Middleburg 2023: Mainstream Oscar Bait is back, baby!

by Lynn Lee

Previously in part one of the Middleburg recap we discussed Cannes triumphs The Zone of Interest and Anatomy of a Fall (now in theaters!), and Sofia Coppola's Priscilla. Now the jam-packed Oscar promise second half of the festival.

Day Three
If you’ve been wondering whether American Fiction – the audience favorite at Toronto – really has Oscar potential, I’m here to tell you yes, it absolutely does.  Cord Jefferson’s debut feature took home the audience award at Middleburg, too, and both my husband and I thoroughly enjoyed it.  It’s a rollicking satire of the literary establishment and the politics of racial representation, based on a novel that was written over 20 years ago but is, if anything, even more current today.  Jeffrey Wright stars as Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, a bougie buttoned-up middle-aged black writer who, appalled at the success of novels and entertainment he sees as pandering to white stereotypes of black life, writes his own gangsta/ghetto porn novel as a bitter drunken joke... only to see it meet with an effusive response far beyond his wildest imagination... 

While the satire starts out broad, it’s still very funny and develops more shading as it progresses.  It’s also deftly interlaced with the more realistic dramedy of Monk’s strained relationship with his family, thereby slipping in the kind of black story he (and the novel’s author, no doubt) actually wanted to tell.  Of course there’s no small irony in the fact that this movie is being warmly embraced by the same white cultural establishment it skewers, but that doesn’t make it any less deserving.  Wright in particular is outstanding – his Oscar stock should be rising, even in a competitive year.  The rest of the cast is terrific, too, with Sterling K. Brown and John Ortiz delivering comic highlights as Monk’s brother and agent, respectively, and Leslie Uggams, Tracee Ellis Ross, and Erika Alexander adding extra depth as the women in Monk’s life.

I unfortunately missed the Q&A afterwards with Cord Jefferson (my husband stayed and said he was very good) because I had to rush off to a screening of Perfect Days, Wim Wenders’ small, intimate tone poem of a film about an older Japanese man (Koji Yakusho, in a lovely understated performance that won him Best Actor at Cannes) who cleans Tokyo’s public toilets for a living and appears utterly content with his daily routine, finding moments of beauty and humor amid its outwardly mundane repetitions.   Like Wenders’ other films, this one both requires and rewards patience – the more you surrender yourself to the protagonist’s daily cycle with its tiny variations, the closer you’ll come to achieving his state of zen.

While my husband went to check out Mads Mikkelsen’s performance as an ambitious settler in The Promised Land, Denmark’s Oscar submission this year for Best International Feature, I opted for a screening of Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers.  Haigh hasn’t put a foot wrong in anything he’s done, and he doesn’t here.  Strangers is an exquisitely sad, strange, haunting film, difficult to describe and even more difficult to shake off.  It’s both a ghost story and a love story, with its protagonist (Andrew Scott) a London writer who finds himself visiting his long-dead parents (Jamie Bell and Claire Foy) – or incarnations of them, preserved at the age when he lost them – even as he begins a (very hot) relationship with his younger downstairs neighbor (Paul Mescal).  The parent storyline is loosely based on a Japanese novel; the romance is all Haigh.  The result is an occasionally disorienting but beautifully acted and deeply poignant meditation on grief and loneliness, filtered through the perspective of an emotionally scarred Gen X gay man who’s never been able to open himself up to love.  The ending takes a turn that I’m not quite sure works, even though I more or less saw it coming.  Nevertheless, it sticks with you; of all the films I saw at Middleburg, this may be the one I find myself thinking about most.

N.B: Husband gave positive marks to The Promised Land; as a Mads fan, I’m hoping to see it if/when it comes to theaters.

Day Four
Our last film at Middleburg, The Holdovers (previously reviewed here by Chris) is Alexander Payne’s Christmas movie – and, not coincidentally, by far his sweetest film (perhaps also not a coincidence: he did not write it).  It’s certainly the only one that’s made me both laugh and cry.  Thankfully it avoids maudlin sentimentality, due in large part to the stellar acting – particularly by Paul Giamatti, who delivers what may be his career-best performance as a curmudgeonly terror of a history teacher at an elite New England boys’ prep school in the early 1970s.  Stuck with looking after the few boys who are left behind to spend their Christmas holidays at the school, he’s just as unenthralled with the task as his charges, most of whom eventually find a way to escape his custody.  However, over the course of the break he builds a slow, mutually begrudging bond with the brightest and most troubled of them (Dominic Sessa), as well as the school cook (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) who is mourning the death of her son in Vietnam.  Both Sessa and Randolph are excellent, but it’s Giamatti who elevates the film to the next level.  He somehow manages to be at once the antithesis of Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society and his natural heir – no mean feat.  If he doesn’t get an Oscar nod, I will riot.

***

If my Middleburg experience was any indicator, we are in for a fall holiday cornucopia of cinematic richness and a much more interesting slate of potential awards contenders than last year.  I didn’t even get to see Saltburn, Maestro, or Rustin, all of which sold out at the festival.  And of course even as I was happily absorbing the films I did see, I was also mindful that Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon was opening in theaters that same weekend.  While the early Oscars betting may still be on that film, Oppenheimer, and, yes, Barbie, I would keep an eye out for American Fiction and The Holdovers over the coming months.  Both are smart, well crafted crowd-pleasers that also serve as effective showcases for respected actors who have never won an Oscar – in one case, never even been nominated!  If their rollouts are properly handled, they could do very well this season.  We’ll see if Amazon/MGM and Focus Features are up to the task.

Comments

[charlea]

Even though I haven’t loved an Alexander Payne film since About Schmidt, I’m still excited to see what he and Giamatti bring to the table.
Also really excited to see American Fiction.
I honestly think I’m so excited for so many films because the last few months have been Dullsville at the box office.

[McGill]

I saw American Fiction with a very enthusiastic audience at TIFF. What fun!

What keeps surprising me afterwards is that I’ll think of a scene or dialogue from the movie and suddenly make a connection that I didn’t see when watching the movie. And I think, how could I have missed that?

That there are so many layers to this highly entertaining film is completely satisfying.