HOLLYWOOD, CA -- The signs telling me when and where I am not welcome in my own neighborhood can only mean one thing: it's Oscar time!
Even though the high-security lockdown surrounding my house will force me to find some longer, alternative route to and from my soccer practice in Burbank on Sunday, I still love the Academy Awards.
It's like watching election returns, only much less depressing. Imagine a magical district where - for one night - dissent, nuance and gayness are accepted, celebrated and rewarded.
Which isn't to say that some years the Oscars don't deliver a rib-cracking sucker punch a la Oklahoma sending eugenicist Tom Coburn to the United States Senate, the electoral equivalent of Million Dollar Baby winning Best Picture last year.
At least the overrated movie that's going to win Best Picture this year is actually a decent film. Though I preferred Capote, Good Night, and Good Luck and Munich to Brokeback Mountain, I won't have any of that Million Dollar Baby, "Are you f'n kidding me?" nausea that I suffered last year. Even the pedantic Crash - a movie both undeservedly loved and unfairly hated - is far superior to last year's winner, which was also written by Crash writer-director Paul Haggis. (And as for Brokeback, on behalf of my pro-gay brothers who didn't love it, it bears pointing out that you can dislike this movie without being homophobic, just as not wanting security of our ports turned over to an Arab company doesn't make you a racist. In fact, turning a 30-page short story into a 134-minute movie is much less of a bad idea than conducting national security-related business with a country that would likely celebrate the total destruction of Israel by dancing in the streets.)
So I take comfort in knowing I'm not going to feel physically ill at the end of the telecast when the big winner is announced. That moment might come earlier in the show.
Only in the year of James Frey could shooting a remake of an adaptation earn someone an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay.
I never read Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy - I did slog my way through 100 pages of Sister Carrie - but I've seen A Place in the Sun, which is based on Dreiser's 1925 true crime novel.
If A Place in the Sun and Woody Allen's Oscar-nominated script Match Point are held up side by side, there's no way the latter could be considered an original work.
In A Place in the Sun, a handsome, charming, ambitious, working-class autodidact (Montgomery Clift) enters the world of the very wealthy, wins the love of the rich daughter and decides he must murder his pregnant-but-poor girlfriend to preserve the dream life he has so fortuitously attained.
In Match Point - Allen's "original" screenplay - a handsome, charming, ambitious, working-class autodidact (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) enters the world of the very wealthy, wins the love of the rich daughter and decides he must murder his pregnant-but-poor girlfriend to preserve the dream life he has so fortuitously attained.
In A Place in the Sun, Clift gets sad-eyed, frumpy coworker Shelley Winters "in trouble", a disaster that threatens to jeopardize his budding relationship with a very hot Elizabeth Taylor. In Match Point, Woody has Rhys Meyers knock up Scarlet Johansson, an unfortunate development that threatens his great new life with Emily Mortimer and her loaded family. (Lest you confuse the smoldering Johansson with the sad-sack Winters, young Scarlet actually declares, albeit unnecessarily, "I'm sexy," during a bar scene in Match Point.)
One reviewer, Jonathan Rosenbaum, wrote, "The correspondences with Dreiser's An American Tragedy that some critics have cited... seem relevant only to the plot." Oh, I see, only the plot was lifted almost precisely from someone else's work, the rest is 100 percent original.
Many of the scenes in Match Point play out like a virtual shot-for-shot remake of A Place in the Sun.
1) You Can't Be Self-Taught Without Self-Teaching
Early in A Place in the Sun we see Clift sitting in his small, gloomy boarding room with a copy of a high school equivalency-type booklet on the table. He's determined to make something of himself, dammit.
Early in Match Point we see Rhys Meyers sitting in his small, gloomy apartment, reading Crime and Punishment and the Cambridge Companion to Dostoevsky. He's determined to make something of himself, dammit.
2) Meeting the Hottie in the Game Room
In A Place in the Sun, the sullen Clift is shooting pool by himself when Liz pops into the game room to make time with the handsome stranger. Their first conversation takes place as he stalks around the table and we see the logical mutual attraction develop between the two most beautiful people in the world.
In Match Point, Rhys Meyers - comically cast as a former tennis pro, a decidedly unfortunate choice when you see his swing - discovers Johansson in the game room, playing ping-pong. Once her previous opponent conveniently exits, the beautiful people are left to play the most sexually-charged game of table tennis in movie history. This leads to some unintentionally hilarious dialogue, something along the lines of "you play a fast game." At least British critics acknowledged the preposterousness of the dialogue in this movie, while their American counterparts - so desperate to declare, "Woody's back!" - apparently didn't find it laughably inauthentic. Anyone who suffered through Wild Man Blues knows Woody's personal life is not exactly a hotbed of sharp, crackling Gen Y dialogue.
3) The Benevolent Patriarch
Clift gets his leg up in A Place in the Sun thanks to his uncle giving him a job at his plant and rewarding his hard work with steady promotion. We get several scenes of the kindly uncle patting Monty on the back for validating his faith in him, though we are shown precious little of this business savvy the gorgeous nephew supposedly possesses.
In Match Point, the handsome tennis pro - seriously, you've got to see this guy's forehand - gets a leg up thanks to his father-in-law (Brian Cox) giving him some non-descript-yet-very-important job at his very important company. Again, we are given no reason to believe that Rhys Meyers can use Microsoft Word, never mind Excel or PowerPoint or whatever it is that business-types use their computers for. Pity poor Brian Cox. The brilliant actor is doubly wasted in this movie, repeating the same steady stream of encouragement to his son-in-law with a drink in his hand in every scene.
4) Awkward Moment on Line One
In A Place in the Sun, Clift is having a wonderful time with his hot new girlfriend and her rich family when one of the servants plops a phone on the dinner table. Uh-oh, awkward. It's Debbie Downer (Winters) calling to insist he leave at once and meet her or she'll spill the beans. Poor Monty tells his hosts his mother has fallen ill and he must go see her.
In Match Point, we see this scene seemingly 10 times. It gets to the point where you're begging out loud that Rhys Meyers just let his damn cell go to voicemail. Each fumbling alibi he provides is slightly more lame than the previous one and none as unassailable as a sick mom.
5) The Crime
Forced to choose a dreary winter (literally Winters) or his place in the sun (Taylor), Clift takes his pregnant-but-poor No. 2 out for a row on a deserted lake with the intention of drowning her. Overcome with guilt - and flop sweat - he can't go through with it. But the boat capsizes and Winters' first on-screen Poseidon adventure ends with her death.
Woody makes the decision a little tougher on his anti-hero by making the poor-but-pregnant girlfriend the super fine Johansson, though I think we can agree that consolation prize Emily Mortimer is a huge upgrade over Winters (God rest her recently-departed soul). Despite an onrush of guilt - and lots of flop sweat - Rhys Meyers does go through with his murder plot, as idiotic as it may be.
6) The Punishment
Like a high school sophomore tweaking the passage from the Encyclopedia Britannica he's lifting, here is where Woody veers from A Place in the Sun.
While Clift may be technically innocent of the murder, he is morally culpable - because he was thinking of Taylor when he should have been trying to save Winters - and is sentenced to death.
In Match Point, despite one of the most ham-handed murders in film history - a broad daylight shotgun slaying in the stairwell of an apartment building? - Allen has his anti-hero get away with it. (C'mon, even on the Armstrong Ranch, the shooter's identity is eventually revealed.) By having Rhys Meyers also blow away Johansson's elderly neighbor to make the murders look like a drug robbery, this is where Allen abandons Dreiser and starts doing his Dostoevsky thing. (His self-taught - remember? - former tennis pro is now Raskolnikov, the dead neighbor is the unlucky sister Lizaveta and the soon-to-be introduced dogged cop is Porfiry Petrovich.) But whereas Raskolnikov is convicted and sent to Siberia, Allen's killer - despite a mountain of evidence and an obvious motive - is saved from certain conviction by a stroke of luck.
As someone who shares Allen's cynicism - bad people are not only exonerated but re-elected - I like this twist, an ending even more pessimistic than Clift going to the chair. But it's not enough to make this an original screenplay.
Is it?