Hidetoshi Nishijima and Tôko Miura in "Drive My Car"
By Dominique Paul Noth
For decades I served as movie critic for The Milwaukee Journal, rubbing shoulders with national film critics and understanding that the movie industry was interested in us only if a review could help their box office. We were free to speculate about insider behavior, such as the Oscars, where it was mutually beneficial. But what critics actually thought about movies – didn’t matter unless we put “fannies in the seats” as one industry spokesman subtly told me -- had little influence compared to the members of the Motion Picture Academy who actually did the work.
This may have changed in 2021 when the choice of 10 films for best picture Oscar was clearly schizophrenic and desperate. Think it was 2013 when Oscar decided to double to 10 the number of best pictures and that seemed to make sense back then. In 2021, however, several films were delayed a year by COVID, some were caught up in controversies such as the continuing #MeToo that snared Harvey Weinstein and Scott Rudin, both successful producers who ran intensive Oscar promotional campaigns for their films. No more, thank heaven, but Oscar still isn’t sure how to police itself from all the vagaries of social comment and split viewership between home screens and movie theaters, which may have lent more weight to the critics’ blather than in earlier years.
The impact of social comment was clear when two films by veteran director Ridley Scott, who has enjoyed Oscar nominations since the 1970s, failed dismally in Oscar voting – The Last Duel (nada) and House of Gucci (one nomination for makeup) despite favorable reviews and an A cast list including Adam Driver, Lady Gaga, Mark Damon, Ben Affleck and Al Pacino. There’s a lot of feeling that Scott did it to himself in an interview when he blamed millennials and their “f*ing cell phone” fetish for skipping out on traditional films.
So, this year out of 10 films there are three with serious traditional Oscar sensibilities. Belfast, which not only emotionally revives the family fleeing in military conflict, but also the tail end of its Oscar campaign dovetailing with similar emotions stirred by Ukraine – and there are similarities in how Putin tried to make this a conflict between Russians and Ukrainians while Belfast explored the effort in the 1960s to split Protestants and Catholics.
Then there is West Side Story, a remarkably fresh retooling of a 60-year-old musical favorite by the world’s most honored director, Steven Spielberg, leading a host of his acclaimed academy cohorts. And, to fulfill the offbeat creative director at full power slot, there is Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog, which has offended Old Western diehards and requires moviegoers to stick through a subtle opening psychological first half for a kicker of a payoff. Not a typical Oscar entry by any measure.
And then come two films that reflect appreciation of individual actors and family values (Coda, King Richard) and others that represent not the best work but at least solid work by admired directors (Dune, Nightmare Alley, Licorice Pizza and Don’t Look Up).
And then there is the mystery entry with four Oscar nominations including best director and best movie, the nearly three hour Drive My Car, limited availability in movie theaters and online at HBO Max (just choose the right language). Its young Japanese director, Ryusuke Hamaguchi, does not have a strong American or Hollywood following. There was no major promotional campaign to include it. But it won best picture from the New York, Los Angeles and National Society of film critics – and this year that seems to have been enough.
Now I like the film but think my fellow critics lost their sense of proportion and don’t recognize flaws in construction that the Oscar professionals will. It’s not the year’s best. It is the year’s most difficult to explain intelligently since it marries Chekhov’s play, Uncle Vanya, a world weary theater director, his late and deeply loved though unfaithful wife, the hypnosis of the family car and conversations (an obsession which the Japanese apparently share with Americans) and how coincidences of auditions and conversations, plus the constantly playing Uncle Vanya on the car stereo in the dead wife's voice -- all connect a wandering storyline.
American film makers often smirk about sex scenes, but the Japanese have a way of combining erotica with character development, and the film shines in this regard. Oto, played by Reika Kirishima, is mostly seen during lovemaking while spinning her poetic ghostlike tales, pretending to be a lamprey sucking the bottom. She also dies early in the film yet remains its most important character.
Her fanciful tales during lovemaking do more than hypnotize her husband, a modernistic theater director played by Hidetoshi Nishijima, who is off to direct a mixed language production of Uncle Vanya (Korean, Japanese, English and even Korean sign language for the deaf).
One of the auditioners is the TV actor he knows slept with his wife and whose memories of her, plus his blatant appeal to women, figure in the conclusion. The director is forced by the Hiroshima theater company to turn over the driving of his car to a young woman of a different class and background. Their encounters also figure in the story.
Something unusual that I liked.: The film waits till some 41 minutes in to flash the opening credits in Japanese and English during one of the many driving moments that are key to its pace and appeal. Curiously, the psychological shards of all this – Uncle Vanya, erotic memories, deaf mute power, and the hours traveling in the red car – do mount up to an involving drama, though the film is a half hour too long and its levers of coincidence become mannered. But it proceeds with an assurance of purpose that does set it apart from other nominated films, and while I doubt that the professional members of the academy will be as taken in by its plot intricacies as the film critics were, it’s a demonstrable case of outside social factors forcing their way onto the Oscar slate.
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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.
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