Brief SAG Reaction

Only two real surprises:

1) The rather random inclusion of Diane Kruger in Supporting Actress

Everybody loves the Basterds this Awards season!. On the one hand I think it's a fun and occasionally delicious performance, and on the other I find it a real shame that Melanie Laurent was campaigned by the Weinsteins in the Leading category, as she clearly would have got in here if they'd settled for Supporting. Laurent and Kruger remain outside shots, but the inevitable split that will occur from this probably means that neither will make it and the last spot will be taken up by either Julianne Moore, Academy favourite Samantha Morton, or the mishandled Marion Cotillard. At least that's my take on the situation.

And while we're on it, if Nine is going to be the worst-reviewed film to get a Best Picture nomination this decade, is it really going to get this many major nominations? It seems comparable with Memoirs of a Geisha four years ago, which got equally poor reviews and probably would have managed a spot in a ten-wide field, given its six nods. None of those, however, were for the big six categories, and so it seems to me that Marion Cotillard is on kind of shaky ground given that she now seems behind Cruz and is saddled with a film that people simply don't like? Nine will probably win the Globe but I can't see it gaining any real momentum before the Oscar ballots are posted.

2) The ensemble snub of Up in the Air

While early precursors suggested Up in the Air had enough to emerge as a solid favourite the support for it clearly doesn't rival that of previous BP winners, and it certainly seems to be dwindling under the euphoric love for The Hurt Locker. At the moment it seems like a three-way tussle between Reitman's film, Bigelow's critical favourite, and James Cameron's beastly, cinema-altering production. Say what you want for the ten-wide category but it's feeling very nostalgic to those forties Best Picture winners (I'm looking at you Rebecca and Casablanca) which only managed one or two other victories. That's possibly why Avatar might have the edge, given that it's likely to win multiple effects prizes, but at the moment it seems pretty wide open.

Anything Does Not Equal Everything

Pour elle (Anything For Her) (2008)
Directed by Fred Cavayé
Starring: Vincent Lindon, Diane Kruger
Grade: F

What Quentin Tarantino did so well with Kill Bill was to outline its basic premise (that simple but wonderfully effective title) and then build upon it, his sleeve stacked with stylish, hybrid aces that dazzled, added meat and scope. French thriller Anything For Her may as well be titled "Free Lisa", and there are no bones about what's at stake and what will go down -- a mere ten minutes in Julien sees his innocent wife carted off to jail and soon vows to break her out -- but that's where Anything For Her begins and really ends.

Most maddening is the film's rigidly basic structure, from the flatlining routine narrative to the lack of any notable supporting characters to the abstinent approach towards character development. Just moments after Lisa's murder conviction appears a flashback of the absurd circumstantial manner by which she is wrongly mistaken of the crime, obliterating any sense of mystery about the event or doubt about the motivations of either spouse. For a film about righting the course of justice there is hardly any exploration of guilt whatsoever, the possibility of landing the pair of them in prison and leaving their son essentially parentless (a very legitimate concern, if you ask me) discussed for all of five seconds. For all of the faults in Neil Jordan's erratic depiction of justice, The Brave One, it at least addressed this issue and encouraged us to read into its character's moral dilemna. The unconditional justification of Julien's actions is admittedly more akin to Tarantino's bride than Jordan's radio host, but Anything For Her is like cutting from the first scene of Volume 1 to the last scene of Volume 2, without the sparkling dialogue.

As for the escape plan Julien formulates it by covering the living room wall with the kind of diagrams and intricacies you'd see at a police station, investigative, thought-out. I honestly couldn't tell you how he managed to cover so much of the wall (maybe he doodled on half of it?) as there is precious little complexity to how he goes about cutting her loose. Only two brief scenes take place in the prison, the bulk of the escape action within a hospital that for all we know could be five, ten, fifty miles from the place. Thankfully the sequence allows for a brief sojourn into the kind of pace and tension you'd expect from a thriller, and is very well constructed. Any tension, however, is killed when a final frustrating act of fate tips the scales of justice to an emphatic clatter. C'est la vie.

Director Fred Cavayé was inexplicably Cesar-nominated for this film, less puzzlingly in the 'First Film' category. It's not terrible visually, but doesn't succeed in any cinematic area that I can think of, unable to flesh out an already limited number of souls, and absent of the kind of stylistic ambition necessary for a production based upon such a simple framework.