Nominees: Coming Home, The Last Waltz, Midnight Express, The Tree of the Wooden Clogs, Gaman, The Lovers' Wind
Oscars pick: The Deer Hunter
Nominees: Coming Home, Heaven Can Wait, Midnight Express, An Unmarried Woman
As I get older, my tastes mature and become a bit more sophisticated, and sometimes my opinions on certain things swing wildly from what they were 30 years past. Case in point -- in 1978 I thought The Deer Hunter was one of the most daring statements on the war as I'd ever seen. Watching it today its emotional impact is dampened. It feels contrived, there's less depth than I remembered and Michael Cimino -never a director who understood the need to tighten things up- stretches out the film long after the point has been made. The first hour alone is a slog and could have been cut in half and not lost a thing.
On the other hand - 30 years ago I thought Days of Heaven was this overlong bit of nothing. All I remembered of it was pretty pictures of people sitting around in empty fields. Watching it today, its tale of hardship and romance and heartbreak as told through the eyes of a young girl is mesmerizing. The visuals are beautiful, like Andrew Wyeth's "Christina’s World" come to life. And the movie is considerably shorter than I thought (and shorter than what we now get from Terence Malick).
Its poetic structural rhythms struck a chord in me, and it struck that chord without the manipulations and excess found in Deer Hunter. There's an economy, even the quiet moments where it appears nothing is happening... something is happening. Everything on that screen is important to the feeling, and composition and tempo of the film. Days of Heaven is criticized as having no point, of being too emotionally distant but I like how Roger Ebert summed it up in his review..."What is the point of ``Days of Heaven''--the payoff, the message? This is a movie made by a man who knew how something felt, and found a way to evoke it in us. That feeling is how a child feels when it lives precariously, and then is delivered into security and joy, and then has it all taken away again--and blinks away the tears and says it doesn't hurt."
I don't hate the Deer Hunter, but it's not the film I thought it was. Heaven, on the other hand, reveals itself as something more: A hypnotizing work of poetry and art.
Heaven's strongest competition came from one of the greatest rockumentaries ever filmed, Martin Scorsese's look at The Band, in The Last Waltz. And Hal Ashby's Coming Home has held up remarkably well. It is still as moving as ever.
Honorable Mentions:
Dustin Hoffman, Straight Time * Anthony Hopkins, Magic * Robert De Niro, The Deer Hunter * Brad Davis, Midnight Express * Ken Ogata, The Demon * Richard Pryor, Blue Collar * Gary Busey, The Buddy Holly Story * Alan Bates, The Shout
Honorable Mentions:
Isabelle Huppert, Violette * Jane Fonda, Coming Home * Glenda Jackson, Stevie * Goldie Hawn, Foul Play * Ingrid Bergman & Liv Ullmann, Autumn Sonata * Micheline Lanctôt, Blood & Guts * Annie Girardot, The Key is in the Door
