America’s Best Picture? All of Them

http://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/25/opinion/sunday/americas-best-picture-all-of-them.html

Version 0 of 1.

For years, the Academy Awards reliably recognized movies that attempted to capture the sweep of the American idea — in earnest films like “Forrest Gump” and “Saving Private Ryan” as well as more scorching efforts like “There Will Be Blood” — that seemed to want to define the country, and its people, all at once.

If you wanted a shot at a best-picture Oscar in that era, an ambitious statement film that tried to tell Americans who they really are was a good bet.

But in this decade, the Oscars have turned inward, eschewing ambitious epics and grand statements about the national character in favor of anxious self-reflection, bestowing the Academy’s highest honors on films like “The Artist” and “Argo” that flattered Hollywood’s self-image. True, in the aftermath of the financial crisis, a handful of movies tried to channel the country’s mood (“The Wolf of Wall Street” and “American Hustle”) or critique its historic self-conception (“12 Years a Slave”). But by and large, Hollywood went from examining the national character to examining its own.

This year’s crop has some of that. A top contender, “La La Land,” a technically proficient love letter to old Hollywood musicals, is set in Los Angeles, of course.

Yet the nine films nominated for the Academy’s highest honor manage to present a vision not of the American identity, but of the variety of American identities — a collage of very different American lives that, taken together, provide as strong a sense of the American idea as any single movie ever has.

Start with “Fences,” which, along with “Moonlight” and “Hidden Figures,” explores the black experience in America.

Denzel Washington’s stirring adaptation of August Wilson’s 1985 play about a working-class black family in Pittsburgh during the 1950s probably has the most to say about the American character. Working from some of the same elements as “Death of a Salesman,” it is blunt about the role of racial discrimination in postwar America. Yet it is also a small-scale affair about the struggles of family life set mostly in a tiny back yard.

“Hidden Figures,” a true story about the contributions of black women to the space program during the 1960s, plays like a perspective-flipped version of “The Right Stuff.” Both “Figures” and “Fences” are steeped in a kind of counter-nostalgia that re-examines postwar America in a more critical light.

No Oscar nominee this year is more intensely focused on the nuances and complexities of individual identity than “Moonlight.” The most likely challenger to “La La Land,” it follows its gay, black protagonist — first as a child, then as a teenager and finally as a hardened young adult — as he struggles with self-actualization and self-acceptance. As Juan (Mahershala Ali), the drug dealer who helps raise him, says early in the film: “At some point, you got to decide for yourself who you’re going to be. Can’t let nobody make that decision for you.”

The line is the key to this year’s entire slate of best-picture nominees, which are built on depictions of specific people and places with cultures and cadences, and accents and aesthetics, that define the characters as separate from the rest of the country.

Another set of films examine class and culture in white America.

“La La Land” is both a throwback musical fueled by cinematic self-reference and a portrait of two urban, coastal strivers who pour themselves into their ideas and ambitions, in part because they cling to a belief in the promise of a creatively and economically fulfilling life.

That makes for a striking contrast with “Hell or High Water,” a taut neo-Western thriller set against the economic struggles of small-town Texas, where debt is rampant and the population is dwindling. The movie follows two brothers who, in an act of economic revenge, have decided to rob the bank that’s about to foreclose on their family home. It’s a bleak, rural counterpoint to the colorful urban fantasia of “La La Land”; one tells the story of working-class men with nothing to lose, the other the story of creative professionals with everything to gain.

Mel Gibson’s bloody, brutal World War II drama “Hacksaw Ridge” also nods to classic Hollywood, with a romantic, earnest first hour. The film tells the true story of the religiously motivated conscientious objector Desmond Doss’s battlefield heroism, and it stands out in this year’s field for its unironic portrayal of individual religious conviction.

All these films embrace cultural memory of a decidedly different flavor than what’s on display in “Fences” and “Hidden Figures.”

In “La La Land,” Ryan Gosling plays Seb, a jazz fanatic obsessed with the genre’s decline. He takes Mia (Emma Stone) to a jazz club, where he insists: “That’s why you need to be in the space and see what’s at stake. This whole thing — it’s dying.” For Seb, jazz isn’t just a kind of music. It’s a way of life, enacted in a particular place, but it’s struggling to survive — much like the dusty Texas towns of “Hell or High Water.”

The writer-director Kenneth Lonergan’s “Manchester By the Sea” is another film defined by both a deep sense of place and a painful attachment to the past. Mr. Lonergan’s portrait of mumbling, emotionally detached Northeastern working-class whites forced to deal with unbearable loss is a story about a distinctly individual trauma, but also about how a community’s particular traits and habits can alter the way that loss is felt.

Each of these movies, in other words, is about the struggle for individual and cultural self-definition — and the challenge of allowing for all those competing self-definitions to flourish and coexist within some larger American community. They are portraits of a nation fragmented by race, class, culture and geography.

Even the two I have yet to mention — “Lion” and “Arrival” — exist on the same continuum. “Lion,” the only best-picture nominee to be set entirely outside the United States, is the true tale of an international adoptee’s search for his Indian birthplace that deals with belonging and the pull of two very different cultures.

“Arrival” is a literary science-fiction story about translating an alien language, and in the process learning a new thought paradigm that staves off global war. It’s a movie about learning to find peace in a dangerous world with others who don’t speak or think like you.

Which is something like the challenge that America now faces. Perhaps more than anything else, last year’s presidential race was fought over internal questions of national identity as well as uneasiness about America’s place in the world. The election did not resolve those questions so much as highlight the strength of disagreement.

The narrow, personal focus of this year’s top Oscar nominees suggests how tough it may be for Americans, or Hollywood, to settle on a single unifying vision of what America means, or what it means to be an American. It may never again be possible for one movie to fully answer those questions. More likely, it never was.

Yet this year’s best-picture crop may have provided an answer — in the notion that there is no one American story, but a variety of specific and unique American stories, and in the idea that America is a nation of both individualism and pluralism. You might think of the movies in the best-picture category as a kind of expanded cinematic universe — not of superheroes, but of ordinary, extraordinary lives, overlapping and intersecting in a sprawling national epic too big for any one film.

Of course, that means the task is more difficult for moviegoers as well: If you really want to find out what America looks like, you have to watch all of them.