crashing his plane into them, is the sequence of the film in which there is the most tension. It’s almost like a film within a film, and that more so than the love scenes between them, is where you see what Almasy will put himself through for Katherine’s love. Then when he doesn’t get to her in time, and we watch him lie next to her body in the cave and ultimately carry her outside as he wails in anguish, combined with Hana “reading him to sleep” after she’s given him the fatal dose of morphine by reading the last words that Katherine wrote to him, all create this cathartic moment in the climax of the film that is just emotionally overwhelming. Ultimately this film is a slow boil that finally builds up to its emotional peak, and even thought the vast majority of the film is less than remarkable, it has perhaps one of the most satisfying endings of any film that I can remember.

Did the Academy get it right?

I don’t think that they got it wrong, but I do have a feeling that if the Academy had a do-over for 1996, they may have given the award to Fargo. The Cohen Brothers were already a well-known commodity in Hollywood, but this film of a kidnapping-for-hire gone horribly wrong solidified them has two of the top filmmakers in the business. It helped make dark, macabre humor mainstream, and was one of the most influential and most quoted movies of the decade. I don’t know if it’s a better movie than The English Patient (apples and oranges again), but it certainly has had more staying power within pop culture as well as the vernacular. So has Jerry Maguire , another oft-quoted film from that year that made a star of Cuba Gooding, Jr. (Show me the money!), and his acceptance speech for winning Best Supporting Actor is one of the great moments in the history of the ceremony. Secrets and Lies was a British film about a black woman who was adopted and traces her family roots to discover that her birth mother is white. It’s a fascinating character-driven piece that I highly recommend and am glad received the recognition of a nomination, but it’s a much smaller film than those others, and not on the same scale of your typical Oscar winner. Shine was the final nominee of the year, and is about the life of piano prodigy David Helfgott. It, too is a wonderful film, and Geoffrey Rush’s performance of the talented and troubled genius won him the Oscar for Best Actor.

This is actually where I take issue with the Academy for this particular year. I don’t want to take anything away from Geoffrey Rush. His performance in Shine was superb, and it fit with the Oscar’s trend at that time to award Best Actor to artists who were portraying characters with varying mental issues, whether it was Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man or Daniel Day-Lewis in My Left Foot or Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs or Tom Hanks in Forrest Gump, the Academy generally played special notice to those types of roles. Geoffrey Rush did a marvelous job of playing David Helfgot in his days after his nervous breakdown and channeled Helfgot’s frenetic and disorganized thinking perfectly. However Rush was only in half of the film. The other half of the film had younger actors playing the role as we watch Helfgot grow up in Australia. On the other hand, Ralph Feinnes absolutely carries The English Patient. It’s a two hour and forty minute film, and he’s in almost every scene. Without the caliber of Feinnes’ performance this film does not win Best Picture. He played the role of Count Laszlo de Almasy with a brooding intensity that prevented you from being able to look away from it. And yet, he made that character so likable that your heart bleeds for him just as his heart is broken. We as the audience feel his emotions, and that’s what any good actor is supposed to accomplish. That’s why for me, Ralph Feinnes not winning Best Actor for 1996 is one of the biggest mistakes in Oscar history.

Braveheart is a film that I love and it truly is a film that has something for everyone. Yes, it is a violent film with some pretty graphic battle scenes, so on its surface this looks like nothing more than an action/adventure movie. However at its core it’s essentially a love story and it shows how far people can go for the love of their soul mate as well as for the love of an ideal. This is in actuality a deep film with rich and compelling characters, a well-structured hero’s journey and many story and character-driven archetypes. There is also a wide range of emotions, as we have romance, sadness and wit to go along with the tension of the action and adventure.

This is a story about William Wallace, a historical figure who led a Scottish revolt against the English in the late 13th and early 14th Centuries. Not a lot is known about Wallace’s actual life outside of a couple of historical events, so the film can’t be considered to be historically accurate. The film is based on his exploits even though much creative license was taken by director Mel Gibson and screenwriter Randall Wallace (no relation to William). The film starts out showing Wallace as a precocious young boy trying to keep up with his father as he gets involved with trying to negotiate a peace with England’s king Richard the Longshanks (Patrick McGoohan). His father and brother are killed however, and at their funeral, a distraught William is given a wild flower by a young girl named Muron. Then William’s Uncle Argyle arrives, promising to teach him to use a sword after he teaches him to use his head. The next day he takes him away from the only home he’s ever known. Several years later, educated after traveling to places like France and Rome, a now grown Wallace (Gibson) returns to his home and reacquaints himself with his old friends.

The previous sequence having served primarily as prologue, the story really begins here as we see William in his Ordinary World and he sees the now grown Muron (Catherine McCormack) at a wedding in the village. He recognizes her immediately and we’re also re-introduced to Wallace’s childhood friend Hamish (Brendon Gleeson), who challenges Wallace to a test of strength. Hamish wins, but then Wallace wins over the crowd by winning a game of wits. A few moments later, Wallace courts Muron by telling her in French that Rome could not match her in beauty. This is a great introduction to this character, because we see him as a likable person with normal emotions who tenderly confesses his love to the woman of his dreams.

Wallace then receives the Call to Adventure from Hamish’s father Campbell (James Cosmo), who tells him that his father was a fighter. Wallace Refuses the Call by telling Campbell, along with Muron’s father that he came back to raise crops and a family, but he has no intention of fighting a war. That all changes after Wallace secretly weds Muron. Longshanks has initiated the practice of Prima Noctum, allowing the local Lord the privilege and right to take a new bride to bed with him on the night of her wedding. Not wanting to share her with an English lord, Wallace secretly marries Muron, and Gibson and Randall Wallace did an excellent job of showing their love as it grew. We care about their relationship and want to see it flourish. However, there would be no story if that were to happen, so when Muron is attacked by an English soldier who tries to rape her, Wallace saves her and sends her away on horseback. He then distracts the soldiers until he can get away, but unbeknownst to him, Muron has been captured and brought to the center of the village and tied to a post. Stating that an attack on the king’s soldiers is an attack on the king himself, the town sheriff cuts Muron’s throat. Wallace returns to the village, appearing ready to surrender, and then he Crosses the First Threshold by attacking the soldiers. Seeing this, the other men in the town join in, and Wallace gets to the fort and cuts the throat of the sheriff.

The Test, Allies and Enemies portion of the film show Wallace growing in stature and strength. Other local villages join with him, and he has now vowed to set Scotland free of Longshanks’ tyranny. We also get to know Robert the Bruce, the lord with the strongest claim to Scotland’s throne, as well as Princess Isabelle (Sophie Mareau), who is married to Longshanks’ son Prince Edward, who is introduced as a weak bodied and weak minded man who is likely gay. The Approach shows Wallace discussing with his men the fact that their victories will only entice the English to send their best troops with armored cavalry and they have little chance to beat such an army. But when the others suggest the old ways of running and hiding when that happens, Wallace looks at the trees around them and suggests they build spears.

The Supreme Ordeal is the Battle of Stirling Bridge where Wallace arrives with his army, and Lords Lochlan and Mornay are hoping that negotiating will bring them more land and title, but their armies are ready to flee. Wallace gives an impassioned speech about fighting for their freedom, and insults the English general. Outnumbered, William uses the tactics that he learned from his Mentor Argyle, and the Scots gain an unlikely victory. Wallace is given a knighthood and then avoids the political squabbling of the Lords by pressing his advantage and invading Northern England, taking over the city of York and beheading the king’s nephew, who was the lord of that town and used it as the staging point for all of the invasions of Scotland. Unwilling to send his weakling of a son to negotiate with Wallace, Longshanks sends Isabelle, figuring that if she’s killed, he could get France to fight on his side. This leads to the Reward, where Wallace meets Isabelle, and his education and passion impress her to the point where Wallace gains her has an ally, and she sends multiple messages to him that save his life and his cause. This ultimately leads them into bed.

The Road Back is the Battle of Falkirk where Wallace is betrayed by not only Lochlan and Moray, but also by Robert the Bruce, whom Wallace had come to trust and admire. This betrayal causes the death of Campbell and it looks like it causes the death of Wallace’s ideals. But he takes his revenge on Lochlan and Moray before waging war on his own. The Road Back has Wallace approaching the Bruce, who has seen the errors of his ways and now wants to help Wallace. However, with the help of Lord Craig, the Bruce’s father betrays them both and Wallace is captured and taken to London. After his execution is ordered. Isabelle approaches an ailing Longshanks, who has not lost the ability to speak, and begs for Wallace’s life. When he refuses to yield, she tells him that she’s pregnant with Wallace’s baby, and his bloodline will soon be over, and his son will not sit long on the throne. The Return with the Elixir shows Wallace tortured as the Magistrate tries to get him to beg for mercy and pledge allegiance to the king. Even after being disemboweled, Wallace refuses, yelling “Freedom!” with the last of the strength he can muster. After seeing Muron walking in the crowd and smiling at her, Wallace knows he’s dying a free man and he’s beheaded.

So we have a deep and compelling Hero’s Journey with many archetypal components. One of the mythic archetypes is the idea of death and rebirth. Braveheart has this idea with the notion that even though Wallace dies, his bloodline will be carried on and he’ll essentially be reborn in Isabelle’s baby. When Isabelle tells the dying Longshanks that his son will not sit long on the throne, it tells us again that even though Wallace will not see it, he will ultimately win. That’s a new thought that occurred to me as I watched Braveheart over the weekend. I’ve seen this film many times, but I hadn’t thought about it this way until now. I had never really thought of Wallace as the winner in this. In fact, since Longshanks dies also, I always felt like this film was a sort of a tragedy with no real winners. That opinion has changed, as Wallace, despite his death is the clear winner of this story, and he’s a winner on a number of levels. His bloodline will be carried on and Longshanks’ will not. That’s clear enough. But Wallace even beats the magistrate, who is trying to get him to confess and declare loyalty to the king. When Wallace calls out freedom after everything that the Magistrate and his agents of torture had inflicted on Wallace, he looks defeated. He knows there is nothing he can do to get Wallace to bend to his will and finally can only nod to the executioner to do his job. With that in mind, Wallace has gained the freedom that he sought. Yes, he dies, but he dies a free man.

This is also a highly entertaining film with a lot of wit and charm. The Irishman who joins Wallace’s army, claiming that Ireland is his island, and always seeming to walk the line between sanity and madness brings a good amount of comic relief to what otherwise would be a very serious story. The action in this film is very well-choreographed and staged. CG had not yet become so pervasive in movie making, so this is a film with a lot of stuntmen performing a lot of amazing stunts. This is also a beautiful film. Almost any film that uses the Scottish Highlands as a backdrop is going to be beautiful, but the production design of the dirty and muddy British villages and the costumes all combine with the cinematography to create a cinematic film that needs to be seen in a theater to be fully appreciated. Braveheart is a movie in the best sense of the word.

Did the Academy get it right?

I believe they did. Apollo 13 actually won the Golden Globe for Best Picture – Drama, so there was a bit of controversy. Also, in the ensuing years, Gibson’s personal issues have derailed what was once one of the top careers in Hollywood. I will also say that I am a huge fan of Apollo 13, and I wouldn’t think it a tragedy had that film won. However, I still give the edge to Braveheart because I believe it to be a more complete film, and it harkens back to many of the epics that won in earlier years like Ben-Hur, The Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, and Dances With Wolves. This was a grandiose film that was on a scale that Apollo 13 was just not on. Braveheart is also a much stronger film thematically than Apollo 13, and the way it depicts Wallace’s victory that appears to be a defeat is a much deeper and more sophisticated way to tell a story. That level of sophistication in the storytelling is what ultimately puts Braveheart over the top. I have not seen The Postman, so I cannot speak to that film. To this day, I’m not sure why Babe was nominated, other than the fact this it did some things technically that had not been done before. It’s a nice film, but not in the same league as the others. In fact, I would say that Babe should not have been even nominated because The Usual Suspects, which was not nominated, is a far superior film. Sense and Sensibility is a wonderfully written adaptation of the Jane Austin novel, and is a very well-made and emotional film. Like Apollo 13, it might have had better luck had it come out in a different year, but Braveheart was clearly the right choice for 1995.

Forrest Gump became a cultural phenomenon of the mid-1990’s. There are so many catch phrase lines like, “Momma always said life is like a box of chocolates; you never know what you’re gonna get”, and “Stupid is as stupid does”, among many others. Tom Hanks, coming off a Best Actor win from the previous year’s Philadelphia would win Best Actor for the second year in a row and even though he was already a big star, he would use Forrest Gump to catapult himself to the upper echelon of the Hollywood A-list and superstardom. To be sure, Hanks’ performance as the dim-witted savant is one of the great performances of the decade and along with his role in Philadelphia, helped turn him from a likable actor in comedies and romantic comedies to one of the most respected actors in the industry, and a man who could play any role.

As for the film itself, I am slightly divided on it. Seventy-five percent of me loves this film. I’ve seen it over a dozen times and every time I see it, it hits all of my emotional buttons and tugs at all of my heartstrings. I fully admit that sometimes I can be a sentimental old fool and this movie hits that sentimental side of me with ease. I am always especially affected by the bookends of Forrest’s relationship with Jenny. It always felt so real and genuine to me like it was crafted out of true emotions and I never felt like that relationship was anything but true to life. We’ve all felt unrequited love, and I believe that Forrest’s feelings for Jenny hit home in a way that made people able to relate to this film on a human level in a way that few films accomplish, and that is one of the reasons for its sustained success. I also love the humor in the film, the irony that is sprinkled throughout the film, as well as the symbolism and all of the planting and payoff.

Then there is the twenty-five percent of me that understands that this is not a particularly well-structured story and that it’s told in much the same way as a road movie, and I am not a fan of that style of storytelling. This is an episodic film, but it does have a decent spine, and that spine is Forrest’s love for Jenny and that no matter what he does or what he accomplishes, his thoughts and feelings always come back to her. As I watched the film this weekend, I tried to look for the structure in the story it’s difficult to find it, but it is there mainly in the story of Forrest and Jenny.

In fact, it is my opinion that the very strong themes in Forrest Gump make up for the relatively weak story structure and storyline. This is a film about destiny and about spirituality. This is a film about making the best of what you have despite the disadvantages you have been given. Forrest was born with a below average IQ and a crooked spine. Despite those problems, and partially because he didn’t know any better and because his mother wouldn’t let him use them as an excuse, Forrest makes his way through life successfully. Yes, he stumbles through life and a lot of his success comes through luck, but he creates his own luck by allowing himself to do things that other people wouldn’t allow themselves to do. Possibly it was because he’s too stupid to understand the risks, but he still takes the chances and his life turns out to be much better than anyone could have reasonably hoped that it would.

Then there’s Jenny, who is smart, talented and beautiful, but she was sexually abused as a child by her father, and that has created a lack of direction within her. She can’t trust herself and she moves from one abusive relationship to another. In fact, the one man who has her best interests at heart and the one man who treats her well is Forrest, but she spends the bulk of the story pushing him away because she doesn’t know how to handle being treated well. Not only does she allow herself to be mistreated by other men, but she continually mistreats herself by abusing drugs and living an unhealthy lifestyle. It isn’t until she becomes sick at the end (presumably with HIV, although it’s never stated what she has), and has Forrest’s baby, does she attain the ability to love herself. Once she’s able to love herself she has the ability to love Forrest. Ultimately that’s Jenny’s character arc. She cannot love Forrest until she’s able to love herself.

Then there’s Lt. Dan Taylor, who is Forrest’s commanding officer in Vietnam. Lt. Dan believes that it is his destiny to die in that war since he’s had ancestors who have died in every previous U.S. war. However, not only does Forrest inadvertently keep that from happening by saving his life, he’s left without any legs. As a consequence Lt. Dan sees himself as a legless cripple who’s been robbed of his destiny. He resents Forrest for that for a long time, and he turns his back on God. Then after joining Forrest as his first mate on the shrimp boat, they survive being at storm during Hurricane Camille and then their shrimping business begins to thrive. In peaceful moment Dan is finally able to thank Forrest for saving his life. He then dives off the boat and contentedly swims the Gulf at sunset as Forrest remarks that he believes Dan made his peace with God. Once again, we have an example of someone finding peace within himself and then finding the ability to move past their inner turmoil and find happiness in his life.

It’s good that these other characters go through the major changes in the story because Forrest himself changes very little. He seems to learn that life is a combination of destiny and making your own way, but he is largely an unchanged character from the beginning to the end. He does affect change in other characters, however and that growth and change helps heighten the emotional impact of the overall story.

Speaking of that overall story, this is a story about a man who lives through thirty years of the second half of the twentieth century and happens to meet several of that period’s iconic historical figures like Elvis Pressley, Bear Bryant, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon, Dick Cavette, John Lennon, and others, and through his very objective perspective we witness the major events of the late 50’s through the early 80’s. Forrest Gump doesn’t really offer any editorial on those events. The character and the film merely show us and tell us what happened and how, and leave it up to the audience to decide how to feel about them.

I mentioned earlier that this is an episodic film and that it has the feel of a road movie. I would say what separates it from entirely falling into that trap is the fact that the episodes themselves aren’t self-contained. That is to say that there is a nice flow and each sequence of the story flows naturally into the next. My problem with many road movies is that they don’t build. You could take out sequences or switch their order around and it wouldn’t affect the story as a whole. Since we’re following Forrest on an historical journey, that’s not the case in Forrest Gump. Each section of the film leads Forrest into the next section and the people that he meets and the issues that come up in each section of the story continue to drive the action throughout the rest of the film. One of the aspects of the film that helps do that is the story between Forrest and Jenny. He falls in love with her the minute he sees her and he loves her for the rest of his life, and with each adventure he goes on, he thinks about her and what she’s doing.

From a structural standpoint, Forrest Gump isn’t a terribly well-told story, but from a device standpoint, it’s brilliantly told. I mentioned earlier that I am a fan of the planting and payoff in Forrest Gump. I am especially a fan that some of the planting and payoff is right on the nose and other examples of it are far more subtle. An obvious example is when Forrest and Jenny are little kids and they’re running away from Jenny’s abusive father. They hide in the corn field where Jenny prays to God to make her a bird so that she can fly far, far away. Then at the end of the film as Forrest is walking away from her grave, a small flock of birds flies off to the heavens, presumably carrying Jenny’s spirit with them. Then there is another example that you have to be paying closer attention to in order to catch it. After Forrest tells Lt. Dan (after he’s lost both of his legs in Vietnam) that he’s going to keep his promise to Bubba and become a shrimp boat captain, Lt. Dan responds by telling him that if he does, he’ll be his first mate. Then chuckling, Lt. Dan goes on to tell Forrest that if he’s a shrimp boat captain, then Lt. Dan will be an astronaut. Then when Forrest and Jenny get married, Lt. Dan arrives with his fiancé and two brand new legs made out of the same titanium alloy that they use on the space shuttle. So in an indirect way, Lt. Dan kept his promise to be an astronaut.

Irony is another device that’s used very effectively, especially when Forrest joins the army. He excels at the mundane and in so doing sails through basic training where his Drill Sergeant predicts that he’ll be a general some day.

Even with their varying levels of subtlety, those are all outstanding storytelling techniques that evoke real emotion, so that even though this isn’t your classic 3-Act film, we’re still given a dramatic story with characters that we care about. Director Robert Zemeckis and screenwriter Eric Roth did an outstanding job of using many storytelling devices to take this story and make it emotional without being overly sentimental. Any screenwriter looking for ways to deepen their characters and learn how to use devices like planting and payoff would be wise to view this film again through that prism or to read the screenplay.

Did the Academy get it right?

No they did not. I realize I just spent over 1700 words describing the virtues of this film, and I am a fan of it. I’ve seen it many times and I love this film very much. However, it had no business winning Best Picture in 1994. The Shawshank Redemption was a superior film. It had a better and more compelling story and it was a much more dramatic film than Forrest Gump was. Thematically, it was just as strong as Forrest Gump and the acting and character development hang right with it as well. I would have definitely voted for The Shawshank Redemption over Forrest Gump. Also there was a film called Pulp Fiction that was released that year, and happens to be one of my personal top 5 favorite films. Pulp Fiction was an absolute sensation when it came out for the way it deconstructed film making as a medium and used insane amounts of violence to tell a compelling story. Again, with its thematic elements of honor among thieves, it was innovative in its storytelling techniques and it resuscitated the careers of John Travolta and Bruce Willis while it sent the careers of Samuel L. Jackson, Uma Thurmon and director Quentin Tarantino into the stratosphere, much like Forrest Gump did with Tom Hanks. It had a profound effect on the industry as a whole and is the film that would have had my vote in 1994. Of the other two films nominated that year, Quiz Show was also a very good film, but probably not on the level of the other three. Four Weddings and a Funeral was the small, indie-type picture, of which the Academy seemed to like to give token nominees to throughout the 90’s, but were never serious contenders. I think what ultimately won the Oscar for Forrest Gump was the amount of emotion that it evoked from audiences. As great as The Shawshank Redemption and Pulp Fiction were, they were largely emotion-less films that relied on great story telling to create drama and get the audience involved. Forrest Gump did exactly the opposite in creating a ton of emotion with a storyline that wasn’t as strong. As much as I disagree with it, that’s what the Academy was looking for in 1994.

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.