Beautiful, but empty.
I’m linking you to Linda Holmes’ Monkey See blog on NPR again – second time in as many posts – because she articulates something I’ve been trying to say for a while: Avatar is, plain and simple, not Best Picture material. She compares it to The Blind Side, about the Best Pic nomination of which there have been howls of protest from critics and serious movie buffs. I haven’t seen The Blind Side and – barring it being the in-flight movie on a very long plane ride wherein I’ve already read the complimentary airline magazine and thoroughly perused and mocked the absurd objects for sale in the SkyMall catalog and have nothing else to read and dead batteries in my iPod and my laptop – I will almost certainly not see it, so I can’t really successfully judge its merits.
But, yeah: Avatar. Did I like it? Yeah. Did I love it? Not really. Did anyone really love it? I don’t know. I guess. There were those people in some news stories a while back who are all depressed or something because they can’t live on Pandora in real life, and they must have loved it. But there are also people who write “Jedi” as their religion on census forms and people who claim to be really real for reals vampires, too. Obviously, it’s made a boatload of money at the box office, the kind of money you don’t get without repeat viewings, so people at the very least want to look at it again.
And that’s the thing: the movie is really something you look at. It was utterly gorgeous to behold, and its slam-dunk Oscar wins for Art Direction and Visual Effects will be well-deserved. But beyond a couple of indelible images, a couple of months after seeing it, the movie doesn’t really stick out in my head. Weeks after watching The Hurt Locker and Up in the Air, the performances and human moments in those movies have really stuck with me. The jittery intensity of Hurt Locker, the magnetic way that Jeremy Renner ably handled the unique challenge of playing an addict who didn’t use any drugs, the way it worked as both an action movie and a closely-observed character study…that’s memorable. The terrific performances in Up in the Air by George Clooney, Vera Farmiga and Anna Kendrick (and, while we’re at it, Jason Bateman and JK Simmons in smaller roles), the delicate balance Jason Reitman achieved between funny and sad, that moment when Clooney shows up in Chicago and you get walloped out of nowhere by a plot twist that is both completely unexpected and perfectly logical…that’s memorable. That’s what Best Pictures are supposed to be made up of.
What is Avatar missing? Here’s a hint: tell me something interesting about Jake Sully, the hero of Avatar. Tell me something about his personality. He’s lost the use of his legs. He’s replacing his dead brother in service on Pandora. He ostensibly falls in love with the Na’vi in general and one in particular. And…? That’s what he does, but, what’s he like? Try the same thing with the heroine, Neytiri. What’s she like? What, for that matter, are any of the Na’vi like? Do any of them have any internal life at all, or do they all exist as mere Noble Savage stereotypes to teach Jake about harmony with nature and show him the error of human ways? What about Colonel Assholington (I don’t remember the character’s actual name, but in a movie where the writer/director decides that literally using the term “unobtanium” for the film’s MacGuffin is an acceptable choice, he might as well have been named Colonel Assholington), or the Corporate Suit Guy played by Giovanni Ribisi? Why are they such dicks? “Because the script requires them to be” isn’t a good enough answer for central characters in what is ostensibly Best Picture material. I want a character in a movie to feel like a real person, and to achieve that, they require personality.
For all the depth of the 3D images on-screen, the characters in the script have two dimensions at most. And while showing me beautiful sights is fine, a perfectly laudable aim for a movie, I expect more from something that has a legitimate shot at being crowned the Best Picture of 2009. I don’t really see it as the sort of technical achievement that will change the way we see movies that some people are claiming it is – I don’t think Avatar did anything that the previous FX-extravaganza Best Picture winner, The Return of the King, didn’t do first and as well or better. It happened to be the first in the wave of new 3D movies to hit it really big, but that’s sort of the Columbus Day problem, for me – Columbus happened to be the first guy in a boat to bump into the Americas, but someone else would have done it within a few years of him. Same thing here – immersive 3D is the trend in movies right now, and it may stick around or it may fade away (again), but if Avatar hadn’t hit it big, then another 3D movie would have.
Avatar, in short, is the very definition of spectacle – it thrills us while we’re watching it, but in the end it leaves us (or at least me) unmoved. I guess my ultimate judgment comes down to this: after we saw Up in the Air and after we watched The Hurt Locker, Emily and I had long conversations about them, parsing out our thoughts and feelings about what we had just seen – in the case of Hurt Locker, especially, we spent the entire hour-long drive up to my parents’ house discussing the movie. After we saw Avatar, the conversation was, more or less, “Boy, that sure was pretty.” “Yup, sure was.” “It was about what I expected it to be…so…what should we do tomorrow?” Roger Ebert once offered as a definition of a great movie one that engages your right brain while you’re watching it and your left brain after it’s over. Up in the Air and The Hurt Locker (among others this year) did that. Avatar simply does not live up to the second half of the definition.