178. British director and screenplay writer Mike Leigh’s “Mr Turner” (2014) based on his own original screenplay: A cinematic canvas providing perspective and colour to the mind and soul of one of England’s finest painters

JMW Turner and John Constable were two of the finest painters in Nineteenth century England renowned for their emotional response to nature and are classified as exponents of romanticism and eventually emerging as major contributors to modernism in painting.  Mike Leigh’s film and original screenplay gives ample scope for movie viewers to appreciate the work of JMW Turner anew. However, the film is not as much about his paintings as it is about the man who made the paintings.

Mike Leigh deliberately titled the film Mr Turner. Now what’s in a name, one would ask? The obvious reason is the film is more about the man and much less about his paintings. The initials “JMW” are replaced with “Mr.” Even in the film, very few addresses the painter as Mr Turner.  Even the physicians, who treated him towards his last days, addressed him reverently as the famous painter “Turner.” JMW stood for Joseph Mallord William. In the film, when Turner wants to hide his true identity while renting a room to stay he calls himself “Mallard” not even by his little known middle name Mallord. Those close to him addressed him as William or Billy. And to some he was just Mr Booth, the “husband” of his landlady.  And Turner straddled two worlds with equal felicity—the world of the nobility and the rich and educated and the world of the poorer sections of society including maidservants, not-very-rich landladies, and prostitutes. The title “Mr” adds a degree of respectability to a man who conventional society may not deem respectable. The title “Mr” also avoids a degree of intimacy that his father and some of his admirers among the nobles had for the painter when they called him William.

Turner (Timothy Spall) after dramatically adding the touch of red to his painting,
an idea he picked up from Constable's painting with lots of red

Leigh’s stated reason to make the movie Mr Turner was to “examine the tension between this very mortal, flawed individual, and the epic work, the spiritual way he had of distilling the world.”  And Leigh succeeded in a not so obvious way.  Had Leigh cast someone other than Timothy Spall in the title role who looked more like the young and dashing JMW Turner in his self-portrait, some purists would have appreciated that fact.  But Mr Spall who plays an older Turner, does not resemble the self portrait by a mile. But instead what Leigh made Spall do was to make him learn to paint as Turner would have painted, over a period of 2 years.  Mr Spall is presented by Leigh as a Turner with awful teeth—and there is evidence that the artist had indeed major dental problems in his later years. Leigh and Spall together succeed in creating a flawed personality, physically and mentally, which Turner apparently was. Not many would totally ignore his own flesh and blood—and Turner ignored the two children born to Sarah Danby (Ruth Sheen) , publicly and never stayed with Sarah Danby in later life giving greater importance to his work. Leigh cleverly shows Spall’s  fingers curling in anguish, only visible to the camera and not to others in the room, as he interacts with Sarah Danby and his daughter. Towards the end of his life, Spall’s Turner is equally dismissive of another lady in his life, his faithful maid servant Hannah Danby (Dorothy Atkinson) with whom he had several sexual trysts, though she cared for him at all times. He would at best enquire about her health and well being, when in close proximity.

But why did he behave in this manner? Leigh provides the answers to any perceptible viewer. Turner’s mother went insane while Turner was young and she made his and his father’s life miserable. On his death bed, Turner Sr admonishes his son “Show her respect. The bitch..” when Turner Jr speaks disparagingly about his mother, who had made life hell for both. Evidently, this had much to do with Turner’s disdain for most women as depicted in the film.

Turner (Timothy Spall) often ignores his faithful housemaid
 Hannah Danby (Dorothy Atkinson)

But Leigh’s intelligent script shows yet another side of Turner the painter. There is a subtle insinuation that Turner finds Miss Coggins, the piano player, in a nobleman’s house attractive, as after staring at her,  he comments “Exceedingly beautiful.” Miss Coggins, being prim and proper, makes no further move to come closer to Turner. For the viewer, the deft editing of the film’s sequence suggests that the comment was not about the music being played by Miss Coggins as it was about the lady’s visage that caught the painter’s attention. Turner makes a similar comment much later in the film “You are a woman of profound beauty,” to Mrs Sophie Booth (Marion Bailey), the landlady, and it is Mrs Booth, less sophisticated than Miss Coggins, who takes the initiative and drags him into her bedroom following his overtures. Earlier before the relationship with Mrs Booth bloomed, the script has Turner getting heady on wine during a dinner and making a comment to an attractive lady sitting next to him “Loneliness and solitude, ‘tis not the same.” There is much to admire in Leigh’s scriptwriting skills.

Turner (Timothy Spall) and  Mrs Booth (Marion Bailey): a change of attitude
towards women

The high point of Mr Turner the film for this critic was the incident where the painter goes to a brothel not for sex but to paint the prostitute lying in bed.  While painting, the otherwise gruff Turner breaks down in tears. Was he thinking of his mother, was he thinking of his daughters? Mike Leigh’s Turner is a complex character—one that you can pity, one that you can dislike, and one you can admire, all in equal measure.  

Turner at work capturing light and landscape

This is in contrast to the superb opening sequence of the film, where two young Dutch milkmaids walk by close to where Turner is standing taking feverish notes of the sky and dawn. Here Turner does not care for women or people as others would have in his place.  He is preoccupied capturing the magic of light and landscape.

Leigh’s Turner is a man with a mission--to paint and earn world recognition for England. He was born poor but he painted his way to success, money and education (his apartment has many shelves of books)—an incredible achievement for the son of a barber and wigmaker.

Dick Pope's magical cinematography

When one views the film Mr Turner, it is not the painter alone that you admire: you admire the filmmakers and their obvious individual commitment to good cinema. You like Timothy Spall not because he is attractive on screen but the effort he has taken to grow into the role of an often dislikeable individual, grunting and spitting. You admire Dorothy Atkinson’s drab and ugly role as Hannah Danby, the psoriasis-stricken dutiful maid-servant who has been so faithful to the painter. You admire Dick Pope’s brilliant cinematography that makes the film so watchable and you wonder at the pains he taken to match the landscapes and seascapes that so fascinated the painter.  You hear  with awe of the commendable pains Leigh and Pope took to get the right shots of the steam locomotive, which was not achieved in a studio as many Hollywood films would have preferred to do.

Director Mike Leigh and Dick Pope's collaboration:foreground of admirers
in black and shadows,
while Turner dramatically adds red to his painting 

Another unforgettable sequence in the film is of Turner and Constable together displaying their works to the admiration of peers and art lovers at the Royal Society exhibit. Leigh’s Turner goes around the hall giving positive comments and suggestions to his peers but avoids making any comment on the work of Constable. Constable’s work has a lot of red dabs of paint which makes it stand out from the rest. Turner’s work on the other hand is admirable but lacks colour.  Turner procures a brush of red paint and creates a red blob on his painting’s seascape, apparently ruining it, to the shock of his admirers including Constable.  After some time Turner returns dramatically and uses his fingernail and cloth to reshape the blob into a buoy floating on the water. Turner got the idea to improve his painting by noticing Constable’s use of red colour in his painting. This is the only scene in the film where Turner’s active artistic skills are shown in such detail.

Where does Leigh’s Mr Turner stand among great films on painters? Luciano Salce’s El Greco (1966) with Mel Ferrer as the painter and the music of Ennio Morricone, Vincente Minnelli’s Lust for Life (1956) with Kirk Douglas and Anthony Quinn, and Maurice Pialat’s Van Gogh (1991) are all lovely films of a similar kind. For this critic, Leigh’s Mr Turner and Salce’s El Greco tower over the rest as a complete cinema experience. While Leigh’s film won the Best Actor award for Timothy Spall and the Vulcan Prize for Dick Pope for his cinematography at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival, the film failed to win a single Oscar though nominated in four categories. However, Mr Turner is undeniably Mike Leigh’s best work and Dick Pope’s best work to date.

Not a painting--its the cinematography of Dick Pope

...and again Dick Pope!

As a student of aesthetics, who earned a postgraduate degree in the subject from Bombay University, this critic has been an admirer of both Turner and Constable and have spent valuable time studying their original paintings on display at various museums and galleries on both sides of the Atlantic.  Turner was a “master of light”, a harbinger of the revolutionary modernist impressionism and expressionism that bloomed much after his demise. Mike Leigh’s film Mr Turner helps a student of art to appreciate his paintings even further by putting the painter’s psychological perspectives in focus while viewing his paintings.  Thank you, Mr Leigh, for your creditable effort in putting it all together. It is a mature work that sadly the Oscars missed to honour but Cannes recognized. That matters.

P.S. Mr Turner is one of the top 10 films of 2015 viewed by the author.

177. Swedish director Ruben Östlund’s “Force Majeure” (Turist) (2014), based on his original story/script: Cowardice (and heroism) of an ideal father figure in a modern family

What is force majeure? Force majeure — or vis major — meaning "superior force,” is also known as cas fortuit or casus fortuitus or a "chance occurrence, unavoidable accident.” Director Ruben Östlund’s film uses this legal term Force Majeure as the title of his film, released in some countries under the less meaningful, alternate title Tourist. The term force majeure is used to describe an unusual situation that prevents one or both parties under a contract from fulfilling their obligations. In practice, most force majeure clauses do not excuse a party's non-performance entirely, but only suspends it for the duration of the force majeure. Some understanding of the legal term will enhance a viewer’s appreciation of this remarkable film.

Tomas with his cellphone--an item that matters in the "Lord Jim" moment

Why then is Force Majeure, the film, worthy of being termed as a remarkable one?

First, director Östlund conceived and scripted the film all by himself.  Few directors are able to do this. Ingmar Bergman and Naomi Kawase, are prominent among the select band of directors who often did/do this. American director Damien Chazelle accomplished a similar feat with the Oscar-winning Whiplash in 2014. Most viewers do not differentiate a film adapting another work from another medium from a film that is the director’s own original conceptualization. Most viewers do not differentiate directors standing on the shoulders of very competent and gifted co-scriptwriters from those directors who sculpt original films based on their own imagination and acumen. Östlund is one of the latter breed. He is able to conceive and develop a tale of a small, young Swedish family enjoying a brief costly vacation in the Alps into a complex, compressed  tale of 5 days of conflict, self realization, and ultimate reconciliation, of not one but two sets of families that could have taken years, if not decades, in real time for other families.

Developing the script from the ideal tourist family on holiday
to present a complex tale of 5 days of conflict and resolution

Second, Östlund in Force Majeure deals with cowardice of principled “heroes” of society. The famous novelist Polish novelist Joseph Conrad dealt with the precise subject in his novel Lord Jim, made into a lovely film in 1965 by Richard Brooks with Peter O’Toole in the leading role. O’Toole played a ship’s captain, who in a rare moment of cowardice jumps off his sinking ship into a lifeboat, not caring for the fate of his devout Muslim passengers for whom there were no lifeboats, when by tradition the captain ought to have been the last person to leave his sinking ship. In Force Majeure, Östlund is not discussing seafarers (though the script does include mention of a recent Estonian tragedy with similar trappings) but instead focuses on the bulwark of a good Swedish family—a hardworking, successful 30-something male called Tomas (Johannes Bah Kuehnke), with a devoted wife Ebba (Lisa Loven Kongsli), and their daughter Vera and son Harry. Director/scriptwriter Östlund creates a convincing ‘Lord Jim’ situation for his devoted family as they enjoy their second day of a 5-day holiday in a plush hotel cum ski resort in the French segment of the Alps mountain range. The US director Brooks adapting Conrad’s tale had a beautiful line in his film: “It only takes a split second to make a coward a hero or to turn a hero into a coward.” There is a huge difference between an American director and a Scandinavian one—the latter is less obsessed with words and more with visuals, sound and silence. The cowardice (and heroism) is more to be perceived than heard in the Swedish film.

Tomas (Johannes Bah Kuehnke) accepting his cowardice

Third, Östlund uses the scenario to make an indirect commentary on male heads of families and their ability to care for the members of the family, in contrast to women like Ebba whose maternal instinct to care for the family at a moment of insecurity comes to the fore. In Force Majeure, the interesting script deals with two male heads of families Tomas and Mats, and a contrasting mother (Charlotte) they meet at the hotel , who like Ebba, is a mother of two but unlike Ebba wants her free time, in which she is not distracted by her responsibilities to her husband or children. (Interestingly the script, as in Kieselowski’s masterpiece Dekalog, where a strange silent individual transects most tales, in Force Majeure too, a silent hotel cleaning staff watches the various developments between the couples with interest).  All three, Tomas, Mats, and Charlotte admit their lapses, big or small, directly and indirectly, at various stages of the film in being a responsible part of their respective family units. Charlotte indirectly admits her guilt by deferring to converse further on the observations of Ebba on the subject.

Even half asleep, the ringing phone is more important for Tomas
(the male bread winner) than all else

Fourth, Östlund uses unusual methods of filmmaking that will upset the purist. Sometimes, in Force Majeure, the speaker’s head is out of the frame; the camera is more interested in the listeners rather than the speaker. In a particular scene, the speaker, Ebba, walks around and sits with her back to the camera, and the viewer gets to see only the listeners. The Swedish director is breaking the cinematic conventions deliberately. Then there are static exterior shots that end each day, or punctuate “acts” in the film as in a play.

Static camera captures a mirror shot of all four members of the family
brushing their teeth

Fifth, Östlund uses the ‘Summer’ segment of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons in a manner reminiscent of the curtain falling on a proscenium stage at the end of each act. While one is befuddled by the choice of the Summer segment, the effect is indeed staggering.  Most of the film does not depend on the music of Vivaldi as much as it does on the use of sound of ropeways or of creaking wooden floorboards.  The sound management in the Swedish film is top notch.

Finally, Östlund uses the time-tested Edward Albee technique of the play/film Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by pitting the major husband and wife duos’ problem on another couple to extend the arguments of the film. And like Albee’s play there is certain resolution of the conflicts. Even the strong Ebba towards the end of the film shows the shades of a Don Quixote tilting at windmills, while Charlotte appears more composed and practical in comparison to her. As the film progresses, Tomas has occasion to redeem himself as a hero to his kids soon after admitting his folly to his family.  The best part is arguably the final innocuous conversation between son and father (Harry and Tomas). Harry asks Tomas “Do you smoke, Papa?” on seeing his father smoke for the first time and the father replies “Yes, I do.” Tomas is finally honest and Harry appreciates it. That honest answer puts much of what has preceded in perspective and provides a final example of the director/scriptwriter’s maturity evident in Force Majeure. The very child that earlier asked its parents to leave the hotel room, now looks up at his father with trust.

One parent who never cared about his own kids carry another's kid,
while Harry learns from his father Tomas
about his father's smoking habit for the first time

Force Majeure is not in the same league as certain important and fascinating movies of 2014 such as Leviathan, Still the Water, and Winter Sleep. Force Majeure is nevertheless a remarkable work that will make any astute viewer to sit up and admire the fresh approach to cinematography, the excellent casting, and a thought provoking original script where saving one’s cell phone (the link to your job and office) is perhaps instinctively more important than saving members of your family.

P.S. Force Majeure won the Un Certain Regard Jury Prize at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival. The films mentioned in the above review Lord Jim, Dekalog, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Leviathan, Still the Water, and WinterSleep have all been reviewed earlier on this blog.

176. Japanese director Naomi Kawase’s “Still the Water” (Futatsume no mado) (2014): A perspective on death, grief, and continuity for those alive and questioning their lives’ meaning

Naomi Kawase stated that she expected to win the Golden Palm at the 2014 Cannes film festival for her film Still the Water during a press conference but she was disappointed. All the awards and attention were instead grabbed by the Russian film Leviathan and the Turkish film Winter Sleep, both competing with the Japanese film for the honors. But a close evaluation proves there was very little differentiating the three awesome films, except for the cultural differences of the subjects in each of the three films.

Trees and the sea enveloping growing minds 

This critic had described Ms Kawase as the Terrence Malick of Japan on this blog in February 2012 while reviewing her previous work Hanezu, which had lost out to Malick’s The Tree of Life at Cannes for the top honor of 2011 at that festival. But if you ask a Japanese cineaste about Terrence Malick he or she is likely to call Malick the ‘Kawase of USA.’ And for good reason—Kawase’s 2007 film The Mourning Forest was about loss of loved ones, death and regeneration, while Malick’s 2011 film The Tree of Life also dealt with death and reconciliation with a larger cycle of life. Both dealt with the sun and the trees/forest. Only for Malick the loss is often of the young, while for Kawase, the loss is often of adults. For Malick, the references are Christian theology and scriptures; for Kawase it’s Buddhist scriptures and shamanism.  For both directors, nature teaches humans to live a better life by observing nature, not resisting it.

Kyoko swims in the sea wearing her school uniform

Still the Water begins with visuals and sounds of the wrath of the sea only to be followed by visuals of the quiet sea where a schoolgirl goes swimming in her school uniform. Yes, the waters can be stilled, philosophically. What matters is our attitude.

Like most Kawase's films, there is a death of an elder that provides the fulcrum of the film. Kawase’s choice of the beautiful Makiko Watanabe (who plays Kyoko’s dying mother in Still the Water and a minor role of Wakako in The Mourning Forest) is laudable and elevate the quality of both films. Preceding the death of the elder in Still the Water is a cruel, unsavory killing of a goat by an old man watched by a young person that almost makes you leave the auditorium unless you know Kawase’s visuals have a purpose beyond shock and gore. The old man pats with affection the goat that he has just killed.  (This is the second important film in recent times that begins with the graphic killing of an animal, the first being Emir Baigazin’s Kazhak film Harmony Lessons (2013), winner of a Silver Bear at the Berlin film festival,  only to be followed by a contrarian humanist story.)  While the gore repulses the viewer, the films use these scenes to prepare the viewer for deeper thought as the films unspool. The death of goat/sheep is contrasted with peaceful death of young Kyoko’s lovely mother dying in the company of her caring husband and daughter from an unspecified disease. The ‘waters’ of the film are metaphorically stilled. “Mother’s soul will be part of you,” Kyoko is told in consolation. A large banyan tree, occupies some space in the movie's script and visuals, with drooping branches and aerial prop roots that grows into thick woody trunks making it difficult to distinguish them from the main trunk.

Wisdom of the elders for the young

Much of Kawase’s films have autobiographical touches. Kawase’s father had abandoned her when she was young and she was brought up by her grandmother. In Still the Water, the young shy boy Kaito, is being raised by his mother after his father has left the village to live in the city blaming the circumstances on ‘fate’. Thus both the youngsters in the film suffer from a missing parent whom they love. The girl loves the sea, while the boy is afraid of water. Early in the film a wise old man comments:  “These kids don’t know what lies in the sea.”  Animate and inanimate objects have relevance in the films of Malick and Kawase in equal measure.  Both are visual poets of nature, life and death. 

Halcyon days: Father, daughter, and the sick mother during a light interlude

Kawase’s handling of Kyoko’s mother’s death is truly unforgettable. The mother, a shaman, dies holding her daughter’s hand as the villagers sing the mother’s favorite song. Friends come to sing and dance as the mother dies reminiscent of an Irish wake.

For Kawase, memory of successive generations lives in trees and forests (The Mourning Forest and Still the Water), and rocks (Hanezu) and life is eternal (the arachnids of Hanezu and roots of the banyan trees in Still the Water.)  The most interesting line Kawase provides in Still the Water is “Young people should be brave to leave us elders to pick up the pieces.” 

The banyan tree as a metaphor of life

The tale of life, death and love as it affects two young people in a Japanese village on the forlorn island of Amami is scripted by the Japanese director herself. The appeal of what she provides as cinematic visuals and storyline could be eclectic to Occidental viewers but it would appeal more to the Oriental mind that seeks spiritual connection with nature and respects the forces of nature.  She might not have won the admiration of Cannes with Still the Water but this work is her most engaging work since she made The Mourning Forest.  The love tale of the boy and the girl is submerged by the sea of philosophical thought the film attempts to provide. Most other directors would have been inclined to do just the opposite.  The unknown killer of Kyoko’s mother’s lover is never revealed.  The detail is peripheral for Kawase; instead the effect of the death on other characters is more important for her. That is where we need to admire Kawase, she is different from the regular filmmaker.  For this critic, Kawase is the finest living active filmmaker of Japan today.

P.S. Kawase’s earlier films Hanezu and The Mourning Forest have been reviewed in detail earlier on this blog.  Still the Water is one of the author’s top 10 films of 2014. Ms Kawase is also one of the author's 15 favourite active filmmakers.

175. Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s “Winter Sleep” (Kis Uykusu) (2014): Top-notch contemporary cinema that will satiate a patient, intelligent viewer

Winter Sleep is one of the outstanding cinematic works of 2014.

Winter Sleep is a daunting 196 minutes long movie and could put off an uninitiated, immature viewer craving for action, sex and thrills. The Turkish director Ceylan, speaking to a packed audience that had earlier stood in long, winding queues on a humid December morning in Trivandrum city in India to view the award winning cinematic work and glimpse the accomplished director, during the International Film Festival of Kerala, India, stated with a note of apprehension “I hope all of you slept well last night as my film is more than 3 hours long.”

Interior lighting that embellishes the film

Winter Sleep, as in the case of the director’s previous two films—Three Monkeys and Once Upon a Time in Anatolia—proved one fact, it was a work of a contemporary master of cinema, while requiring a viewer’s undivided concentration to savour all the multifaceted morsels of delectable cinematic treats the film offers in the form of amazing performances, cinematography, choice of classic western music, and last but not least impressive script and direction. Winter Sleep deserved the two awards it won at the Cannes film festival—the Golden Palm for the best film of the festival and FIPRESCI prize for the content.

Winter Sleep is a film about several subjects of conflict and their resolution moulded into one tale, constructed with immaculate care.

The Script and the Scriptwriters

The husband-wife team of Ebru and Nuri Bilge Ceylan has been responsible for the last three masterpieces of director Ceylan. In all the three films, they have developed and presented varied types of husband and wife relationships. (Their collaboration is quite like another notable contemporary screenplay collaboration team made up of the Russian film director Andrei Zvyagintsev and scriptwriter Oleg Negin on their respective last three Russian masterpieces that culminated in Leviathan, a film that competed with Winter Sleep at Cannes and had to settle for the Best Screenplay Award, losing out on the top award to the Turkish contender).

 

The fascinating bit about Winter Sleep is that a real life husband-wife duo have come together to write about the fictional see-sawing relationship of a husband and a wife, who in this film are not cheating on one another and on many counts can be well considered as admirable individuals and perhaps from certain perspectives even as a devoted couple.

Husband Aydin (Bilginer) and wife Nihal (Sozen)
in delicate hues of light and shade

The husband in Winter Sleep is a retired actor named Aydin of certain national repute. He has co-inherited, with his sister, a boutique hotel in a fascinating natural rocky setting of Cappadocia in Turkey attracting international tourists.  Aydin’s wife is Nihal, an attractive young lady, who is evidently not as financially secure as her husband, whom she had admired in the past as an actor of repute and has been married to for a while.  Nihal now finds Aydin to be “an unbearable man.” They have no offspring.  Apart from helping run the small hotel, Nihal takes a proactive interest in the improvement of a local school and its affairs. Her husband has apparently never shown interest or an inclination to help improve the functioning of that school, which has caught the attention of his wife. He is busy writing a column for a small newspaper with limited readership, cocooned in his study filled with books and memorabilia of plays and films that he was associated with or liked and dreams of writing a book on the history of Turkish theatre.  He has even named his hotel “Hotel Othello.” The script of the film shifts gears with the arrival of an electronic mail from a female reader of Aydin’s column. She respectfully requests Aydin’s help in improving the deplorable conditions of a school in a not-so-distant village by either providing direct monetary help or by Aydin, as a respected citizen, contacting influential government officials to provide more financial resources for the school.  Aydin, who has never been interested in supporting Nihal’s pet school, suddenly wonders if he should respond positively to this distant admirer of his column.  What follows in the film, provide sufficient details to show the cracks in the marriage of two otherwise admirable educated Muslims, Aydin and Nihal, both having diverse social acceptance by different sets of people. Unlike George and Martha of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? where the husband and wife spewed venom at each other, in Winter Sleep, Aydin and Nihal are overtly caring and respectful to each other, taking great care not to tread on each other’s toes.  Even the most hurtful comments made by Aydin’s sister Nacla towards her brother are gently-spoken, well-chosen words though sharp as knives. One unforgettable line from Nacla to her brother is “I wish my level of self deception was as low as yours.”   So, too, are those of Nihal addressed to her recently divorced sister-in-law---subtle words and inflections of speech that drive home the intended critical message, without seeming to be ugly, even to the ears of the hotel‘s main employee who was in earshot. And like the Albee play (made into a memorable Hollywood film by Mike NIchols) there is reconciliation at the end, but in a quite unusual manner  for the average Muslim male ego one often associates with the contemporary Middle East.

Mature performances are the mainstay of the film

This critic, who was able to throw a couple of questions at the director, during a post-screening public interaction, specifically asked Ceylan about his three film long collaboration with his wife Ebru in scriptwriting--all of which resulted in three consecutive major award-winning films at Cannes. The response was revealing and startling. Ceylan stressed the fact that Ebru an accomplished Turkish actress (she also acted in Ceylan’s early films Distant and Climates) and filmmaker had taken to scriptwriting very well. Ceylan explained that he himself was influenced by literature, specifically Russian literature and that Winter Sleep is very similar to Anton Chekhov’s short story The Wife. Ceylan, who was influenced by Ingmar Bergman’s The Silence when he was a young man, evidently continues to develop and construct scenes reminiscent of the Swedish maestro. While developing the script, Ebru kept reminding her husband Nuri Bilge that the script was way too long and the length needed to be reduced.  Nuri Bilge Ceylan finally decided not to reduce the length as all the small details were important for him. As a jury member at Cannes, Ceylan recalled he wished Michael Haneke’s lengthy Austrian film White Ribbon could go on and on as it was great cinema just as he wishes certain badly made 80 minute long films would end quicker than their intended full duration. With remorse, he added to this critic, Ebru, his wife, might not work on a film script with him again after this decision to retain the film’s length and its myriad details. He added that he found women were stronger than men intellectually.

This critic decided to read the Chekhov story and compare it with Winter Sleep.  In the Russian story there are similar characters and a parallel ending, when you compare it with the film. In the Russian story, the lead character wished to write a book on the history of railways, while in the movie the lead character Aydin wishes to write a book on the history of Turkish theatre, which both pursue in the separate creative works. But more importantly, both works look closely at the social divide, in Russia (in the short story) and in Turkey (in the film). The social divide leverages the emergence of the fissure in the husband-wife relationship in both the movie and short story and therefore serves as an important sub-plot in both tales.

Social Commentary of Chekhov and of the Ceylans

In Winter Sleep, as in the Russian short story, the social divide is all pervasive. The landed gentry live in comfort concerned only whether their tenants pay their rents on time and do not hesitate to take corrective action if they are not paid, blind to the financial conditions of their tenants. The Ceylans, in their script, weave in the reactions of children and old women in the family of the tenants (an aspect Chekhov never dealt with) deprived of their TV by the owners because the rents have not been paid. For Chekhov, the peasants were hit by famine; for the Ceylans, it is a population who sought refuge after calamities decades ago. The Ceylans’ script even details the reaction of the landed gentry to the smelly socks of a tenant, oblivious of the fact that the poor tenant has walked miles to make a token payment.  Even the employees of hotel treat the less financially supported  tenant with disdain by bringing small female slippers for a male adult tenant, who has left his muddy shoes outside, when Aydin asks the employee to bring slippers to protect the visitor’s feet from the cold floor.  The boiling anger of the socially deprived folks towards the well-heeled landowners reminds one of Dostoevsky’s literary works, just as a swooning young boy in Winter Sleep reminds one of passages describing an epileptic in The Idiot. In Winter Sleep, the husband Aydin passing value judgements on the lack of cleanliness of the poor is contrasted with his wife Nihal who is a naive do-gooder who senses the pain of poorer sections of society. Both have differing attitudes and perspectives of the poor. Nihal does painfully realize that “hell is paved with good intentions.”

Aydin writes his column while sister Necla (background) provides bitter criticism

Shakespeare in Winter Sleep

There is no Shakespeare in Chekhov’s story but Ceylan’s love for Shakespeare goes beyond the name of the hotel in Winter Sleep.  There are two references to Richard III in the movie. The title itself connects with the famous line of the play “Now is the winter of discontent...” and towards the end one of the minor characters verbally attack Aydin with the quotation from the same play “Conscience is but a word that cowards use devised at first to keep the strong in awe; our strong arms be our conscience, swords our law.”

Winter Sleep may not be an obvious treatise on conscience of the rich and powerful but on some reflection the film is indeed on this subject.  It is not without reason that the Ceylans have called the film by that name and introduced Richard III’s lines into the script.

The ambiguous, reflective visage of Nihal (Melisa Sozen), the wife,
 at the end of the film

Religion in Winter Sleep

Turkey is a Muslim country and it is inconceivable to make a realistic feature film without touching on religion.  In answer to another pointed question from this critic on the references to religion in the film, Ceylan noted that intellectuals worldwide are not worried about religion. In the film Winter Sleep,   the rent defaulting tenant is an Imam, a religious figure, who curses the inconsiderate rich landlord under his breath, while literally going the extra mile to grovel and appease his landlord. The Ceylans’ script makes Aydin realize that his roles on stage as an imam were all wrong after his brief interactions with his tenant imam. The former actor Aydin is taunted by his acerbic sister Necla as she describes him as a Muslim who never goes to a mosque to pray and yet writes about the importance of cleanliness by the devout.  Another taunt by Necla that deeply hurts Aydin is “Philanthropy isn't tossing a bone to a hungry dog. It’s sharing when you are equally hungry.”  And by stark contrast, the Chekhov short story has no mention of religion.

Ceylan, the Director, and Animals as Allegories

The cinema of Nuri Bilge Ceylan has increasingly used animals—the role of dogs in Once Upon a Time in Anotolia is easily recalled.  In Winter Sleep, horses, a dead dog and a hare get attention. And interestingly, this is purely the Ceylans’ contribution, not Chekhov’s.  Aydin, the retired-actor-cum-hotel-owner, never owned a horse. Since a hotel guest points out to him that the hotel’s website shows horses, Aydin is persuaded to purchase a wild horse, which is subdued and kept in the hotel’s makeshift stable. It does not require the brains of a rocket scientist to see the parallels between the horse and Nihal as what happens to the horse is related to the husband-wife relationship. So do the allegories of the dead dog’s carcass and the waiting carrion birds on the tree branches connect up with the film’s plot.  And the final quixotic proof of ability to hunt game by killing a hare and showing the trophy to his wife Nihal provides considerable visual treats for the viewer to mull over the ambiguous ending.

Profile of Aydin in reverse before he spots the dead dog

Ceylan’s Actors

Winter Sleep is a tale of a retired actor Aydin and his wife. It was imperative that Aydin’s character be played by an able performer. Ceylan achieves this by casting Haluk Bilginer, a Turkish actor with considerable experience on the British stage and TV, who is a delight to watch as he interprets Aydin on screen. So are Melisa Sozen as Nihal and Nejat Isler (who was equally impressive in Semih Kaplanoglu’s Egg) as Ismail, the elder brother of the Imam.  While these three performers are top-notch, the other minor characters such as the Imam Hamdi, his nephew Ilyas, and Aydin’s sister Necla will not fail to impress a perceptive viewer. Winter Sleep is not a film held together by one actor, it is held together by an ensemble of quality actors well chosen by the director.

Cinematography in Winter Sleep

No discussion on this remarkable film would be complete without praising the cinematographer Gokhan Tiryaki, who has been a regular collaborator of Ceylan and has been responsible for capturing effective external and indoor scenes with dramatic effect, more so in the latter. His use of light and shadows in interior shots will remain in a viewer’s memory, film after film.  In Winter Sleep, his reverse angle shots of Aydin and slow zoom in on Aydin’s head at key junctures in the film are remarkable.  The rock thrown at Aydin’s Landrover can be seen in flight before the ultimate impact and one doubts if special effects were employed.

Reverse shot of  Aydin (Haluk Bilginer) in light and shadows

Lastly, the final shots of both Winter Sleep and Zvyagintsev’s Leviathan (cinematographer Mikhail Krichman) are almost identical wordless shots of rocky snowy landscapes. Both films are outstanding and comparable. Winter Sleep won the top award at Cannes but failed to reach even the final nomination stage at the Oscars.  Leviathan won the Golden Globe, an Oscar nomination, and the Cameraimage Golden Frog award, the most prestigious award for cinematographers.

Music in Winter Sleep

The choice of music in a film by the director is often missed out by viewers. In Winter Sleep, music is sparsely used, but when it is utilized it embellishes the cinematic work. The piece of music Ceylan uses is Schubert’s Sonata no. 20 in A major the very same piece of music used by Robert Bresson in his French classic Au Hazard Balthazar. By a coincidence, the French classic is one of Ceylan’s favourite films.

Concluding Remarks

Though this critic is a great votary of Nuri Bilge Ceylan and considers him to be one of the finest directors alive and making films, the best work of Ceylan remains Three Monkeys, the first movie the director collaborated with his wife on the script. Both Nuri Bilge Ceylan and Semih Kaplanoglu, two remarkable Turkish directors, have injected a new life into Turkish cinema to take it new highs in world cinema.

P.S.  Winter Sleep is one of the top 10 films of the author in 2014. Three Monkeys (2008) and Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011) have being reviewed on this blog earlier. Three Monkeys is the lone Ceylan work on his top 100 films list. A report of a brief interaction between the author and Nuri Bilge Ceylan in December 2014 at Trivandrum’s International Film Festival of Kerala published on the Dear Cinema website can be accessed at http://dearcinema.com/article/men-intellectually-not-strong-women-nuri-bilge-ceylan/1346 Zvyagintsev's Leviathan (2014) and Nichol's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), mentioned in the above analysis, have been also earlier reviewed in detail on this blog. Mr Ceylan is also one of the author's 15 favourite active filmmakers

174. Belgian directors Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s francophone film “Two Days, One Night” (Deux jours, une nuit) (2014): Ethics and self-interest in a job-insecure world

The Dardenne brothers’ work Two Days, One Night is typical of a movie that makes you think beyond its apparent light-hearted positive ending that closes a tense and bleak scenario of sudden impending unemployment. It is a film that makes the viewer ponder if a positive ending is indeed so beyond what the film’s official ending suggests for the viewer’s benefit. More importantly, the film presents a grim situation that could be universal in democratic environs.

The facts are stacked against the film’s protagonist Sandra (Marion Cotillard) in Two Days, One Night. Sandra, a factory worker, has been hospitalized for depression and has now been discharged to resume work. While she is on leave getting treated, her employer who runs a solar panel manufacturing plant, realizes that his company needs to tweak its workforce to stay profitable and a sick employee like Sandra is not helping matters. One way out for the employer would be lay-off Sandra and ask the other employers to work more hours and compensate them with an attractive bonus for their additional sweat. The small company could then stay afloat and make profits and share some of it with the employees.

Now the Dardenne brothers, who write their own original scripts, when presenting the tale of a mentally fragile lady worker in Two Days, One Night, are also presenting the fragile Belgian economy (or for that matter, the world’s). That’s the charm of the directors who are in their sixties and perceptible of changes in their own neighbourhood. What you see is a lot more than what you think you are viewing. The film is more than the depiction of 2 critical days and 1 night in Sandra’s life. The larger perspective the film offers is the dilemma of Belgian industries that have to trim their costs to remain competitive in a global economy. And in a democracy, it ought to “appear” that the workers are increasingly a part of the decision-making process. And the decision the workers make is to bring in more money for their own stretched monetary household budgets by working more hours. That decision results in the employer giving the pink slip to the worker Sandra recently hospitalized for depression. Thus 16 families stand to gain from the promised bonus; the employer presumably spends less on the gross salary outgo for his healthy 16 employees; and his factory remains financially viable. Only the 17^th family, the family of Sandra with her caring husband and two school-going kids are to face a financial tsunami, with Sandra unemployed. The ethical question is whether a sick employee, vulnerable on several fronts, physical, financial, and isolated by her guilty co-workers, can be shown the door.  At the same time a sick employee reduces the profits of the company, which in turn cannot be expected pay bonuses to its healthy workers due to decreasing profits.

The Dardenne brothers seem to be attracted to the subject of unemployment and its ripple effect on society, both social and psychological.  An early Dardenne brothers’ work Rosetta (1999), which also dealt with unemployment, not merely won the director-scriptwriter duo the coveted Golden Palm at the Cannes Film Festival but the film had the honour of being associated by the Belgian Government to a bill already in Parliament which ultimately became the Rosetta law (after the movie’s name), a labour law protecting young workers similar to the movie’s protagonist Rosetta. Two Days, One Night, is yet another delectable film that looks at unemployment in Belgium or rather the fear of unemployment for employed workers universally.

Absence of solidarity: A scene that captures it all--the sadness, the guilt,
the empathy, and the self interest

While the script and direction of the Dardenne brothers lead the viewer to gently slip into the viewpoint of Sandra (so often in the film the camera is either behind Ms Cotillard or facing her) so that we are led to empathize with Sandra, a sick lady who is almost forced to beg her 16 work compatriots to forgo the bonus that has been assured, which understandably would make a big difference in their quality of lives with Sandra’s exit and their extra hours of labour at the plant. While the viewer is cajoled to see 16 different views to the options before the workers, ethical issues are cleverly reversed on the victim. Sandra is forced to see a dozen or so viewpoints of her co-workers about the choice she would have make if she were in their shoes.  The overall brilliance of the film again rests with the scriptwriting-director duo who are able to bring on the table differing reactions. One reaction is of fear of losing his/her job if Sandra is retained in the plant. Another interesting reaction is the nagging emergence of guilty conscience of voting against Sandra when she had hid a co-worker’s mistake to help him retain his job and covered it up by saying she was responsible instead for the mistake.  Yet another reaction comes from another co-worker who wants to flee a spouse who forces her to make decisions as he wants them made. Subtleties of the Dardenne brothers’ cinema are many: parents don’t want their children to hear as the adults make their unethical decisions, employers like to pass on the brunt of their unethical decisions on the most vulnerable of their workforce at each given time.

The Dardenne brothers have stated that they always wanted to make this film but the global economic upheaval that began in 2008 spurred them on. According to their interview given to Larry Rohter in the New York Times, the seed of movie germinated when they read a sociological book called The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society edited by Pierre Bourdieu. Apparently one case study in that book dealt with a non-productive worker. The idea of the managers influencing the workers to push such a worker aside with the carrot of bonuses for the productive workers in Two Days, One Night comes from that case study. To have built the complex tale of Two Days, One Night from a sociological case study is a creditable feat, especially when the viewer is privy to the interesting twist the employer provides Sandra in confidence towards the end of the film. It reverses Sandra’s position so dramatically.

The vulnerable and the more vulnerable worker

The importance of Two Days, One Night lies in two distinct departments of the movie: the scriptwriting and the acting. The scriptwriting reveals the importance the brothers give to psychology of the personalities in the film. The honest conversations are always in the open space. The unethical conversations are in closed environments, with no witnesses. The Dardenne brothers allows for the discussion on the lack of sex between Sandra and her husband to be discussed in the open areas but in stark contrast Sandra’s employer makes his final deal with Sandra in closed space.  In the final moments of the film, there is an awkward optimism. But is it real? We always tend to believe the employer is a villain but in the evolving management scenario the co-worker can be an equal villain--all for self-interest and self-preservation.

The best and most effective role of the script is pushing the viewer to make choice at each stage of the film as what he or she would do in that particular situation when Sandra meets up with each of her 16 co-workers rather than the viewer making value judgements on each character. That is what makes this film remarkable.

A sleepless night spent to seek support from co-workers

It appears that Ms Cotillard was approached by the Dardenne brothers for this role while they were producers of Ms Cotillard’s earlier work Rust and Bone and she agreed. Her work in Two Days, One Night is amazing as she is deglamorized and has to combine mental fragility and resilience. The complex emotions required of her are truly phenomenal. She richly deserved her Oscar nomination for this demanding role.

The effect of unemployment on caring spouses

The Dardenne brothers ought to have been recognized for their admirable script. The film may be bleak, but it throws up important and relevant questions applicable to all of us. It is good to have directors like the Dardenne brothers making such rich thought-provoking cinema offering catharsis for the viewer just as the Greek playwrights of the distant past.


P.S. The film won the best film award at the Sydney film festival. The film is one of the author's top 10 films of 2014. Marion Cotillard, nominated for the Best Actress Oscar for her role in this film, did not win the award. The Dardenne brothers are also on the author's list of 15 favourite active filmmakers

173. US director Damien Chazelle’s second feature film “Whiplash” (2014): The ultimate Svengali levelled

“I saw a drive in him” —Terence Fletcher in Whiplash, referring to his former student Sean Casey 

“The next Charlie Parker would never be discouraged” —Terence Fletcher in Whiplash

A quick assessment of Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash would be that the film is about a music student carving out a drumming career in a jazz band. Another would be classifying the film as a tale of a musician’s long and winding journey to acquire recognition by the critics who matter.  Others would only remember the film as one that forces the viewer to hate and cringe at the actions of an inhuman mentor, a perfectionist, who wrecks the lives of young creative diligent minds by physical and verbal abuse, all for his own goal in life. While all these are justifiable perceptions of the film, young Damien Chazelle’s script and film offers more than the obvious.

The film’s opening sequence is of the camera (the viewer’s point of view) entering a darkened corridor at the end of which the student Andrew Neimann (Miles Teller) is religiously practicing on a drum and cymbal set.  Concentrating on his music, he is oblivious of all else around him.  The lighting and camera movement innocuously provide the prologue for what is to follow without a word spoken. Chazelle’s poster of the film too captures that very mood. The spotlight is on the drummer.  And that is what could mislead the viewer. The film is equally about what is not under the spotlight, the shadowy part of the space, surrounding the drummer.The film is as much about the various characters (the teacher, the father and the lover) in the film who directly and indirectly shapes Andrew to what he becomes ultimately.

Fletcher (Simmons) (right) exacting what he wants from the drummer

The prologue over, from the darkened closed doors emerge a man in black Terence Fletcher (J K Simmons) like a cat’s stealthy entrance, followed  by a defining staccato conversation and the removal of his jacket (denoting that he is at work), and an equally dramatic exit slamming the doors only to reappear again apologetically to retrieve his jacket. Most viewers will be transfixed by the overpowering presence of the man in black (Simmons), but a keen viewer will note the effect is totally orchestrated by the scriptwriter and director Chazelle. It is not Simmons who has grabbed your attention; it is Chazelle who is really shaking up the viewer, with the lighting, Fletcher’s clothes, the quiet entry and the loud exit. Chazelle by getting Fletcher to remove his jacket for such a short time has told the viewer that the man takes his job very, very seriously.

Whiplash is more than a movie about music; it is a lovely work exploring the ultimate Svengali bringing out the best of drumming in a wannabe using insults, intimidation, skulduggery and psychological manipulation. While Andrew takes the spotlight, Fletcher is the less assessed ogre lurking in the shadows.

Developing the Charlie Parker in a first year student with  'a drive"

The viewer is manipulated by Chazelle to hate Terence Fletcher, who does everything to ensure his jazz ensemble is the best of the best. He spots the “drive” in a former trumpet player Sean Casey when the rest of the Schaefer School of Music faculty was telling him “Maybe this isn’t for you “ (who the viewer never gets to see on screen), picks him for his ensemble just as he does Andrew the drummer, to push them to the limits psychologically and physically to bring out the best. Sean Casey ultimately becomes the first trumpet at Lincoln Center.  Only Casey dies shortly after “in a car accident” according to Fletcher.  Casey’s Svengali—Terrence Fletcher (Simmons)—is sorry and provides a eulogy for the departed in a touching manner by making his entire ensemble listen to a CD of Casey, with the name Sean scribbled on it, playing. Evidently, Fletcher had recorded Casey’s musical output and kept the recording with him. There is a human side to the beast, who spits out venom at his students, and yet spots the real potential talent, shapes that, and makes them famous. Much later in the film, we learn that Sean Casey did not die in a car accident but hanged himself. Fletcher can lie as well. The spacing and timing of the two differing bits of information about Casey's death provided to the viewer is clever. The original details that Chezelle provides work as an antidote to the evil sketch of Fletcher elsewhere in the film.  The revised information on Casey’s death makes the viewer to reappraise Fletcher and his tactics. So are the innocuous yet brilliant lines written by Chezelle and mouthed by Fletcher “I never really had a Charlie Parker.  But I tried. I actually fucking tried. And that’s more than most people ever do.” The man in black is not all black. He too has a talent to spot the Charlie Parkers of the future and chisel them into a live Charlie Parker. And he does transform Andrew into a Charlie Parker, Andrew’s ideal musician.

Who is this Charlie Parker mentioned again and again in this movie? Charlie Parker is a legendary jazz saxophonist who often combined jazz with blues, Latin and Classical music. The recurring references to Parker in Whiplash relate to a real incident involving Parker, the jazz saxophonist. Apparently a real drummer colleague of the teenage Charlie Parker named Jo Jones threw a cymbal at the floor near Parker’s feet because Parker didn’t change key with the rest of the band (according to Wikipedia) , just as Fletcher threw a cymbal close to Andrew’s head in Whiplash. In real life that incident apparently inspired Charlie Parker to practice inordinately until he became a legend in music. In Whiplash, Charlie Parker is first mentioned over dinner by Andrew. Then you hear Fletcher wishing he had a Charlie Parker to mentor. And finally you see Andrew transform into a Charlie Parker not with a saxophone, bit with the drums. Again, if one looks at the film closely it is the brilliant screenplay that comes out trumps.

Light and shadows effectively used by Chezelle

There are aspects of the Svengali’s manipulation that one has to conjecture from what is not shown in screen.  One of them relates to the mysterious disappearance of the musical notes folder of the drummer Fletcher decides is better than Andrew. Fletcher tells the band never to lose the notes.  Then director/scriptwriter shows Fletcher noticing Andrew sitting by the drummer turning pages for the drummer. This is followed by the mysterious disappearance of the folder. One can only surmise that it was Fletcher who ensured the disappearance so that Andrew could play without the notes.  If the viewer takes the incident to be happenstance, one is missing out on the brilliance of the screenplay (Chezelle) and editing (Tom Cross) in Whiplash.

It would be short-sighted to view Whiplash as a duel of egos between the mentor and the mentored. Whiplash is more about levelling of the egos between the two. A keen viewer will note the camera perspective that allowed Fletcher to tower over ensemble players throughout the film  making a defining change in the  point of view  at the end when drummer  seems to be looking down at the conductor Fletcher, and finally having both Fletcher and Andrew  appear at the same visual level, each appreciating the other. So much is said in the film without the spoken word—in a movie where spoken word seems to be overarching at key moments. Are the words of Fletcher, “Not my tempo” more memorable in the film or the door opening precisely when second hand of the clock moves to 9 o’clock? There are invisible aspects of Fletcher the Terrible not so subtly brought on screen by the scriptwriter/director. The reconciliation between the tormentor and the tormented, the mutual admiration of each others talent and the manner in which the unusual ending shows the gains of the lies, torture, and manipulation that helps another Charlie Parker arrive on the music scene are laudable.

The Svengali in black merges with the shadows

Ironically Whiplash is competing with one another film at the Oscars that deals with another obsession of another character, that of the real life Alan Turing the mathematician turned inventor of the world’s first computer in The Imitation Game. In both films, a flat tyre delays two different characters to make the films interesting. In both films, the love interests are peripheral to the tale but add considerably to the character development. In both films, the protagonists are loners in school with no friends. Only Whiplash does it all with subtlety, an aspect bereft in the competing film. But then most audiences do not appreciate subtlety.

The shadows/lack of lighting gains importance in the final drum sequence as in the prologue as lights seems to go off before Andrews drum solo takes centre stage.  Fletcher is shadowed out, the ensemble is not lit, and slowly the drums are lit by the spotlight.  Then follows the amazing solo by Andrew which at times are not heard (by the human ear but heard by the mind’s ear) but only seen (a brilliant exhibition of sound mixing in the history of cinema and deserving of the Oscar nomination). First, Chezelle shows us the sweat drops on the cymbals and later a few drops of blood.  Fletcher is shown lending a helping hand to set Andrew's cymbals right. Fletcher takes off his jacket during the solo as in the first scene of Fletcher in Whiplash.  Fletcher is in business again, he has spotted the real Charlie Parker.  Such importance to details make Chezelle’s work truly amazing. The final body language between Fletcher and Andrew is one of mutual appreciation. A Svengali is sometimes needed. Somewhere in the shadows, Andrew’s dad’s visage changes from concern for his son’s physical agony to one of celebration. What a film! It is one of the finest films from USA in a long while with incredible attention to scriptwriting, editing, sound mixing (that includes patches of near silence) and cinematography.  The contribution of Simmons as Fletcher is overarching in this lovely film. Chezelle deserved a nomination for direction as well, despite the Oscar snub.  One wishes the 30 year old Chezelle, with just two feature films behind him, proves to be a Charlie Parker of cinema.

P.S. Whiplash is one of the author's best ten movies of 2014 and the only one from USA.  The film won 3 Oscars-- Best Editing, Best Supporting Actor (for J K Simmons) and Best Sound Mixing. It has won the Golden Globe award and the BAFTA award for Best Supporting Actor for J.K.Simmons who plays Fletcher. At BAFTA, it picked up awards also for editing and sound. At Sundance Film Festival it won the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience award.