Brazil (Terry Gilliam, 1985)

Jonathan Pryce in Brazil

Cast: Jonathan Pryce, Robert De Niro, Katherine Helmond, Ian Holm, Bob Hoskins, Michael Palin, Ian Richardson, Peter Vaughan, Kim Greist, Jim Broadbent. Screenplay: Terry Gilliam, Tom Stoppard, Charles McKeown. Cinematography: Roger Pratt. Production design: Norman Garwood. Film editing: Julian Doyle. Music: Michael Kamen.

I have to admit reluctantly that I'm not a fan of the kind of dystopian social satire epitomized by Terry Gilliam's Brazil and echoed in such films as Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Delicatessen (1991) and the Coen brothers' The Hudsucker Proxy (1994). They seem to me too scattered to be effective as satire, too dependent on production design and special effects to connect with the realities they're supposedly lampooning. I find myself forgetting them almost once they end. That said, Brazil is always worth watching just for the performances of a cast filled with specialists in a kind of British-style muddling through even the weirdest of situations.

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.

Anna Karenina (Joe Wright, 2012)

Jude Law and Keira Knightley in Anna Karenina

Anna Karenina: Keira Knightley
Alexei Karenin: Jude Law
Count Vronsky: Aaron Taylor-Johnson
Stiva Oblonsky: Matthew Macfadyen
Dolly Oblonskaya: Kelly MacDonald
Kitty Scherbatsakaya: Alicia Vikander
Konstantin Levin: Domhnall Gleeson
Countess Vronskaya: Olivia Williams
Princess Betsy: Ruth Wilson

Director: Joe Wright
Screenplay: Tom Stoppard
Based on a novel by Leo Tolstoy
Cinematography: Seamus McGarvey
Production design: Sarah Greenwood
Costume design: Jacqueline Durran

Anyone who wants to shake up an established film genre gets my support, even when what they do doesn't quite work. So I'm okay with what Joe Wright tries to do to the historical costume drama and the adaptation of a famous novel in his version of Anna Karenina. Which isn't to say that I think it works. What does work is the attempt by Wright and his screenwriter, Tom Stoppard, to redress the imbalance I've noted in my entries on two previous film adaptations of Tolstoy's novel, the ones directed by Clarence Brown in 1935 and Julien Duvivier in 1948: the neglect of the half of the novel that deals with Konstantin Levin. Domhnall Gleeson, the Levin of Wright's film, is hardly the Levin Tolstoy describes as "strongly built, broad-shouldered," but Gleeson seems to know what the character is about. And he's beautifully matched with Alicia Vikander, who gives another knockout performance as Kitty. Wright and Stoppard use their story as an effective foil for the obsessive, careless love of Anna and Vronsky. That it's only part of Levin's function in Tolstoy's novel, which gives us a view of Russian reform politics and social structure through Levin's eyes, just goes to show that you can't have everything when you're trying to adapt literature to a medium it isn't quite suited for. Wright has also cast brilliantly. As Karenin, Jude Law elicits sympathy for a character that can easily be reduced to a stock villain, as when Basil Rathbone played him in 1935. I also liked Matthew Macfadyen as Oblonsky, Anna's womanizing brother, and it's fun to see Macfadyen and Knightley together in completely different roles from Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet, whom they played in Wright's 2005 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. As Anna, Knightley sometimes looks a bit too much like a gaunt fashion model in the Oscar-winning costumes by Jacqueline Durran, and Taylor-Johnson lays on the preening a bit too much in his bedroom-eyed Vronsky, but they have real chemistry together. Seamus McGarvey's Oscar-nominated cinematography makes the most of Sarah Greenwood's production design. But the decision to film the story partly as as if it were being staged in some impossible, dreamlike theater, but also partly realistically, goes astray. It begins as if it were a comedy, with the philandering Oblonsky sneaking around from his wife both onstage and backstage. And throughout the film, reversions from realistic settings to the theater keep jarring the overall tone. There are occasionally some spectacular uses of the set, as when the horses in Vronsky's race run across a proscenium stage, and in his accident, horse and rider plunge off the stage. Here and elsewhere, Greenwood's design is extraordinarily ingenious. But the theater trope -- all the world's a stage? -- never resolves itself into anything thematically satisfying.