 "The Theory of Everything")
Societies seldom embrace damaged personae. But they are big ticket items come Oscar season. Films centred on troubled minds bagged the top honours this year - Birdman won the best film and director trophies, while Julianne Moore carried home the best actress prize for her portrayal of a professor with a premature case of Alzheimer's in Still Alice and Edward Redmayne was adjudged the best actor in The Theory of Everything, playing Stephen Hawking, the celebrated physicist afflicted by motor neurone disease who can communicate only with the flick of his eyelids and a special computer. The best supporting actor was J K Simmons as a vile-tempered music conductor-teacher in Whiplash. Yet another serious contender this year was The Imitation Game, based on the life the cryptographer genius Alan Turing, a prophet without honour in his native England who underwent chemical castration for his "crime" of homosexuality and died while not yet 42, a presumed case of suicide.
Birdman, the Mexican auteur Alejandro González Iñárritu's tour de force, was easily the pick of this random harvest of sagas of disturbed and persecuted individuals. Iñárritu demonstrated his mastery of filmcraft by conceiving and faultlessly executing almost the entirety of the two-hour film as a single seamless shot. That required tremendous background work among the crew - the director, scriptwriters (Iñárritu was one of them), production designers and the cinematographer.
But it wasn't the cinematic artistry that got the film its popular and critical acclaim - it was the theme. A Hollywood star, who anchored a successful superhero franchise a quarter of a century ago and has now been consigned to the dustbin of has-beens, makes one last desperate bid to reinvent himself. He adapts a minimalist story by a well-known author into a Broadway play, which he also stars in and directs. He stakes what remains of his wealth and his relationships with his former wife, current girlfriend and a daughter just out of drug rehab. The prospects hinge on a narcissistic male co-star and a shrew of a drama critic of The New York Times. He alternates between severe self-doubt and delusions, aided and abetted by the choice milieu of equally damaged characters.
That strikes a chord immediately. Don't we all know someone of moderate abilities but blessed with disproportionate initial success making one last hurrah to regain the lost glory? An author with one acclaimed book trying for a second one through the years, as in Harper Lee? A sportsperson seeking a desperate comeback, as in Martina Hingis? A politician upstaged by a one-time protege, as in Lal Krishna Advani? That stuff readily plays on the heartstrings like a Beethoven sonata.
To be fair, Iñárritu suffuses his masterwork with subtle and unsuspected humour and deep insider knowledge of the cloistered world of New York theatre. Besides the stunning cinematography, he extracts standout performances from Michael Keaton in the unglamorous lead role, Edward Norton as the cringe-worthy co-star and Emma Stone as the daughter who is the unexpected keeper of conscience and fount of wisdom.
This year may have had an unusual number of disturbed personalities featuring in the Oscars race, but it only tops what the Academy has honoured many times before: Russell Crowe as the bipolar genius who wins the Nobel (A Beautiful Mind, 2001), Anthony Hopkins as the brilliant psychoanalyst who is also a cannibal (The Silence of the Lambs, 1991), Dustin Hoffman as the misfit autistic memory wizard (Rain Man, 1988) and Jack Nicholson deemed insane because he defies authority (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, 1975) have all garnered awards not just for lead performances, but also in other categories.
This shift away from grand spectacles or heroic biopics, which collected Oscars by the bagful earlier, reflects a change in social values. Armed conflicts in large or limited wars raise unsettling moral questions. This year's hugely popular and well-made American Sniper failed to be honoured. The audiences and the Academy voters alike find the drama unfolding in that other theatre of perpetual war, the human psyche, as absorbing. Tortured souls battling their demons have now become as great scene stealers as those staples of the past, children and dogs.
Heroic was good, but damaged is now best, says the Motion Picture Academy!
