AMERICAN FACTORY AND FINAL OSCAR REFLECTIONS

By Dominique Paul Noth

Cultures bond as well as clash in American Factory

For the past month or so Urban Milwaukee readers have been able to dip into my reviews of films that are up for Oscars on February 9.  The advantage of these  Oscar films reviews is readers have a chance to get a critic’s inside reaction to the incredibly diverse field of offers.  The other advantage is seeing how often I’m wrong, because I don’t expect Oscars to go along with me.

There were some films I’ve seen I had not previewed with  full reviews, including the likely winner of the best documentary Oscar since I felt constrained without the opportunity to see the full field.  Now I have so I’ll catch up here with my pick for best feature length documentary, American Factory.

The smart money Sunday night is on this particularly strong entry that mixes old-fashioned narrative documentary devices with advances in technology. Such as mikes inside households to give the illusion than interior monologs of participants are being captured.  Such as intimate  scanning cameras allowed during manufacturing or lavish office celebrations to tell the story. Such as seamless moves from the home plant in China to the new venture.

This is the former Dayton (Ohio) GM plant taken over by giant Chinese glass company Fuyao (glass windshields for Ford, GM, Bentley, Honda and more).  The problems faced in Ohio are hauntingly familiar to what Foxconn and its differently aimed glass, using much the same management techniques,  is trying to set up in Wisconsin.  The parallels are amazing.

All the attendant clashes of separate cultures are there as the Chinese strain to seem to let Americans run the show, while they quietly do.  The mikes and cameras capture the Chinese supervisors attitudes  – the Americans all have fat fingers as the Chinese masters quietly sneer, they have been taught disrespect and too much freedom from childhood.  There’s  anger among the Chinese when US Sen. Sherrod Brown pushed unionization in his welcoming speech though the company wanted its own “money talks”  work ethic  to catch fire.

Yet ironically, the documentary plays fair with both sides (some friendships are formed) and with the threat of automation to all sides.  What makes the film likely to win is that Oscar voters know that two names nowhere on the screen have helped fund the movie through Netflix as their initial filmland effort – Barack and Michelle Obama – and the film plays honestly with themes they have also urged discussion of during their White House tenure and are currently all over the presidential debates if your name is not Trump.

Both it and another moving documentary, The Edge of Democracy, are available on Netflix. The second is a fascinating if a bit complicated look inside the unraveling of two Brazilian presidents who had notable personality cults and economic visions, Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff.

There is also one review on my own site which still has me ticked off since none of the three films discussed received any Oscar nominations, though the names in those films are deeply involved in Oscar selection.  The problem in my view is those films dealt seriously with how unexpected heroes took on corporate or government corruption – and society needs more of that, and I wish the Oscars were saying so.

Looking back over the reviews that appeared on Urban Milwaukee, I am struck by how many of my choices will probably be avoided by Oscar.  My choice for best movie is South Korea’s phenomenal Parasite, which works on so many levels of comedy and social commentary (saw it months ago during a film festival).  I suspect Oscars will be carried off by a solidly serious film that pushes the envelope of pretending to be one long continuous shot – 1917,  which did not get a good review from me.

I also fear that a film I deeply criticized, Joker, may run off with the best actor Oscar for Joaquin Phoenix, though the truly triumph acting job belongs to Jonathan Pryce as Pope Francis in The Two Popes.  I also wouldn’t mind a best Oscar for Adam Driver in Marriage Story, one of three films he’s made quite an impact in this year. Not reviewed, alas, but I saw it early.

The best actress Oscar seems destined for Renée Zellweger as Judy Garland in Judy, a film I did not review, though I admire her work even more than the likely runner-up, Scarlett Johansson.  Now Johansson is an interesting case, also up for supporting actress in JoJoRabbit, which might give her a boost in the best actress race for Marriage Story.  She started life as a fine child actress, is now lost between her Internet fame as a sex image and her constant effort to return to serious consideration while also playing fast and loose with Marvel Comics blockbusters.  It’s going to take her fan base some time to adjust to the real Scarlet and I don’t think this Oscar is yet the time.

Speaking of Marriage Story, Laura Dern as the divorce lawyer with an amazing monolog probably has supporting actress sewn up because she had fine roles on the TV screen this year and in one blockbuster movie, Star Wars: The Rise of Starwalker, and a film reviewed for Urban Milwaukee, Little Women. There will be some pressure for it to win even more Oscars, including best actress for the coltish Saoirse Ronan, though I wouldn’t mind seeing Florence Pugh as Amy knocking fellow Little Women star Dern off her supporting perch.

Nor would I mind the best supporting actor winner to wind up being Tom Hanks for A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood over the likely embodiment of Tarantino cool Brad Pitt in a fun romp Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, also heavily nominated and likely to be otherwise aced out.

It did review The Irishman directed by another nominee Martin Scorsese, yet strongly suspect he will not win a single Oscar for the film though every other person on the stage will acknowledge stealing from him!

To refresh you, here are the reviews and categories Urban Milwaukee has run, plus a few others not yet repositioned from my own domain:

JoJo Rabbit 
Oscar nominated as best picture, supporting actress (Scarlet Johansson), adapted screenplay, production design, film editing and costume design.

Little Women 
Oscar nominated as best picture, best actress (Saoirse Ronan), best supporting actress (Florence Pugh), adapted screenplay, costume design, music.

Joker 
Oscar nominated best picture, actor, director, adapted screenplay, film editing, sound mixing, sound editing, makeup, music, cinematography, costume design.

The Two Popes 
Oscar nominated as best actor, supporting actor, adapted screenplay.

1917 
Oscar nominated as best picture, director, original screenplay, production design, sound mixing, sound editing, cinematography, music.

Ford v Ferrari
Oscar nominated best picture, film editing, sound editing.

The Irishman
Oscar nominated for best picture, best supporting actors, film editing, production design.

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood 
Oscar nominated for best supporting actor (Tom Hanks).

Richard Jewell
Oscar nominated for best supporting actress (Kathy Bates)

About the author: Noth has been  a professional journalist since the 1960s, first as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then as an editor for its original Green Sheet, also  for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic. He became the newspaper’s senior feature editor. He was tapped by the publishers of the combining Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and as first online news producer before voluntarily departing in the mid-1990s to run online news seminars and write on public affairs. From 2002 to 2013 he ran the Milwaukee Labor Press as editor. It served as the Midwest’s largest home-delivered labor newspaper, with archives at milwaukeelabor.org.  In that role he won top awards yearly until the paper stopped publishing in 2013. His investigative pieces and extensive commentaries are now published by several news outlets as well as his DomsDomain dual culture and politics outlets.  A member of the American Theatre Critics Association at its inception, he also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee.