Tag Archives: Best Picture Oscar

Oscars are often awarded to big, talky American movies full of rapid-fire dialog and insistent energy. But this year’s Best Picture nominees include powerful but quiet films that inspire deep emotion thanks to strong but subtle performances. Both Train Dreams, directed and co-written by U.S.-born director Clint Bentley, and Sentimental Value, a Norwegian film directed and co-written by Joachim Trier, create their magic using surprisingly few words. The same was true of Past Lives, Korean-born director Celine Song’s moving 2023 Best Picture Oscar nominee.

Train Dreams

Train Dreams is rich with lush and imposing scenes of rural Washington State, which stands in for Idaho ably thanks to Adolpho Veloso’s Oscar-nominated cinematography. Indeed, beautiful but often-dangerous nature plays such an important element in the story, one could almost say that the landscape is one of the film’s main characters.

Joel Edgerton’s understated performance as logger and railway worker Robert Granier is at the heart of the story. He uses few words but conveys deep feeling through gesture, tone, and his heartbreakingly expressive face. Edgerton was well cast in this role, since he’s especially gifted at expressing sadness, loss, or pain in a compelling way, without making a big, bold fuss of it. His isn’t a flashy kind of charisma, but he draws us in for exactly that reason. It’s his quiet quality that draws us closer, since we don’t want to miss a word.

The arc of the film, which is based on Dennis Johnson’s novella, includes a good deal of difficulty and lost opportunity. The story—full of love, loss, and longing—is episodic. It moves through a series of Granier’s introductions to people who connect, deeply but often briefly, to the introspective, quiet, often lonely man. Most are themselves introverted and comfortable being on their own for vast stretches of time.

Yet Granier and those who move through his life connect to each other quietly but profoundly, without a lot of talk or explanation. They bond over shared kindness, sincerity, and modesty. We don’t need to be told that these are good people; we can see and feel who they are through their actions. The film does include narration, but it’s not overly intrusive. The writers trust the audience to be able to read into the characters’ words and actions without a lot of wordy exposition. The script doesn’t explain the characters’ motivations or backstory more than necessary.

Sentimental Value

Swedish actor Stellan Skarsgård brings his own quiet intensity to Sentimental Value, which has earned him his first Best Actor Academy Award nomination. He portrays a famous and much-admired film director who has always had difficulty connecting emotionally with the people he loves most.

Sentimental Value begins by introducing us to the house at the center of the story. Just as the landscape of rural Idaho plays an important role in Train Dreams, the Borg house in Sentimental Value is an essential character from beginning to end. The film begins by introducing us to the house in the many forms it’s taken over the previous century, easing us into the story through soft humor and just enough back story. Then the players take over, speaking to each other naturally in Norwegian, Swedish, English, and Danish by turns.

The film is very Nordic in tone, not only because of the location and primary languages spoken, but because of how much of the story is unspoken. The feelings are clearly there, but expressed over time, and through movements—the slow spread of emotions across a face, the silent exchange of looks between people, the mounting realization of what is about to happen based on seemingly simple, everyday movements that all add up to something shocking.

Skarsgård is a master of discomfort. In so many of his best roles, we understand how he’s feeling not because of the words he says, or even the way he says them, but by the way he shifts in his chair and diverts his attention away from things he doesn’t want to deal with. He looks silently into his lap, unable and unwilling to say the one thing that most needs to be said. Here, as in his masterful performance as Detective John River in the excellent 2015 British TV miniseries River (not to be confused with the 2012 horror series The River) Skarsgård is comfortable inhabiting discomfort. In each role, he plays a highly skilled and insightful professional. As both Gustav Borg and John River, his characters’ most intense pain comes from the emotional reticence that they must face before solving their greatest professional challenges.

Past Lives

South Korean-born Canadian director Celine Song’s debut film, Past Lives, has much in common tonally with the films mentioned above. Nominated for Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay Oscars two years ago, this film shows similar restraint. Its dialog, which is mostly in Korean, is spare. Its most important feelings are often left unexpressed, but made clear to the audience in the spaces between words.

Past Lives focuses on two characters, Nora and Hae Sung, close childhood friends in South Korea who lost track of each other when Nora’s family moved to the U.S. We first see them together in childhood, clearly enjoying being in each other’s company, but often doing so silently, or while sharing few words. We next meet up with them some two decades later, when they reconnect online, then decide to meet in person. Though some important dialog is spoken aloud, much of what passes between them is expressed through silences—eloquent and beautiful ones.

I saw Sentimental Value shortly before Past Lives. While watching actors Greta Lee and Teo Yoo give such moving performances in the latter, I was struck by the similarity between Nordic films (such as those by Joachim Trier and Ingmar Bergman) and Celine Song’s film. Though outwardly quite different in style and subject matter, they share a great deal in their characters’ comfort with silences, and in the stories’ ability to express deep feelings with few words. Both Trier and Song were born into cultures that prize emotional restraint, comfort with silence, and the belief that scenes built on tacit understanding often convey more than a page of emotionally heated dialog can.

When expressed by talented and thoughtful writers, directors, and actors, a spare script with limited dialog can allow actors to shine if they have the restraint and comfort with nuance that makes these three films so special.

At top:

Felicity Jones and Joel Edgerton in the 2025 film Train Dreams

Film & Television

Only the Shadows of Their Eyes

Video March 17, 2015 Laura Grey

I just watched the last 15 minutes of Midnight Cowboy, a movie I have admired for decades and seen a half-dozen times, but which brings me pain each time I watch it. It’s one of those films that I cannot turn away from if I happen to run across it while changing channels, so powerful are the performances and so unflinching is the focus on captivating yet repellent characters.

Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight are natural, believable and awkwardly honest in their roles (which are among the finest performances of their careers); John Schlesinger‘s direction is unflinching and powerful. Schlesinger was unwilling to turn away from the sorts of intimate, painful moments that other directors tend to cut away from in order to soothe audiences and tie up loose ends. He avoided palliative measures, trusting his audiences to handle the pain and unfairness at the heart of his characters’ worlds and sit with their devastation and disappointment even as the final credits rolled by.

The film begins with what sounds superficially like an upbeat tune with an ambling gait, the song “Everybody’s Talkin‘” sung by Harry Nilsson. The song, which won a Grammy and was a million-selling single in 1969, is deceptive; listen to the lyrics and you’ll see it’s about an overwhelmed man who can’t handle or comprehend the needs and conversations of the people around him and longs to move far away to a place without cares, “somewhere where the weather suits my clothes.” He sings:

Everybody’s talking at me
I don’t hear a word they’re sayin’
Only the echoes of my mind

People stopping, staring
I can’t see their faces
Only the shadows of their eyes

It’s easy for the casual listener to notice only the upbeat qualities of the song and the positive fantasies of the young man as he imagines himself moving lightly through the better life that awaits him:

Banking off of the northeast winds
Sailing on a summer breeze
And skipping over the ocean like a stone

The song suits the story of handsome but none-too-bright young Texan Joe Buck (played by Jon Voight) who leaves Texas in a hurry and moves to New York convinced that he’ll be a big success as a gigolo wearing his cowboy hat, boots and pretty-boy grin, and as he walks around Times Square in his fringed leather jacket he seems to be just a sweet, overgrown, oversexed kid. And he is, at first. Full of hope and confidence but leaving a disturbing and misunderstood past, he soon becomes overwhelmed like the man in the song. He longs to escape his life, first running to New York, then to Florida with his friend Rico (played by Dustin Hoffman). But in this story, there is no easy, rambling way through life or around trouble, and there’s no way for Joe to stop the cascade of horrible lessons that come with being too trusting, hopeful and needy while living among broken, wary people.

Midnight Cowboy is an exceptional film which captures the disturbing power of the fine novel by Leo James Herlihy upon which it’s based. Indeed, the movie, the only X-rated Best Picture Oscar winner ever, was a huge critical success despite its reputation for grim, mature subject matter, and it won Oscars for best picture and best direction. While the story is gritty, it isn’t by any means pornographic; the X rating was misleading. But the story is adult in nature, ultimately cynical, tragic and hopeless. The main characters are hustlers, professional liars at the bottom of society who are not very bright and are willing to take advantage of people in pain. Yet the story is told in such a way that, although we cringe when the principal characters harm themselves and others, we cannot help but feel our own hearts break as we watch their hopes go down in flames.

So why do I come back to this film, and why do I love other devastating Schlesinger films about unrequited love and loss (like his beautiful, faithful adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd and the 1971 drama Sunday Bloody Sunday with its exquisite performances by Peter Finch and Glenda Jackson) and of moral decay (like Marathon Man) so much? I suppose it’s because Schlesinger was a masterful storyteller who managed to focus on difficult, broken and fearful people, people on the edges of society, people who are willing to live in shadows. He let us watch them lash out at others in desperation, flail and grasp for meaningful connection with other people, and then have to live with their losses and failures. There are few redemptions in Schlesinger’s stories, but there is great humanity. Schlesinger helped viewers get under the skin of his characters and understand their pain without whitewashing their behaviors or putting them on pedestals. He loved flawed people and stories full of heartache, and he made a career of getting the intelligentsia to peer more closely at and care for stories about the very people those same people might cross the street to avoid in their daily lives.

Schlesinger, who was gay, incorporated homosexual themes into several of his films and teleplays, sometimes portraying gay men as self-loathing (as he did in a disturbing scene in Midnight Cowboy) but also including one of the first depictions of a successful, honorable, well-adjusted professional homosexual man in modern cinema (in Sunday Bloody Sunday). He treated his characters’ sexuality with the same straightforwardness he showed toward their other characteristics; it was simply another facet of their lives. This matter-of-factness, which made Sunday Bloody Sunday particularly advanced for its time, was part of a wave of naturalism in film also seen in the work of other important directors of the sixties and seventies such as Martin Scorsese, Mike Nichols, Tony Richardson, Robert Altman, Francis Ford Coppola, Sidney Lumet and Peter Bogdanovich.

It may seem odd that some human beings (like me) seek out stories of loss, failure and emotional pain like this one both as forms of entertainment and as cathartic experiences. Such films shine a light on the human condition and help viewers like me to understand and empathize with the misbegotten and seemingly cursed people of the world in a way that feels especially visceral and real. Films like Schlesinger’s are, however, at enough of a remove that film lovers who appreciate a good dose of angst with their drama can feel safe sidling up to the misfits, losers and dangerous people who inhabit the underworld that Schlesinger created. There’s a voyeuristic thrill at getting so close to the people and emotions that scare or excite us, followed by a shock when we realize how close they are to ourselves.