Best Picture 2016: American Culture in 1950s in Three Movies

On the surface, and many simpleminded (mostly male, let’s face it) critics will tell you, John Crowley’s Brooklyn is an “old fashioned” film about an Irish girl immigrating to the United States. Or they will say it’s a love triangle where a woman must choose between two men and two countries. Maybe those are easier selling points but the truth about Brooklyn is that it’s wildly subversive storytelling of the kind Hollywood is greatly in need of. If you’re looking for a deeply satisfying love story, driven by well written, well acted and well directed characters – Brooklyn contains all of these elements so that people of all ages can sit down in front of it and be richly rewarded. But Brooklyn is more than the sum of its easily recognizable parts. While it isn’t a movie that can carry or relieve the burden placed on Mexican-American or Syrian immigrants who are risking life and limb to get a better country than their own, it is a film that reminds us of America’s promise. You know, the promise it once held before the Tea Party rose to power? The promise that helped fulfill the melting pot, the nation of immigrants, the land of opportunity, the flexibly defined world of ethnic diversity? As that promise is fading, those hopes are dying and what America once represented has been replaced by a selfish, war mongering bully whose doors are closed to new citizens.

It isn’t a familiar story of an immigrant family, like The Godfather, or even The Immigrant. This isn’t a tragedy, nor it is a cautionary tale. It is the internal life of a shy girl who finds courage to make choices about who and what she wants to become. Girls in movies are trapped behind their types and definitions of those types – the wife, the girlfriend, the manic pixie dream girl, the bitch, the virgin, the whore. Men react off of that type in 99% of films we see now. Here is a film that finds a girl coming of age the way, say, a genius was discovered in last year’s Whiplash. To carry this entire film, Crowley needed a formidable actress and he could not have found a better translator of the internal world of girlhood than Saoirse Ronan.

She is not sexualized, nor stick thin. She is not required to lead with fuckability. She is surrounded by female co-stars who also refuse to fall into cliche typecasting. They are afforded their own stories, their own quirks and personalities. Most surprising of all, though, is that Brooklyn is, more than anything else, a story about women helping women to keep society in balance. The mean boss eventually softens to give advice about shaving and bathing suits. The girl on the ship is snippy at first but eventually sees who she once was in Ronan’s Eilis Lacey and helps her to evolve ever so slightly to survive in this new world. Her housemates are competitive and then protective. Her sister, her mother, her best friend – are supportive even if she encounters one or two intolerable women along the way. Mais, bien sur.

And yeah, you could easily whip up a fuss about how Eilis is a white girl so naturally it’s easier for her assimilate. She’s comfortable and not starving. She’s relatively privileged and therefore has an easier ride. You can make that argument if you want. I would counter it with how many films we’ve seen telling the other story. Because films with a mostly female cast are so rare, why would anyone want to make this particular film (or Suffragette for that matter) carry the burden of America’s collective sins? Why is it always these kind of stories that get dumped on, when 99% of the films out there are simply and unapologetically about every single aspect of the white male condition?

Brooklyn is so beautifully rendered, so swoon-worthy it kidnaps a person from our filthy, unbearable world and drops them into an oasis for a time. So unusual is this film, about so many women just making their way in the world, it was almost like walking into a zoo where all of the animals in their recreated habitats have long since become extinct. Brooklyn is one of the finest films of its kind, and easily one of the year’s best.

If the promise of the land of opportunity is made somewhat ironic in Brooklyn, so too is the idea of a free nation brought forth in Steven Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies, which also takes place in 1950s America. What is remarkable about this film right now is that it very much speaks to the current climate of the “imprison now and ask questions later” America that we’ve become after 9/11. Fear has consumed us, so much so that part of what the immigration debate is about is this idea of “foreigners” coming here and murdering us, whether they are “RADICAL ISLAMIC EXTREMISTS” or Mexican immigrants. These fingers get point though only a few Senators will bring up the subject which race actually represents most of the gun-toting mass shooters who are terrorizing our country. The fear is as palpable now as it was in the 1950s when Americans built bomb shelters to protect us from “the big one” and Senator McCarthy was able to cast a wave of hysteria over all citizens for fear of ferreting out secret communists. Spielberg’s film is such a careful meditation on fear that works as a mirror reflecting our own current jitteriness back upon us.

What Tom Hanks’ character is standing up for in Bridge of Spies is character itself. That American character we’re supposed to all aspire to – innocent until proven guilty, every person entitled to due process under the law, even those we deem “enemies of the state.” We know the baby-boomer generation romanticizes this time but Bridge of Spies, and Brooklyn, dare to remind us why romanticizing that era is so dangerous and why it’s more important now than ever to aspire to some kind of inner character that will guide each of through the more hysteria-driven events of the day.

Amy Ryan plays Hanks’ wife and is the typical 1950s housewife, which is not what we see in Brooklyn, where actual working women of the time – black and white – are shown taking the subway and pleasing customers. Because women were not trusted with making change they had to take the payment – put it in a capsule that went down a pneumatic chute and then the tube shot the capsule back with the correct change. This is the same atmosphere we find our heroines from Todd Haynes’ exquisite Carol. This is the same world of Crowley’s Brooklyn with both the presumed (albeit highly glamorous Cate Blanchett) 1950s housewife and the working girl, Rooney Mara who is also searching for her identity as a gay woman on the verge of coming out.

It’s hard to even imagine 1950s American gay culture because it was hidden from view so much of the time and in fact considered such deviant behavior it was thought to be psychological illness. Haynes explores this territory in Far From Heaven too, only in that film the final summation of their lives was tragic while in Carol it’s full of hope. That hope is found in uncovered identity – living one’s life out and proud. It would be decades before couples would be given permission by the US government to marry but Carol depicts what lives were like back when it wasn’t.

One remarkable thing among many about Carol is how Rooney Mara’s character does not accept inner shame for who she is. If Blanchett’s Carol has learned better how to live a double life as a “straight woman” by hiding in a loveless marriage (and believe me, you’d have to be a lesbian to not want to sleep with Kyle Chandler) Mara’s character is much more willing to discover herself and live as she is. Maybe it didn’t happen like that for many back then but for Haynes to show it so freely now is itself revolutionary.

All three of these films are among the best offerings of this year. In taking us back to the 1950s they have the opportunity to use the full force of what Hollywood does best – bringing period films to vibrant life through heart-achingly beautiful costumes, sets, makeup, hair, music. If Best Picture is built branch by branch the tech categories are where you can start with all three of these.

They resonate not because they are necessarily about America in the 1950s — a time when television was just starting to influence the way we live our lives, when the Mad Men of Madison Avenue were figuring out how to manipulate American culture to sell their repackaged lifestyles back to them, when the Cold War was raging, and women were expected to put a bun and a turkey in the oven. They resonate because they are about American life now, as it tries to shed the oppressive tendencies we still carry with us, all of these decades later. We are coming off of 9/11 and two wars in the Middle East. We are heading into a presumably more tolerant society that seems to become more intolerant as the seconds fly by. It is worth taking a look backwards so that we can try harder to look forward to find a way out from under our worst impulses.