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| /NYTimes |
Cinema
and television have always functioned differently in the cultural and artistic
canons, even as the latter has made enormous qualitative gains over the past
two decades, and the former’s budget inequality epidemic has shifted from a combatable
problem to a perpetual condition.
Globally,
the possibilities present in television have finally been understood –
Americans’ chronic need to remake and redo has extended to the foreign
television market, as material from Israel (In
Treatment, Homeland), Denmark (The Killing), Venezuela (Jane the Virgin) and so many others has
been adapted, to varying degrees of success, for stateside audiences. Moreover,
when considering A.O.
Scott’s widely-disseminated recent essay about the disconnect between contemporary
art and contemporary problems, I’d first look to the essential geopolitical
arguments in the BBC’s The Honorable
Woman and the scathing institutional critique that defines Netflix’s Orange Is the New Black for robust
rebuttal.
Television
is expanding and segmenting, and in the past year, a substantial amount of filmmakers
made the transition – directing pilots are one thing, but lauded moviemakers
have begun directing entire series. In 2014 alone, Oscar-winner Steven
Soderbergh helmed the entirety of Cinemax’s The
Knick to
great acclaim; the work of Independent Spirit Award nominee Cary Fukunaga
on True Detective was one of the most
talked-about
directorial efforts of the year; Oscar nominee Lisa Cholodenko’s helming of
HBO’s Olive Kitteridge resulted in
her finest artistic achievement to date; and Sundance Film Festival Directing
winner Jill Soloway quite literally fashioned the Amazon original Transparent as a five-hour indie movie.
Even beyond what these filmmakers did: Rectify’s
Southern tableaus are as richly cinematic as Jeff Nichols’ best work, Getting On demonstrates finesse with
deliberately-oppressive lighting and cinematography, and shows like The Leftovers and Looking are at their best when their communications are principally
visual.
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| Selma's Ava DuVernay, a likely Oscar nominee, is prepping a television series. /Indiewire |
And
the effects of 2014 and what built to it are clear. Alejandro G. Inarritu, who
will at minimum earn his second directing Oscar nomination for Birdman this year, is helming a timely
television project about modern-day farming with Ed Harris and Hilary Swank
attached. David Fincher, an Oscar contender this year for Gone Girl and a multi-nominee already, clearly enjoyed his
experience on the pilot of House of Cards,
which netted him an Emmy: he’s directing the entirety
of an ambitious adaptation of Britain’s Utopia,
scribed by Gone Girl author Gillian
Flynn. The Duplass Brothers, of wonderful little gems like Jeff Who Lives at Home and Cyrus,
are following in Soloway’s footsteps with HBO’s upcoming
Togetherness. Most substantially,
12 Years a Slave’s Oscar winner Steve
McQueen, and Selma’s soon-to-be-Oscar
nominated Ava DuVernay, are both
taking
advantage of their heightened-profiles as they ready series that will tackle
the black experience in contemporary America – a perspective seriously lacking
across storytelling mediums. The line that divides the big- and the
small-screen is rapidly disintegrating.
With
the exception of the crowd-pleasing and ultimately-inconsequential Argo and The King’s Speech, it’s no secret that the Academy’s decision to
expand the Best Picture race to 9-10 films in 2009 – as a way to broaden the
Oscars’ appeal and to reignite film’s social relevancy – has coincided with the
honoring of relatively low-grossing
and low-budget films. The Oscars are neither a barometer of quality nor an
indicator of the cultural moment, but they do occupy a suggestive
middle-ground. And this year’s frontrunners for Best Picture range from a
micro-budgeted critical darling in Boyhood
to a socially-relevant $20 million production in Selma, whose win would reflect 12
Years a Slave’s last year for reasons far beyond the fact that they would
be the only two “black” films to ever win the big award. Their modest means is
the new “big” in prestige Hollywood – the overhyping of the awards prospects of
both Gone Girl and Interstellar proved as much – and given
the fair amount of voters that didn’t even see 12 Years a Slave yet checked it off to win, the Oscars’
hypersensitivity when it comes to their social function has been exceedingly
evident of late (in 2009, The Hurt Locker
became the lowest-grossing Best Picture winner ever; its director Kathryn
Bigelow, very deservedly if not coincidentally, was the first woman to win Best
Director).
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| /Sundance |
But
I digress. Boyhood is a film and only
a film, celebrated with exuberance by critics and the industry (and me) for the
sheer fact that it is cinema, evocative and innovative and form-bending.
Other small indies such as Love Is
Strange and Obvious Child aren’t
quite as distinguishable – and given what we know television can do, letting go
of Alfred Molina and John Lithgow and Jenny Slate after spending just a couple
hours with them was just so unfair – but there’s a special, closed-ended
intimacy to these slices of life that television can’t quite replicate.
Visionaries Paul Thomas Anderson and Wes Anderson operated at the peak of their
powers this year – the former creates such visceral experiences, and the
latter’s stylings are so manic and obsessive, that to imagine either in an
open-ended, longform setting is next to impossible – while vital,
Zeitgeist-probing efforts were well-integrated into this year’s landscape, from
the grand in Selma to the slight in Two Days, One Night. Looking back on the
year that was, I find cinema always offers more than the vast majority of
thinkpieces would have us believe. It’s a different market and culture, to be
sure – and I’ll be the first to dub 2014 TV a level above 2014 film – but there
remains quality and variety, and as Boyhood
chiefly reminds, it still serves an exclusive function.
We’re
living in a fascinating time, as the worlds of film and television are swiftly
changing. I hardly associate quality with popularity – imagine my shock at
actually liking The Imitation Game,
given the profound backlash against its shamelessly awards-y nature – but when
I look at my favorite films and series of the year, I see a barren
field. Shows like Getting On and Rectify barely register; epic miniseries
including Olive Kitteridge and The Honorable Woman, for whatever
reason, didn’t get the attention they absolutely merited; and small films like Love Is Strange, Force Majeure and Mr. Turner
(more on that one in a minute) rendered others, like Boyhood and The Grand
Budapest Hotel, smash hits. But, Jesus, look at the list of brilliant directors
putting out yet another great film: both Andersons, DuVernay, Mike Leigh,
Richard Linklater, the Dardenne brothers, Bennett Miller and on. Similarly,
consider the expanding worldviews of TV’s veterans: Jenji Kohan building her
major themes from Weeds to the second
season of Orange, Jill Soloway’s
exploration of family in Six Feet Under
and of identity in United States of Tara
giving way to Transparent; Noah
Hawley experimenting in tone and voice, from The Unusuals to Fargo;
and Mark V. Olsen and Will Scheffer continuing to explore ignored crevasses in
the American landscape, first with polygamy and Mormonism in Big Love, and now with the elderly and
healthcare in Getting On. These are
voices we have come to recognize, and that can challenge us and dig deeper as a
result.
But,
as
I’ve already discussed, there remains a serious representation divide
between film and television. Television’s very nature right now is so niche
that Getting On and Transparent and Orange Is the New Black can exist, thrive in quality and sometimes
even succeed commercially. Film is going in a sadly different direction –
Angelina Jolie star-power aside, the only female director to helm a film that
got released in more than a handful of theaters in 2014 was DuVernay, who was
basically seventh
in-line for Selma and got the job
only because of her relationship with pre-attached star David Oyelowo. And we
see what got put on screen: men, men, men. In my top 10, only two films were
headlined by women – in both, it’s Marion Cotillard, for reasons I absolutely
cannot explain – and one was French (Two
Days), the other basically abandoned by its distributor (The Immigrant). Obvious Child was also fantastic, and there’s a lot to like in the
flawed Gone Girl and Wild (both only existing because of
Reese Witherspoon’s will). But I shouldn’t have to search – nearly every
television show I named in my top 10 is top-lined by an actress, and it’s no
coincidence that a fair amount are also run by female writers. And the issue
extends beyond gender. The Screen Actors Guild did not get screeners for Selma in time; not that it’s any excuse,
but as a result their film acting nominees amounted to 64 white artists. Yet on
the television side, Uzo Aduba, Cicely Tyson and Viola Davis were individual
nominees, and over a dozen other actors of color were nodded as a part of
nominated ensembles. That’s a massive divide, and it’s not just my own perception
of quality that’s illuminating it. The TV market is disparate, and so it’s
where enormous strides are being made. But after the “progressive” year that
was in film last year, with Fruitvale
Station, The Butler, 12 Years and others, 2014 doesn’t just
feel like a comedown – in light of what’s been revealed
vis-à-vis the Sony hack, it’s a reminder that there exists a grave problem,
near-unsolvable as a result of current market structures.