What's vexing about the omission of female filmmakers from the Best Picture and Best Director categories has as much to do with the content of the movies nominated as it does with behind-the-scenes talent: With minor variations and few exceptions, each nominee up for the top prize is about men, Great Men, men with the weight of the world on their shoulders or the lifelong burden of identity on their minds, perhaps both. Vice, Bohemian Rhapsody, Green Book, A Star Is Born, BlacKkKlansman, and even Black Panther are each shaped predominantly by male characters searching for power, prestige, personality, or just personhood. Maybe it follows that they'd be directed by men-which, of course, they all are.
But that's casual misogynist bunk: The best movies of 2018 to roll up their sleeves and get elbow-deep in macho gray matter all happen to be directed by women. Lynne Ramsay's You Were Never Really Here, Debra Granik's Leave No Trace, and Chlo Zhao's The Rider cut to the core of male identity, sans the pomp of awards-bait pictures and with greater precision than the actual best movies in the Best Picture category. No disrespect to BlacKkKlansman or Black Panther; no hate for Roma, which, female lead aside, also contains sharp insights into male behavioral health. It's not that these movies are bad, or bad explorations of masculinity. Rather, it's that Ramsays, Graniks, and Zhao's movies outclass them.
Each is also its own beast. You Were Never Really Here captures the sensation of living in someone else's waking nightmare with soul-rattling confidence. Leave No Trace inhabits the experience of struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder, for both the afflicted and the outside observer. And The Rider asks what compels men to push themselves beyond their limits in pursuit of a dream they can't let go of. Trauma is the common thread binding the trio. These filmmakers put it under a microscope. Theyre tender, careful not to mishandle that trauma, but just as determined to do it justice on the screen.
Of the three, Leave No Trace strikes the gentlest chord. The film unfolds in a public park in Portland, Oregon, where Iraq War veteran Will (Ben Foster) lives off the land with his daughter Tom (Thomasin McKenzie), until authorities discover them, put them into social services, and attempt to relieve Will of his suffering. His PTSD drives the plot, but Granik fuels his story with the kindness of strangers.
You Were Never Really Here goes in the opposite direction: Ramsay, adapting the Jonathan Ames novella, throws hitman tropes on the hearth and douses them with gasoline. She cares about her protagonist, Joe (Joaquin Phoenix), as Granik cares about Will, but Ramsay's film is considerably more merciless. Joe, like Will, wrestles with PTSD, the product of his Gulf War service and his career as an FBI field agent. He lives on society's edges, too, interacting solely with his mother (Judith Roberts) and his handler McCleary (John Doman). McCleary gives him work, each assignment a rescue mission for trafficked girls. Joe finds them, violently murders their kidnappers with a hammer, and brings them home safely. He's ferocious the way grizzly bears are ferocious defending their cubs.
The Rider falls between Leave No Trace and You Were Never Really Here as a portrait of masculine psychological stress, a reenactment of real-life events instead of whole-cloth fiction. Brady Blackburn is the main character, Brady Jandreau the actor playing him, but they both had the same career-ending accident: a skull fracture sustained at a rodeo. Another movie, and another director, mightve populated the story with professional actors. Zhao lets Jandreau, his family, and his friends tell their own stories, as Blackburn comes to terms with his new life restricted from riding. While Granik explores Will's identity removed from civilization and Ramsay explores Joe's removed from sanity, Zhao peers at Brady's identity divorced from his livelihood.
The damages dealt to Will, Joe, and Brady in these movies aren't specific to men, but the marriage of male subjects with female directors produces effects that might be otherwise missed. Hitman movies are cheap commodities. Less common are hitman movies so vested in their protagonists' mental stability. Every minute of You Were Never Really Here is spent in the endless cacophonous cycle that is Joe's anguish. His world is coated in horrors re-lived on street corners, in hotel rooms, in the house he shares with his mom. Joe's memories haunt him with each child he saves, every monster he kills. (It's not by accident that his favorite weapon is a hammer, the conduit for abuse he suffered as a boy.)
Joe can't escape his past. Neither can Will, but boy he tries: staying off the grid, teaching Tom how to forage for survival, occasionally selling painkillers given to him by the VA. When the state intervenes and places the two in a home, Will grows visibly uncomfortable over time. He absconds with Tom to trackless woods and they arrive at a figurative crossroads. She wants to stay among people. He can't, or won't, or both. Granik doesn't treat Will's reckless longing for solitude as noble. She sees him as tragic, neither judging nor rewarding his self-imposed isolation.
Brady, on the other hand, exists among his peers, though even in a crowded room he's not quite there. His impulses set him on a course of self-destruction. Doctors tell him not to ride. To compensate, he trains other riders and breaks in horses. He also keeps riding against orders, and pays for his stubbornness with a seizure. Zhao mines the clash between his limitations and his dreams. What's a cowboy without a horse and spurs? If Brady can't ride, what can he do? And what, ultimately, is he? The Rider dangles masculinity from a thread. Brady invests so much of himself in his profession that he'd rather risk dying than find the alternative. Maybe he's nobody. Maybe he's still a cowboy.
The Rider and Leave No Trace both echo past Oscar nominees. The Rider takes after Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler and Black Swan. Leave No Trace feels like the gracious cousin of Granik's 2010 film, Winter's Bone, nominated for four Academy Awards in 2011, including a Best Actress nod for Jennifer Lawrence that instantly made her Hollywood royalty. There's only one meaningful (and old) Academy precedent for You Were Never Really Here, Martin Scorseses Taxi Driver, but Ramsay's a master filmmaker, so precedent be damned.
These sterling movies share plenty with the Oscar favorites no one can stop talking about. Bradley Cooper interrogates male jealousy, boosted by alcoholism, over female success in A Star Is Born. Adam McKay studies power-hungry patriarchy in Vice. With Black Panther, Ryan Coogler shows viewers the pain that fatherless boys can carry with them into manhood.
Granik's, Zhao's, and Ramsay's films are, however, possessed of more skill than their male-helmed peers. If the Oscars must reward grizzly displays of dick-swinging, then they should at least reward those displays on egalitarian lines (a pipe dream, perhaps, but still). AMPAS has crept a small step closer to racial and ethnic parity with each year since April Reign's made fools of them in 2015 and yet again in 2016. In 2019, they've made the same glaringly dumb mistake in gender representation.
That'd be awkward in any year, but it's especially embarrassing today as demand for recognition of female talent gains urgency. Without the credits attached, however, these works stand on their own and deserve the same attention accorded to 2018s nominees, some equally as acclaimed, some much less so: You Were Never Really Here, The Rider, and Leave No Trace respectively clock in at 89 percent, 97 percent, and an astounding 100 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. (Box office is another disappointing matter; combined, they comprise a fraction of A Star Is Borns domestic gross, but the Academy finds plenty of other limited releases to champion.) These are supremely accomplished films by both objective and subjective measures. The Academys failure to acknowledge that is as much a dereliction of purpose as proof that the institution is out of touch with its own multifaceted industry.