Riveting Edward Snowden exclusive Citizenfour is the frontrunner among a crop
of documentary nominees that – for once – cater more to the head rather than the
heart
• Who will win best supporting actress?
Oscar documentary
nominees
Clockwise from centre, Finding Vivian Maier, The Salt of the Earth,
Citizenfour, Last Days in Vietnam, Virunga.
With best foreign-language film having been partly reformed in recent
years – more on that in a later column – best documentary is the fringe category
for which the Academy most regularly takes flak. Last year’s victory for 20 Feet
from Stardom (a perfectly good film) over The Act of Killing (an imperfectly
great one) was a typical one: formal risk-taking rarely trumps emotional uplift,
no matter how many precursor awards point in the opposite direction.
This year, however, it seems the Academy’s documentary branch has largely
voted with their heads over their hearts, compiling a list low on peppy
crowdpleasers and omitting the film many thought might be the sentimental
favourite: Steve James’s affecting but hardly inspired Roger Ebert tribute Life
Itself. Though some US critics have taken this as an affront to their own
profession, they should be appeased if – as looks increasingly likely – voters
side with the film that has dominated the awards circuit thus far.
That’d be Citizenfour, Laura Poitras’s riveting, in-the-moment study of
former CIA system administrator Edward Snowden and his fire-starting role in the
National Security Agency surveillance scandal. Poitras’s connection to the
material could hardly be more direct: the film-maker (a former nominee in this
category for her Iraq doc My Country, My Country) was invited by Snowden
himself, along with Glenn Greenwald and the Guardian’s Ewen MacAskill, to
collaborate in his planned data leak, and the film that has resulted from their
covert hotel-room consultations is a journalistic coup of the first order. It’s
arguably a triumph of content over delivery, but that hasn’t prevented
Citizenfour – which boasts Steven Soderbergh among its executive producers –
taking top honours from the International Documentary Association and every
major US critics’ group, or becoming easily the highest grosser of the
nominees.
While Citizenfour has the topicality vote all wrapped up, Virunga is the
category’s most rousing feat of contemporary activism. The first feature-length
effort from the splendidly named British documentarian Orlando von Einsiedel,
the film depicts the range of forces threatening the survival of the Democratic
Republic of Congo’s Virunga National Park, from the violent impositions of rebel
military forces to the more insidiously alarming presence of British oil company
SOCO International. The Academy is often sympathetic to environmentally themed
documentaries – The Cove and An Inconvenient Truth both won in the last decade –
and this Bafta nominee has the urgent structure of a thriller. Surprisingly,
it’s the only film in the category to have also scored a nomination from the
Producers’ Guild of America.
It’s been 40 years since the Academy last rewarded a documentary concerned
with the Vietnam war, with the ordeal finally drawing to a close, and the wound
still a fresh one on voters’ collective conscience. This doesn’t seem likely to
be the year they reopen it, but Last Days in Vietnam makes a decent case for
them to do so. Directed by Rory Kennedy – incidentally, the youngest daughter of
outspoken Vietnam war opponent Robert F Kennedy – the film is a marvel of
archival gathering, showcasing astonishing footage of Saigon’s fall that does
much to contextualise America’s collective memory of the events at hand.
Firsthand recollections from American and Vietnamese participants, Henry
Kissinger among them, supplement this calmly reconstructed history; its slight
favouring of the US experience certainly won’t harm its chances.
Two contrasting portraits of photographers made their way into the category;
pundit logic dictated that only one would make the cut, but Academy voting
doesn’t allow for slot-based strategy. The more widely predicted of the two
actually has the lower profile: Finding Vivian Maier, John Maloof and Charlie
Siskel’s fascinating exposure of the titular street photographer and her
clandestine career. It’s a melancholy, fascinating study of artfully concealed
artistry that perhaps errs a little on the side of self-conscious myth-building;
some critics have questioned the moral responsibility of Maloof (the chief owner
and curator of Maier’s work) to a deceased subject who clearly never wished for
this level of attention. Also nominated for the Directors’ Guild award
(alongside Virunga and Citizenfour) and the Bafta, it’s been popular on the
festival circuit since 2013, but is probably a shade too low-key to grab the
win.
A little heavier on spectacle is The Salt of the Earth, a glorious tribute to
Brazilian photojournalist Sebastião Salgado that sees Wim Wenders extending his
run of form in the documentary format. Co-directed with Salgado’s son Juliano,
the film – winner of the Special Jury Prize in Un Certain Regard at Cannes – is
a more traditional effort than Wenders’ much-garlanded Pina, but no less
dazzling. Beginning with Salgado’s name-making images of the Serra Pelada gold
mine and expanding outwards to reflect on a larger career, Wenders hits on novel
methods of demonstrating his subject’s visual fluency, even through potentially
conventional talking-head passages. As a formal feat of filmmaking, it’s by far
the most impressive of the five. Never acknowledged by the Academy for his
narrative work, Wenders has now racked up three nominations in this category; if
voters are in a lyrical mood, and fancy recognising a worthy career in the
process, he could be the spoiler.
Hey where’s ... The Overnighters? Jesse Moss’s taut, tough survey of migrant
oil-field workers in North Dakota inspired critical comparisons to Steinbeck in
its moral weight and complexity, and cracked the Academy’s initial 15-film
shortlist. It deserved to go further.
