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OSCARS DEATH RACE: THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO

[EDITOR'S NOTE: Fearless Sarah D. Bunting of Tomatonation.com is making it her mission to watch every single film nominated for an Oscar before the Academy Awards Ceremony on February 26, 2012. She is calling this journey her Oscars Death Race. For more on how the Oscars Death Race began, click here. And you can follow Sarah through this quixotic journey here.]

A disgraced journalist, Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig), is called to the home of aging magnate Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer) to investigate an ancient crime in the magnate's family — the disappearance and presumed death of Vanger's niece, Harriet, decades ago. Parked in a drafty cabin on the island where many of the Vangers still live (and back-bite), Blomkvist looks into the locked-room mystery, and as matters become more complex, he requires a research assistant — the same researcher, it turns out, who dug into him at Henrik Vanger's request. This researcher is, of course, the eponymous Girl, Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara): pierced, bony, rendered by turns mute and blunt by traumas past and present.

(Spoilers ahead.)

It takes about 45 minutes for their paths to converge, but the time is enjoyable. The entire movie is enjoyable, even when it's difficult (That Scene) (also, That Other Scene), or predictable (you can throw as much Stellan Skarsgard at the trope as you want, but it's still a Talking Killer), or disappointing (it's not a travesty that Mikael and Lisbeth start Doing It or anything, and it leads to a couple of good lines, but Craig and Mara had such sparky and fun partner chemistry that that subplot came off lazy). I hadn't read the books or seen the previous version of the filmed story, so I had no preconceptions about Fincher's version — except that I would only spend two and a half hours plus with that material because of Fincher.

I should warn you now that I'm one of Those Zodiac Cultists who bangs on about how the Academy jobbed that movie, Downey is awesome in it, blah blah blah, and I'll skip the bulk of the harangue, but that film showcases what I liked about Dragon Tattoo: the little moments in longtime/working relationships. Fincher's good with a credits sequence (Panic Room) and good with a tricksy time lapse (Zodiac), he varies his shots in their angles and lengths and his cutting team keeps things interesting and on pace. But my favorite Fincher thing is how he lets his actors work with each other, letting gallows humor percolate up, waiting for that exchanged eye-roll. There's an understanding that the characters have interior lives, opinions about sushi and double-parking, entirely outside of the film's plot. Some of that proceeds from the scripting, obviously, but it's seldom the same writer on each movie, and that wouldn't explain the seemingly uniform respect the films have for the partnership vibe. Nobody gets better play on an actor's face when his/her character is struggling not to call a higher-up a fucking moron than David Fincher. Probably not what he wants on his tombstone, but it's nice for Rooney Mara under the circumstances.

Mara's very good; she doesn't take shortcuts where many actors would, and her stoniness isn't uniform — sometimes it's just stony, blank, but at other times her face wavers, and you can see the effort of control and how tightly the lid is clamped. She lets us know Lisbeth as who she is, not just what we get to see her do. That nuancing is one of those "if you don't notice it, that's how you know it's good" things, so it's nice to see it recognized by the Academy even if the performance functionally can't win. Mara works fantastically with Craig, too; at the end of the movie, I was bummed, not because of the lonely-hearts twist (that was merely annoying) but because I wanted to keep watching them hang out together. I felt the same way at the end of Zodiac — can't Downey and Jake Gyllenhaal get a TV show and solve cases together while wearing terrible '70s scarves? One that airs every day? At…my house? Kudos to Fincher for getting these performances, and also to his casting director(s), who always set him up nice. (Robin Wright, usually not my jam, turns in the second textured performance of the year that I loved and nobody else noticed. And yes, I am also That Guy Who Won't Shut Up About Rampart.)

Probably the best possible treatment of the material, based on what I know of it; solidly captivating and nice to look at. Hard to say why it didn't get a Best Director nod, but it wouldn't have won that anyway, and it likely won't win anything else. Still, as my man Joe Reid says, it's a good sit.

Sarah D. Bunting co-founded Television Without Pity.com, and has written for Seventeen, New York Magazine, MSNBC.com, Salon, Yahoo!, and others. She's the chief cook and bottle-washer at TomatoNation.com. For more on how the Oscars Death Race began, click here.

SIMON SAYS: THE WICKER TREE needed a different director

Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Tree could have been a much stronger film had it not been directed by Robin Hardy, which is a weird thing to think when you actually waste time thinking about it. Hardy is the director of the original 1973 film The Wicker Man and the author of 2006's Cowboys for Christ, a thematic sequel to The Wicker Man. He’s now synonymous with The Wicker Man, a canonical British horror film about a murderous community of Scottish pagans. Hardy’s the first guy that balked in terror and dismay when Neil LaBute’s The Wicker Man, an underdone parody-cum-remake, came out (also in 2006). While playwright Anthony Shaffer scripted the original Wicker Man, it is now considered Hardy’s baby, so who else could direct The Wicker Tree, an adaptation of Cowboys for Christ, but Hardy?

Anyone but Hardy, really. To be fair, The Wicker Tree’s script, which Hardy also adapted, is pretty sharp. He capably evokes the main ideas and wryly cynical sense of humor that makes Cowboys for Christ so entertaining. (Christopher Lee, who starred in the original Wicker Man and has a cameo in The Wicker Tree, heartily endorsed the book by saying, “It's comic, romantic, sexy but also horrific enough to melt the bowels of a bronze statue.”) But as a director, Hardy hasn’t improved drastically in the intervening four decades between The Wicker Man and The Wicker Tree. If there’s anything holding The Wicker Tree back from being the adaptation Hardy’s charmingly mean-spirited source material deserves, it’s unfortunately Hardy.

First, the good news: Hardy does a great job of slimming down Cowboys for Christ’s tangent-filled story to a 90-minute narrative. There are a couple of supporting characters that could have been left on the cutting room floor, like the Scotsman that speaks only in portentous selections from poems and songs. There are also some supporting characters that could stand to be fleshed out a little more, like Beame (Clive Russell), a Scottish butcher that does a lot of dirty work in Hardy’s story. But The Wicker Tree is mostly a very sharp version of Cowboys’ story.

Beth Boothby (Brittania Nicol) is a Texan pop star that used to sing empty-headed, salacious pop songs and now performs Christian-themed country music. Together with Steve (Henry Garrett), her cowboy boyfriend, Beth sets out to convert the residents of Tressock, Scotland to Christianity. This makes Beth and Steve prime targets for the sardonic Sir Lachlan Morrison (Graham McTavish) and his wife Delia (Jacqueline Leonardas), community leaders that are more bemused than off-put by the Americans’ arrival. To Lachlan and Delia, the two missionaries are unexpected but not entirely unpleasant additions to their May Day festivities: Beth will be their Queen of the May and Steve will be their Laddie.

The Wicker Tree is as satisfying as it is because there’s a substantial give-and-take inherent in Hardy’s representation of Cowboys’ central Americans vs. Scots/sincerity vs. sarcasm/chastity vs. sex/Christianity vs. paganism feuds. Both Lachlan and Beth understand that their respective beliefs are determined by a combination of necessity and convenience. Lachlan tells Delia that he’s not a priest or a rabbi but rather a Maypole-worshipping pagan because he feels that’s the religion that will best serve the people of Tressock, whose population has steadily declined after they’ve become more reliant on a new nuclear power plant.

Likewise, Beth wants to turn her back on her past as a randy sex object and focus on her current position as a symbol of Christian piety. But the fact that she acknowledges that she willingly objectified herself in the past suggests that Beth’s also adept at role-playing. It’s fitting then that the character that bridges the ideological gap between Lachlan and Beth is Lolly (Honeysuckle Weeks), a nymphomaniac that has sex with whomever Lachlan tells her to—for the good of their community.

That dichotomy is pretty prominent in The Wicker Tree, for which Hardy fans should be very grateful. What’s not in the film is the crass kind of energy needed to make what’s already a rude and macabre story memorably depraved. There are several key scenes, like the one where Steve meets his demise or when Beth dispatches Beame by almost severing one of his “googlies” with a broken glass, that just aren’t as effectively unnerving as they should be.

For instance, as it’s written in the book, Steve is literally torn apart by a hungry mob. A mob of people, armed only with their zealotry and prying fingers, strip a man of his clothes, skin and muscles and eat him alive. This is Looney-Tunes-by-way-of-Tales-from-the-Crypt kind of stuff, and in The Wicker Tree, Hardy shies away from representing the gristly, ridiculous nature of this sequence. He shows a crowd of Scotsmen frenziedly tucking into some kind of raw meat but never highlights the agony of Steve losing said meat. So while Cowboys’ ideas are present in The Wicker Tree, Hardy inexplicably tries to remove some of the more base aspects of his novel. The Wicker Tree consequently falters where it should bounce around gaily without restraint or a functioning ethical compass.

Still, I wish more people would watch The Wicker Tree. There’s so much of what made Cowboys for Christ terrific in Hardy’s film that I can’t help but want to overlook the bits of The Wicker Tree that simply don’t work. If you’re even remotely curious, seek it out. Come for the half-hearted impromptu castration, stay for the provocative moral relativism.

Simon Abrams is a New York-based freelance arts critic. His film reviews and features have been featured in the Village Voice, Time Out New York, Slant Magazine, The L Magazine, New York Press and Time Out Chicago. He currently writes TV criticism for The Onion AV Club and is a contributing writer at the Comics Journal. His writings on film are collected at the blog, The Extended Cut.

GREY MATTERS: WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN is disjointed and brilliant and baffling

Nothing gets a horror fan more ticked off than a director with airs claiming her new film isn’t really horror but actually a character study exploring the deep psychological recesses of blah blah blah. In the case of We Need to Talk About Kevin director Lynne Ramsay, you’ve got a fancy Scot arthouse filmmaker (Morvern Callar) big on New Wave affect who probably doesn’t think she’s making a horror movie. Lionel Shriver, author of the book the film is based upon, probably thought that, by mentioning horror movies frequently, she could escape the fact that she was blending multiple horror narratives to make one very good horror novel that wasn’t really just a genre effort.

Put the in-denial text and film together, multiply by the accumulated subtexts, carry over the pretenses and, um, wait – is this an algebra equation?

It’s at least a tripartite genre denial, but that’s just one of a panoply of self-imposed avoidances that define the annoyingly interesting We Need to Talk to Kevin. It’s a film where there’s very little to be even slightly certain about, and not in a satisfying, Don’t Look Now/Nicholas Roeg way.

Ramsay’s film fascinates like Goldfrapp’s radical, downcast remix of Lady Gaga’s “Judas” fascinates: as a remix more than an adaptation. Goldfrapp took Gaga’s pop-club banger, cut it to half time and deconstructed it to almost unrecognizable effect. It was creepy, scary, strange, way cool, but not a touch on the original, and is ultimately mainly interesting in relation to its source. In a similar way, Kevin is big on its own abstractions and its relation to the original text, but mainly, I think back on it going, “Why?”

Like the book, Ramsay’s film is about motherhood as living hell – as Job times pi – as suffered by Eva (Tilda Swinton). But Ramsay’s dumped Shriver’s brilliant, flux-y mix of liberalism-critique-meets-Alien-meets-Frankenstein-meets-The Omen-meets-absolution (whew!) in favor of, well, I’ve no idea, really.

Instead, in Goldfrappian manner, Ramsay cuts and pastes bits and pieces of Shriver’s Eva – the cold yuppie, terrified victim, asshole liberal, terrified boomer, Accepting Woman of Eternal Suffering (there are really old blues songs to hammer this in) – and insists that Swinton perform all of them at disconnected junctures. The result is what it might feel like flipping through two twins’ life-long photo album with no captions, with years cut out in between, the pages flipping randomly, and nobody around to tell you what’s what. Could lead to serious WTF. Either that, or Ramsay wants Swinton to “do” archetypes instead of characters. Or something.

But Ramsay’s a fantastic maker of cinema. As much as I was baffled/dazzled by her super-skilled disjointedness, color-coded segues (tomato red never worked so hard) and brilliant dreamtime flow, I was still happy to go with it at the time. But still.

Here, let me tell the original story so some of this starts to make some sense.

In the book, which is told as a series of letters to her all-American/Republican husband Franklin (played in the film by John C. Reilly as a generic Dad), we meet Eva, a pushing-40, self-centered, unbearably obnoxious Manhattan woman who probably reads Mary Gaitskill, Paul Bowles and Jane Austen in equal measure and occasionally sounds like all of them. Her empire of travel books has made her wealthy but also wanting. Maybe a baby is the answer!

Against the background of the 2000 presidential recount nightmare and the end of the Clinton prosperity age (all deleted in Ramsay and Rory Stewart Kinnear’s screenplay), we watch Eva grow aghast as her pregnant body bloats and she name-checks horror films like Alien and Mimic as references for motherhood. It’s a dark joke that the baby turns out to be another sort of monster – a joke Ramsay leaves out, because Ramsay doesn’t do funny. It’s an art-film thing.

When that baby is born, he refuses to breastfeed. The scene’s replayed in the film but there’s no sadness or horror since there’s not really any build-up of body horror, because Ramsay is busy using edits that make you go, “Cool edits,” to super-foreshadow what will happen years later.

Which is – no spoiler – that the grown-up child (the Kevin of the title, of course) will stage a Columbine-esque massacre in his high school, locking up a bunch of kids in a gym and shooting arrows into their bodies. This is something the film fragments in Goldfrappian style because, well, that’s what the movie does: it fragments.

The book, it flashes back and forth in ways that are motivated by theme, emotion and event. You know, literary shit. Neat literary shit that allows Eva to be a Cronenbergian post-feminist Doctor Frankenstein as her misconceived creation, as always in these archetypal tales, becomes a mess – angry, unable to communicate, howling, increasingly sociopathic, and not 4 years old yet.

In the book, the tone and mode and Eva herself flip on a dime, and everything becomes The Omen as Kevin becomes more terrifyingly, more unbeatably Evil (people keep citing The Bad Seed as parallel but I think this kid is far more lowercase hell-sent, as in an inexplicable brand of utter secular badness.) The book’s Kevin likes nothing, hates existing, loves hurting another Frankenstein project that turns out poorly – a weak, pitiable sister named Celia – and in an unbelievably disturbing bit of barely off-stage Grand Guignol, pours Liquid Plumr into her eye, burning the socket dry. But hey, it’s not horror or anything.

And yes, I’m almost sighing as I note that Ramsay, knowing how horrific this business of the missing eye is, starts abstracting it in the first reel of the film in the hope, one assumes, that we’ll be so inured to the concept that by the time Kevin eyes that bottle of Plumr, the worst the audience will feel is an ironic titter. Or something.

Every few chapters, Eva meets post-massacre Kevin (played in the film by Ezra Miller), now an inmate at a youth correctional facility. These are the film’s most engaging moments, but not for the reasons Ramsay would like. They show that all the cool filmmaking in the world is kind of no big deal when compared to a still camera recording two fantastic actors working at the top of their games.

The book’s grandest achievement is how it both accuses Eva as complicit in making a monster and then forgives her; how it takes a thoroughly unlikeable woman and evolves her into someone with a hard self-awareness we have to respect. The film? Ultimately, we’re back to the remix analogy, but without Goldfrapp’s unity of purpose – even if there isn’t much of one.

Two revealing examples of Ramsay’s enforced vagueness:

There’s a shot – a single shot! – where we see Eva standing in front of a large staff of people in some kind of office; I assume it’s her travel book agency. People who’ve not read the book will, of course, have no idea why this shot is in the film. Why rob Eva of her accomplishment, of becoming an entrepreneur, of the life she could have had if she hadn’t had this demon baby? Is this an anti-capitalist gesture? Beats me.

Apropos of nothing and never once followed through, we get the Eva of Shriver’s book – the obnoxious, stereotypical, America-bashing Manhattan liberal – taking Kevin on a trip to a miniature golf course and cawing through an anti-populist rant. If you read the book, this makes sense. I would think that for casual filmgoers, though, this would seem like she was suffering a Truthdig-influenced sort of Tourette’s. Meaningless and, if you excuse the pun, out of left field.

Deal is, I always thought the New Wave was about deleting excess syntax so you could get to the heart of cinema. Ramsay uses some of its disjunctive tropes brilliantly so she never has to commit to anything but Swinton’s pursed grimace.

When she’s not doing that, she loves to have her camera sit still so we can watch Swinton do nothing, and then moves her camera a great deal when Swinton’s doing lots, so that we don’t know for certain what’s actually going on in the agitated frame. It’s like creating secrets, which, I suppose, could be a way of externalizing what Eva is doing with herself.

But see? Here we are, trying to fill in Ramsay’s gaps. Maybe that’s her idea, or mode, or style, or whatever. We Need to Talk About Kevin should perhaps be more accurately titled We Need to Talk About Ramsay. And here we are.

Ian Grey has written, co-written or been a contributor to books on cinema, fine art, fashion, identity politics, music and tragedy. His column "Grey Matters" runs every week at Press Play. To read another piece about Drive, with analysis of common themes and images in all of Refn's films, click here.

OSCARS REVISITED, 1981: CHARIOTS OF FIRE

[EDITOR'S NOTE: In a yearly feature titled "Oscars Revisited," Press Play takes a look back at the Academy Awards race from earlier eras. Our inaugural series focuses on the five Best Picture nominees from calendar year 1981: Reds, Atlantic City, On Golden Pond, Raiders of the Lost Ark and Chariots of Fire.]

When Bud Greenspan loosed his 22-part documentary TV series The Olympiad on the world in 1976, he created a template by which all future Olympic-related works would be judged. Scoring the title sequence with Charpentier’s Te Deum, he signaled the godlike grandeur of the Olympian with Baroque pomp. Chariots of Fire, influenced by Greenspan in its lofty view of pure athletics and idealized, Oscar-winning score by Vangelis, is typical of the kind of Anglophile, prestige ﬁlm the Academy favors. It is also a rare, accurate biopic with an above-average script (it won the best screenplay Oscar as well). This inspirational 1981 ﬁlm tells the true story of the track team Britain sent to the Paris Olympics in 1924. Tellingly, it concentrates on two runners who stand apart from the upper-crust Cambridge men who comprise a major chunk of the team. The ﬁrst is Harold Abrahams (Ben Cross), a hard-driving Jewish law student at Cambridge who uses winning races as a cudgel against anti-Semitism. The second is Eric Liddell (Ian Charleson), the son of a Scottish missionary who intends to follow in his fatherʼs footsteps, but has earned the nickname “The Flying Scotsman” for his prowess as a rugby player and sprinter.

A turning point for Abrahams comes when he watches Liddell run. Not only does he see that his unbroken winning streak can be threatened by the awkward but fast Liddell, but he also meets Sam Massabini (Ian Holm), a professional track coach who has tried unsuccessfully to recruit Liddell. Abrahams persuades Massabini to come see him run, and Massabini agrees to coach him, an arrangement that displeases two Cambridge dons (Sir John Gielgud and Lindsay Anderson) with a strong commitment to the notion of amateurism. Abrahams ignores their protest, gives them a tongue lashing for trying to impede progress, and starts to train for the Olympics with Massabini, who becomes something of a surrogate father to him.

Liddell faces resistance as well when his sister Jennie (Cheryl Campbell) worries that his Olympic dream will tear him away from what is truly important—God and his ministry. While admitting that he has let running crowd out other aspects of his life, he tells Jennie, “I believe God made me for a purpose, but he also made me fast. And when I run I feel His pleasure.” He also has to endure pressure from the Prince of Wales himself for refusing to run a qualifying heat in Paris on the sabbath.

Chariots of Fire takes few liberties with the facts, but screenwriter Colin Welland and director Hugh Hudson arrange them in such a way as to make the underlying story a conflict between mortal men and God. Indeed, the very title of the film quotes from a very pertinent book of the Torah, Kings, and is requoted in the hymn that closes the film “Jerusalem.” The film toggles between holy churches and earthly temples—in one scene, Hudson’s camera lingers amusingly on the figures of stained-glass cricket players adorning a Cambridge restaurant where Abrahams dines.

Abrahams, a fully assimilated, nonpracticing Jew, is always on the outside looking in. Surrounded by the Christianity of his country, he can only stand silently by as choirs praise the name of Jesus at his welcome to Cambridge and dramatically prefers to slip back to England unnoticed rather than face the ecstatic crowds that welcome Liddell and the others home at the boat train. His fiancée Sybil (Alice Krige) and a small sign calling him the toast of England comprise his hero’s welcome, the latter likely a true-to-life sentiment that has the unfortunate effect of seeming to be a bone thrown to the character. The film rather heavy-handedly has Gielgud and Anderson give voice to the anti-Semitism Abrahams faced, a convenient device to keep audiences from turning on his very WASP teammates who likely held similar views. In real life, Abrahams converted to Roman Catholicism, rather perversely still an outsider to English Protestantism; the film doesn’t wish to open that kettle of fish, but does allude to it by opening and closing the film at a present-day church memorial service to the recently deceased Abrahams.

The clear hero of the story is Liddell, a man who might have been handed a white feather of cowardice had he been a conscientious objector during World War I. Instead, he is judged to run for the right reason—to honor God— and sends down a chilling indictment of kings and men who put their own vanity and self-interest above God’s in a sermon delivered at a church somewhere in Paris on the very day he refused to run. This sermon is intercut with his teammates falling short in their races, more affirmation of who’s really the boss.

When Liddell finally prepares to run, he is handed a note containing the Bible quote “Those who honor me I will honor.” The film takes liberties with this true incident by affixing the unsigned note with American runner Jackson Scholz’s signature, a move certain to please an ascendant religious population in the United States. During the race, the reason for his flailing running style is revealed. When a voiceover of his remark to Jennie culminates on the words “His pleasure,” the perfectly cast Charleson throws his head back as if in orgasm, the embodiment of religious ecstasy, and easily wins the race.

Although the final words spoken in the film honor Abrahams (“He did it. He ran them off their feet.”), “Jerusalem” gives the final glory to God:

And did those feet in ancient time walk upon England's mountain green? And was the holy Lamb of God On England's pleasant pastures seen? And did the countenance divine shine forth upon our clouded hills? And was Jerusalem builded here among those dark satanic mills?

Marilyn Ferdinand is founder and a principal of Ferdy on Films and cofounder and a principal of For the Love of Film: The Film Preservation Blogathon, a unique fundraising blogathon now entering its third year. Marilyn has contributed film criticism to Fandor, Time Out Chicago, Wonders in the Dark, and Bright Lights Film Journal. She is a member of the Online Film Critics Society. A Chicago native and lifer, she carries on in the grand journalistic tradition of columnists in her city by using a headshot that reflects a reality long past.

VIDEO ESSAY: The Double Life of James and Juliette: Mysteries and Perceptions in Kiarostami’s CERTIFIED COPY

The Double Life of James and Juliette: Mysteries and Perceptions in Kiarostami's Certified Copy from Peter Labuza on Vimeo.

Narration:

The newest film from Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami, Certified Copy, is a complete and total enigma. Many films pose mysteries at their centers, including detective stories, thrillers with multiple twists, and now often art films that pose ambiguous endings. But Certified Copy emerges as something of a different order, because it challenges the spectator to explore the mystery yet never come to any particular solution. But by examining the clues Kiarostami gives us, we, the audience, can understand the philosophical ideas of what our answers may suggest.

If you haven't seen the film, I should note that this essay will include spoilers, which is unavailable on DVD in the United States but now on Netflix Instant. That actually includes people who have actually seen Certified Copy, as there's much that one may miss a first and even a seconding viewing, a testament to the art of Kiarostami.

Certified Copy follows an art philosopher named James Miller, played by William Shimell and an unnamed character played by Juliette Binoche, only known as "She" in the credits. For simplicity sake, I'll be referring to the character as Binoche. The two strangers meet after he gives a lecture, and walk around a small Tuscan village without much of an agenda. But suddenly the film seems to switch – these are no longer strangers, but a married couple struggling through the day after their fifteenth wedding anniversary.

Kiarostami has said in interviews that there is no direct answer to whether the two protagonists had a previous relationship or not. However, that doesn't mean we shouldn't search for the clues to answer it. Certified Copy is one of those rare films that ties its emotional stakes to its philosophical stakes. If we believe one solution, it means we must assume some proposition about the nature of art that James discusses in his book. At the core of Certified Copy is Kiarostami's own philosophical proposition, explained by James in his opening lecture:

What I want to do is discuss here are three theories related to the film and its central mystery, and explore how Kiarostami hints at them with visual details, the use of particular dialogue (including the delivery of that dialogue), and the metatextual elements of the film, a crucial key in many of Kiarostami's films.

There's a particular turning point in Certified Copy where we realize the film we thought were watching completely turns into something different. While sitting in a café, the owner begins talking with Binoche while James is away.

Binoche tells this to James, who does not dispute.

It is after they leave this café where the movie changes from something more reminiscent of Before Sunrise to something much more dramatic.

James and Binoche stop acting like strangers having a somewhat awkward first date, and begin to act like they've known each other for years. My theory here is that both parties have never met, but Binoche wants to test James. Earlier in the film, we learn that she disagrees with certain points from James's book on the idea of whether a copy can be just as authentic as the original. So Binoche's game is this: If James and her can recreate the emotions of a real couple, and make their drama as authentic as any other, then he wins, so to say.

The question here, however, is who is this game being played for. But Kiarostami presents the answer quite simply.

Us.

We are the judges in Certified Copy, and Binoche directly challenges us. I started to notice this when James and Binoche first sit down at the café. She's staring directly at us, and while Kiarostami gives us her point of view of James, he does not do the same. His look is just off center, and thus that intense connection we get with Binoche through her eyes, we never feel with James.

This puts us in the position of James, who always seems to be one step behind in keeping up in his role as "husband." He doesn't remember the events that Binoche seems utterly convinced of, and she seems to have the whole scheme planned, trying to lead him on to as many details as possible.

This also brings up the nature of casting in film. Binoche is an international superstar, so big that the year Certified Copy premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, it was her face on the festival's poster. But Shimell, who gives a remarkable performance, is someone we don't recognize at all, something he actually comments on at the beginning of the film.

His origins are in the British opera, so for most audiences, it is easier to identify with him as an unknown, especially given that he has a name, James, while she remains to us as simply Binoche, an actress giving a performance on top of a performance. If we consider what an actor is supposed to do, his or her job is to copy the emotions of life and present them on screen. And thus, Binoche does exactly that, whether it is her, the actress, or the character pretending to be someone else.

In fact, much of the film's background feels like copies upon copies. The streets seem to mimic each other; the cypresses that line the drive to the town. And then there's the case of weddings. As soon as we arrive in the town, we see bride…

After bride…

After bride.

Kiarostami has chosen marriage and weddings as a running background theme in Certified Copy not just because of the emotional stakes that weddings suggest, but the idea of marriage as a sacred ritual that is supposed to be a one-time event.

Kiarostami plays with this during one of the film's masterful shots, as a couple pleads with James to be in their wedding photo, having believed that Binoche and him took a similar photo fifteen years ago.

James initially resists, but he soon gives in, and Kiarostami makes a masterstroke by showing another bride lining up, the woman already tearing up over the importance of this event. Weddings thus become copies among copies, each a fleeting moment in the lens of Kiarostami, and an essential reminder that traditions themselves are copies of events from the past, but none are ever given less value.

As the weddings remind us of the joy of marriage, our two protagonists act out their fifteen years of strife and turmoil, trying to discover what went wrong. The two bring up stories to challenge the other – his choice to never be around, her lack of understanding for his situation. Kiarostami constantly brings us closer to the more intimate into the details of their relationship. As they try to cross boundaries, so do we.

One of the major keys is a discussion James has with a French man, who suggests that James simply approach Binoche from the side, and put his arm around her. Doing this action is of course nothing original, but when we see James do it.

Can we really say we don't feel it emotionally? Kiarostami makes this moment a literal bridge as they pass by a tree. Where they were once separate, they are now together. Their emotions may not be authentic, but from our perspective, they certainly are.

When James and Binoche first meet, the two seem like amicable strangers. Why they are meeting, we don't exactly know, but everything seems perfectly fine. As they drive in the car and begin to talk, Kiarostami pulls this in all one straight single take. And then…

This precise cut shows the breaking of a boundary, not only between James and Binoche, but us, the audience, and them. There's also is something curious about Binoche's performance here, a sudden desperation in her voice, a worry not present before. We see the first crack in her armor, perhaps of a secret she's not ready to reveal.

So what I'm suggesting in this theory is that the illusion of the copy is not what comes during the second half of the film, but what comes from the first half. What appears as illusion or just a game may actually be truth, and their pretend date is actually a copy of perhaps a date fifteen years ago.

The crucial point comes right before the moment that changed the narrative. James tells a story about seeing a son following 50 feet behind her mother. It doesn't seem to have any particular relevance, but then Binoche changes the stakes through one line of dialogue.

To even many diligent viewers, this may seem like a odd story for Binoche to tear up at, especially given that we, the audience, don't necessarily understand the circumstances of the situation. However, it was on my third viewing that I noticed something that changed how I read this scene. It's right after Binoche and her son leave the lecture to go get food…

The story that James tells could be coincide, or perhaps, a copy that Binoche responds to, but this seems to be too sensitive of a detail, too shocking of a memory to recall, to simply be a story.

And thus, it is this spark that allows the two to finally admit to their true selves, or some version of it. Consider how the film uses different languages. Kiarostami is of course an Iranian director, and this is his first narrative feature film outside his home country. As a European production – financed mostly by France, shot in Italy, with a cast of one Englishman and one French national – Kiarostami uses different languages throughout the film to clue us in. For the first part of the film, James and Binoche only speak English to each other. Later, when talking to the owner of café, Binoche remarks on his lingual abilities…

However, when the "game" begins, so to say, James decides to switch his linguistic tendencies.

We could simply believe that James is playing along, making stories as quickly as she is, and the two are working together to form a fabricated history. But there's one detail that proved for me this cannot be the case. It deals with James's facial hair, which comes up at the café.

And then again near the end of the film.

Kiarostami relays this important moment while striking an essential visual clue with his characters. As Binoche rests her head on James, we immediately hearken back to their previous discussion about a statue of a man protecting a woman, who laid her head on his shoulder just the same.

If they replicate this statue, do the feelings thus translate between the original work of art and the humans imitating the pose? Because, of course, the artwork itself is an imitation of a gesture the artist of the sculpture must have seen. And thus, the dilemma continues…

To say Kiarostami made Certified Copy without an answer in mind is a little bit of a constructive lie. I think the director has built a film that allows us to believe whatever answer we want. This deals with Kiarostami's real theme of the film – the nature and role of perception.

This brings me to my third theory, which is something of a strange mixture between the two previous ones. If we begin to think about answering the mystery, there are issues we can take with both theories.

Obviously, if James has lied about knowing French and can recall specific details of their relationship, he is certainly no stranger.

However, if Binoche's son has no idea who James is, when he should clearly know his father as the story suggests, then the two can't be the married couple they pretend to be.

Plus, James argues with the role himself…

There is a third option, however – one bizarre but worth proposing. It returns us to the moment on the piazza that has inspired James's book.

James explicitly says that it was five years ago. If they've been married for fifteen, why did this story take place five years ago?

References to five years ago keep coming up and up. My suggestion is this: James certainly knows Binoche, not from their marriage, but being a close friend and perhaps lover that she has hidden over the last five years. So, why the game?

The first part is to stay secret while in a town where someone may recognize the two together, but I think Binoche is interested in creating a copy. Binoche's husband is obviously absent, not only physically, but also emotionally as well. The town she takes James to might be the one she was married at, but she hopes to make a copy of her anniversary, using the man she truly loves, James, instead of her husband.

This theory, tenuous at best, does seem to explain a lot of issues. It proves why James is ambivalent about taking the picture with the couple. Or why he can't recall the hotel they stay at for their wedding night.

It also answers why he knows so many intimate details about the relationship between Binoche and her husband. Perhaps he was a best man at their wedding.

This theory, and all the theories really, get to the meaning of what Kiarostami really wants to talk about when discussing art: its really all about perception.

This is an issue that James and Binoche discuss at length. It comes up when Binoche takes James to a small museum that holds a copy of a painting that they continue to cherish as much as they did when they thought it was an authentic original.

James and Binoche not only discuss this theory as related to art, but in personal and human connection.

Each person in Certified Copy is obsessed with perception. During the sequence in which Binoche tries on the different earrings and makeup in the mirror, she is considering the perception of what James will think of her. She is still the same person, but the different lipsticks and earrings may change how he sees her.

Perception is also a theme that has appeared in many of the works of Kiarostami. In Taste of Cherry, a man who plans on committing suicide, for no reason told to the audience, receives three different answers to why he, or any man, should live. In Close-Up, Kiarostami makes a fake documentary about a man who pretends to be a famous Iranian director. When he is asked in court whether he is acting because there are cameras there, the man tells us "I'm speaking of my suffering, that is not acting." Perhaps, but that's only one perception.

And it is perception that will change how we look at James and Binoche, and whether they've been married or not. This is what Certified Copy is truly about. It's not what the art is, it's how we, the audience, view it. Which is why Kiarostami's film is so open to many different interpretation. However we want to view the film – based on our emotions, our intellect, our philosophy – will create a different picture for us.

In the final moments of Certified Copy, James finally looks at us in the camera. He stares into the mirror the same way Binoche has the entire film. What does he think? What do we think? When he leaves the frame, we see the church bells, but through the frame of the window. If we perceive it through the frame does that change our perception? Kiarostami's beauty as a filmmaker is that he never gives complete answers – he has been quoted as saying that he removes elements from his films, and it is up to the audience to finish the film for him. In this essay, I've tried to complete some of those gaps, but anyone can do so, and create a completely different film. After all, it is how you perceive the object, not what the object truly is.

Peter Labuza is a film writer in New York City originally from Minnesota. He was the former film editor for the Columbia Daily Spectator and has contributed pieces for the CUArts Blog, Film Matters, and MNDialog. He plans to attend graduate school and focus on the history of American film genres. He currently blogs about film at www.labuzamovies.com, where this article was cross-posted. You can also follow him on Twitter.

VIDEO: BREAKING BAD P.O.V. Compilation

YouTube user Kogonada's Breaking Bad montage remixes an array of P.O.V. shots from the series, specifically from the perspective of inanimate objects. Experience what it is to be a frying pan, shovel or clipboard within the world of Walter White.

OSCARS DEATH RACE: REAL STEEL

[EDITOR'S NOTE: Fearless Sarah D. Bunting of Tomatonation.com is making it her mission to watch every single film nominated for an Oscar before the Academy Awards Ceremony on February 26, 2012. She is calling this journey the Oscars Death Race. For more on how the Oscars Death Race began, click here. And you can follow Sarah through this quixotic journey here.]

Real Steel is one of those trailers that makes you turn to your movie-going companion and say, "You know, I really like [above-the-title star who's talented, attractive, and doesn't take himself too seriously but apparently just hit some kind of alimony balloon payment]. He's a nice man. I want him to make lots of money. Are you telling me there's no better way for him to do that than to star in the robot-boxing version of that infernal arm-wrestling Stallone movie from the '80s?"

I actually never saw the infernal arm-wrestling Stallone movie from the '80s, although I saw the hateful Kenny Loggins video from same approximately 17,000 times — but I'm pretty sure Real Steel is the same shit (but with, you know, robot boxing). Robot-boxing impresario/dillweed Charlie (Hugh Jackman) is down on his luck and behind on his rent when he finds out that an ex-girlfriend has died, leaving him in custody of a son, Max, he's never seen (Dakota Koyo). The ex's sister, Debra (Hope Davis), wants t– you know what, who cares. Robots box; the flimsy backstory excuse for Jackman to develop those magnificently ridonk biceps is totally justified; everything works out.

And the movie is pretty fun, despite going on too long, co-starring Evangeline Lilly, and trading cynically on the deep love some of us have for Iron Giant. Four things to like about Real Steel:

1. The robot boxing is fairly rad. It didn't blow my mind or anything, but I bet it looked amazing on an IMAX screen, and they get some cool shots out of it (one early fight features a disturbing visual of a robot with its leg blown off). The country-fight scene gives off a basement-cockfight vibe, and the title fight has a robot ring girl, so it's clear the visual-design team paid attention to little things.

2. The film is totally committed to the fiction that its story capital-M Matters: soaring strings, 12-o'clock camera positions of Max in the rain, old newspaper clippings of Charlie's (people-)boxing career.

3. Koyo is quite good as the kid, despite the character as written bearing Hollywood's customary tenuous resemblance to an actual fifth-grader — and when he gets old enough for this comment not to be a felony, he's going to be really cute.

4. Lilly is fine! I had a bitchy crack all ready to go about how I understand that the Liv Tyler we already have is barely serviceable but it doesn't mean we need a second one, but then Lilly went and turned in a nice performance. I'm-a say it anyway because this is a Death Race and you take your shots where you can, but she's likeable and un-Kate-like in a thankless role. She could put on a bra now and then, though. So…I guess that's really five things to like about Real Steel for you gents, and ladies who like ladies, out there. …Wait. Six. Seven if you count the "I've got her Real Steel right here IN MY PANTS" joke I just handed y'all.

Anyhow! The Oscars. Real Steel got a nod for Visual Effects, and as deeply as I've come to resent the tech categories for horking up hairballs like this, and Tron, and the 654 hours of Harry Potter and the Masterpiece-Theatre Reunion I've sat through, now and then you get a fluffy, crunchy thing like Real Steel. No shot at a statue, but I'm not mad at it.

FESTIVAL VIDEO: Rotterdam Sunset Chat with IndieWire Press Play + The House Next Door + Cine Qua Non

The International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) has been called a cinephile’s festival. This year’s edition (January 25-February 5) is living proof. Indiewire/Press Play editor-in-chief Kevin Lee talks with fellow critics Aaron Cutler (The House Next Door/Cine Qua Non) and Michal Oleszczyk (The House Next Door) about what films to see, old and new, in and out of competition. Recorded February 1, posted February 3. (pictured above: Awakening of the Beast, from the IFFR series "The Mouth of Garbage")

Index of video highlights:

0:20 – Why Rotterdam Matters
1:10 – Rotterdam vs. Sundance
2:52 – Competition Favorites
5:13 – Our Favorite Things from the Festival: Brazil's "The Mouth of Garbage", China's "Hidden Histories," James Benning's "small roads"

OSCARS REVISITED, 1981: RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK

For years after the release of his box-office breakthrough Jaws, Steven Spielberg fantasized about directing a James Bond picture. He got his chance, sort of, with Raiders of the Lost Ark, his first team-up with his longtime friend and fellow "movie brat" George Lucas. The two were on vacation in Hawaii in 1977 after the release of Lucas' own career-redefining blockbuster Star Wars, Episode IV: A New Hope but before the release of Spielberg's next movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Spielberg told Lucas of his desire to make a Bond film; Lucas replied that he had a better idea, and Spielberg instantly seized on it as "James Bond without the gadgets." It was about Indiana Smith, an archaeologist who travelled the world unearthing buried treasure, fighting bad guys and witnessing supernatural events; Lucas envisioned it as an homage to the World War II-era cliffhanger serials that he, Spielberg and other '50s kids used to watch in reruns on local TV, only in color and CinemaScope and in Dolby stereo. Spielberg liked the concept but suggested changing the hero's last name from Smith to Jones.

Four years and a $18 million worth of Paramount's money later, Spielberg and Lucas released Raiders of the Lost Ark, featuring up-and-coming action hero Harrison Ford — Han Solo in Lucas' Star Wars franchise — as the whip-cracking archaeology professor trying to keep the Lost Ark of the Covenant out of Hitler's hands. As scripted by Lawrence Kasdan, who rewrote the Star Wars sequel The Empire Strikes Back, Indy was a rumpled, unshaven, refreshingly human hero, surly but decent, less like a Bond-style sexy sociopath than a Gary Cooper character in a bad mood. The combination of Ford's casual fearlessness, Lucas' gee-whiz sensibility, Spielberg's kinetic precision and costar Karen Allen's tomboy sass made the film into the year's biggest hit, a sleeper that rolled into multiplexes opposite Superman II and the latest James Bond entry For Your Eyes Only and stole their box office thunder. Raiders grossed $209 million in North America and took the "So popular that we can't ignore it" spot in the following year's Best Picture lineup. It also inspired knockoffs, including the network TV series Tales of the Gold Monkey and Bring 'Em Back Alive and the movies High Road to China, Romancing the Stone and The Jewel of the Nile.

Spielberg didn't stint on the violent action; this was probably one the first PG movies in which a lone hero singlehandedly and bloodily eliminated scores of foes, and definitely the first in which the power of God made Nazis' heads melt, implode and detonate, spewing meat chunks into the camera. Three summers later, the even more extreme violence of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and the Spielberg-produced Gremlins inspired the creation of a new MPAA rating, PG-13. But the film's real draw was its mastery of pacing and tone. For a large production shot in several countries, Raiders was light on its feet, zipping through scenes without a wasted frame. And it managed the same neat trick as Spielberg and Lucas' earlier films in managing to seem at once self-aware and innocent. The duo plundered recent and past film history like kleptomaniacs on a prowl through Macy's. The deranged finale evoked Brian De Palma's Carrie and The Fury; Indy's wild escape beneath the carriage of a hijacked truck echoed a similar stunt in John Ford's Stagecoach; the final shot in which the Ark of the Covenant, recently recovered from Hitler's minions, is wheeled into a gigantic warehouse was filched from Citizen Kane. The transitional sequences depicting the global progress of Jones and company via cross-dissolved travel footage and maps festooned with animated red lines was so brazenly old-fashioned that it made the circa-1981 audiences that I saw it with laugh and applaud. (As I recounted in a piece about Raiders for The House Next Door, this was the first film that made me realize that movies could be expressions of a singular sensibility — that they were directed.)

Raiders was a career-redefining entry on the resumes of its major players. Ford stepped into the lead after CBS refused to release the filmmakers' first choice, Magnum, P.I. star Tom Selleck, from his TV contract, and proved he could sell tickets without a laser pistol in his hand; the film's success marked the start of a 20-year run as one of Hollywood's highest-paid actors. Ford's regular employer Lucas showed the studios that he wasn't just the Star Wars guy. The movie also revived Spielberg's career momentum after the box-office flop of 1941 (1979), an epically overscaled bit of period slapstick that in retrospect feels like a dry run for Raiders, an immense physical comedy that owed as much to Jacques Tati and Buster Keaton as it did to poverty row cliffhangers, with a stalwart hero taking on armies. The film and its sequels went on to comprise one of the most financially successful and stylistically influential series ever made. With their superficial awareness of the texture of certain periods and places, Jones' pre-World War II shenaningans felt like a precocious schoolboy's fantasy — flip books scrawled in the margins of a history text. Lucas, Spielberg, Ford and their collaborators pushed this sensibility further in the film's sequels, which saw Indy cheat death in pre-war Shanghai, British colonial India, Nazi-occupied Austria and Germany (where Indy ends up getting his father's Grail diary autographed by Hitler at a book burning!), and an atomic testing site in 1950s Roswell, New Mexico, (which gave prankish new meaning to the phrase "nuclear family"). Although mainstream critics and general audiences enjoyed the series (except for the long-delayed fourth film Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, which some fans viewed as a personal affront) Indy's adventures had their detractors. The New Yorker's Pauline Kael complained that Raiders lacked the human touch of Spielberg's earlier hits and was lukewarm on The Last Crusade — although with typically Kaelian perversity, she adored The Temple of Doom. Alternative press critics pointed out — correctly, but without much impact — that Indy's adventures had an ahistorical and oddly pre-sexual vibe, and that Lucas and Spielberg's depiction of "foreign" cultures was cluless at best, racist at worst; for a long time, Indy's second adventure Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom was banned in India. For a brief period in the late '80s and early '90s, Lucas brought Indy to TV. His youthful adventures were bracketed with segments narrated by a geriatric Indy, a craggy-faced, one-eyed icon whose appearance was inspired by documentary footage of the old John Ford.

The Indy films do have a personal sensibility, although it's admittedly obscured by gunshots, explosions and supernatural maimings. The films feel like daydreams, not product, and their fusion of spectacle, mayhem, slapstick, banter and miracles has no equivalent elsewhere in cinema. And the saga does have an implied narrative that's more knowing and gentle than Spielberg and Lucas' detractors care to admit. Over the course of four films, the arrested adolescent Indy grows up, taking responsibllity for a surrogate family in The Temple of Doom (a prequel that feels like a sequel), reconciling with his estranged dad in The Last Crusade, then coming to terms with mortality and reconnecting with Marion and the son he didn't know he had in Crystal Skull. There's something to be said for Indy's brand of resourcefulness; it's earthbound and useful, rooted in emotional reality and ultimately touching. He's a superheroic everyman, surly and self-effacing — James Bond as Yankee prole. "I'm going after that truck," Indy tells his buddy Sallah, before throwing himself into the movie's most raucous action setpiece. "How?" Sallah asks. "I don't know," Indy replies, pushing his hat down tight on his head. "I'm just making this up as I go."

A critic, journalist and filmmaker, Matt Zoller Seitz is the staff TV columnist for New York Magazine and the founder of Press Play.

OSCARS REVISITED, 1981: ON GOLDEN POND

Of the five films nominated for Best Picture of 1981, On Golden Pond is greeted with the most derision – dismissed as the Academy falling for cheap sentiment as an excuse to honor their own. Raiders of the Lost Ark set the template for the modern blockbuster, its popularity and influence so immediate that recognition could not be denied it. Atlantic City had an almost European attitude toward character and sexuality while providing a wonderful showcase for Burt Lancaster. Reds was a mix of sweeping historical romance and vanity project. And the winner, Chariots of Fire, had just the right combination of underdog scrappiness and rarefied air of repressed British passion that wins over voters. But what about On Golden Pond?

At the time of the Academy Awards, the film's box office take was closing in on $80 million. It was obviously hitting a chord with audiences, but the critical response was mixed at best. The positive notices seemed to be written under duress. The rest of the mixed-to-negative reviews rang of hardened resistance to being moved at the sight of two old geezers puttering about and saying the damnedest things. (I know one critic who at the time referred to the movie as On Golden Shower.) Some critics and younger film buffs scoffed at a movie they perceived as appealing to middlebrow tastes – i.e., conservative older moviegoers who probably say things like, “Why don’t they make more movies like that?” On Golden Pond was one of the first big Reagan-era dramas, the anti-Ordinary People. The pairing of Katharine Hepburn and Henry Fonda bridged opposing ends of Hollywood’s political spectrum – the brassy liberal and the stern all-American traditionalist. And the sight of Hanoi Jane making nice with her dad now seems like one of the first examples of what turned out to be a major trope in 1980s American cinema, the sight of '60s kids reconciling with their parents.

Seen today, the film version of Ernest Thompson’s Broadway hit looks shockingly small-scale, quaint even. If it weren’t for the star power, it might not have been a hit. Seeing Hepburn and Fonda portray Ethel and Norman Thayer stirs all kinds of emotions. We are at once watching the characters and the actors. The simplicity of the story is crucial to us connecting with the Thayer family. A more complex story would be pointless. Fonda was 76 years old and Hepburn was 74 years old at the time of filming. They no longer had to get into character. They were the characters.

If you didn’t know the movie was based on a play it wasn't hard to figure out, and not just because the story takes place in and around one location. Thompson’s dialogue has, at times, an overly-written cleverness. Unlike the worst of Neil Simon, where characters talk in two-liners, Ethel and Norman speak to each other in quips. What keeps their exchanges from being intolerable is that we feel as if they’ve been talking like this for their entire lives.

The story’s structure is at times quite rickety, but it is also curiously comforting. The opening scene sets the tone perfectly as the Thayers arrive at their summer home and Ethel quickly gets out of the car and calls for Norman to listen to the loons. It’s a classic Kate moment as she says, “The looons, the looons.” (Norman claims he can’t hear anything.) The opening scenes have a stagy busyness that only pros like Hepburn and Fonda can keep from being grating. (The bit where Norman calls the operator so they can call him is quite funny.) The opening passages show the Thayers puttering around, taking their boat to town to pick up supplies, making small talk with Charlie the mailman (William Lanteau). These scenes are finely executed but feel frankly quite twee. Then, Norman has an episode where he can’t remember the route of the road in the woods he’s taken thousands of times to town. He momentarily lets his guard down and tells Ethel he’s scared. Ethel comforts him by saying, “Listen to me, mister, you’re my knight in shining armor.” Up to this point Hepburn has spoken in her trademark New England braying bellow. (Seeing and hearing her again made me realize just how astonishing Cate Blanchett’s portrayal of Hepburn was in The Aviator.) But when she comforts Norman she lowers her voice, almost whispering. It’s a great piece of acting that only someone as experienced as Hepburn could make look easy. The scene hooks us and we’re on Norman and Ethel’s side for the rest of the movie.

Not much happens during the summer. Well, not exactly. What happen are the kind of small compromises and accommodations that sometimes occur in families. The Thayers’ wayward daughter Chelsea writes and says she wants to visit for Norman’s 80th birthday. She says she’s bringing her latest boyfriend and his 13-year-old son from a previous marriage. The scene where Norman and Ethel wait for Chelsea to arrive surprises us because an unexpected tension starts to mount. Through inferences we learn that Norman and Chelsea have a friction-filled relationship that they tiptoe around; of course there’s also tension because we know real-life conflict existed between Jane Fonda and her dad. That’s what makes their first on-screen scene together so good. We sense things could explode at any moment. Henry Fonda’s admiration of his daughter’s acting registers as Norman’s distant nature as the old man tries in his own way to get along with her.

(Watching Henry Fonda in On Golden Pond, I was struck at how son Peter Fonda’s career-capping performance in Ulee’s Gold is like the dark side of Norman Thayer; the younger Fonda is playing both his dad and Ulee Jackson.)

The middle section of the movie consists of the Thayers looking after Billy Ray (Doug McKeon), son to Bill Ray (Dabney Coleman), who is taking Chelsea to Europe for a month. Coleman’s big scene with Henry Fonda is a real gem. At first he is intimidated by Norman and comes off as almost condescending towards him. Norman senses this and refuses to give him a break. The way Bill calls Norman out on trying to push his buttons is startling to both us and Norman. Norman decides he’s good enough for his daughter. McKeon, iffy in the early scenes, eventually grows on you. He matches up nicely with Fonda as they develop a winning comic rhythm. We need to feel their affection for one another so that the sequence where their lives are danger doesn’t feel like a manipulation of the plot.

Norman, Ethel and Billy make a fun trio as we sense they’re getting right as surrogate grandparents what they got wrong as parents. There’s a feeling that tragedy could occur at any moment. It doesn’t, really. The big scene in the movie is when Norman and Billy attempt to navigate their boat through a rocky cove. They hit a rock and Norman falls overboard. The highlight of the sequence comes when Ethel goes looking for them and comes upon their boat. When she sees Norman and Billy hanging onto a rock she immediately dives into the water and swims toward them. What gives the scene a swelling emotional power is that Hepburn’s stunt is done in one unbroken shot. She really jumps into the water.

Jane Fonda’s interactions with Hepburn and her father demonstrate her skill at being able to adapt to differing acting styles. Her scenes with Hepburn have a loose give-and-take feel. There’s a remarkable scene where mother and daughter go skinny-dipping at night. Seeing their heads poking above the water at night, we register that it is possible Jane could be the offspring of these two. Her sharp features and her quivering, clipped voice are just right. Her big scene with her father is one for the time capsule. The way her Strasberg-training acting style and his do-it-as-rehearsed strictness rub against each other beautifully illustrates the generational gap they are trying to close. The elder Fonda hated improvisation. He felt there was no need to change what was already on the page. This leads to a fleeting moment where the real world comes crashing into the movie. Chelsea tells Norman she wants to be his friend. When the camera switches to Henry Fonda’s side of the scene, Jane/Chelsea improvises a gesture and puts her hand on his arm. (You’ll miss it if you’re not looking for it.) This bit of business was not rehearsed and startled the elder Fonda. His fleeting reaction to this moment of affection is real. You see him turn, almost embarrassed by the intimacy of the moment. At the end of the movie, when Chelsea, who always refers to her father as “Norman,” calls him “Dad,” we can no longer separate the characters’ quiet acknowledgement of their love from seeing Jane and Henry finally connect with one another.

At the time of its success, On Golden Pond was mocked in some quarters as being some kind of big-screen therapy session for the Fondas. Seen today, removed from its zeitgeist moment, On Golden Pond reveals itself to be an enormously moving (if manipulative) story of familial reconciliation.

San Antonio-based film critic Aaron Aradillas is a contributor to The House Next Door, a contributor to Moving Image Source, and the host of “Back at Midnight,” an Internet radio program about film and television.