The Favourite (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2018)

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Shakespeare in Love (John Madden, 1998)

Colin Firth and Joseph Fiennes in Shakespeare in Love

William Shakespeare: Joseph Fiennes
Viola De Lesseps: Gwyneth Paltrow
Philip Henslowe: Geoffrey Rush
Hugh Fennyman: Tom Wilkinson
Lord Wessex: Colin Firth
Tilney: Simon Callow
Queen Elizabeth: Judi Dench
Nurse: Imelda Staunton
Ned Alleyn: Ben Affleck
Richard Burbage: Martin Clunes
Christopher Marlowe: Rupert Everett
Ralph Bashford: Jim Carter
John Webster: Joe Roberts

Director: John Madden
Screenplay: Marc Norman, Tom Stoppard
Cinematography: Richard Greatrex
Production design: Martin Childs
Film editing: David Gamble
Costume design: Sandy Powell
Music: Stephen Warbeck

Posterity is a bitch. Winning a best picture Oscar doesn't necessarily fix a film permanently in the hearts and minds of moviegoers or film historians. Who today, for example, thinks that How Green Was My Valley (John Ford, 1941) was a better film than Citizen Kane, the Orson Welles masterpiece that it beat for best picture Oscar? And even more recent Oscar history is littered with dubious choices, most notably Paul Haggis's Crash, which was chosen as best picture of 2005 over Ang Lee's epochal Brokeback Mountain. Almost overnight, the tide began to turn against John Madden's Shakespeare in Love, in large part because it was a surprise winner over the presumed front-runner, Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan. As time has passed, Gwyneth Paltrow's best actress win for Shakespeare in Love has been questioned, too, partly because Paltrow's subsequent acting career has done nothing to maintain her reputation and her dabbling in fields such as country music, fashion, and off-beat New Age medicine and diet has made her look like a giddy dilettante. Even the fall of Harvey Weinstein cast a dark shadow over Shakespeare in Love, which he helped produce for his company, Miramax, and for which he managed an extensive Oscar campaign. But watching the film last night, I found myself caught up once again in its witty imagining of Shakespeare's life and milieu, the sexiness of its romantic intrigue, and yes, Paltrow's skillful performance of what is essentially four roles: Viola De Lesseps, Thomas Kent, and both Romeo and Juliet. It's a charming tour de force that makes me wonder what brought it out of her and what subsequently made her crash and burn. Much of the success of the film, however, lies not in its uniformly good performances or in John Madden's direction, but in the Oscar-winning screenplay by Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard. I suspect the latter, who had already demonstrated his intimate knowledge of Shakespeare in the play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, is most responsible for a screenplay that can attract the casual moviegoer and entertain English majors at the same time. Some of its jokes go over a lot of the audience's heads, such as the revelation that the bloodthirsty, sadistic street urchin who hangs around the playhouse is named John Webster. The character is just the right age to grow up to write those hair-raising Jacobean plays The Duchess of Malfi (1612) and The White Devil (1614), but not knowing that doesn't matter much to the success of the film. Shakespeare in Love is never, as its central character would put it, "caviar to the general." Is it a better film than Saving Private Ryan? Or is it just smaller but cleverer and the temporary beneficiary of aggressive promotion? That bitch posterity will be the final judge.

Hugo (Martin Scorsese, 2011)

Hugo Cabret: Asa Butterfield
Georges Méliès: Ben Kingsley
Isabelle: Chloë Grace Moretz
Station Inspector: Sacha Baron Cohen
Mama Jeanne: Helen McCrory
Rene Tabard: Michael Stuhlbarg
Uncle Claude: Ray Winstone
Lisette: Emily Mortimer
Monsieur Labisse: Christopher Lee
Madame Emilie: Frances de la Tour
Monsieur Frick: Richard Griffiths
Hugo's Father: Jude Law

Director: Martin Scorsese
Screenplay: John Logan
Based on a novel by Brian Selznick
Cinematography: Robert Richardson
Production design: Dante Ferretti
Film editing: Thelma Schoonmaker
Costume design: Sandy Powell
Music: Howard Shore

Martin Scorsese's fantastical tribute to pioneer filmmaker Georges Méliès begins with a spectacular traveling shot, a combination of CGI and live action, sweeping across Paris and into the Gare Montparnasse until it finishes on a shot of young Hugo Cabret in the clock tower. Normally, I feel that too much CGI robs a movie of its grounding in reality, drawing attention to itself at the expense of characters and story. But on the other hand, who can really doubt that if computer graphics had been available to Georges Méliès, he wouldn't have done something similarly amazing with them, the way he relied on papier-mâché, cardboard, flash powder, and whatever camera tricks he could muster? One of the great delights of Hugo is its re-creations of parts of Méliès's movies, particularly from the behind-the-scenes angle. It's a charming film, perhaps a little overloaded with effects, but Scorsese has a light touch with the story and he has a cast equal to the task of standing up to the computer trickery. A few critics demurred, finding the special effects oppressive, especially in the 3-D version, but on the whole the reviews were raves. It also won Oscars not only for the effects but also for cinematography, art direction, and sound mixing and editing, and was nominated for best picture, director, screenplay, film editing, costumes, and musical score. It seems to me a much better film than the year's best picture winner, The Artist (Michel Haznavicius), coincidentally a movie set in a significant moment in film history. Yet it was a major box-office flop, which may have shadowed its chances at the awards.

Far From Heaven (Todd Haynes, 2002)

Jason Franklin, Bette Henritze, and Julianne Moore in Far From Heaven

Cathy Whitaker: Julianne Moore
Frank Whitaker: Dennis Quaid
Raymond Deagan: Dennis Haysbert
Eleanor Fine: Patricia Clarkson
Dr. Bowman: James Rebhorn
Sibyl: Viola Davis
Mona Lauder: Celia Weston

Director: Todd Haynes
Screenplay: Todd Haynes
Cinematography: Edward Lachman
Production design: Mark Friedberg
Music: Elmer Bernstein
Costume design: Sandy Powell

Homage never turns into parody in Todd Haynes's Far From Heaven, a film whose very title alludes to Douglas Sirk's great 1955 melodrama All That Heaven Allows. Haynes's film is set in 1957, only two years after Sirk's was released, but the sensibility that controls it is very much of an era almost half a century later. Haynes has the liberty to deal with matters that were taboo for American filmmakers in 1955, specifically miscegenation and homosexuality -- two terms that now have an antique sound to them. But his film has the same resonance as Sirk's: Both expose the raw wounds inflicted on people by social conventions, by the desire to "fit in" with what a given community establishes as its values. We like to think of the 1950s as the nadir of American conformity, a society on the brink of having its repressive qualities exploded by the rebellious 1960s, but although Haynes's film is a "period piece," I think it also provokes us to evaluate what restricts us today. We can pat ourselves on the back that we -- or at least the liberal-minded people in the circles in which I travel -- no longer recoil in horror at an interracial couple or find ourselves shocked, shocked that there are people who love others of their own sex. But just as Cathy Whitaker and her circle of friends retreat into an exclusive community, we too often find ourselves falling into a similar trap of smug self-righteousness that won't withstand the cold shock of reality -- like, for example, a presidential election gone awry. Cathy's blithe intellectualized conviction that all people are created equal is tested when she crosses the invisible line between the races. Her frustration at not being able to have a friendship with a black man -- i.e., someone other than the dull suburbanites that surround her -- is mirrored by her husband's inability to make his way out of the closet. But Cathy naively thinks that there's a "cure" for his problem, making it a lesser trial than her own, which she can blame on society. In the end, the beauty of Haynes's film is that he never yields to the temptation to impose a false liberation on his characters, an ending in which everyone lives happily ever after. Cathy sees Raymond off at the station, knowing that she'll never visit him in Baltimore. Frank is holed up in a hotel room with his lover instead of his spacious suburban home, his family life and probably his job now at an end. They are real enough characters that we want to know what will happen to them, but we suspect that there are no stirring triumphs ahead, only a struggle to rebuild damaged lives. Haynes and his team of cinematographer Edward Lachman, production designer Mark Friedman, costumer Sandy Powell, and composer Elmer Bernstein have crafted a 1950s world that's familiar to us from countless movies, but because of the shrewdness of the screenplay, the depth of the characterization, and the brilliance of the performers the film succeeds in making it real. There are stereotypes in the film, like Celia Weston's malicious gossip, but they are balanced by roles that could have fallen too easily into stereotypes -- Patricia Clarkson's best friend, James Rebhorn's doctor, Viola Davis's maid -- yet manage to develop dimensions of actuality. Far From Heaven also does something that very few films inspired by older ones do: It illuminates its source, so that it's possible to watch All That Heaven Allows again with a new understanding of Sirk's achievement.

Starz