‘We’re thrilled to have him,’ Academy Awards producer Brian Grazer says. By Ryan J. Downey Sacha Baron Cohen as General Aladeen in “The Dictator” Photo: Paramount Action heroes like Rambo may not give in to threats, but Oscar producers caved to “The Dictator.” Of course, it’s all in good fun. In an interview with “Extra,” producer Brian Grazer confirmed Sacha Baron Cohen will arrive at the Academy Awards on Sunday as his character from his forthcoming political satire, contrary to earlier reports. “We’re thrilled to have him and he’ll be on the red carpet, I guess, dressed as the ‘dictator,’ ” he told “Extra.” Grazer, a producer on movies like “A Beautiful Mind” and “Apollo 13,” is also producing this year’s Oscars. In “The Dictator,” Baron Cohen adds the totalitarian leader of a fictitious country to his list of alter egos, which already included Ali G, Borat and Bruno, all of whom have headlined feature films since launching on “The Ali G Show.” He played a supporting role in Best Picture nominee “Hugo” but was insistent about attending the awards show in character as Admiral General Shabazz Aladeen. Earlier on Friday (February 24), the English actor and comedian called in to the “Today” show (as Aladeen) to address his alleged ban from awards. The “Today” interview came on the heels of a video message on the website for “The Republic of Wadiya,” in which the dictator made a number of threats. “On behalf of the nation of Wadiya, I am outraged at being banned from the Oscars by the Academy of Motion Pictures, Arts and Zionists,” General Aladeen said in the video. “While I applaud the Academy for taking away my right to free speech, I warn you that if you do not lift your sanctions and give me my tickets back by 12 p.m. on Sunday, you will face unimaginable consequences.” Back in 2007, Oscar producers wouldn’t allow the actor to appear in character as Borat. At press time, a spokesperson for the Academy told The Hollywood Reporter she had not heard about the plans for Cohen for Sunday. “The Dictator” arrives in theaters May 11. The MTV Movies team has the 2012 Oscars covered! Stick with us for everything you need to know leading up to the awards show, and head to Next Movie for a printable Oscar ballot . On Sunday, tune into MTV.com at 5 p.m. ET for our two-and-a-half-hour red-carpet live stream and updates on the night’s big winners. To join the live conversation, tweet @MTVNews with the hashtag #Oscars.
Each Wednesday for the past five months, my colleague S.T. VanAirsdale has fearlessly navigated the ever-shifting Academy Awards tides with his weekly Oscar Index , a gig that’s enough to make even the most intrepid seafaring mortal long for dry land. It’s in sight, Stu! By this coming Monday morning, all of our meticulously calibrated predictions, as well as our wayward hopes for our own personal favorites, will amount to little more than scraps of speared whale blubber, receding in the distance as we move toward next year’s Oscar broadcast. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. There’s still time to savor the last-minute glitter wave. To that end, here are my own Oscar predictions for each category, followed by the candidates I wish would win. BEST PICTURE I loved The Artist when I first saw it last May, and I’ve seen it twice since. It has, of course, become de rigueur to adopt the “It’s not so great” stance when talking about the picture. But that’s not where my heart lies, and I’ve already spent ample time, both publicly (over at Slate Movie Club ) and privately, defending the movie from the “Meh” Brigade. So, yeah, I hope it wins. But I also have a great deal of fondness for both Moneyball and Midnight in Paris , as well as for War Horse , whose old-school movie grandness appears to be sorely out of fashion, and more’s the pity. Will win : The Artist Should win : The Artist BEST DIRECTOR I still don’t understand how you can have nine Best Picture nominees and only five Best Director nominees. What, does the Academy think these pictures direct themselves? Of course, in the case of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close , you’d be forgiven for thinking so, but never mind. Woody Allen has given us his best movie in years – many years – with Midnight in Paris, so I would probably quaff an extra dose of Champagne if he were to win. But my Best Director choice nearly always aligns with my Best Picture choice, which leads us to Hazanavicius. Will win : Michel Hazanavicius, The Artist Should win : Michel Hazanvicius, The Artist BEST ACTOR As I voted in numerous critics’ groups at the end of 2011, I put the same three names on every Best Actor ballot: Jean Dujardin, Gary Oldman and Brad Pitt (the latter for Moneyball only, though I concede that in The Tree of Life, he works his ass off for a director who cares little for actors). I would be thrilled if any of the three were to win, with perhaps a slight edge – about the width of a pencil mustache – going to Dujardin. Will win : Jean Dujardin Should win : Jean Dujardin or Brad Pitt or Gary Oldman – please don’t make me choose! BEST ACTRESS Although Michelle Williams gave my favorite female performance of the year, in My Week with Marilyn, for so many years now I’ve been watching Viola Davis doing superb work – always the quiet, unflashy kind – that I would be thrilled to see her win for The Help. Poor Glenn Close – I don’t want to look at Albert’s or anyone else’s nobbs, thanks very much. And while I greatly dislike Meryl Streep’s high-toned mimicry in The Iron Lady , the one thing that would really drive me ‘round the bend is another trilling, faux-gracious acceptance speech from La Streep. Oh God, no, please. Will win : Viola Davis, The Help Should win : Viola Davis, The Help BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR This is the category for which I have the least enthusiasm: These performances are all fine, but I don’t see any sparks of mad genius in them. (Not even Branagh’s amusing channeling of Olivier qualifies.) I can live with a Christopher Plummer win, if only because it’s about time for Old Mr. Grouchypants. Will win : Christopher Plummer, Beginners Should win : Christopher Plummer, Beginners BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS Octavia Spencer is the real charmer in this category, and she has the benefit of being both an unknown and the underdog. Jessica Chastain is lovely in The Help, but she’s even better in a little-seen movie from a few years back called Jolene, in which she played a forerunner of the same character. Bérénice Bejo is extremely winning in The Artist , but I’d still prefer to see Spencer win. While it’s laudatory that the Academy should nominate a comedic actress for this award, I’d prefer it not to be the brassy McCarthy. And while McTeer is quite moving in Albert Nobbs, I truly am looking forward, as I said earlier, to a nobb-free Sunday evening. Will win : Octavia Spencer, The Help Should win : Octavia Spencer, The Help BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY I have my fingers crossed for either Guillame Schiffman for The Artist or Janusz Kaminski for the unfairly maligned – and gorgeous — War Horse. (I wish Kaminski could follow me around with a key light every moment of my life – I’d kill to look as luminous as that horse does.) But I fear the winner will be Emmanuel Lubezki for The Tree of Life. I love Lubezski, but not The Tree of Life ‘s brand of sterile, calculated beauty. Will win : Emmanuel Lubezki, The Tree of Life Should win : Guillame Schiffman for The Artist or Janusz Kaminski for War Horse. BEST ANIMATED PICTURE Generally, I’m with Mark Harris : I don’t much care about this category. Except when I do. And this year, I found what I thought was a firm favorite in Fernando Trueba and Javier Mariscal’s lovely, mostly hand-drawn Latin jazz romance Chico & Rita. . Then I saw Alain Gagnol and Jean-Loup Felicioli’s A Cat in Paris – another hand-drawn adventure, this one about a winsome and mysterious cat burglar padding his way through the world’s most mysterious and beautiful city – and I fell even more deeply in love. I would be thrilled to see either picture win, though I suspect the honor will go to Gore Verbinski’s Rango, which is at least clever and lively. Will win : Rango Should win : A Cat in Paris or Chico & Rita Follow Stephanie Zacharek on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
Tyler Perry doesn’t don drag or delve into religion in his latest, Good Deeds — the film isn’t part of the prolific entertainment giant’s Madea franchise (next stop Madea’s Witness Protection , slated for later in 2012), but rather of his less broad line of feel-good dramedies like Daddy’s Little Girls and Why Did I Get Married? But despite the restrained tone, it’s no less savvy an entertainment, one that Perry wrote, directed and stars in as San Francisco businessman Wesley Deeds, the wealthy, perfect son of a good family, head of the company his father created. Wesley’s life changes when he meets Lindsey (Thandie Newton), a beleaguered single mom who works as the night janitor in his office building. Like Maid in Manhattan , Good Deeds is an urban fairy tale in which the idea of a prince swooping down to woo and rescue the poor cinder girl is given a contemporary twist. But the film is well aware that it’s Wesley, and the man playing him, who are the real objects of fantasy here. Loving to his icy mother (Phylicia Rashad), protective of his alcoholic, angry brother Walter (Brian White), devoted in his stewardship of the business he was left, this Deeds is actually too good, too reliable, subsuming any actual desires of his own to cater to the needs of everyone around him. He’s so safe and predictable that when his fiancée Natalie (Gabrielle Union) finds a blonde hair on a pillow in their bed, she takes it not as a sign of possible infidelity but as one that she needs to tell the housekeeper to be more careful with their dry cleaning. It’s Lindsey, who with her 6-year-old daughter Ariel has recently fallen from a precarious economic situation into full-on homelessness, who breaks through Wesley’s shell by, well, trampling all over him. Good Deeds has the shrillest meet-cute imaginable, in which Lindsey parks in Wesley’s spot in the company lot and, having no idea who he is, calls him an asshole and walks away. Later, she taunts that he’s going to run and “tell massa” on her when he catches her using an office phone for a personal call late at night. Lindsey’s abrasiveness is weirdly delightful — she’s not on the lookout for anyone to save her, and she’s going through a very difficult time — but it’s one of several reasons the romance angle of this otherwise engaging melodrama doesn’t work. The primary one is chemistry — Lindsey and Wesley have none at all. There’s a sibling quality to their banter that diminishes the potentially creepy aspects to the fact that Wesley comes to Lindsey’s aid financially, buying her and her daughter dinner and eventually providing her with a place to stay in a corporate apartment, but there’s no spark between them, even as her influence starts opening him to new possibilities in his life. Newton’s loveliness is undeniable, but it’s downplayed until late in the film — before that point, she’s harried and frequently seen wearing a cleaning crew outfit, sleeping with Ariel in her minivan or trying to hide the girl in a supply closet while she works the night shift. In contrast, Union’s character is shown beginning the day getting immaculately made up while wearing a slip and heels. Part of the fancy of Good Deeds is that Wesley, a character who, as he says himself in the introduction, has everything, has a run-in with an unapologetically insulting, frazzled woman who leaves her kid unattended in her car and runs off, and he thinks that she’s probably what he’s been missing in his life. Wesley’s so square that when he looks through Lindsey’s iPod, he notes she’s listening to “Two-P-A-C,” but the two find common ground in their love of motorcycles, and take a geographically improbable lunchtime ride across the Golden Gate Bridge to Santa Rosa (despite filling in plentiful snap zoom-filled shots of San Francisco, Good Deeds was filmed in and looks like it was filmed in Atlanta). While Wesley is both too good to be true and an absence of a charisma on screen, Good Deeds is very fair to its two main female characters even as they’re both entangled with the same man. Despite her role in the story, Natalie isn’t made into a villain, just someone who, like Wesley, has chosen something because she’s been told she should want it. And the domino chain of poverty-driven difficulties Lindsey faces is well-realized — because she can’t pay her rent on time, she’s evicted and loses the savings she’s hidden away, because she has to work she can’t check into the shelter on time, because she’s working double shifts to get back on her feet financially she’s late picking up Ariel and her teacher notified child services. It’s Wesley who never seems like a real person, but then he’s not meant to be one — he’s Prince Charming for a prospective audience of women who are less enchanted by rippling abs than by kindness and responsibility. Follow Alison Willmore on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
Producer talks to MTV News about collaborating with award-winning composer Hans Zimmer. By Jocelyn Vena, with reporting by Ricky Louis Pharrell Williams Photo: MTV News This Sunday, super producer Pharrell Williams and Oscar-winning composer Hans Zimmer will show the world what they’ve been cooking up since the December announcement they would join forces as the musical consultants for the 84th Academy Awards . “You know, Hans called me and he said that [Oscars Producer] Brian Grazer had asked him to come on as a consultant and effectively score the music or whatever,” he explained to MTV News. “And Hans was like, ‘I can’t do that. … I’d do that if like I had, like, Pharrell.’ [Grazer’s] like, ‘OK, get Pharrell on the phone.’ That’s the story he told me. I got the call from Hans and he told them he wanted to do it with me, and so I pleasantly accepted and we’ve just been working ever since.” While Pharrell wanted to keep the collaboration as top-secret as possible, he did give some insight into what the two have in store for the big night, which will be hosted by Billy Crystal. “Well, you’re gonna have to watch the show and see, we can’t give it away. That’s what’s so funny about interviews. They always want to know what you’re about to do,” he explained. “It’s like some of us love you know music and art that blindsides, comes out of nowhere with a crazy impact. And then sometimes you talk about things because you want to warm up the feeling before the huge impact. “But this is another one of those things where we keep things under wraps,” he continued. “But it’s cool; it’s interesting; it’s very different. Definitely there’s an homage to the tradition of how the music was done traditionally. … [but] we’re different, and when given an opportunity and it’s our opportunity, Hans and I agreed we just would do it from the perspective of people who love music and love making music and respect it, giving back to what gave us so much, which is music and film.” The MTV Movies team has the 2012 Oscars covered! Stick with us for everything you need to know leading up to the awards show, and on Sunday, February 26, tune into MTV.com at 5 p.m. ET for our two-and-a-half-hour red-carpet live stream and updates on the night’s big winners. To join the live conversation, tweet @MTVNews with the hashtag #Oscars. Related Photos 2012 Oscar Nominees Related Artists Pharrell Williams
From Justin and Selena to Justin and Jessica, MTV News takes a look at the hottest couples from the 2011 Academy Awards. By Jocelyn Vena Selena Gomez and Justin Bieber at the Vanity Fair Oscar Party Photo: Craig Barritt/ Getty Images The Academy Awards happen to be one of the most glamorous nights of the year, filled with over-the-top acceptance speeches and crazy-expensive couture. It can also serve as the glitziest date night for some of the most famous people in the world. With this year’s Oscars only days away, we decided to take a look back at last year’s show and remember some of the most dazzling couples to hit the Oscar scene. A very pregnant Natalie Portman took the stage on Oscars night last year to accept her prize for Best Actress for her role in “Black Swan.” In between “thank you’s” for the Academy, her family and her fellow nominees, she also thanked her main man, and the father of her son, ballet dancer Benjamin Millepied. “I want to thank my parents for giving me the opportunity to work from such an early age [and] my beautiful love, Benjamin, who has now given me my most important role of my life,” she told the room. “Most importantly, my family, my friends and my love, thank you so much.” Justin Bieber and Selena Gomez looked like the young A-listers they are when they arrived at the annual Vanity Fair Oscar party, arm in arm. The night was filled with nuzzling, schmoozing and being in love. It also served as the most high-profile appearance the two had made in their time as a couple. Another Justin and his lady love also dazzled at the same bash. Justin Timberlake and Jessica Biel chilled at the party, looking stunning in high-end fashion. The two may have broken up not long after the fete, but the photo remained a reminder of their often-speculated-about romance, before they got back together — and reportedly got engaged — later in 2011. “True Blood” stars Anna Paquin and Stephen Moyer looked like the grown-up version of Justin and Selena (both guys donned formal wear and both ladies wore blood red). James Franco and Anne Hathaway may not have been romantically involved, but they were certainly trying their best to romance Oscar viewers as co-hosts. While Hathaway brought her high-energy theater-kid charm to the show, Franco opted for the type of charm we might expect from his “Freaks and Geeks” character Daniel Desario: low-key and a bit confused. Who will be the biggest couples at the 2012 Oscars? Let us know in the comments! The MTV Movies team has the 2012 Oscars covered! Stick with us for everything you need to know leading up to the awards show, and on Sunday, February 26, tune into MTV.com at 5 p.m. ET for our two-and-a-half-hour red-carpet live stream and updates on the night’s big winners. To join the live conversation, tweet @MTVNews with the hashtag #Oscars.
Only time will tell just how many statuettes will ‘The Artist’ take home and whether talking puppets will grace the Oscar stage. By Kevin P. Sullivan Jean Dujardin and B
Well, it finally happened. The line separating America from America: The Movie found a way to arrange itself into a stick figure and walk off the scene in disgust. In Act of Valor , an elaborate branding exercise for the U.S. Navy SEALs in the form of a Hollywood action blowout, the two mingle freely and openly at last. The movie opens with a statement from directors Mike McCoy and Scott Waugh. They describe the importance of casting real Navy SEALs — “the greatest action heroes of them all,” according to the film’s press notes — to give the film that much-desired feeling of “authenticity.” It was all for us, McCoy and Waugh agree. They wanted to show the audience what it really feels like to fire an automatic weapon and burst someone’s head open from 50 feet away. And so they dragged two chiseled specimens (uncredited, they appear as “Dave” and “Rorke”), out of active duty and in front of the camera and forced them to perform in a really bad war movie. Act of Valor was produced with an unprecedented level of Pentagon cooperation. Four years ago, when the film was conceived, the Navy was looking for 500 new recruits, and a movie seemed like just the thing. Top Gun famously boosted recruitment by 500 percent, and the military now uses popular entertainment vehicles to make its pitch as a matter of course. America’s Army , the 2002 video game created by the military to mimic war games like Call of Duty , now seems like a strategic part of the run-up to the Iraq war. So by “the audience” McCoy and Waugh mean American boys. And the goal of showing them how it feels to be a SEAL means combining the aesthetics of war they know from movies and gaming with the exhilaration of showing off actual American might. And yet there is a larger “us” addressed by the thickly written narration (the script, by 300 screenwriter Kurt Johnstad, gives new meaning to the phrase “fog of war”). All of Valor is designed to emphasize the direct impact of military action on American safety, from the opening rescue of a female CIA agent (Roselyn Sanchez) who is being tortured to within an inch of her life (and the integrity of her tank top) in the Costa Rican jungle to the interception of high-tech suicide vests making their way to major American cities. The plot might be summed up this way: America’s having a war, and everybody’s invited! Everybody, oddly enough, except Iraq and Afghanistan. After an unexplained explosion kills an American diplomat and a whole mess of children in Manila, we meet a SEAL platoon on a San Diego beach, where they are preparing for deployment. “Chief Dave” has already passed his Tom Brady genes on to five kids; “Lieutenant Rorke” is about to have his first child. Being a dad comes up a lot. They never turn to each other between kill shots and swap parenting tips, but if they did it would fit right into the script’s awkward attempt to jam characterization into these two beefy avatars. You can’t help thinking these guys got hosed: All that lethal know-how and they’re bested by dopey dialogue. A lack of continuity, both within and between scenes, makes a fairly simply set-up weirdly difficult to follow. The bad guys are childhood friends Abul Shabal (Jason Cottle), a Ukrainian convert to Islam who is mad about Chechnya, and Christo (Alex Veadov), an arms dealer with unclear motivations. But they are desultory villains, there to provide minimal narrative hinge action. The bigger story is that we are battling a global enemy with weapons connections and no respect for their own lives or the lives of anybody else. From the Philippines and Costa Rica we stop in Somalia, Mexico, and parts of Eastern Europe, and they hate us everywhere. We also have a couple of enemies within our borders: “the media” and “the economy” are cited as key allies in any terrorist plan to take down the United States. Each location provides a stage for some serious military peacocking: The opening rescue has some thrilling shots of an amphibious operation — boats dropped from helicopters! — and the surfacing of a nuclear submarine is so colossally breathtaking it’s hard to believe it’s not an act of nature. Much gadgetry is wielded to no discernible purpose, and at almost every stop live ammunition discharges like a five-cent slot machine on somebody’s lucky night. But there is little sense of how these teams work and strategize together, all the stuff that might actually make for an interesting story. The finale is a first-person-palooza on the Mexican border, a crescendo of incoherent carnage that requires one of the SEALs to perform his own death. The sacrifice and ceremony of that performance is most sickening when it penetrates the protective layer of numbness that builds up over the course of any movie with a body count this high. To feel something means the ignoble plan is working. Yeah, it’s just another movie with things blowing up in highly realistic fashion, and yet it embodies the insidiousness of a culture seduced by sensation and jingoism. Because although the last decade of war has done much to convince us otherwise, this country is not a movie we are watching, and people really do die in the end. Follow Michelle Orange on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
Fingers are crossed that Pixar bounces back from the uncharacteristic critical disappointment that was Cars 2 with their next effort, Brave — a foray into Disney princess territory about a headstrong young Scottish lass (voiced by Kelly Macdonald) who defies tradition in her parents’ kingdom. A new trailer for the animated adventure promises no small measure of spunky girl power as our heroine Merida upends an archery contest where doofus candidates are vying for her hand in marriage. It’s not a traditional trailer so much as it is a scene from the film, but it conveys a sense of what to expect, tonally. (Watch the first full trailer here .) From what’s been released so far it seems Brave ‘s story will be its strength; the round, cartoony CG-animated character design doesn’t appeal much to me, but Merida’s spirit is infectious in this twist on the familiar medieval archery scenario. (That’s Billy Connolly voicing her father and Emma Thompson as her mom, in case you were curious.) Brave hits theaters June 22; leave your impressions below!
Fingers are crossed that Pixar bounces back from the uncharacteristic critical disappointment that was Cars 2 with their next effort, Brave — a foray into Disney princess territory about a headstrong young Scottish lass (voiced by Kelly Macdonald) who defies tradition in her parents’ kingdom. A new trailer for the animated adventure promises no small measure of spunky girl power as our heroine Merida upends an archery contest where doofus candidates are vying for her hand in marriage. It’s not a traditional trailer so much as it is a scene from the film, but it conveys a sense of what to expect, tonally. (Watch the first full trailer here .) From what’s been released so far it seems Brave ‘s story will be its strength; the round, cartoony CG-animated character design doesn’t appeal much to me, but Merida’s spirit is infectious in this twist on the familiar medieval archery scenario. (That’s Billy Connolly voicing her father and Emma Thompson as her mom, in case you were curious.) Brave hits theaters June 22; leave your impressions below!
Maybe you’re the kind of person who wakes up in the morning and says, “What can I learn today about the psychological effects of blood feuds in contemporary Albania?” But I doubt it. Who even thinks about these things, or cares about them? The strange miracle of Joshua Marston’s modest, well-constructed drama The Forgiveness of Blood — which really is about blood feuds in contemporary Albania — is that once you’ve watched it, you might find that you actually do care. It’s the kind of movie that makes the world feel like a smaller place, suggesting that the similarities connecting us across continents and cultures are more resonant than the things that divide us. The Forgiveness of Blood is set in northern Albania — it was also filmed there, using local, nonprofessional actors. Eighteen-year-old Nik (Tristan Halilaj) is a senior in high school, with his eye on the prettiest classmate and ambitions to open his own Internet café. But one day his father, Mark (Refet Abazi), becomes involved in a land dispute: Mark makes a living for himself and his family by delivering bread to local homes and businesses — his mode of transport is a horse-drawn cart — and he habitually takes a shortcut across land that used to belong to his grandfather. The current owners take umbrage, and an altercation breaks out in which one of them is stabbed to death; implicated in the murder, Mark immediately goes into hiding. But according to codes of law that have been in place for centuries, the aggrieved family is entitled to take the life of a male from the aggressor’s family. Nik is forced into a kind of house arrest, along with his younger brother and two sisters. But because the female members of the household aren’t in danger, Nik’s younger sister, Rudina (Sindi Laçej), must leave school and temporarily take over her father’s business, just to keep the family afloat. This is a vivid, tough little story that enfolds lots of dramatic subthreads: Nik and Rudina live, as most of us do, in a world of cell phones and satellite TV, yet they find themselves bound by antiquated rules of conduct. Nik is just learning his way around the adult world — he preens in front of the mirror, Tony Manero-style, hoping to look good for the girl he’s set his sights on — only to be imprisoned at home, as if grounded by an especially strict parent. It’s a particularly painful kind of cultural emasculation, and he lashes out. And Rudina, a bright girl who seems to enjoy school (it’s hinted that she may have a future outside this rather restrictive community), suddenly has to play the role of the male breadwinner. She’d rather go shoe-shopping with her friends, of course, but the point is that her very sex both protects her and makes her life harder: Her life is of lesser value under the arcane rules governing the blood feud, which means that when the males in her family are compromised, she has to step up to the plate and act like a man. She seems to have the worst of both worlds. Marston’s gift as a filmmaker — he also co-wrote the script with Albanian screenwriter Andamion Murataj — is that he makes us care about these characters without forcing us to eat the knobby, dirt-encrusted root vegetables of cross-cultural awareness. You know what I’m talking about: The world of independent filmmaking is full of movies designed to congratulate well-informed, literate liberals on how well-informed and literate they are — we watch as peasants and otherwise “compromised” people, who live in countries outside North America (or even the poorer communities within it), suffer through their daily lives. Then we’re allowed to pat ourselves on the back for allowing our eyes to be opened to their plight. Marston doesn’t play that game here, and he didn’t play it in his first feature, Maria Full of Grace , either: That picture told the story of a young Colombian woman who becomes a drug mule to raise money for her family. The picture could have been a pile-up of the most tense horrors imaginable, but Marston has the rare gift of knowing when to ease up on the clutch: He focuses on individuals, on their faces and their feelings, sometimes at the expense of your garden-variety dramatic buildup. His movies have their own kind of narrative intensity, but they’re not thrillers masquerading as human-interest stories. With Marston, the interest is all human. That’s especially true in The Forgiveness of Blood . In the movie’s early moments, when I saw that horse-drawn bread cart rambling across a scrubby-yet-beautiful semi-rural landscape, I groaned. Was this going to be one of those good-for-you movies that’s pure punishment to watch? The picture does have its unnerving moments, points at which you find yourself inside the head of a particular character and you’re not sure you want to be there. But Marston doesn’t overreach dramatically. Mostly, he simply trusts the faces of his actors: Halilaj’s Nik has a gawky-charming teen-scarecrow look — he’s all long limbs and awkward pauses, particularly when he’s in the presence of that pretty classmate. And even though Rudina isn’t really the movie’s main character, as Laçej plays her, she’s its quiet, somber soul. Rudina observes the proceedings around her with resigned exasperation: Just when her life should be moving forward, it’s being pulled backward through hundreds of years of tradition. That tension is gentle but potent, and it’s what keeps The Forgiveness of Blood coursing along. By the end, you’ll care more about Albanian blood feuds than you ever thought you could. Follow S.T. VanAirsdale on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
