Anatomy of a Fall 2023
This movie got very good reviews and then picked up five Oscar nominations including for Best Picture, Director, Actress, and Screenplay. That's an impressive score, especially for a movie that is half in French (and the rest English). I was able to rent it before the Oscar winners are announced. I was not impressed. It is basically a crime drama, which is a pretty common type of movie, done many, many times not just in the movies, but also long-running crime procedurals and detective TV shows. What is new here is the movie takes two and a half hours to tell a story that might have fit into a one-hour TV show. The director is very indulgent, letting his actors really go, with a lot of dialogue, and milking scene after scene for everything he can get out of it. But it is just too much. In an age of true crime podcasts that drag out a crime over many, many hours, maybe the movie could somehow be thought of as efficient, but I don't feel like we're learning more, just throwing in a very slow-moving character study about an unhappy marriage on top of this crime. I feel like the acting is very good, particularly by Sandra Hüller, who is German and has to speak English and French the whole time. It is such a meaty role and she carries it off well enough that she could easily win the Oscar, but I wish the movie was better.The writer and director tries to throw a lot of things into the mix to keep you guessing or make things look a certain way, but it seems a little manipulative for things to just keep showing up like that. Ultimately it isn't really intriguing or that suspenseful and you just wait to be told how it turns out.
Written: 21 Feb 2024