Just after my 40th birthday in 2022, I decided it was finally time to tackle a project I’d been meaning to start for years. I was going to watch and rank every Best Picture Oscar winner. I’d seen them all before, some more times than others, but I knew the only way to get an accurate ranking was to rewatch them and review them as I went along. The whole thing took just over a year to complete but it validated my belief that a rewatch was necessary, since I ultimately discovered films I thought I disliked but really enjoyed, as well as former favourites that no longer appealed to me in the same way. I grappled with a lot of material, filmmakers and actors who have become problematic and felt better for clarifying my ever-changing relationship with them. I agonised over placings that seemed too close to call and delighted in discovering underrated films I had no idea I loved so much. I ended up rating twenty-six of the Best Picture Winners with the full five stars.
But we’ll get to the great stuff later. Here in Part 1, it’s all about the stinkers. These are the ten films I rated two stars or lower. Some choices are controversial, while others are inevitable. The ranking reflects my personal taste and I hope it will stimulate discussion, debate and disagreement, all within the boundaries of civility. Please do call me out on anything you think I’ve got wrong but do so in the spirit of enjoyable and lively conversation.
The order in which I viewed the Best Picture winners was determined by placing all the titles into a random generator and letting it pick my evening’s viewing. I have included at the top of each entry the date on which I watched the film. It should also be noted that all entries include spoilers. I hope you’ll enjoy coming on this journey with me as much as I enjoyed plotting the route.
95. OUT OF AFRICA
Watched 26 June 2023
I wasn’t looking forward to the moment the random generator chose Out of Africa because I have so little to say about it. The great director Billy Wilder reportedly told Sydney Pollack that his Best Picture winner was “beautiful but boring” and I can only think of the review of Spinal Tap’s Shark Sandwich as a rival to the concise accuracy of this assessment. Hang on though, maybe it’s not so accurate in my case because, as much as I recognise the surface beauty of David Watkin’s Oscar-winning cinematography, without the sense of heart and soul that this flabby slog so desperately lacks, I can’t honestly consider it truly sumptuous. It feels like a brochure, a backdrop to a really dull story, the poetic aspirations of its voiceover narration detracting from, rather than adding to, the effect.
I’m not a fan of colonialism. I’m not a fan of white saviour narratives. I’m not a fan of big game hunting, or hunting of any type (ok, bargain hunters, I’ll give you a pass). I should probably be tearing a strip off Out of Africa for all these things right now but it’s likely a sign of my own white privilege that I couldn’t even be bothered to analyse Out of Africa’s ideological failings because it was all I could do to stay awake. I hate to be glib but, again, I have so little to say about Out of Africa because its meandering storytelling failed to engage me in any way. Even its two big stars, Meryl Streep and Robert Redford, failed to bring a spark to this. Streep, having so thoroughly nailed the Polish accent in Sophie’s Choice, seems to be floundering in her attempt to recreate the Danish accent of Karen Blixen. Redford, meanwhile, plays the Englishman Denys Finch Hatton, without an English accent. This was apparently at the behest of director Pollock. Redford could do a decent English accent but Pollock was seemingly so terrified of losing the movie star charisma that Redford oozed that he accidentally reduced his role to no role at all. He wanted Redford to be Redford and that’s what we get, an awkward non-performance which, in the process of trying to ensure the movie star magic remains intact, thoroughly wrings him dry of any trace of such a thing.
I could go on about everything that didn’t work for me in Out of Africa but it seems pointless at this stage. It’s just so bland in every respect that I can’t work up enough energy to itemise my disappointments. Perhaps its greatest failing is that nothing is disastrous because the film strives for so little. I’d rather see it aim for something interesting and fail than hunker down in the middle of the road and occasionally throw up a picture of lion silhouettes against a sunset to make up for it.
94. THE BROADWAY MELODY
Watched 9 April 2023
The earliest days of sound cinema weren’t exactly the most prestige in Hollywood history. The year before The Broadway Melody won Best Picture, Wings and Sunrise took the top awards. These two classic films showed just how far silent cinema had come since its infancy, while among the nominees sat King Vidor’s even better The Crowd. But the arrival of sound meant a readjustment, finding new ways to tell stories on screen and getting to grips with new techniques. In these very earliest of sound films, you can absolutely tell what you’re watching is essentially a learning curve. Of course, the visual element of cinema was still hugely important so this wasn’t a total reset, which meant that it wasn’t too long before wonderful sound films started being made, as the subsequent year’s Best Picture winner All Quiet on the Western Front attests. But between these impressive early Oscar winners came the most terribly dated film to walk away with the top honours. That’s The Broadway Melody.
The Broadway Melody isn’t an offensive film, it has merely aged badly in terms of audience expectations. With synchronised sound being a whole new proposition for cinema goers, a film that promised song and dance routines, even primitive ones, was always going to wow the punters. It seems that even many critics of the era recognised that The Broadway Melody’s dreary plot about a backstage love triangle was unoriginal and dull, but hearing the characters speaking and occasionally singing was enough to still elicit positive notices. While many of the contemporary reviews acknowledged that the dialogue scenes were merely a way to string together the musical numbers, they generally praised these melodic interludes. But watching The Broadway Melody in this day and age, the lengthy gaps between these often very brief songs seem interminably long and the plot never justifies even the comparatively brief runtime. Not every song is unmemorable. The jaunty title song is fun and catchy, while You Were Meant for Me was eventually given a grand treatment in Singin’ in the Rain but works quite nicely in this smaller, intimate context. But when the music stops, as it does all too often, so does the film.
For the most part the characters are empty shells performed with little gusto. Charles King makes for a horribly unlikeable leading man, throwing over his fiancé for her sister in a manner that’s supposed to encourage us to root for them but merely makes him seem like a manipulative louse. The one performer worth watching is Bessie Love, Oscar-nominated as the headstrong Hank Mahoney, as she brings real enthusiasm and life to a largely dead picture. But it’s not enough to save The Broadway Melody from feeling like an exhausting traipse. You can cling to the thrill of imagining being an audience member experiencing sound for the first time but this approach sputters and dies after one scene. There’s not much else to say about a film whose aging process has essentially drained it of nearly all its original appeal. When what’s left is barely even a film at all, there’s no way I can justify putting it anywhere but near the very bottom of the pile.
93. CIMARRON
Watched 22 October 2022
Looking up reviews of Cimarron, you’re likely to find more than a handful of utterly incredulous people crying “HOW?! How did this win Best Picture?” While I at least sympathise with the bewildered exhaustion they feel after sitting through two hours of this film, if you apply a little historical context, it’s not hard to see why Cimarron won the Oscar for Best Picture in 1931. If nothing else, it’s a film of enormous scale and storytelling scope, at least for its era. Based on Edna Ferber’s novel of the previous year, Cimarron traces the changes in the Oklahoma town of Osage across a 40 year period. To achieve this feat, the film was blessed with nearly double the budget of the average film of its time, quite a privilege in the midst of a depression that would ultimately scupper its chances to recoup that at the box office. But if Cimarron was a commercial flop, it was a huge critical success. While it may not live up to the promise of its bodice-ripping poster that it is “Terrific As All Creation”, you can certainly still see the elements by which critics of its day were so wowed. As well as its celebrated opening recreation of the 1889 Oklahoma land rush, Cimarron’s recreation of Osage through the ages is very impressive and often goes unacknowledged.
Sadly, Cimarron has aged rather poorly in virtually every other respect. Watching it now, the pitfalls of the early sound era are impossible to escape. I watched about as good quality a copy as could be hoped for, sidestepping issues of muddy sound and picture which have dogged some reviewers’ experiences in a way that is not the fault of the film itself. The slow pace and ample speechifying are less easy to forgive, although they too are staples of many films of the era. However, the fact that Cimarron’s Best Picture win was immediately preceded by All Quiet on the Western Front’s victory shows how turgidity was not necessarily a prerequisite for Epics of the early sound era. While that film still stands as a recognised classic, Cimarron has become a relic of its time, easily matched or surpassed by other contemporary productions with considerably smaller budgets but a less pompous outlook and more coherent storytelling.
As Cavalcade would prove two years later, though cross-generational stories can result in an Academy-pleasing scope, they also come with a built-in threat of episodic tedium and oversimplified characterisation. Cimarron is very pointedly the story of Yancey Cravat (yep, that’s his name!) and in its hurry to create a hero of mythic proportions, Cimarron fails to imbue anyone else with much depth, while Yancey himself emerges as overglorified when you consider the flaws that are so readily forgiven by the film but are harder for modern audiences to overlook. There may be a tempting romanticism in making Yancey a natural adventurer with an irresistible sense of wanderlust, but the extent to which he repeatedly ditches his family to fulfil these desires feels unexplored as a negative trait, especially when you’re staring at the reverent commemorative statue of Yancey that is our almost inevitable endpoint. The story tries to balance this flaw by making Yancey everything from a reluctant but skilled gunfighter to a progressive newspaper founder to a temporary preacher and stand-in lawyer. But his apparent championing of the victims of prejudice, from undervalued black servants to persecuted Jewish citizens and despised fallen women, is very much of its era, positioning Yancey as the virtuous saviour of pathetically grateful, downtrodden beneficiaries who’s hero-worship is portrayed as not only appropriate but judiciously necessary.
More so than Yancey’s white-hatted heroism, the depiction of the recipients of his virtuous attentions is likely to be what sticks out most to modern viewers. In particular, Eugene Jackson’s black servant boy Isaiah is a quintessential old Hollywood racist stereotype. Although his persecution by his less-sympathetic employers aims to paint them in a negative light (and, by extension, apply another coat of white gloss to the marginally more accepting Yancey), the film still plays Isaiah’s resultant indignities for mean-spirited laughs. When we first meet him he is swinging on a platform above a dinner table from which he can keep the white diners cool with a fan. His panic and discomfort is obvious and his subsequent tumble onto the table intended to be hilarious. Those who are familiar with old Hollywood will be unsurprised, if still rightly disgusted, by this racism, but Cimarron’s Best Picture win often brings in audiences who are unused to these grotesque depictions, which has driven its rating down further in elapsing years.
Given its broad, melodramatic writing, the performances in Cimarron aren’t terrible. Richard Dix brings exactly the sort of rugged forcefulness you’d expect from Yancey, although the shortcomings of the role are epitomised by a scene in which, faced with a terrible tragedy, he turns away from the camera, stoically hiding his emotions from the audience instead of seizing the opportunity to let us glimpse an emotional complexity that could’ve better justified that Best Actor Oscar nomination. This is more an issue of either writing or direction, of course, and Dix is nothing if not compliant with the basic demands of the filmmakers. Irene Dunne, a wonderful actor, arguably has the more interesting role as Yancey’s wife Sabra. At the very least, she has an arc from prejudiced to tolerant which, while underwritten, is still more interesting than Yancey’s arc of perfect to wonderful. Dunne is hamstrung by the shortcomings of the screenplay and the largely pedestrian direction of Wesley Ruggles, who seems more comfortable with the handful of large scale moments than he is at close quarters with actors. Dunne still bagged herself an Oscar nomination, although she would subsequently prove herself a far more gifted actor in roles that allowed her to make greater use of her considerable range, particularly her notable flair for comedy.
When you set aside its larger scale moments and focus on the narrative, the kindest thing you could say about Cimarron is that it is a film that at least had progressive intentions. But the skewed version of progressiveness it favours, in which persecuted minorities are depicted as the white man’s burden to pity and defend in exchange for adulation, is at least as systemically problematic as the social injustices it aims to rally against. As a fan of classic Hollywood, contextualisation of retrograde attitudes is something with which you get used to having to grapple but when there’s so little of worth underneath, the grappling becomes pointless. Having now seen Anthony Mann’s better, though still far from classic, 60s remake of Cimarron, I found the original a little easier to follow second time round but the muddy motivations and unearned transitions, the flat characters and the dull storytelling, all make Cimarron a taxing experience. It’s a shame, given that only three Westerns have ever won the Best Picture Oscar.
92. PATTON
Watched 1 February 2023
Patton was always going to be a hard sell for me. I’m not a big fan of certain types of War films or Biopics (least of all those with runtimes that seem determined to match the actual lifespan of the subject!) and I didn’t have many fond memories of my first viewing of this. Having now watched it for a second (and final) time, I can confirm that this just isn’t for me. Had I not pledged to review and rank every Best Picture winner, Patton is probably a film I’d have left unrated, since my complete lack of interest in its subject matter makes my intense boredom almost an inevitability. Hang on a minute though, that “almost” is important in that last sentence, because a truly great film can gain the favour of even those who have no initial interest. I’m sure Patton works well for military enthusiasts and those fascinated by Patton himself, but for me these three hours drizzled by with interminable sluggishness.
Patton opens with a celebrated monologue performed to an unseen audience against the backdrop of a giant American flag. It is entertaining to watch and listen to, with George C. Scott immediately registering a forceful performance. The problem for me is not that Patton can’t live up to this opening, but that it essentially goes on in the same manner for the rest of the runtime. Patton is so bullish and unswerving in his attitudes that he quickly becomes boring to watch, spouting endless clearly pre-written pieces of quotable dialogue that add up more easily to an Oscar-winning screenplay than they do to a realistic, or even bearable, viewing experience. Unlike many, I don’t find Patton a fascinating figure so much as a tediously repetitive blowhard. Even Scott’s celebrated performance did little to make him a rounded character in my eyes. Franklin J. Schaffner’s blandly classical direction and Karl Malden’s oddly faltering supporting performance didn’t help matters either.
With its basically reverential tone, Patton’s Best Picture win came at an odd time in American history, with a generation of protesters and draft dodgers unlikely to rush out to see it. One of the films it beat was Robert Altman’s pointedly anti-war MASH, who’s nomination perhaps attested to some level of political balance in the Academy, even if Patton’s victory suggested a conservative stronghold. Oddly enough, the Oscar-winning screenplay was co-written by Francis Ford Coppola, soon to be one of the most successful New Hollywood trailblazers. The times were certainly changing, and Patton feels like a final remnant of a bygone era rather that a precursor to a new and exciting one. At the risk of making the preposterous implication that my rambling, unqualified thoughts have any influence whatsoever, I’d still very much urge those with an interest in Patton to watch it, as there are many who disagree with my assessment. But after a joyless viewing experience, I was forced to conclude that this film has nothing of what I love about cinema.
91. THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH
Watched 5 February 2023
Whether you like Cecil B. DeMille’s epic The Greatest Show on Earth or not will rest at least partially with your answer to the following question: Do you like the circus? I HATE the circus. HATE it! From the ill-treated animal acts to the grotesque, unfunny clowns and the death-defying snooze-fest of the acrobats, there are few things I dislike more than this splashy, over-egged pudding. It was a pretty safe bet, then, that The Greatest Show on Earth was going to bore me rigid. At two and a half hours in length, this brightly coloured, lavishly produced epic is very much aimed at the ever dwindling market of circus appreciators. There is a story, which involves a determined manager called Brad Braden (Charlton Heston) who has “sawdust for blood” and is determined to put on the best show he can, while still running a good, clean operation. The various exploits of Brad and his repertory company provide The Greatest Show on Earth with its narrative thrust.
But DeMille’s intention was to make a film that really captured the experience of going to the circus. So, at tiresomely regular intervals, the story is interrupted by lengthy circus acts performed by the Ringling Bros. and Barnum and Bailey’s circus troupe, captured in all their tedious glory. The only thing more boring than attending the circus yourself is surely to sit through documentary footage of it. DeMille anticipates this problem and attempts to solve it by intercutting the acts with shots of amazed punters, all of whom have a pre-rehearsed wonderstruck comment to share with us. It’s horrendously corny and not even in that charming way that many films of this era make into a virtue. It feels like the equivalent of DeMille ramming the gaeity of his show down our throats while shrieking “IF YOU RESIST YOU ARE UNAMERICAN!”
A subtler form of this statement comes in DeMille’s own opening narration, in which he informs us that the circus is a “Pied Piper whose magic tunes lead children of all ages, from 6 to 60, into a tinseled and spun-candied world of reckless beauty and mounting laughter”. It’s all so insistently wholesome that it borders on agressive. DeMille’s oratory is accompanied by more documentary footage of the circus being set up and the massive amounts of effort that goes into making the “magic” happen. These fleeting moments are probably the most fascinating parts of The Greatest Show on Earth. Also worthy of applause is the fact that DeMille’s starry cast made the effort to learn their acts to a certain extent, allowing them to participate in the action.
But that makes little difference when the action is so feeble. For anyone whose idea of fun doesn’t correspond to sitting through a second-hand circus experience, a strong plot is required to hold interest. What DeMille serves up in the dramatic sections of the film is an intensely annoying, hackneyed love triangle between Heston and his two trapeze artists, Cornel Wilde and Betty Hutton. The actors mostly enter into proceedings gamely and are likable enough. Heston does his well-practiced rugged, salt-of-the-earth routine, Wilde hams it up appropriately as the showboating new trapeze star and Gloria Grahame is agreeable cynical as the elephant trainer and Wilde’s ex-lover. The one bum note is hit by the intensely irritating Hutton as the love interest of both men and, unfortunately, she gets the majority of the screen time, constantly changing her mind over who she loves until any right-thinking person draws the conclusion that whoever she settles on is ultimately the loser.
There’s also a very weird subplot which involves one of the strangest bits of miscasting in film history. Dear old Jimmy Stewart, one of my own personal acting heros, is Buttons the Clown, a performer who never takes his make-up off even when the show is over. This turns out to be because Buttons is actually a former doctor who mercy-killed his terminally ill wife and is hiding out from the police. It seems like the perfect cover, if only medical emergencies didn’t keep arising for him to deal with in a suspiciously expert way. Watching Stewart trying to act beneath half a ton of clown makeup is somewhat disturbing and his distinctive persona clashes badly with this oddest of characters.
It’s been a constant source of disbelief over the years that The Greatest Show on Earth could possibly have won the Best Picture Oscar, especially since it beat High Noon. Suspicions that High Noon‘s chances were affected by its allegorical indictment of the blacklist, coupled with its screenwriter Carl Foreman’s refusal to co-operate with the House Un-American Activities Commitee, a force which DeMille actively supported, seem likely to have had some bearing. But even more unbelievable in my book is the fact that The Greatest Show on Earth won the Oscar for Best Story, quite an achievement for a film that barely has a story!
The Greatest Show on Earth is often cited as the worst film to ever win the Best Picture Oscar. While it’s certainly up there with the worst, it does have one or two saving graces. The sheer gloss of the lavish production values make The Greatest Show on Earth undeniably attractive and complex technical scenes such as the disastrous collision of the circus trains are exceptionally effective. Plus, jarring and bizarre as it is, there’s a captivatingly peculiarity to that Jimmy Stewart storyline that just keeps you watching through splayed fingers. But ultimately these small (miniscule!) mercies are little comfort in the vast ocean of tedium that is The Greatest Show on Earth.
90. CAVALCADE
Watched 21 June 2022
When I began watching Cavalcade, a film I haven’t seen in decades and remember nothing about, I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to dislike it as much as everyone else seems to. I told myself, somewhat snobbishly, that I was more used to accommodating the context of early sound cinema and all those negative reviews were probably from people unwilling or unable to do the same. My review would surely end up being a shining beacon of sense among the hyperbolic vitriol. Even if I’d been right about liking Cavalcade, these still would’ve been the unfiltered thoughts of an idiot. That I was also wrong about the quality of the film just makes me doubly ludicrous.
To be fair to myself (not that I’ve earned it), I had other reasons for believing I’d enjoy Cavalcade. I’ve always enjoyed David Lean’s adaptation of Noel Coward’s This Happy Breed and that play is considered something of a companion piece to Coward’s earlier play Cavalcade. Both examine the lives of a family and their friends through the prism of a portion of the twentieth century, with domestic dramas punctuated and influenced by major real life events. But while This Happy Breed uses this structure to examine contemporary attitudes and politics more closely, screenwriter Reginald Berkeley’s adaptation of Cavalcade fails to convincingly weave its strands together. The smaller plots seem superficially soapy and while characters do change across the lengthy time periods explored, the gaps in the narrative seem to be used as an excuse not to bother making these changes realistic. Cavalcade seems to hope that we’ll feel the passage of time is enough reason to explain, for instance, a descent into alcoholism, and neither the script or Frank Lloyd’s direction do anything to help us fill in the gaps. And then the audience is compensated by simply being handed another historical marker. Changing people, changing times. The social commentary doesn’t get any more complex than that. I imagine Coward’s original play is a bit more insightful, although his penchant for maudlin patriotism and mawkish sentiment seem to have been accurately preserved.
Amongst casual film viewers ticking off their Best Picture list, there’s a general air of mystification over Cavalcade’s Oscar win but for anyone with a bit more experience of the early sound era it’s not that much of a mystery. A lot of early Best Picture winners were clearly decided by the level of spectacle on offer and Cavalcade does provide big scenes to offset its smaller dramas, mirroring the respective scopes of the would-be complimentary strands. Large crowd scenes of street celebrations, parades, soldiers shipping out and revellers coming together to sing Auld Lang Syne (somewhat endlessly! The song appears three times before the first half hour is over) abound. As cinematic narratives were forced to find their feet all over again with the dawn of sound, such superficial spectacle and ambitious scope was more impressive to audiences and critics and the shortcomings of Cavalcade (stagey acting, underwritten script) were probably less easy to pick out among a sea of films trying to get a handle on the new medium. That said, as we shall see below, Cavalcade came out in a year when many other sound films were making significant leaps forward in quality and its rivals for Best Picture feature many films that play significantly better with audiences today, whereas Cavalcade has severely lost its lustre, especially as the historical events it references drift further from the viewer’s present day.
But if actually remembering the events depicted doubtless enhanced the experience of some viewers, Cavalcade isn’t above using this for cheap, dirty tricks. A sequence in which we are given great hope for a couple’s future as they set off on honeymoon, only for a dramatic reveal to show us they’re on the Titanic, plays as mere melodramatic silliness today but given that the sinking of the Titanic was a then recent memory, reducing the tragedy to a pull-back and reveal is a crass and insensitive ploy on a par with the deplorable 2010 film Remember Me, for which I’ve had a longstanding loathing. Seeing the supposedly classier Cavalcade pull this stunt pushed it down even further in my estimation.
89. THE HURT LOCKER
Watched 5 June 2023
The Hurt Locker is a film that, like Patton, were I not rating and ranking all the Best Picture winners, I may well have left completely unrated because it is so emphatically not my sort of thing. I don’t like to dismiss entire categories of film if I can help it, as this is inevitably a reductive approach that leads to missing out on those exciting discoveries that sit outside your own cinematic comfort zone and yet somehow wow you anyway. But The Hurt Locker was not one of those. It is the kind of muddily incessant War film that bores me very quickly, with repetitive action sequences centred around bomb disposal that feel gradually less tense the more they repeat and the less connection I feel with the undeveloped characters. There’s an attempt to engage with the psychological effects of war but it is pretty surface level and the soldiers through whom we explore that side of things have so little distinct personality that it’s hard to experience any emotional connection. Even Jeremy Renner’s star-making turn plays as unremarkable to me, so drearily cliched is his brooding lone-wolf protagonist.
Coming out in the midst of the Iraq war, The Hurt Locker’s sense of contemporary significance was boosted in the same way that the likes of Mrs. Miniver and The Best Years of Our Lives were given added weight by their proximity to World War II. But one of the things that critics and audiences seemed to love most about The Hurt Locker was the notion that it gave viewers an authentic glimpse of the intensity of being in a war zone. This notion has subsequently been debunked by numerous Iraq veterans who have dismissed the film as preposterous from a realist point of view. Although the subject of sensationalist misrepresentation of a war that was ongoing at the time is a bit of a sticky wicket, it’s probably also fair to say that in a fictional story the teller has licence to take certain liberties in order to entertain. But the weight of praise behind The Hurt Locker hinged so strongly on its apparent gritty realism that the proliferation of those who had really experienced this war decrying it as a macho fairytale can’t help but impact its credibility.
The Hurt Locker made history by becoming the first Best Picture winner directed by a woman, with Kathryn Bigelow also becoming the first female recipient of the Best Director Oscar (and, disgracefully, only the fourth female nominee ever). While I celebrate and would not want to take away these achievements, the film itself does not, to me, feel in any way deserving of the top honour and Bigelow’s direction, though displaying a kinetic charge that does its best to keep things exciting, relies too heavily on that old chestnut of sometimes nauseating shaky cam. Mark Boal’s Oscar-winning screenplay feels like a retread of themes explored better, or more often with equally sterile mundanity, in countless predecessors. Again, you don’t have to bring something entirely new to the table to convincingly win Best Picture, but it helps if it has at least something that stands out. For many, The Hurt Locker did, but for me it was a tedious, repetitive and unoriginal plod that I won’t be revisiting again in future.
88. MILLION DOLLAR BABY
Watched 28 June 2023
Back when I was signing on, there was a sign on the wall of my local job centre that said “If you think you’re unlucky, check the level of your effort.” This deeply insulting faux-wisdom, though not surprising to discover in a job centre under Tory rule, so infuriated me that I returned the following week with a homemade sign in my pocket that read “If you think you’re inspirational, check you’re not actually a condescending prick”, which unfortunately I couldn’t sneak past the security guards. I was put in mind of this incident while watching Million Dollar Baby, when I saw a sign on the wall of boxing trainer Frankie Dunn’s gym that read “The Winners are Simply Willing to Do What Losers Won’t.” I don’t know if this detail was included in Paul Haggis’s screenplay or at the behest of director and star Clint Eastwood, but it certainly seems in keeping with the hardline conservatism of the latter and his claim that Million Dollar Baby is a film about “the American dream.” Differing political viewpoints between a film and its audience are not necessarily the be all and end all of film appreciation. Certainly, I’ve enjoyed plenty of right-leaning films in my time despite, perhaps sometimes even because of, their monstrous ideologies. But this particular detail irritated me right from the off, at first because of the personal memory it evoked, then because of the part it played in Million Dollar Baby’s pointed demonisation of the benefits-reliant lower classes, and finally because of the ghoulish context it takes on in the third act, whether by misjudged design or hideous accident.
Million Dollar Baby was more famously criticised for its attitudes to disability than poverty, with many interpreting the ending of the film as the equivalent of saying quadriplegic people are better off dead. While many of the film’s defenders argued that this was one story rather than a symbolic, across-the-board statement, it’s hard not to see it that way when the film is so keen to hitch its wagon to the hot button issue of euthanasia yet seemingly reluctant to examine it very thoroughly or realistically. Throughout its gruelling third act, there seems to be little point to the film other than to depress the audience, before finally revealing that the story of Hilary Swank’s Maggie was largely just a way for Morgan Freeman’s Scrap to mansplain to Frankie’s estranged daughter what a great guy he is (the narration was a letter all along! Gasp! How… unconvincing). So where does that Winners and Losers poster come in? Well, Maggie’s family, headed by a grotesque caricature way beneath the acting abilities of Margo Martindale, are ungrateful spongers who angrily turn down a house from her because it will affect their government relief, before arriving at her hospital bed in Universal Studios T-shirts and trying to get her to turn over her earnings to them by sticking a pen in her mouth and waving legal documents at her. There’s zero nuance here and the only sort of person I can imagine not being mortified by this scene is the type who decided to hang that sign in my local job centre.
I don’t just have problems with Million Dollar Baby’s attitudes though. Despite all the excited jabber about it being an old-fashioned Hollywood picture, I just don’t think it’s well written, paced or directed. In terms of acting, everyone’s doing fine for the rather empty melodrama this is, with Clint trotting out his growly curmudgeon act, Swank doing her scrappy charmer bit and Freeman presumably banking on the hope that reprising the gravitas-heavy-narration routine might finally bag him an Oscar (it did). Glibness aside, the performances are genuinely decent, although I actually think Freeman feels slightly miscast and Jay Baruchel as the young aspiring boxer with an intellectual disability is the sort of casting choice that feels very off now, if not quite so off as the patronising way in which Haggis writes the character.
There’s so much I dislike about Million Dollar Baby. Even in the early stretches, during which many assumed the film was going to be Rockette Balboa, I found it sluggish and emotionally and thematically muddy. Perhaps it was tainted by the fact that I knew the film’s literal suckerpunch was on its way this time, but I just felt depressed for most of this. But it’s hard to know how the film could’ve got itself out of that drastic narrative corner into which it backs itself. Critic Wesley J. Smith argued “the movie could have ended with Maggie triumphing once again, perhaps having obtained an education and becoming a teacher; or, opening a business managing boxers; or perhaps, receiving a standing ovation as an inspirational speaker.” But all of those ideas, particularly the last one, would’ve avoided a problematic ending at the expense of leaning into the very worst Hollywood clichés. Ironically for a film with such a bull-headed take on what makes a “winner”, it feels like Million Dollar Baby places itself in a no win situation. For all the flack that Haggis would eventually take for his Crash screenplay, Million Dollar Baby seems to have largely sidestepped its controversies to remain as highly regarded as it was at the time. I have no idea how. I think it’s a bad film and it left me feeling horrible.
87. CRASH
Watched 29 June 2023
I first came across the name Paul Haggis as the creator of Due South, a show about a Canadian Mountie in 90s Chicago who owns a deaf wolf and occasionally sees a ghostly apparition of his father, which ultimately turns out to be real rather than symbolic. After watching Crash, I realised Due South was no longer Haggis’s most ridiculous work. I own a copy of Crash on DVD. It was never meant to be this way. Crash actually came up on the random generator earlier in this project but at the time I couldn’t access it without paying a £3.49 rental charge which, tellingly, I deemed too much. With its declining reputation and Haggis’s loss of a civil rape trial amidst numerous other allegations of sexual abuse, Crash is rarely screened on TV anymore either, so each time it came up I made my excuses and asked the generator for another film. But now we’re down to the final two films, I can no longer escape my responsibilities, and it turns out the cheapest way to watch Crash is to order a second hand physical copy. This comes with its own set of problems, of course. For one thing, you become a Crash owner, feeling compelled to justify it to anyone who sees it sat on your shelf. I would never dream of making someone feel bad for their film preferences. On the contrary, when you find people who genuinely love a film everyone else hates, they tend to be a lot more interesting to listen to than those reiterating the same points about its shortcomings. But in the case of Crash, those shortcomings are very real and I’m afraid I can’t be one of those more interesting people. Elsewhere on this list you’ll find me going easy on Green Book and delighting in Driving Miss Daisy. But when it comes to Crash, I’ll be putting my bought DVD copy at the back of the drawers under my bed. I could try and pass it on to someone else who wants it but, let’s face it, I may as well head out on a snipe hunt.
Adding another negative voice to the Crash debate feels a tad redundant at this point. We’ve all heard about how it gets racism wrong, presenting it as something that’s in everyone and can be overcome if we just embrace our connections, ignoring the systemic problem and giving white audiences a way to watch the film at one remove. I agree with all of this and feel deeply uncomfortable with a white man presenting such a finger-wagging screenplay on the subject of race. But as a white man myself, I feel uncomfortable reiterating all of these points from a self-erected soapbox, as if my aspiring liberalism isn’t riddled with its own egregious failures. These issues are all valid and demand to be listened to, but you’d be better off seeking out reviews from minority audience members who have first hand experience of how damaging patronising films like Crash are. I flatter myself that I have absorbed and understood these criticisms to an extent but if I start parroting them here as if they were my own unaided conclusions, I risk occupying the same sanctimonious seat from which Haggis drives his passion piece into the ground.
Fortunately for my review, there are plenty of other reasons to dislike Crash. Its defenders usually start by pointing out that it is a fable, not intended to be realistic but rather to highlight its points through heightened realities. Accordingly, everything is exaggerated to an exhausting degree. We’re battered over the head with epithets, with no stereotype left unturned and every character ready to leap to the most offensive verbal attacks they can think of with minimal or zero provocation. Haggis’s screenplay is trying to pare things down to the basics, removing the nuance to simplify the route to the moral, but in doing so he also removes the heart. The film opens with a fender bender in which a Mexican character and an Asian character instantly begin hurling racist taunts at each other while a black detective looks on. By opening with a scene featuring no white characters but excessive examples of racism, it’s clear Haggis is trying to pull the rug with that now inextricably Trumpian conceit: “There are bad people on both sides.”
Crash is right in its refusal to paint minorities in a blandly angelic light but in trying to avoid making some of his characters into ciphers, Haggis inadvertently does it with all of them by portraying every kind of racism as essentially the same. But it’s the presentation as well as the message that makes Crash so insufferable. Everything is so amped-up, smothered in intrusive music and lapses into clichéd slow motion. I’d be lying if I said this transparent manipulation didn’t occasionally work on me. I was on edge throughout the scene in which Terrence Howard has a standoff with the police, for instance. But the conclusions Haggis comes to are either unsatisfying or infuriating. The most famous instance of this is the scene in which Matt Dillon’s racist police officer rescues Thandie Newton’s Christine from a crashed car that is moments away from exploding. The rub here is that the officer has earlier sexually assaulted Christine during a racially-motivated roadside incident, so that when he arrives to rescue her from the wreckage she desperately does not want to be touched by him. That’s a hell of an interesting premise to set up and there’s all sorts that could’ve been done with it but Haggis opts for a blandly redemptive angle as the two work together to avoid disaster. Some have claimed that this is not meant as redemption for Dillon’s character but Haggis’s sentimental direction suggests otherwise and his failure to explore the aftermath of the scenario further removes any opportunity to right this. The scene is even more uncomfortable in light of Haggis’s own sexual abuse conviction.
While Crash leaves several threads dangling, a plot involving a Hispanic locksmith, a Persian shopkeeper, a little girl and an invisible protective cloak plays out like a Twilight Zone episode, albeit with a twist that dispels the initial notion of supernatural forces at work. As a standalone short story it’s a reasonably interesting idea but Haggis fails to weave it convincingly into his intricately constructed web. It’s a tricked up flourish that seems to say nothing at all about race, merely using characters pushed to their limits by racism as pawns in its game. Worse still, Haggis overplays his hand again in the pivotal scene where it appears the young girl has been shot. The writing, performances, music and direction all suffocate the story here. Again, I admit the scene initially elicited an emotional reaction from me but it was based entirely on the fact that I’m the father of a young child myself. It was a gut reaction that immediately dissolved into irritation and disbelief as I realised what the film was doing and how it was manipulating me. Crash tries to hit us with those kneejerk reactions and then hopes we will go with it so that the initial emotion can be extended. But it fails to earn that extension, with characters whose ridiculous actions undermine its credibility. “It’s a fable” isn’t a good enough excuse. If it’s to have any socially redeeming value at all, there has to be some kind of concession to real life or else that all important connection is lost and the moral gets left behind amongst the empty popcorn tubs and giant Pepsi cups.
Crash is often cited as the worst Best Picture winner. Perhaps the dangerous reductionism it encourages makes it worthy of that title but purely from an entertainment standpoint I’ve put it a bit higher up. Perhaps of particular interest is the fact that I’ve placed it just above Million Dollar Baby, a much more acclaimed film with a screenplay by Haggis. We all know where that driveway paved with good intentions leads but the fact that Crash does at least seem to be trying to find a progressive message made it more palatable than what Clint Eastwood turned Million Dollar Baby into: a film that lashed out at the poor and who’s attitude towards disability felt like an echo of Jerry Lewis’s monstrous comment “You don’t want to be pitied because you’re a cripple in a wheelchair? Stay in your house.” If we’re to similarly assign Crash an emblematic quote it would, unfortunately, be that aforementioned one about there being good and bad people on all sides. Somewhere in there is a well-meaning attempt to find common ground based on shared humanity but when it comes to trying to untangle as thorny and complex an issue as racism, we can’t afford films to be this naïve, and less still can we afford to be giving them awards for it.
86. FORREST GUMP
Watched 12 July 2022
The TV series Quantum Leap, in which Scott Bakula’s Dr. Sam Beckett would time travel within his own lifetime, inhabiting the bodies of other people in order to put things right that once went wrong, would often include small comedic moments in which Sam encountered famous figures from twentieth century history and inadvertently inspire the thing that would ultimately make them famous. The producers referred to these moments as “a kiss with history.” Forrest Gump, at its core, is A Kiss with History: The Movie. OK, so there’s a little more to it than just that, but an essential part of Forrest Gump’s appeal is its journey through modern American history from the 50s through to the 90s, ensuring its success amongst a certain age group notorious for revelling in nostalgia. As someone born in the 80s I’m no stranger to nostalgia, nor am I averse to it. And Forrest Gump’s kisses with history at least make more sense than Quantum Leap’s ever did. For instance, given that Sam was meant to be putting things right that once went wrong, how could he possibly be tasked with helping Buddy Holly write Peggy Sue by using his pre-existing knowledge of the song? I’m talking too much about Quantum Leap in a Forrest Gump review, aren’t I?
But Forrest Gump shares another quality with Quantum Leap (sorry!) in that it is occasionally problematic in its rewriting of history. Sure, no-one is expected to mistake this film or that TV series for a true revisionist historical claim, but Forrest Gump does occasionally credit its fictional white hero with achievements we know to belong to real life black heroes. There’s nothing quite as problematic in this regard as Quantum Leap’s episode ‘The Color of Truth’, which suggests a white future man initiated the Civil Rights movement by puppeteering a black man’s body, but there is an overall sense that Forrest Gump’s attitude is “Yeah, we know this was really inspired by black innovators, but imagine how much more moving and Oscar-worthy it would’ve been if we’d got there first.” There’s an element of cynicism here, of course, which is something Forrest Gump demands we ditch altogether if we are to tune into its specific wavelength. But there’s an undeniable conservatism that keeps surfacing in what its makers apparently intended to be an apolitical film. An extremely shocking and spectacularly imbecilic moment appears early on, in which Forrest reveals that his mother named him after Ku Klux Klan founder Nathan Forrest Bedford as a reminder that “we all do things that, well, just don’t make no sense.” This is presented as a moment of great wisdom on the part of Forrest’s mother. Oh yeah, and the person Forrest is telling this to is a black woman waiting at a bus stop with him, who doesn’t even flinch. Yes, she’s portrayed as sort of half ignoring him as she tries to read her book, but I’m guessing a black woman in the South confronted with a buzz-cutted, white suited man talking about the Klan in not entirely unfavourable terms might at the very least raise an eyebrow and shift a little further down the bench.
Like its hero’s dear old racist mom, Forrest Gump has a nauseatingly patronising view of how we could all stand to dangerously oversimplify a little. It wields its protagonist, a man with an unspecified mental condition and an IQ of 75, like a cross between a cutesy mascot and a deadly weapon. It’s like those condescending pet owners who continually tell you that, unlike humans, animals don’t have wars, while their cat tortures a frog in the middle of the living room carpet. Forrest’s ability to drift through monumental historical backdrops without ever registering their significance is depicted as rendering him as some kind of great leveller, although really it just seems to be used to portray anyone with a political opinion (specifically a left wing one) as being overwrought, naive and hypocritical. If only we could all be so apolitical, maybe we’d all be proudly and comfortably named after white supremacists.
Before we get too wrapped up in righteous indignation over Forrest Gump’s perceived conservative leanings, it’s important to remember that conservative values do not necessarily make a film a failure on their own. Staunch liberal though I am, I can see in many negative reviews (including my own) an arrogance that assumes that films should be made to suit our own political leanings and failure to align with our specific beliefs is tantamount to a mistake. I remember An Officer and a Gentleman being a key film in helping me realise that terrible ideologies do not necessarily negate good filmmaking. It’s perfectly valid to reject a film if you find its message repugnant but there’s a difference between judging a film on its own merits and judging it against your own values. So for all its tin-eared tussling (or lack of tussling) with history, I decided to make sure I gave Forrest Gump a chance in other respects too… Yeah, it still ain’t good!
Though I can’t enjoy Forrest Gump myself, I can certainly see the appeal that keeps so many people coming back to it. It has a simple, fable-like quality and mixes a seemingly gentle (though often misjudged) humour with surprisingly bleak undertones. Forrest’s capacity to misunderstand most things casts some very dark subject matter in a gently farcical light. This pill is sugared to the extent that it could easily be hidden as one of the things you don’t know you’re going to get in that famous box of chocolates. The roll-call of events and people from US history triggers the same appeal as lazy stand-up comedy, leaving audiences with a delighted sense of recognition that can easily be mistaken for fulfilment, despite the lack of insightful elaboration. There’s a certain amount of skill in the way Robert Zemeckis switches genres using Gump as his anchor, so that the shift from, say, romantic drama to war film doesn’t feel at all jarring. But the fact that Gump can so easily be used in this way speaks of his lack of effectiveness as a central character. His blankness and disengagement is obviously the point but it ultimately gives him all the heroic appeal of a silent man turning pages in a badly-written history text book. This is not helped by Tom Hanks’s performance. Hanks is a wonderful actor but I’ve always thought the Academy awarded him for the wrong performances. In my book, his vibrant turn in Big should’ve snatched the statuette, rather than his rather strange performance in Philadelphia and his downright unbearable one in Forrest Gump. Of course, it was instantly iconic. For years in the 90s you couldn’t go a week without someone having a crack at an impression or reciting that box of chocolates line. But the fact that it is so easily mimicked doesn’t make it great and those terrible impressions you’ve no doubt heard someone doing are far less exaggerated than you probably remember. If anything, that infamous line about chocolates (and you don’t have to wait long to hear it. It’s right up front) is delivered with an even more laughable drawl than the worst impressionist could hope to capture. And it goes on like that. Roles like this would likely be differently cast these days but representation was not as widely discussed back then and Hanks’s Gump is part of a group of surefire nomination-grabbing turns of the era that vary in quality from Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man and Daniel Day Lewis in My Left Foot to Billy Bob Thornton in Sling Blade and Sean Penn in I Am Sam. Gump is perhaps the most caricatured of the lot, although Thornton is perhaps slightly more unwatchable.
Of the rest of Forrest Gump’s small main cast, Robin Wright probably fares the best as Forrest’s longtime love Jenny. Given Forrest Gump’s well-documented woman problem (just look to the scene with the sex workers for an example), this is perhaps surprising but Wright brings life, warmth and charm to the underwritten “wayward woman” role which ends with crushing predictability. An Oscar-nominated Gary Sinise is memorable, if occasionally over the top, as the bitter Lieutenant Dan, while Mykelti Williamson is scuppered by the indignity of having to wear a humiliating lip extension in order to make his character Bubba as grotesquely caricatured as possible. And Sally Field doesn’t get much of a chance to register as Forrest’s mother, although her star presence does manage to elevate a weak part. An early scene in which she is coerced into securing a school place for her son by having sex with the principal is notable for the way it epitomises how this sort of atrocity was so casually played for comedy in the 90s.
The other part of Forrest Gump that wowed people upon its release was the visual effects. Some of them still hold up, like the iconic (if hardly symbolically featherlight) falling feather, Lieutenant Dan’s amputated limbs and those famous ping pong scenes, but the most talked about effects are the ones that have dated the worst. Though, to be fair, I remember being quite impressed at first by the scenes in which Hanks is inserted into real historical footage, significant advances have since rendered them rather hokey looking. There’s still a charm to the technique but it is not helped by the fact that these are some of the worst-written moments in Eric Roth’s not-short-of-lowlights screenplay. The scene in which Gump encounters John Lennon on The Dick Cavett Show and inadvertently inspires the lyrics to ‘Imagine’ is just abominable. The filmmakers surely knew they couldn’t not acknowledge The Beatles in some way but the scene is followed by a narration that breaks the film’s own rules, as Gump details the subsequent death of Lennon. Why would he have that information about someone who clearly meant nothing to him, let alone share it with strangers at a bus stop as a tangent in his own story?
I’m nitpicking again and I’m sure there are plenty of valid ripostes the many dedicated Gump fans out there could offer. But it is supremely easy to nitpick Forrest Gump because it seems to put at least one foot wrong in every scene. It’s hard to settle into its folksy rhythm when it keeps tripping over itself so badly and no amount of fantastic music (and there is an avalanche of it) or familiar newsreel footage can change that.