Every year, I fear watching the Academy Award-Nominated Shorts: Live Action. Usually, they are a doleful parade of shock and sorrow: works whose chief aim is to make you feel miserable, while jumping up and down shouting: give me the Oscar. I am not saying that is not the case this year. Yes, a couple of these entries “The After,” in particular, are bummers.
Written and directed by British screenwriter and actor of Bangladeshi descent Nazrin Choudhury, “Red, White and Blue” tells the story of a working class single mother Rachel (a dazzling Brittany Snow) in Arkansas struggling to raise her two children, a preteen named Maddy (a remarkable Juliet Donenfeld) and her younger bother Jake (Redding Munsell, another wonder). The film is the story of what pressures come to play when Rachel must travel to Missouri with barely sufficient funds in an, old unreliable piece of junk to arrange for an unexpected abortion. Just when you think you can’t bear another story of this type, Choudhury sticks the knife in you. Choudhury’s previous credits include “The Walking Dead.”
In the aforementioned “The After,” a film directed and co-written by Nigerian-born British photographer Misan Harriman, making his debut, Englishman David Oyelowo plays Dayo, a young, successful father without much time for his young daughter, who arranges to attend a school event only to have something completely unimaginable happen. It was here that I was ready to check out of this miserabilist entry and go stub my toe. But Oyelowo, riding high on the success of his Paramount + revisionist Western “Lawman Bass Reeves,” kept me mesmerized, as Dayo tries to plumb the depths of grief, climb out of his misery and find comfort in even the most petty, bickering couple.
Of course, one entry had to be an example of Nordic noir. “Knight of Fortune,” which is named after the song “Ridder Lykke” by the Danish band Rocazino. It’s refrain is, “Take me with you.” Meet Karl (veteran Swedish actor Leif Andree). His wife has just died. He is at a chapel, where he has been warned that her “mouth might hang open” and “her skin might have turned yellow” before being directed to open her coffin. Karl cannot bring himself to do it. He’d rather repair the blinking light fixture above her. In the loo, Karl encounters Torben (Danish actor Jens Jorn Spottag), and finds himself with Torben at the coffin of a stranger as her extended family arrives. The people of the North know that a spot of black comedy makes this sort of thing very palatable. Some of them drink stuff called Black Death. I want more of the comic misadventures of Karl and Torben.
In the French-language Canadian entry “Invincible,” a young man named Marc (a feral Leokim Beaumier-Lepine), who was on vacation with his family, must return to the facility for troubled youth, where he buts heads with a manager named Luc (Ralph Prosper). Marc seems incorrigible. But he’s also capable of writing poetry in which he yearns, “To return the sea.” “Invincible” is an ode to self-destructiveness and the inescapable and at times attractive lure of nothingness.
As good as these entries are, the best of the lot is American filmmaker Wes Anderson’s droll English/Indian adventure “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar,” based upon a 1976 story by Roald Dahl, the now controversial writer also known for Willy Wonka. Henry Sugar (Benedict Cumberbatch in one of his best performances) is a rich, good-for-nothing Englishman when we first meet him. Henry finds a book at a friend’s manor house library, and in scenes featuring the actors Dev Patel, Richard Ayoade, Ben Kingsley as a yogi who can levitate and Ralph Fiennes as Dahl himself, we are amused by a completely bewitching tale of how a good-for-nothing trained himself to see through playing cards – or maybe through the delightful geometric set designs – or how to write quirky stories about such things – and made the world a better place.
Variously Rated. At the Coolidge Corner Theater.
Grade: A-