Secrets & Lies
All right, so now I have seen all of the Academy Award nominees for Best Picture except Jerry Maguire which I will be seeing tomorrow, the day of the Oscars. However, I'm not sure why Secrets & Lies was nominated, except for the fact that the entire movie was improvised. Other than that fact, the movie is EXTREMELY slow going. This movie made me do something that I have never done in the theater while watching a movie: I fell asleep.
Which is sad because the entire overall movie is pretty good. If you can wait out the first half and try to stay awake and pay attention, you're in for a real treat. The second half is so powerful and emotional that you can't help feeling the pain of the effects secrets and lies have on a family. If only the first half was as good as the second half, then this movie could have been an Oscar contender with a real chance at winning.
But as it is, Secrets & Lies does have some really good points, mainly the two main stars. Brenda Blethyn, nominated for Best Actress (though McDormand will probably steal it away from her... and she deserves it), cries so much on screen that I almost got sick of it. But that's the character she had to play, and it's a very good character. Marianne Jean-Baptiste, nominated for Best Supporting Actress, is very good as well, and holds her own against Blethyn. These two actresses are the reason that this movie is so good. How these two were able to improvise all the dialogue and action of this movie is beyond me. Yet, I wonder what they improvised and what they didn't. Did they improvise everything, or just the dialogue. They must have had some central plot to focus around.
And that is my only problem with the movie. It seems so out of focus because it appears to have no direction. It does have one, but it takes about an hour and a half before anything really starts coming together. I had this problem with another Oscar nominee, The English Patient, but that movie held my interest. I really wanted to like Secrets & Lies as much as the rest of the critics, but I don't think that the beginning half was that good. I mean, it really took a LONG time to get going. So, while I still have not seen Jerry Maguire, I consider this movie the worst of the five nominees, but that's not bad because all the movies are excellent.
Secrets & Lies begins telling the story of several different people's lives. We learn about a photographer, a woman who works in a factory (Blethyn), a black woman who is trying to find out who her real mother is (Jean-Baptiste), and several other people. I can't really tell you details about the first half because it didn't hold my attention and so I fell asleep. However, when I began watching it again (after my friend woke me up), I was really excited about it. Jean-Baptiste was finally going to meet her real mother, who happens to be white. This dilemma is another one of the many secrets and lies that are going to be revealed in the last half of the movie. I'm not going to spoil any of them by telling you about them, but it's a real treat to watch everyone react to the surprises.
Secrets & Lies is rated R. There is a lot of language, and suggested sex, but that's about it. There is also some humor in the film, a lot of it coming from couples and families being photographed by the photographer. But this is a drama, and a very emotional one at that. I don't think I have ever seen one actress cry so much on screen as Blethyn. The thing is is that we can feel her pain and agony as she tries to figure things out and sort them in her mind. For me, I think this movie would be better suited on video, but maybe that's just because I'm only a teen. Who knows.