Every week, I answer a question from Monday's Act Four Live chat in the Wednesday edition of this newsletter. You can read the transcript of the Jan. 22 chat here, and submit...
| |  | | | | Alyssa Rosenberg on culture and politics | | | | | | Actor/director Jordan Peele attends the 24th Annual Screen Actors Guild Awards at the Shrine Auditorium on Sunday. (Christopher Polk/Getty Images for Turner Image) | Every week, I answer a question from Monday’s Act Four Live chat in the Wednesday edition of this newsletter. You can read the transcript of the Jan. 22 chat here, and submit questions for the Jan. 29 question here. This week, as the Oscar nominations roll out, a reader steps back from the specific honorees of 2018 to grapple with a larger question. | | I have no idea, as an outsider, how directing is judged – I don’t know how where the director’s job shows through vs. the screenwriter, cinematographer, actors, scale of production, etc. I guess, how do I know a film is well directed instead of a good film directed by a replacement level director working with talent that elevates the film regardless of the director? | | This is a great question, especially because a dirty secret of criticism is that sometimes even professional critics find it difficult to break down how they make these kinds of judgments when we’re asked to explain them in a granular way. (There’s a great conversation on this subject, focused on acting, by three of the critics at Vox up here.) | | | Sometimes, it’s an easier question to answer when the person who directed a movie also wrote it, such as Christopher Nolan did with “Dunkirk,” Jordan Peele did with “Get Out,” Greta Gerwig did with “Lady Bird,” or Martin McDonagh did with “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.” Under circumstances like that, you can feel reasonably confident that the movie you’re watching is a unified product of a director’s mind, and wonder less about the replacement-level director question. You know they put those words on the page intending to translate them into something specific and can trust that the movie they released is at least a pretty good approximation of what they intended. | | Beyond that, I think it can be useful to watch a number of movies by the same director so you can start picking up patterns in their work, and patterns in the way actors perform when they work with those directors. Nolan, for example, is interested in questions of chronology and time, and that shows up as a theme in his work a lot; he also tends to make movies about male stoicism that cracks at the edges. That means I can compare the performances he gets out of, say, Christian Bale in the Batman trilogy and “The Prestige” to the work Bale has done with David O. Russell in a number of movies and think about the way Nolan teases out the gap between the face Bale’s characters present to the world and his inner person. I know Dee Rees is extremely sensitive to lighting the black actors in her movies well, something that other directors don’t always think a lot about, and that she’s interested in telling period stories about black life in America, so I go into her movies expecting different things than I might from another director who hasn’t worked with a predominantly African American cast before. | | I realize that’s a lot to ask of lay viewers. So to put it another way: It’s good to think of the director as similar to the head coach of a football team. Obviously he has offensive and defensive coordinators, trainers, and a lot of other staff working with him to manage a huge number of decisions involving the players who are on the field. But the head coach is the person responsible for making sure that all of those people come together to produce a successful end result. This is one of the reasons that, when it comes to awards season, people will often expect that the nominations for Best Picture and Best Director to track each other very closely. They may diverge in the final results, not least because some directors might have taken on more challenging projects even though voters think a different movie is better overall. But I think the metaphor is a useful one for those of you watching at home. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
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