Monaco P. A History of American Movies: A Film-by-Film Look at the Art, Craft, and Business of Cinema

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Todd McCarthy echoed the same sentiments in Variety:

Staying at the top of his game when most of his contemporaries have long

since hung up their gloves, Clint Eastwood delivers another knockout

punch with Million Dollar Baby. As if Unforgiven and Mystic River weren’t

rave enough, this endlessly resourceful filmmaker goes just as dark and deep

in this slow-burning drama of a determined female boxer and her hard-

shelled trainer, a tale Eastwood invests with rewarding reserves of intimacy,

tragedy, tenderness, and bitter life knowledge.

A. O. Scott in the New York Times called it “the best movie released by a major

studio this year, and not because it is the grandest, the most ambitious, or even

the most original.” The review in Boxoffice noted:

On the surface, the film is a simple boxing story about a hellcat from the

Ozarks and a grizzled Irish Catholic trainer who takes her on. Under East-

wood’s painstakingly stripped-down direction—his filmmaking has become

the cinematic equivalent of Hemingway’s spare though precise prose—the

story emerges as that rarest of birds, an uplifting tragedy.

At first, Frankie is unwilling to train and coach a girl fighter. Eventu-

ally, of course, he changes his mind, turning Maggie into a rising star headed

toward a championship bout. The rise is cut short dramatically when she

takes a beating from a much larger and stronger German fighter. Maggie is

hospitalized and survives, but is paralyzed and disabled. She tells Frankie—her

only friend and visitor—that she wants to end the suffering and die. Eventu-

ally Frankie enters the hospital late at night, slinks into her room, and injects

her. He then leaves and disappears from the screen as Scrap-Iron narrates the

speculations as to what then happened to Frankie.

Time’s Richard Corliss offered: “The story has a sucker punch which

reveals both the importance of family and the ways loyalty can trump official

morality.” But the protagonist’s complicity in injecting a solution to cause

her death did not escape the attention of the contemporary culture warriors.

Conservative culture critic Michael Medved attacked Million Dollar Baby as

“an insufferable, manipulative right-to-die movie.” More neutrally, veteran

movie critic Andrew Sarris wrote of the ending: “No movie has depressed me

more than Million Dollar Baby.”

By the end of March 2005, Boxoffice reported international earnings on

Million Dollar Baby to have exceeded $36 million just since its Oscar win at

the end of February. Nonetheless, the project had been viewed initially with

suspicion by many in the industry as a “boxing movie.” Originally, Warner

Bros. had been a reluctant partner in the project, even given Eastwood’s

Hollywood Enters the Twenty-First Century 323

legendary status and track record. When the accounts were tabulated on this

$30 million production, the gross revenues for its theatrical distribution alone

exceeded $100 million.

ON A ROLL

The screenwriter for Million Dollar Baby, Paul Haggis, built on the success of

that 2004 Best Picture with Crash, the 2005 Oscar winner for Best Picture,

which he produced, wrote, and directed. Packaged and distributed by Lions

Gate, the company trumpeted the social significance of Crash:

It’s a fast-paced portrait of the multi-cultural metropolis all disarranged

and out of joint. A young African American man complains when a white

woman clutches her purse as she passes him, then he carjacks her SUV. An

L.A.P.D. officer goes on a rant against a black employee at an HMO, but

later saves the life of a black woman. An Iranian shop owner, the victim of

a hate crime, takes out his anger on a hardworking Latino locksmith. After

a fender-bender, a Latina police detective and a Korean woman exchange

racial epithets.

Out of the blocks, Crash was perceived as polarizing. The Los Angeles

Times called it “a grim, histrionic experiment in vehicular metaphor laughter.”

By contrast, its distributor, Lions Gate, insisted: “There’s a cultural relevance

to it.” The New Yorker apparently agreed, labeling Crash “the strongest Ameri-

can film since Clint Eastwood’s Mystic River.” The New York Times, however,

panned it.

The movie was Haggis’s directorial debut, and as a director he won praise

from the venerable critic Stanley Kauffmann of the New Republic:

The screenplay originated with Paul Haggis, who wrote Million Dol-

lar Baby, and, as in that overrated picture, he builds on basically familiar

material. But Haggis is making his directorial debut here, and—as was not

the case with Baby—the directing gives this film stamina. Director Haggis

greatly helps his writing self.

It was reported that the genesis of the screenplay had occurred fifteen

years earlier when Haggis and his wife’s Porsche was stolen by two black

teenagers while the Haggises were shopping at a video rental store. Hag-

gis reportedly had begun thinking about the thieves and their motivation,

which drew him into concocting the lengthy dystopian descent into the

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heated passions and ethnic and racial antagonism seething beneath the façade

of contemporary Los Angeles.

Structurally, Crash is reminiscent of Hollywood classics dating back as

far as MGM’s Oscar-winning Best Picture Grand Hotel (1932). It is a story

of a number of different people, from different social backgrounds and with

decidedly different life histories, thrown together in a pell-mell blend of in-

cidents that are cleverly connected. The ensemble cast of Crash, including

Dom Cheadle, Matt Dillon, Sandra Bullock, Brendan Fraser, Chris “Ludacris”

Bridges, Thandie Newton, Jennifer Esposito, and Ryan Phillippe, was perhaps

not the equal in star power to the cast that MGM brought together in 1932.

Some motion picture industry observers—commenting on what seemed to

be somewhat of an upset win for Crash as Best Picture, beating out Brokeback

Mountain—noted that in the first decade of the twenty-first century, it is es-

timated that roughly 20 percent of the Oscar voters are actors and members

of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG). Actors are widely assumed to be partial

toward “actors’ films” with large casts, and as Oscar voting time began, Lions

Gate distributed free DVDs of Crash to a lengthy list of SAG members.

The first positive buzz for Crash had begun when the film premiered at

the Toronto Film Festival, the long-standing venue that served so well for

many American independent films to gain attention and secure at least a cred-

ible initial following. Crash, a $7.5 million production, earned $53.5 million

domestically, but by the time the Oscars were awarded it had already been

out on DVD for nearly half a year, thus limiting its possibilities for theatrical

re-release.

Producer credit on the movie went only to Cathy Schulman and Haggis,

prompting a lawsuit filed by Schulman’s former business partner, Bob Yari

(Yari is recognized in the film’s credits). The Producers’ Guild, however, de-

cided that only two producers could share an award. The Academy of Motion

Picture Arts and Sciences concurred, and, eventually, so did a court.

The review by David Denby in the New Yorker gave Crash a good boost,

when he applauded it as “breathtakingly intelligent and always brazenly alive.”

He noted that, like other recent movies set in Los Angeles (Grand Canyon,

Short Cuts, Magnolia),

the picture is structured in vignette form, a natural dramatic outgrowth of

a strange automotive paradise in which people live in separate racial and

class enclaves, drive to work, and stick with their own. [Haggis] has laid

the groundwork for emotional release by writing some of the toughest talk

ever heard in American movies. Some things may be better left unsaid, but

the exuberant frankness of this movie burns through embarrassment and

chagrin and produces its own kind of exhilaration.

Hollywood Enters the Twenty-First Century 325

Across Manhattan, Haggis’s portrayal of Los Angeles earned similar praise from

Ken Tucker in his review for New York magazine:

If Crash resolves itself around a series of sentimental familial tableaux . . .

it also makes its social and political collisions resonate in our heads so as to

leave them ringing. It’s a film you won’t stop thinking about, arguing over,

and debating, after the lights come up.

However, at the New York Times, A. O. Scott offered an alternative to Denby’s

praise:

Mr. Haggis is not unduly concerned with subtlety. At a time when ambi-

tious movies are knowing cleverness and showy sensation, he makes a case

for blunt, earnest emotion, and shows an admirable willingness to risk

sentimentality and cliché in the pursuit of genuine feeling. . . . That these

bromides count as insights may say more about the state of the American

civic conversation than about Mr. Haggis’s limitations as a storyteller. . . .

So what kind of a movie is Crash? A frustrating movie: full of heart and

devoid of life; crudely manipulative when it tries hardest to be subtle; and

profoundly complacent in spite of its intention to unsettle and disturb.

In a similar vein, writing in the London Sunday Times, critic Edward Por-

ter claimed that while the film tackled racism head-on, on the whole it felt like

“a social studies project. . . . The frequency with which characters use racial

slurs is not just monotonous, it means that the film drifts into pomposity.” As

Richard Alleva wrote in Commonweal:

Haggis seems to think that if you scratch a bigot, you automatically find

a decent human being, and if you scratch a decent human being you au-

tomatically find a bigot. . . . Haggis has been praised for creating complex

characters. But simply to supply a character with wildly contrasting traits

doesn’t guarantee complexity. It merely guarantees that movie critics,

hungry to believe that Hollywood still caters to adults, will praise you for

a complexity that isn’t there.

A LONG TIME COMING

Previously nominated for the award but always passed over in the actual vot-

ing, many industry insiders called Martin Scorsese’s 2006 Best Director Oscar a

lifetime achievement award. Of course, there were also critics who argued that

an award for his work on The Departed was undeserved because it was far from

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being his most significant directorial achievement. In some ways, the media

attention to Scorsese’s long-awaited Best Director triumph overshadowed the

Academy’s recognition of The Departed as the year’s best picture. Such a debate

within the arts will never be finally closed, but what critic Scott Foundas wrote

in the L.A. Weekly tried to put that debate put into perspective:

I’d like to begin by thanking the Academy—for snubbing Martin Scorsese.

Scorsese’s last two pictures, Gangs of New York and The Aviator, felt like hat-

in-hand pleas for acceptance by an organization that considers Crash, Chi-

cago, and American Beauty among the greatest of recent American films, and

which holds Scorsese himself lower than Robert Redford, Kevin Costner,

and Rob Marshall. But with his new picture, The Departed, Scorsese seems

to have abandoned his Gollum-like quest for golden trinkets, and the result

is the best thing he’s done in ages—an exhilarating pulp entertainment.

The Departed, produced by Brad Pitt, Brad Grey, and Graham King for

Warner Bros. distribution, stars Jack Nicholson as Boston mobster Frank

Costello, Leonardo DiCaprio as Billy Costigan, and Matt Damon as Colin

Sullivan. The movie was based on a successful Hong Kong film entitled In-

ternal Affairs (Mou gaan dou, directed by Wei-keung Lau, 2002), with a new

screenplay written by William Monahan. It was edited by Scorsese’s longtime

collaborator, Thelma Schoonmaker, who—with The Departed—earned her

third Oscar for editing a Scorsese film.

The director of photography on the movie was Michael Ballhaus. Scor-

sese, an aficionado of film history, instructed Ballhaus to watch two movies

from the late 1940s for the look: T-Men (1947) and Raw Deal (1948), both of

which were shot by the master of noir cinematography, John Alton. Scorsese

and Ballhaus wound up using five cameras on the shootout, toward the end

of the movie, between the Costello gang and the cops.

Critic David Ansen, writing in Newsweek, commented:

Martin Scorsese’s profanely funny, savagely entertaining The Departed is

both a return to the underworld turf he’s explored in such classics as Mean

Streets and GoodFellas and a departure. What’s new is that he’s hitched his

swirling, white-hot style to the speeding wagon of narrative. For all his

brilliance, storytelling has never been his forte or his first concern. Here

he has the devilishly convoluted plot of the terrific 2002 Hong Kong cop

thriller Internal Affairs to work from and it’s a rich gift. . . . The Departed is

Scorsese’s most purely enjoyable movie in years. But it’s not for the faint

of heart. It’s rude, bleak, violent and definitely un-PC. But if you doubt

that it’s OK to laugh throughout this rat’s nest of paranoia, deceit, and

bloodshed, keep your eyes on the final frame. Scorsese’s parting shot is an

uncharacteristic, but well-earned, wink.

Hollywood Enters the Twenty-First Century 327

Here, too, was a motion picture for movie buffs who could savor a certain

irony apparent in Scorsese doing a Hollywood remake of a Hong Kong

movie. The New Wave of Hong Kong films of the 1990s celebrated Scorsese,

and the breakthrough Hong Kong director in that period, John Woo, even

dedicated his film The Killer (1989) to Scorsese.

Peter Travers’s review in Rolling Stone speculated that “maybe you’ll

recognize The Departed for what it is: a new American crime classic from the

legendary Martin Scorsese whose talent shines here on its highest beams.”

Travers went on to applaud Scorsese’s use of found music—a unique uniting

of the Rolling Stones, John Lennon, Nas, Van Morrison, the Beach Boys, and

Patsy Cline—as typical of the director’s influence on his movies’ soundtracks

and simultaneously astute. At the same time, he recognized Howard Shore’s

evocative original score for embellishing the vital, visceral filmmaking. Rec-

ognizing the central importance of editing, Travers writes:

And once again, Thelma Schoonmaker turns editing into an art form. She’s

the wizard at Scorsese’s side, getting the action to jump off the screen while

setting up psychological provocations that reverb hellishly in your head.

Scorsese tops the list of American directors because, even when he fails, he

strives passionately to make movies that matter. The Departed, a defiantly

compromised vision of a society rotting from inside, is one of his best.

Mahola Dargis’s review in the New York Times praised Scorsese’s direc-

tion as covering potential flaws in the screenplay: “There simply isn’t time to

think about the story and whether any of it makes sense.” Writing in the Vil-

lage Voice, J. Hoberman attempted to clarify where one of the pillars of modern

and contemporary American independent film actually stood in relationship

to this work. “The Departed is a wildly commercial project, but let no one

imagine it a work for hire.”

Typical of the hybrid approach to motion picture production in early

twenty-first-century Hollywood, The Departed was a Warner Bros. release of

a Plan B/Initial Entertainment Group/Vertigo Entertainment production in

association with Media Asia Films. The Departed won Oscars for Best Picture,

Director, Adapted Screenplay, and Editing. Scorsese recognized it as a genre

film—like the Warner Bros. gangster films of the 1930s—precisely the kind

of movie that film fans love but Oscar voters generally ignore. The Departed

had opened on three thousand screens nationwide, and by the time the Oscar

ceremonies came along, domestic theatrical earnings on the movie already

had exceeded $132 million. Patrick Goldstein, however, posed this question

regarding the movie itself in the Los Angeles Times: “Scorsese will remember

his big night. But will filmgoers remember The Departed?”

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IDEAL MATERIAL FOR A SEASONED TEAM

The 2007 Best Picture, No Country for Old Men, was a coproduction of Para-

mount Vantage and Miramax, which distributed the film in North America.

The film was produced by Scott Rudin at Disney-Miramax, who considered

the material of a novel by Cormac McCarthy to be a perfect match for Ethan

and Joel Coen. To quote Rudin:

The Coen brothers are the filmmaking-language equivalent of what Mc-

Carthy does in his books. They had dealt with these Melville-like themes

of fate and destiny in their films. I bought the book, but the only way I was

interested in making it was with the Coens. They committed to write, but

down the road I’d hoped they’d want to make it, too.

Robert Graf and Mark Roybal were credited as the film’s executive produc-

ers. Roger Deakins, A.S.C., was the director of photography and “Roderick

Jaynes” (a pseudonym for the Coen brothers themselves) was credited as the

editor.

No Country for Old Men is a mesmerizing thriller, set in West Texas in the

early 1980s, where cattle rustlers have become drug runners and small towns

have become veritable war zones. When Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) finds

a pickup truck surrounded by dead men with a load of heroin and two mil-

lion dollars in cash, his discovery sets off a chain reaction of violence that the

aging and disillusioned local sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) cannot

contain. As Moss tries to evade his pursuers—led by a mysterious manipulator

named Anton Chigurh (Javier Badem), who has developed a habit of flipping

coins to determine who lives and dies—the film was said to strip down the

American crime drama, while at the same time broadening its concerns to

encompass themes as ancient as the Bible’s. Though Brolin’s character might

be called the protagonist, Bardem’s performance took the Best Actor Os-

car. There were strong supporting performances from Kelly Macdonald and

Woody Harrelson, as well.

Writing in L.A. Weekly, Scott Foundas noted:

The mechanics of No Country for Old Men recall those of a vintage film

noir, and in that respect, the movie is brilliantly executed, as gripping and

mordantly funny a treatise on the corrosive power of greed as The Killing

and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre were before it. In terms of filmmaking

and storytelling craft, it is a work destined to be studied in film schools

for generations to come, from the threatening beauty of Roger Deakins’

O’Keefe-like images to what is surely the most pulse-raising scene of

motel-room suspense since Marion Crane took her fateful shower. There

Hollywood Enters the Twenty-First Century 329

isn’t a moment here that feels false, less than fully considered, or outside

the Coens’ control.

Writing in the industry’s major trade publication, Variety, Todd McCar-

thy offered this buoyant assessment:

Cormac McCarthy’s bracing and brilliant novel is gold for the Coen broth-

ers, who have handled it respectfully but not slavishly, using its built-in

cinematic values while cutting for brevity and infusing it with their own

touch. Result is one of their very best films, a bloody classic of its type

destined for acclaim and potentially robust B.O. [box office revenues].

Joel Coen analyzed the project in this way:

It’s as close as we’ll come to doing an action movie. It’s a chase story—with

Chigurh chasing Moss and the Sheriff bringing up the tail. It’s a lot of

physical activity to achieve a purpose. It’s interesting in a genre way; but it

was also interesting to us because it subverts the genre expectations.

As Kenneth Turan opined in his Los Angeles Times review:

Although only the spawn of the Marquis de Sade would consider this

harrowing, uncompromisingly violent film a comedy, the Coens have un-

derstood the potential for acid humor in the dialogue and even added an

unexpected comic moment or two, like a cheerful norteño band waking a

seriously wounded man.

Like Turan, most critics were positive about the movie, but the critic

Ray Bennett, writing in the Hollywood Reporter noted:

Plot holes, cracker-barrel philosophizing, and setting a major climactic

scene off screen serve to undo all the Coens’ fine work. The entire prem-

ise of the film is to pitch three men onto a path that will lead to a final

reckoning, but it just peters out. Audiences will flock to see a mainstream

Coen brothers film with such a colorful villain, but word-of-mouth about

its fizzled conclusion might do damage at the box office.

With No Country for Old Men, Miramax had followed its patented

gradual-release strategy for the movie’s marketing. Produced for $30 million,

it had earned just over $60 million by the time it won the Best Picture Oscar.

Industry predictions expected only another $10 million to $20 million in rev-

enues theatrically following the awards. The final balance sheet on No Country

for Old Men, indeed, was a $74 million gross.

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BOLLYWOOD IN HOLLYWOOD

The Academy bestowed its Best Picture award for 2008 on Slumdog Millionaire,

an essentially British production, filmed in India with a largely native cast and

crew (although the lead role in the movie was played by Dev Patel, who is

British and of Eastern Indian ancestry). Two British production companies,

Caledor Films and Film4, financed the movie, which was distributed in North

America by Fox Searchlight. Fox Searchlight had become one of the most

successful of Hollywood’s subsidiaries, specializing in finding unique and edgy

low-budget features and foreign titles for distribution.

In accepting the Oscar at the Academy’s annual award ceremonies in

February 2009, producer Christian Colson announced: “Together, we’ve

been on an extraordinary journey. When we started out we had no stars, no

power or muscle, and we didn’t have enough money to do what we wanted

to do.” Danny Boyle, holding up the Oscar statuette that he received as Best

Director, intoned: “Just to say to Mumbai, all of you who helped us make the

film and all of you who didn’t, thank you very much. You dwarf even this

guy.” Slumdog Millionaire proved successful across the Oscar categories, includ-

ing wins for cinematography, sound mixing, original score, original song (“Jai

Ho”), and editing.

Slumdog Millionaire follows the travails and eventual triumphs of Jamal

Malik (Patel), an orphan from the teeming slums of Mumbai (Bombay),

who witnesses his mother’s violent death, artfully dodges and escapes from a

criminal gang that mutilates children to make pitiable beggars, endures police

torture, and struggles with betrayal by his brother, while single-mindedly pur-

suing the apparently hopeless quest to reunite with Latika (Freida Pinto), the

long-lost love of his childhood. A penniless Mumbai teenager who works as

a tea boy, Jamal becomes a contestant on India’s version of Who Wants to Be

a Millionaire. Toward the conclusion of his time on the show, he is arrested

and subjected to intensive police interrogation on suspicion of cheating, which

frames the narrative. While being interrogated, events from his life are seen as

flashbacks, each of these incidents explaining the source of his knowledge of

the answer for one of the quiz show’s questions.

In a welter of praise for the film, one widely repeated assertion was that of

a film critic for the Montreal Gazette who ventured the opinion that the movie

was vastly superior to the novel by Vikas Swarup on which it was based. In

general, the only caveat that seemed apparent was that the use of these flash-

backs as triggering explanations for his quiz show answers seemed sometimes

contrived and overly mechanistic. Still, most of the national critics in the

United States lined up with Roger Ebert’s assessment of Slumdog Millionaire in

the Chicago Sun-Times: “This is a breathless, exciting story, heartbreaking and

exhilarating at the same time.” As Lou Lumenick noted in his New York Post

Hollywood Enters the Twenty-First Century 331

review: “Slumdog Millionaire just may be the most entertaining movie I’ve ever

labeled a masterpiece in these pages.”

The movie was put together by a creative team of individuals with very

different kinds of successes to their credit, including screenwriter Simon Beau-

foy (The Full Monty, Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day) and director Danny Boyle

(Trainspotting, Shallow Grave).

Scott Foundas wrote in L.A. Weekly:

The potential for a treacly Good Will Hunting of the Mumbai ghetto

abounds, but Boyle and screenwriter Simon Beaufoy think more in terms

of a minor-scale Dickensian epic (with one minor nod to Dumas); as Jamal

journeys down memory lane, the crux of Slumdog Millionaire becomes the

pull of time on the relationship between Jamal, his artful-dodger brother

Salim, and the suitably beautiful, unattainable Latika (Freida Pinto), the life-

long object of Jamal’s affection. . . . Zigging to and fro, Slumdog Millionaire

whips these familiar raw ingredients into a feverish masala, at once touristic

and something deeper, which drenches the screen in sights and sounds of

modern Mumbai. . . . That sort of hyped-up aesthetic can quickly turn

wearying, as it has in several of Boyle’s less successful ventures (including

Shallow Grave and the duly forgotten A Life Less Ordinary), but here it is a

fount of renewable energy.

The editing of Chris Dickens cuts from shot to shot, scene to scene, leap-

ing back and forth from Jamal in the game-show hot seat to Jamal in a very

different kind of hot seat going through a police interrogation. Cinematog-

rapher Anthony Dod Mantle’s camera and lighting make the colors pop out,

and the music by composer A. R. Rahman sustains the movie throughout

and infuses the grand production number at the end of the film. Mantle, by

the way, was using compact digital cameras to move with speed and stealth

through the streets and slums of the city.

The contrived episodes explaining how a tea boy (chai-wallah) could know

the answer to such a range of questions on the quiz show may function too

mechanically, but this seems not to matter. The likeability of the protagonist

and the sheer energy and pace of the film transcend what might be considered

structural flaws in the movie. As critic Anthony Lane wrote in the New Yorker:

“Subtlety, you will have gathered, is not the prime concern here.”

The film premiered in North America at the Telluride (Colorado) Film

Festival, and a week later it won the audience award at the jewel of autumn

film festivals in Toronto. As Kenneth Turan, writing in the Los Angeles Times,

observed:

Who would believe that the best old-fashioned audience picture of the

year, a Hollywood-style romantic melodrama that delivers major studio

satisfactions in an ultra-modern way, was made on the streets of India with