Acceptance Arrives in Many Ways

Here is a look at the Live Action Short Films up for an Academy Award tonight!


A good film touches us in some way – a great one grabs us by the collar with both fists.

The Academy Award nominees for Live Action Short Films fit neatly in either of these two boxes. For me, what separated them was how deeply they churned in my gut.

Pentecost

In the tale of an Irish altar boy caught in the web of expectations from his father, his parish priest and his archbishop, Pentecost invites us to witness a comedic coming of age moment.  The boy, Damian, unwittingly injures a priest when he swings a metal incense ball a bit too enthusiastically and finds himself banned from his duties and from watching his beloved Manchester United football team.  Damian says he’s thankful to be relieved of the church duties because he never wanted them in the first place. This goes unheard.  A plot twist finds Damian as the incense bearer again this time for an all-important archbishop’s visit to his country church.

The predictable ending, in which some spirit moves the hero, places this film into the ‘good’ box for me.  However, a hilarious scene that can only be described as a private pre-Mass pep talk is delivered with such fervor that if you close your eyes, you’d swear it was being given in a Super Bowl locker room at halftime. 

 Krish Gupta as Raju

Raju provides a sobering riddle that is dropped into the lives of a German couple as they spend the first hours with their newly adopted four year old son, Raju in colorful, raucous, bare bones Calcutta, India.  In a bustling marketplace with his new father, the boy seemingly vanishes and, from that point, the film pulses with doubt, fear, and anxiety. The father stumbles into a discovery about his sweet child that ironically clarifies his next decision but muddies the waters for his spouse.  Here Raju quietly explodes with a gut check for the audience, asking the question: What would you do?

Interestingly, the film begins with its conclusion, and this deliberate sequence adds greater power to its fuel injected ethos.  In twenty-four minutes, the film dispenses an intense dilemma that sank its teeth into me. 

Ciaran Hinds (Jim) and Kerry Condon (Patricia) in "The Shore"

Ireland is once again a backdrop in The Shore in which an Emerald Isle son, Joe, returns with his daughter, Patricia, to his coastal birthplace and is embraced after a 25 year absence.  A more meaningful reunion lies beneath Jim’s trip across the Atlantic as he seeks his childhood friend, Paddy, and sweetheart, Mary to right a wrong.  The trilogy find themselves in a sequence of two person conversations, sorting out their shared past, as they unlock the contents of their hearts. 

Michael Nathanson (Stillman) in "Time Freak"

Humor appears again in Time Freak in which a Groundhog Day-like plot finds two friends experiencing the power and pitfalls of minute time travel. Evan finds his friend Stillman with his fully operational time machine in a Brooklyn warehouse. Lined with charts, diagrams, and timetables, the spot becomes Stillman’s frequent home base.  His plans of traveling to Ancient Rome become surpassed by life’s simpler conundrums, like retrieving a shirt that is never ready for pick up at the corner dry cleaners and botching a chance meeting with a woman he’d like to date.  The waters become even murkier when the woman tells the time weary traveler to stand up to the dry cleaner.

Stillman sinks into quicksand as he relentlessly tries to repair the situations.  It is like watching someone repeatedly tumble down the same set of stairs – no matter how often he reaches for something to break his fall, he lands badly bruised at the bottom. Every. Single. Time.

It is a purposeful mirror held up for the audience - how many times do we mentally revisit a moment in time with a different dialogue and outcome? Stillman shows us how fruitless these mental ‘do-overs’ are when acted out. Every. Single. Time.

Edvard Haegstad as Oskar in "Tuba Atlantic"

I was prepared to dislike Tuba Atlantic for superficial reasons – freezing coastal Norway, seagulls being gunned down, a cantankerous man named Oskar who is told he has six days to live, sparse settings. That is until Inger, the self-described Angel of Death hospice worker, arrives and melts it all away.  She is an angel in a mechanical, awkward, teenage sort of way that simply endears her to the audience and, eventually, to Oskar. 

The unlikely pair stumble along as their disjointed natures struggle to connect, in spite of themselves.  The cacophonous climax announces what is possible when kindness is offered and accepted. 

The five films share a theme of acceptance.

In Raju and Tuba Atlantic, both wrestle painfully and begrudgingly to reach it; The Shore resurrects it after being buried 25 years earlier; Pentecost and Time Freak tickle audience funny bones to release it.

While my vote for Oscar goes to Raju, I believe Tuba Atlantic will pick up the award because of its quirkiness.  In the spirit of acceptance, I will embrace any outcome!