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He Said/She Said: ''Chicago'' or ''The Pianist''? Lisa Schwarzbaum and Owen Gleiberman take sides in a debate about Oscar's biggest prize

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''Chicago'' vs. ''Pianist'': EW's critics debate | 184653__he_she_l

He Said She Said Illustration by Eric Palma

All About

Chicago

By Lisa Schwarzbaum, Owen Gleiberman

Lisa Schwarzbaum
March 19, 2003 11:38 AM
Okay, Owen, this is it: the last chance for me to tell you -- one more time! -- why ''The Pianist'' is more commanding and dynamic than you think, and for you to tell me one more time why ''Chicago'' is more pointed and substantial than I think. Then we both kick around ''The Hours'' together, tweaking its preciousness and its glum message that Women Suffer In Every Generation (so that actresses may win awards). And then we call it a day and prepare for our respective Oscar evenings. (You, per your usual regime, will happily be out at a party; I, per mine, will happily be home in my slippers.)

Before we do our thing, though, I thought I'd take the long view of the five candidates for Best Picture. And what strikes me is that each nominated movie, in its own way, reaches for a sense of the epic -- five different contemporary versions of the epic, in fact. You've got old-fashioned storytelling on a mythic scale, of course, in ''The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers'' -- the middle episode in a superb cinematic project I'm trusting will sweep up awards, as it should, when the final installment is released next winter. You've got a dramatically violent, anti-mythic depiction of one neighborhood in 19th-century New York City (in which, arguably, the modern American character was forged) in Martin Scorsese's ambitious, hell-for-leather historical drama ''Gangs of New York.'' Roman Polanski makes enormous historical horror vivid through the experience of one man against a background of 6 million others in ''The Pianist.'' Taking its cue from ''Moulin Rouge,'' ''Chicago'' pumps up the movie-musical form to oversized proportions, emphasizing bigness and brashness and bedazzlement in every element from lighting to choreography to film editing -- a story set in the 1920s, told for our era of collagen-lipped excess. And even ''The Hours'' attempts a grand, unifying theme, attempting to bind generations of women (and the sons they damage) in a museum-quality portrait of misery.

Hmmm, interesting. I see now that in favoring ''The Pianist'' as Best Picture among this quintet, I'm instinctively staying true to an aesthetic preference I mentioned last week when we were discussing the candidates for Best Actress: I tend to admire the quiet and the un-grand (which is why I love ''About Schmidt'') over the noisy and sumptuous.

Now's your chance to ask me how I square that taste with my adoration of ''The Lord of the Rings.'' Or about who designed the sweatshirt I'm going to wear on Oscar night. Or to come up with an epic Best Picture theory of your own, and lay it on me.

OWEN GLEIBERMAN
March 19, 2003 11:45 PM
Well, Lisa, now that we're wrapping up our annual dialogue (which I've enjoyed immensely, by the way), I'm frankly of two minds. Let me offer you a piece of both.

On the one hand, I'm more than happy to come aboard your bandwagon. Let's hear it for the quiet and the un-grand! The Oscars will always be wired into that middlebrow vision of movie art that dictates spectacle as the ultimate achievement. Not to sound like a pimp-daddy for the Independent Spirit Awards, but if we're really, seriously talking about candidates for BEST PICTURE, I would take Rebecca Miller's ''Personal Velocity,'' with its piercing short stories, its roughhewn snapshot-of-life DV images, its timeless vision of the complexities of women's lives, over any of the five Best Picture nominees. Without too much of a stretch, you could even see ''Personal Velocity'' as a richer, better, unheralded version of ''The Hours'': these three troubled feminine spirits rippling across time and place, only in this case with nary a Mopey Victim in sight. I would call Miller's movie quiet and un-grand, and also lithe and mysterious and moving and profound. A part of me wants to ask, Where's the Oscar for that?

But I digress! The magic of the Academy Awards, even for those of us who can be cynical about them, is that for all their imperfection, they're a way of taking stock of the nature, the meaning, of popularity in movies. I'm not talking about the routine vulgarity of box office numbers. I'm talking about what audiences truly, madly, deeply...love. And why they love it.

At this point, pretty much everyone has figured out that ''Chicago'' is going to sweep the awards. This naughty-girl musical is going to be anointed, in letter and in spirit, as the ''best'' that Hollywood has to offer. To be honest, I'm more than willing to embrace that, because ''Chicago,'' while far from a perfect movie, tickles a nerve that hasn't been brushed by the movie industry in quite some time. Let's call it a nerve of worldly joy. There's something in its giddy, roaring-'20s pageant of women who Get Away With It (and the men who tap dance for them in court) that feels almost primal in its exuberance -- a happy, brazen antidote to our own timid, controlled, smoke-free-zone society.

Yet I also think that this whole comeback-of-the-musical phenomenon, spearheaded though it may have been by ''Moulin Rouge,'' is, on some level, a reaction to the depressing corporatization of the pop-music industry. I'm one of those cliché folks who, by and large, HATES Broadway musicals. With rare exceptions, I tend to find most of the songs hopelessly coy and corny and square. And yet I loved -- LOVED! -- even the the most old-fangled, un-pop numbers in ''Chicago,'' like ''Mr. Cellophane'' and ''We Both Reached for the Gun.'' I felt, in a way that I might not have a decade ago, that those songs, and the renditions of them in the movie (John ''Cellophane'' Reilly! Catherine Zeta-Jones stretching the word ''jazzzzz'' into pure hormonal honey!), possess a wry humanistic soul missing from so much of what I hear on CD these days. Perhaps I'm just turning into a fogy who prefers Broadway to pop, but what I really think is going on is that ''Chicago'' marks the moment in our culture when Broadway has returned, once again, to BEING pop.

LISA SCHWARZBAUM March 19, 2003 12:17 PM
I'd spend more money buying your elaborate argument about Broadway if I were sure you've even SEEN many Broadway shows in the quarter of a century since ''Chicago'' first opened back in 1975. And ''Mamma Mia'' -- which I know you loved, ABBAholic that you are -- doesn't count. Good Broadway musicals transcend corniness and squareness and are never coy -- and no, I'm not just talking about Stephen Sondheim musicals, but also audience-pleasing, beautifully made shows like ''The Secret Garden,'' ''Ragtime,'' ''The Lion King,'' and ''The Producers.''

You know, of course, that ''Chicago'' was roundly overshadowed back in the 1970s, both at the box office and at the Tonys, by ''A Chorus Line'': At the time the show, slinky and dark with tail-end-of-Vietnam cynicism and Bob Fosse's dance moves, was felt to be too cold, cynical, and nasty. In fact, the excellent full-Fosse revival still packing satisfied audiences in on Broadway right now is appropriately cynical and icy-cool. You're absolutely right, though, the ingratiating movie adaptation is none of those things, dammit; it's more cuddly and puppyish rather than skinny and mongrel. (I'm still looking for that wry humanistic soul and nerve of worldly joy you've channeled -- and, for that matter, for any pure hormonal honey at all in any of Zeta-Jones' hard-working, professional, let's-make-a-hit moves.) And I LIKE skinny and mongrel! So once again, I think we're coming back to gut preferences rather than aesthetic qualifications. You're excited by ''Chicago,'' if I'm getting this right, because it grabs you by the heart, throat, and assorted other body parts. You love to be knocked out! And that's not my chief pleasure in a movie: I need to feel like I'm more of an intellectually engaged participant than a sensation-drugged recipient.

You're right, Oscar winners ARE usually about spectacle as the ultimate achievement. (You're right, too, about the Independent Spirit-style beauty of ''Personal Velocity,'' a film I love quite as much as you do.) It's strange -- and, to me, disheartening -- to think that as we write to each other, on an eve-of-war Wednesday, the Best Picture winner is already a lock. But, hmmm, what if it isn't? What if, on the eve of war, the more profound and resonant spectacle of a previous war's horrors has led to a swell of support for ''The Pianist''? Could that happen? This isn't handicapping on my part, heaven forbid: It's more of a conjecture I'm drumming up to support my own candidate in the race.

And if you don't care to go there, tell me this: Do you think anyone really LIKES ''The Hours,'' rather than admires its classy pedigree?

OWEN GLEIBERMAN March 19, 2003 2:20 PM
Oh, absolutely! I have no doubt that a lot of people truly love ''The Hours.'' I've met legions who are just nuts for the movie -- and 90 percent of them, let's be honest, are women. I think that the film's gauzy, pseudo-metaphysical embrace of what it sees as the PRIVACY of feminine spiritual pain, stretching across the generations, speaks to something that a lot of women feel has been unacknowledged by movies. I have to take their response seriously. I just wish that ''The Hours'' had been less schematically engineered to manufacture that response. Of course, you're also right, Lisa, that the movie's aura of classiness doesn't hurt. It's the Merchant-Ivory Factor gone postmodern.

But speaking of films that I think have been admired -- or, at least, praised -- rather than genuinely liked, ''Gangs of New York'' has been in the news recently due to an industry flap over its Academy Awards campaign. Specifically, a letter in support of Scorsese, written by the veteran director Robert Wise, was reprinted in a series of ads, and then it turned out that the letter was ghostwritten. More than that, a number of industry types felt that this marketing tactic crossed over the line of ''acceptable'' hype. On some level, this is clearly absurd. In the current P.T. Barnum atmosphere of Oscar overkill, who is anyone to say what's respectable and what's Too Much? The relevance of the flap, to me, is that it demonstrates just how badly Martin Scorsese wants that Oscar.

He should really get over it, because it's my belief that the drive for industry respectability has consumed him as a filmmaker. What some of us loved about Scorsese's movies isn't just that he made violence voluptuous, or that he could move the camera as if it were on fire, but that he got inside the white-hot tormented souls of characters like Travis Bickle or Jake LaMotta or Jesus Christ, figures who followed their passions to the point of self-destruction. They kissed off the world, or, just maybe (in ''Last Temptation''), transcended it, and their glory -- and folly -- was their fearlessness, a quality reflected in the volcanic daring with which Scorsese crafted his films.

I think he's lost touch with that rhapsodic urgency. In Scorsese's great ''Mean Streets,'' Johnny Boy accuses Charlie of being ''a f---in' politician,'' and I'm afraid that Scorsese, too, has turned himself into a professional Hollywood diplomat. He's a filmmaker who can still revel in the superficial narcotic of the brutality that men do, but he's forgotten what it means to say ''F-- you!'' to the establishment through the radical humanism of his art. One of the strangest, and most revealing, flaws in ''Gangs'' is the way that Leonardo DiCaprio doesn't just infiltrate Bill the Butcher's gang with Machiavellian cunning. In fact, he accommodates himself to Bill -- the brute who slaughtered his father -- to the point of unaccountably becoming comrades with him. Psychologically, this makes no sense, especially given the lack of shading in Daniel Day-Lewis' performance. But I think it's an inadvertent expression of the way that Scorsese himself now pours his energy into accommodating the powers of Hollywood. To put it bluntly: He wants this Oscar too much.

LISA SCHWARZBAUM March 19, 2003 3:16 PM
Hmm, we may be starting and ending our round of Oscar debates on a theme of aging -- yours, mine, and Scorsese's. I detect a longing for the bad-boy days of younger men in your comments, as if it's somehow a cop-out or a sell-out for a filmmaker to trade in f---in' fury for something softer -- or even, God help him, for something shiny, like a nice gold Oscar. I don't see that Scorsese's naked hunger for an Academy Award in any way compromises what he does as an artist; in fact, I think there's something moving and mature about the way the guy has expressed his desire -- openly, on talk shows everywhere! And just as there's nothing unseemly in wanting an Oscar, there's also nothing ''weak'' in being drawn more and more, at middle age and beyond, to the psychological connections between characters, and not just the psychological clashes.

Anyhow, the exceptional nature of the campaign to get Martin Scorsese his f---in' Oscar is, as we both know, hardly the work of M.S. alone, but rather of the studio that released ''Gangs'' -- Miramax. And in this case, the push is being led by Miramax chief Harvey Weinstein himself, large and in person, making it his mogul-mitzvah for 2003 to Show Marty Love. I'm not saying I don't think Scorsese doesn't have input into the strategy -- he's the dude showing up in front of all those talk-show microphones, after all. But neither do I think that he's speed-dialing Miramax on his cell phone, suggesting that a ghostwritten-by-flack letter signed by Robert Wise is a great way to sweat the oldie Academy voters.

It's okay to get older, Owen! It's okay for an established artist to work with a new, softer edge, so long as the new edge has its own integrity. (My final dig at ''Chicago'': Its edge is machine-milled.) Hell, I'm feeling new and soft myself, openly desirous of having the Oscars go on as planned on Sunday. Let's do this again next year, okay? But as of next week, let's never, ever waste a breath on Nicole Kidman's prosthetic nose again, deal?

OWEN GLEIBERMAN March 19, 2003 5:14 PM
Agreed. If the Best Actress race proves as unpredictable as I think, that nose may just be another Oscar footnote anyway!

Personally, I'd be a lot more ready to embrace the graceful aging of Scorsese if I could, indeed, see more of the ''connection'' between characters that you describe in ''Gangs.'' That's the precise quality I thought was missing from the film. But enough! In the last few weeks, we've hashed over our differences with a fervor that lets me know that I'll never get you to see the cynical joy -- indeed, the soul -- that drives the slither of ''Chicago,'' and that you'll never convince me of the flawed majesty of ''Gangs'' or the intimate power of ''The Pianist.''

I wouldn't have it any other way, either, because then the two of us wouldn't have the pleasure of arguing about it all. It really has been a pleasure, too. It heartens me, Lisa, that you're already thinking about...a sequel. I, as well, would be more than keen to reprise this dialogue a year from now, when I'll be older but probably no Oscar wiser.

Posted Mar 20, 2003 | Order Article Reprints