Good film hunting in open Oscar season

December cramming didn't end with exams--boning up for the Oscars began in earnest just before the new year, when Hollywood released its customary glut of serious blockbusters in consideration of the Academy's notoriously short attention span. The pickings were mercifully short on stunt-acting and "issue films" this year, and most of the contenders seemed at least to have a healthy sense of humor in the midst of their own grandiosity. Otherwise, though, finding the virtues in this crop was often an act of scavenging: one found recompense in an actor here, a scene or moment there. Herewith, the latter component of the holiday movie binge-and-purge.

Titanic. Yes, yes, the whole thing's ridiculous. The didactic contrast that director James Cameron draws between the fun-lovin' steerage passengers and the pathologically snobby first-class travellers is insultingly simplistic. The framing device, in which Kate Winslet's character tells her story in flashback, is superfluous.

Billy Zane's villanous theatrics, as critics have pointed out, would be better suited to a mustache-wagging blackguard from a silent movie, though once you've heard enough of this film's dialogue you may find yourself wishing the overwrought Harlequin novel-speak of its characters had indeed been relegated to between-scenes placards. (My favorite: Winslet's "I'd rather be his whore than your wife." Ouch!)

And on, and on. But Titanic cannot be denied as a technical masterpiece: one has to go back to The English Patient to find a rival to its crystalline cinematography and seamless editing. Winslet and co-star Leonardo DiCaprio start out seeming mismatched but end up a perfect fit, and anyone who wasn't gripping his or her seatmate's arm during most of the hour it takes the ship to sink should remember what Mom used to say: if you keep rolling your eyes like that, they might just stay that way.

Like Spielberg, Cameron will never make a great film because his instincts are too democratic, too artless, and driven by a need to entertain: he wants to make a film for every and any audience. Convenient, since Cameron's refusal--or inability--to make movies driven by an artistic impulse allows the snotty college kids in the balcony to stop applying their semiotics lessons and let themselves go a little mushy when, say, Kate jumps back on the ship after her Leonardo, or Leonardo dies the prettiest on-screen death since Kristen Scott Thomas's.

As Good As It Gets. The title is posed as a question in the film (as in, "What if this is..."), and viewers may be left with a few questions of their own. Like, is James L. Brooks' excessive reliance on the close-up a means of eluding the inherent sitcom-y sentimentality of his script--that is, can you look into a person's soul if you are looking up his nostrils? Why are there so many passive, victimized, de-sexed gay neighbors (such as Greg Kinnear) in mainstream Hollywood movies, but none in my apartment building? How come 13 years ago in Terms of Endearment Jack Nicholson was matched with Shirley Maclaine and already looked a little worse for wear, and now this Pluto-and-Persephone pairing with Helen Hunt is being sold as the sweet denouement of a feel-good movie? Why should a woman as luminous and intelligent as Hunt's character be so desperate that Nicholson's nasty, sausage-y Melvin can all but buy her off with kindness, and why should an actress as luminous and intelligent as Hunt be so desperate as to take a thankless role like this?

Good Will Hunting. Like Melvin, Good Will Hunting's Will, played by Matt Damon, gets to tell a lot of people in vicious specifics just how stupid they are. Melvin and Will's targets kindly sit in silence until these diatribes are completed so that the audience can bask in the screenwriters' barbed cleverness. Maybe Damon, who wrote this funny, vibrant film with co-star Ben Affleck, is a bit too clever for his own good: his script is rife with verbal showboating and speechifying, and emotions are explained--at length--instead of evoked.

This is the only means of getting Stellan Skarsgard's pompous professor literally on his knees, confessing deep-seated insecurities to the abusive genius Will, or Robin Williams's soulful therapist, Sean, on a park bench delivering the kind of endless confessional monologue that the Academy loves to excerpt on Oscar night.

Williams, happily, pulls it off. As his face grows softer and more lined his patrician nose seems longer, more Roman; those remarkable blue eyes appear to brighten with each passing year. In short, as an actor he is aging beautifully, and he may yet become a grand old man of American cinema. Damon, meanwhile, achieves a remarkable feat in creating a character who is often quite unlikable and yet always fiercely sympathetic.

The two actors share a bracing late scene in which Sean oversteps his professional bounds and essentially coerces Will into breaking down emotionally; his abuse of his power forces catharsis, and the tension is wrenching. That Damon and Affleck could allow saintly Sean to momentarily inhabit a moral gray area is risky and thrilling, but the remaining events of the film imply that Will's cathartic cry is all he needed to shake free the shackles of his past. All done, all better.

Leaving the theater, I was grateful for an intelligent young film untainted by clichéd Gen-X malaise, but still wished that Damon and Affleck could have done more than just meet their audience halfway.

Jackie Brown. Pam Grier is a fascinating artifact: memories of her '70s incarnation as karate-kicking, Amazonian blaxpoitation princess jar with the slight convexity of her middle-aged body and the wise, world-weary cast of her gaze. She seems a bit uncomfortable before the camera, and the few moments when Quentin Tarantino's script allow her pent-up rage to let rip seem slightly forced. Perfect: as a woman who is tallying up her life's losses, the chances she botched and let pass by, Grier's Jackie seems a little uneasy in her own skin, and we can't take our eyes off her.

But Jackie is an unfortunate counterpoint to the movie that bears her name: she is rallying against her own tendency toward resignation, while the film just sits there, sluggish, even stagnant. It's a real bore, or, to be more faithful to our source, a real motherfucking bore.

Oscar and Lucinda. At once deeply flawed and very often enchanting, the film is based on Peter Carey's Booker Prize-winning novel about two obsessive gamblers in 19th-century Australia. If anything, the movie is too faithful to its source; like The Age of Innocence, it relies heavily on voice-over narration, as if the film cannot stand on its own terms and the audience needs a guided tour of what is unfolding. In one of the first scenes, after little Oscar's mother has died, his grieving father tries to throw her clothes out to sea. The tide keeps coughing them back onto the shore, though, and Oscar pleads with his father to stop, his mother's dress tangled around his ankle. The scene is beautifully shot, but director Gillian Armstrong hits the viewer over the head with its significance by delivering Carey's equally beautiful rendering of the episode in voice-over. The doubled visual and textual portrayals of the same event cancel each other out, leaving the audience simply numb.

Soon enough, though, Oscar and Lucinda finds its own lingering pace, and its languor is one of its greatest virtues: more a landscape than a triptych, it invites intimate study, and as in the best tradition of Merchant-Ivory films, we are always conscious of passions simmering under the proper surface.

Ralph Fiennes is wonderful, portraying a character who is nervous, twitch-ridden and mannered with a performance that is none of these things. His Oscar, wraithlike and frail, is a daringly feminine creation, while Cate Blanchett's Lucinda embodies a sort of assertive feminist girlishness; together they make a decidedly androgynous, even childlike, misfit pair. Too bad the film that bears their names, in its melodramatic last twenty minutes, fails them so badly.

Wag the Dog. Razor-sharp and often uproariously funny, the movie nonetheless doesn't stick around too long, like most films that tell you what you already know (Wag the Dog's revelations include "Politics is All Spin" and--stop the presses--"David Mamet is Cynical"). The film evaporates, like all those wayward advisers from Clinton's first term. All I can remember is Anne Heche's modified Karen Elson bob and Dustin Hoffman's fabulous tinted glasses.

Deconstructing Harry. One of the promo stills says it all: Woody Allen stands in profile, kvetching, while Elisabeth Shue, at the center of the frame in flowered dress and poufy hair, looks on adoringly. Draw a cartoon bubble emerging from the Woodster's mouth and you've got his movie's moral: "I'm a terrible person, a dirty old man, I hate myself, and all these young beautiful women adore me." Cut, print.

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