Was this the year cinema chickened out?

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/feb/05/hollywood-lost-edge-awards-seasons-proves

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Cinema may be our era’s dominant art form, but it has rarely been the bravest. As a mass-entertainment industry, it has often succumbed to financial, political and cultural pressures. The past 12 months, however, have seen a display of cowardice that startled many.

Today, The Interview finally shuffles on to British screens. Last year, Sony Pictures cancelled the Pyongyang-bashing comedy’s release after an unconvincing terror threat. It took the intervention of President Obama to persuade the studio and cinemas to relent. George Clooney tried to rally Hollywood against this show of funk with a petition. “Nobody signed the letter. Nobody stood up,” he was later obliged to report.

The loss of nerve reflected in this incident has come to permeate the industry’s output. “It’s one of the more creatively timid times in Hollywood,” actor Will Ferrell has observed. “The truth is that Hollywood is risk-averse,” says Variety’s Steven Gaydos. “It’s trying not to alienate any possible audience.”

The big studios are in trouble. Last year, cinema admissions fell sharply as new media won more ground in the battle for eyeballs. Western filmgoers are losing their taste for tentpole movies, so others further afield must be courted. “Foreign markets like China and Russia are by far the most important influences on film production,” according to film historian Peter Biskind, whose seminal book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls documented a time when Hollywood was all about mad gambles and leaps of faith – in the audience, as much as the movie. Bland and inoffensive films usually travel best.

However, it’s not only major players who are pulling punches; independents have their own problems. “Among low-budget films there may be a bit more risk-taking,” says Gaydos, “but different rules come into play. Political correctness ensures that there’s no bracing, wide-open dialogue. Instead you get conformity.”

Even publicly funded film-makers are being affected. Last year, the British Film Institute required applicants for lottery funding to tick two out of three diversity boxes. “It’s vital that our film and television industries reflect and properly represent our society,” explained BFI chief executive Amanda Nevill.

Such considerations do not exempt the subsidised and independent sectors from ever-tougher financial demands. The success of The King’s Speech in 2010 led backers to expect small films to reach larger audiences. This week, British indies were applauded for achieving their highest-ever share of box-office receipts. In response, culture secretary Sajid Javid described the UK film industry as “a powerhouse for growth”.

It’s these conditions that have shaped the films now vying for awards. Shortlists boast much already-acknowledged excellence. Actors have delivered unparalleled tours de force; cinematography, writing and design have all shone. Yet something has been missing. It’s edge.

“For social and political boldness, Hollywood and the Oscars are not the place to look,” says Alex Cox, the maverick British director behind Repo Man and Sid and Nancy, whose star has waned as cinema’s capacity to embrace audacity has flagged. Neither, apparently, are the Baftas. A closer look at some of the top contenders at both events lends colour to Cox’s judgment.

The odds-on favourite for best picture at the Baftas and the Oscars is Richard Linklater’s Boyhood. Its theme is pertinent. While girls do their homework, conform and succeed, boys are increasingly mired in moody recalcitrance. Stepdads and teachers urge discipline on Boyhood’s unruly hero. He gamely resists. Nonetheless, he ends up scoring a hot chick and looking set on the path towards an enviable career.

Related: The 10 best films of 2014: No 2 – Boyhood

Luckily for him, he happens to be blessed with creative genius and heart-throb looks that release him from his apparent predicament. It’s a heart-warming outcome, but it’s also a cop-out. Such treacly treatment of a pressing topic contrasts sadly with Linklater’s forthright take on marriage in 2013’s Before Midnight.

Britain’s top dog in the running for best film is The Imitation Game, about gay Bletchley Park codebreaker Alan Turing. From his story, three different characters draw the same moral: “Sometimes it’s the people who no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one can imagine.” Now that the geeks control our lives, this homily is surely redundant. It serves not to shame us, but to feed our self-satisfaction.

Hot on its heels in the race is another scientific genius biopic, The Theory of Everything, in which Stephen Hawking’s struggles with dread disease and cosmological mystery prove less compelling than his love life. The film wakes up when Hawking manages to dump his devoted first wife Jane for his comely nurse. The emotional realities of the situation cry out for exhaustive scrutiny, but instead the film withdraws to the sidelines.

In a 1999 memoir, Jane said “flames of vituperation, hatred, desire for revenge leapt at me from all sides, scorching me to the quick”. Yet, in the film, no one gets upset, all remain friends and the superstar scientist’s image remains considerately unsullied. One critic dismissed it as “a shallow, tame adaptation of Jane Hawking’s memoir, diluted to the point of tedium”.

Related: The Imitation Game: inventing a new slander to insult Alan Turing

The Oscar field finds room for a further portrayal of a real-life paragon: Selma, which breaks the news that Martin Luther King was one of the good guys and that his people were wronged. These points may be little disputed, but the film still stands accused of adjusting history to keep things facile.

Unlike 12 Years a Slave, this hagiography delivers no shocks and will disquiet few. In the era of Ferguson, Staten Island and Bridgeton, something addressing our own period’s racial tensions, as Fruitvale Station did, might have been more welcome.

Still, Selma is not alone in shunning the perplexities of the present for the comfort blanket of the past. During the year, film-makers vied with each other to refight battles won long ago and revisit superannuated controversies.

The centenary of the first world war brought us Testament of Youth. Its muted tale of a Somerville place forgone for the rigours of wartime nursing “is veiled with piety”, according to Peter Bradshaw. It certainly pales in comparison with All Quiet on the Western Front, La Grande Illusion, Oh! What a Lovely War or King and Country.

The second world war yielded little more sustenance. Both Fury, Brad Pitt’s tank opera, and Unbroken, Angelina Jolie’s PoW true story, bring battle strikingly to life, but fall back on narrative tropes too threadbare to stimulate. Northern Ireland’s Troubles yielded one of the year’s best British films, but ’71 is a thriller, not a reopening of the island’s abiding wounds, like Steve McQueen’s Hunger.

Related: Is American Sniper historically accurate?

Sometimes revisiting the past can help lay present ghosts. It was only when Vietnam was slipping into history that Hollywood confronted its legacy. As the Iraq war fades from view, we might have hoped for its Apocalypse Now. Instead, the Oscar best picture shortlist offers Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper.

This film (“bland, unsubtle and worryingly dull”, according to Bradshaw) is not out to learn lessons. Instead, it prefers to invest the computer-gamer’s delight in dealing death with the glow of heroism. Its Iraqis are targets, not human beings; the war’s only real victim is the Iraqis’ oblivious assassin, condemned as he is to postwar angst by their unexamined iniquity.

During the year, the UK neglected to offset Hollywood shortcomings with its much admired miserabilism. There were no equivalents of Fish Tank or The Selfish Giant. Like so many others, Ken Loach and Mike Leigh opted for the safety of the past.

Among the Bafta candidates for outstanding British film, only one offers social comment, and even that is harmlessly archaic. Pride’s tale of gay supporters of the miners’ strike invites us to congratulate ourselves on our current broad-mindedness by deriding our grandparents’ homophobia.

The year did yield some films that addressed current concerns. However, Jason Reitman’s take on new media in Men, Women and Children proved mild, compared to the same director’s Thank You for Smoking, Juno and Up in the Air. Little was as thought-provoking as Her, Margin Call or The Wolf of Wall Street. There was certainly nothing like 2012’s The Hunt, which not only took on child abuse, but also dared to suggest that infant accusers can lie.

Related: Men, Women & Children review: Adam Sandler gets a logon in ambitious digital sex drama

Instead, cinema genuflected to the orthodoxies of the age. Our turbulent gender wars might have prompted demanding drama, but cinema failed to deliver. Women were wronged by beastly men (Big Eyes, Effie Gray) or sent on wearisome journeys to show they are really tough (The Homesman, Tracks, Wild).

None of this is to deny that the year delivered films that are creative, if not socially or politically bold, such as Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel or Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin. Director Mark Cousins, whose own documentaries about cinema history burst with reflected creativity, cheerleads for a strain he still sees in today’s movies. Birdman, in particular, is “bursting with energy”.

Beyond the Anglosphere, there were some films that displayed more than aesthetic boldness. Belgium’s Dardenne brothers grappled sternly with the cruelty of capitalism in Two Days, One Night, which has earned an Oscar best actress nod for Marion Cotillard. Meanwhile, the best foreign film list and its Bafta equivalent host one unarguable titan. Leviathan’s epic saga of corruption, brutality and desolation beside the Barents Sea savages both Russia and human nature. The film has caused outrage, with culture minister Vladimir Medinsky condemning its “existential despair” and cinemas refusing to show it. In Poland, Paweł Pawlikowski’s Ida has also angered many with its unwelcome take on the Holocaust.

Few mainstream films, however, were audacious enough to offend anyone outside North Korea. Britain’s annual censorship row hardly recalled the furore over A Serbian Film. The issue was whether Paddington really needed a 12A to protect youngsters from its moments of furry bawdiness.

In 2011, the Iranian documentary This Is Not a Film was so explosive that its makers had to smuggle it out of the country in a flash drive hidden in a cake. This year’s favourite for best documentary Oscar, Citizenfour, depends not on its own daring but on that of its subject, NSA leaker Edward Snowden.

Most of the summer spectaculars were weary sequels. “We’re still in comic book blockbuster mode,” says Biskind. Comedy was more Dumb and Dumber To than Borat. Comparison with Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey laid bare Interstellar’s hollowness. Children were fed cheer by The Lego Movie and The Boxtrolls, but not the inspiration offered by Frozen or Up.

This was the year cinema sparkled but failed to nurture. It had plenty to show but little to say. It chose to console rather than provoke. Yet we can’t just blame the industry for the blandness of its output.

Studio decision-makers are guided by ever-more intensive research. Even small investors and public funders pore over market stats. They find that filmgoers seek uplift and reassurance, and they act accordingly. “‘The public won’t like it’ is a mentality you meet everywhere in the film world,” Cousins says. If we are being fed comfort food, it’s because we appear to want it.

Some maintain that we would wolf down spicier fare if only we were offered it. However, Leviathan took just £90,000 at the UK box office. “Look at the massive figures of American Sniper,” says Alex Cox. Eastwood’s film has taken more than £210m worldwide in barely a month. If anything, the preference for cheer over challenge on the big screen seems to be growing.

Related: Leviathan review – a compellingly told, stunningly shot drama

Maybe this is not surprising. Nowadays, we are troubled by economic uncertainty, anxious about social discord, unsettled by conflict abroad and unwilling to take risks. “The present generation may be the most abjectly cowardly cohort in memory,” says historian Victor Davis Hanson.

If this is what we are like, why would we want to be shaken and stirred at the cinema? Increasingly, it seems, our concerns are health, safety and fear of being offended. Timid filmgoers are bound to beget tame films.