004: Maybe Try to Feel Something Next Time
a brief unedited rant about screentime, lily gladstone, and the desire to turn movies into statistics.
Every year when awards season rolls around some of the lovely people who discuss film online take it upon themselves to tally the screen time of each of the prospective nominees to decide objectively through the power of statistics what categories each actor should be running in. In doing so they ignore a key component of enjoying and making movies, they ignore the feeling.
Take Killers of the Flower Moon for example; Lily Gladstone, who stars as Mollie Kyle, is on screen for 56 minutes and 13 seconds of Killers of the Flower Moon’s 3 hour and 26 minute runtime, the lowest of any of her fellow nominees and, when one looks at it purely from a numbers perspective it would make sense for an actor who was only in the movie for 26% of the runtime to be nominated in Best Supporting Actress instead of Best Actress. Thankfully the Academy is not composed of people who seem capable of understanding the difference between lead and supporting based solely on statistics. Lily Gladstone is the heart of Killers of the Flower Moon; her performance as Mollie is raw, heartbreaking, and powerful. Do you know what it takes to star in a movie where Robert De Niro is channeling an evil like he is here and to come out the other side as his equal? To imply that her “lack” of screentime is somehow something that reduces the impact or importance of her role is to be ignoring the emotional core of the movie. It isn’t how much screentime you have, it’s what you do with it and in her 56 minutes Gladstone is doing more than most would if given a full 3 hours. Anna Paquin’s work in The Irishman is not made lesser by the fact that she only said seven words, but it is made lesser by the people implying that her role is nothing because of that.
Movies are not sports, they don’t lend themselves well to statistical analysis, try as the studios might. I don’t respond to movies because of some objective data point, I respond to them because of the emotions they make me feel. I saw The Fabelmans for the first time over a year ago now and in all that time I have yet to feel it leave my body. I often find myself hearing “Do You Hear the Music” from Ludwig Göransson’s Oppenheimer score in my head. The Red Shoes is not my favourite movie ever because of some objective metric that tells me it should be, it isn’t even one of the best movies ever made because of that. Time and time again it has been proven that we don’t respond to movies the way we do because of numbers, we respond that way because of the feelings movies give us. Statistics make for fun trivia, but they don’t make for good criticism, or even for worthwhile discussion. Maybe try to feel something next time.