I was asked a couple of weeks ago if I think Garrett Hedlund‘s performance as Neal Casady/Dean Moriarty in Walter Salles‘ On The Road is an award-calibre thing. In a sense, certainly. But in reality, not quite. For as good as he is (and I think Hedlund easily matches or even slightly surpasses Nick Nolte‘s performance as the same guy in 1980’s Heart Beat), the competition is too tough. Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor are brutal fields this year. But first-rate work is its own reward as it leads to other good things.

Same thing when it comes to Kristen Stewart‘s performance as Marylou. It’s great to see her kick back and get sensual in a meditative art film that exudes soul and swoon and pastoral splendor and real-deal undercurrents instead of…you know, phoning in a Twilight or Snow White performance. She’s starred in indies before but never one as good as On The Road. But her role isn’t big enough or strongly written enough to win special attention. It would be one thing if she was playing “the” supporting actress role (as Sissy Spacek did in Heart Beat), but she isn’t — Kirsten Dunst is also in the mix. And Best Supporting Actress competish is fierce: Anne Hathaway (Les Miserables), Sally Field (Lincoln), Helen Hunt (The Sessions), Amy Adams (The Master), Jacki Weaver (Silver Linings Playbook), Ann Dowd (Compliance), Susan Sarandon (Arbitrage).

“The experience of sitting through all 160 minutes of Les Miserables can feel less like an awards bash than an epic wake, at which the band is always playing and women forever wailing. By the end, you feel like a pinata: in pieces, the victim of prolonged assault by killer pipes.” — from a 12.6 review by The Guardian‘s Catherine Shoard.

I saw Judd Apatow‘s This Is 40 about six weeks ago, or on Thursday, 10.25. It was a mid-afternoon screening on the Universal lot on a hot day. I wrote the following to Apatow and the Universal publicist who invited me a few hours later. Well, that’s not true. I wrote a version of this letter, but I finessed it today…sorry. [Warning: Mild spoilers herein.]

“Judd — I don’t know if you personally signed off on my seeing This Is 40 this afternoon, but thanks if you did. I appreciated the opportunity & value the respect shown by your or the powers-that-be in allowing me to have an early looksee.

“Basically I think This Is 40 is a fairly ballsy act of self-portraiture as far as it goes. By that I mean it’s self-portraiture plus Apatow schtick for the first 75 minutes, which isn’t exactly in the realm of an Ingmar Bergman or John Cassevettes film in terms of frankly revealing the inner life of a filmmaker, but it’s certainly attempting that kind of thing while simultaneously going for the big audience. A less brave director wouldn’t have even flirted with a film like this. I mean that.

“All right, that’s the kiss-ass part of this letter and here comes the truth.

“I have to say that I think This Is 40 works best during the last hour, give or take, or roughly beginning at the 75 minute mark. But I think Leslie Mann is excellent all through it. She’s the spiritual anchor of the film, I think. I also loved the performances of Albert Brooks, John Lithgow and Melissa McCarthy. (This is still sounding kiss-assy.) But I honestly didn’t care for Charlyne Yi. Chris O’Dowd explodes in The Sapphires but his material wasn’t as good as it needed to be here. It’s an in joke having the manatee-like Jason Segel play a fitness trainer, right?

“And you’ve got your older daughter Maude playing…I have to say this carefully. She’s playing…I don’t want to make a mistake. She’s portraying a rather…don’t hate me for thinking these things about Maude’s character but it’s well-known that teenage girls are a pain to their parents. Your younger daughter is totally cool though.

“I loved the line about Megan Fox having painted an image of a vagina on her dark underwear. And the line about the last of Graham Parker‘s fans being taken away in an ambulance — that was excellent.

“I saw the love and the struggle and the humanity in Leslie’s “character”, of course, and the strain and the pressure in Paul Rudd‘s (i.e., yours) but mainly I felt the effort to sell their lives by way of fast schticky-angsty humor. I kept wanting the schtick to be dropped and the plain, awkward ordinaryness of life to come through in a Bergmanesque way. And I kept thinking to myself ‘boy, this movie is not a very attractive advertisement for West LA/Brentwood Liberal Values & Lifestyles’ and ‘I’m kind of glad this movie isn’t coming out before the election because it might persuade some people to hate liberals.

“You know how Bill Maher goes on about the Republican bubble that rightwingers live inside of, the thick gelatinous membrane that keeps out all the facts and the general reality of things? That’s what I felt during the first hour or so of This Is 40. Like I was stuck inside a Westside Liberal Membrane for people who live north of San Vicente and west of Bundy. ‘I’m not sure if I like these people very much,’ I was telling myself. ‘These people need to quit whining and complaining and basically take their fingers out of their asses and smell the wind coming off the sea, and the daughters need to read the Baghavad Gita or go work on a horse ranch or go to Africa to help impoverished people.

“It’s hard to put into words, but I read portions of the script when Universal put it online last week (or was it the week before?) and I’m re-reading certain portions as we speak, and a lot of it reads better than it plays. During the first hour, I mean.

“But like I said, it takes off and finds the groove and kicks into gear around the 75-minute mark. Starting with the scene in which Rudd is weeping in his BMW, which directly follows the scene in which he realizes that Graham Parker is not going to save his company financially. Of course, this is something that everybody in the audience knows from the get-go, but which takes Rudd over an hour to figure out.

“But after this point the anger and the fighting and the resentments really let loose, and that’s when the movie starts to really work.

“So much of the hassle and the tension of things comes from the Graham Parker situation, and that just didn’t fly for me. It’s hard to root for anyone who’s so blind to the realities of the music market that he’s pinning his hopes for survival on the ascendancy of Graham Parker and the Rumor. Rudd’s character has done pretty well for himself in the music business (a syou have in the film business), obviously, but suddenly he’s an idiot who thinks that he can sell Graham Parker in a big enough way so that his financial pressures will be alleviated? And the solution at the end is representing Ryan Adams, another getting-old guy?

“I have to say that being 40 is a pretty easy thing, Judd, if you don’t mind my saying. It’s officially the start of middle age but the ‘uh-oh’ feeling doesn’t really kick in until your mid to late 40s. I’ll tell you this: I look at photos of myself when I was 40 and I think to myself, ‘Wow…almost a spring chicken! Okay, a little bit of wear and tear has started to show by that point but very little, really.’ 40 is when your face begins to acquire a little character, and when moms enter the MILF stage. It’s pretty hot when you get right down to it. So I don’t get the angst.

“What guy is dumb enough to tell his wife or girlfriend that he took Viagra or Cialis before making love to her? It’s not only printed on the warning label. I think 15 year-olds know that when they get older they’re not supposed to tell their girlfriends that they’re taking it. It’s almost on the level of ‘go when the light is green and stop when it’s red.’

“Brooks kills it in every scene he’s in. McCarthy is really great because she never goes for the laughs. Lithgow is too pursed and pinched at first, or so I thought, but then he saves it at the very end, and that scene between he and Leslie.

“Marriage is hard, marriage is a grind, it’s not easy to keep the fires going, etc. Your film honestly deals with all that stuff, warts and all. And it honestly states that teenage girls (even the ones sired by the director-writer) can be whiny, abrasive and self-absorbed and dismissive of their parents. I just didn’t buy the quirky oddball humor in the first hour (particularly any and all material related to anal probes) and I didn’t buy the Graham Parker/music business material. But the final 50 minutes is pretty good stuff.

“So there’s my positive streak, my admiration, what I liked. ‘Get through the first 75 minutes so you can savor the really good final 50 minutes.’ Do I need to work on that line?”

No ZDT, eh? I would be hugely surprised if the quirky, contrarian-minded LACFA picks Silver Linings for Best Picture, and flabbergasted if they go for Lincoln, Argo or Les Miz. The Master has faded and they know it. And Life of Pi and Beasts of the Southern Wild simply don’t have the horses. If they had real vision and brass balls (which of course they don’t) they’d celebrate the mad abandon of Anna Karenina. The only left-field contenders I can think of are The Grey or Looper…is that what you’re thinking, Glenn? One of these?

If I was Rian Johnson…no, fuck that, I’m not Rian Johnson and never will be. Although I sometimes bat tweets his way like it’s a Sunday tennis game with Eric Clapton.

So the MUBI guys are doing a Tony Scott celebration, and while reading their copy I was once again reminded that no journalist seems to care why this sharp guy with a red baseball cap, this creative go-getter, this dynamic turbine of a director killed himself last August. Nobody is asking any questions, at least, and it just seems odd.

When a guy who lived in front of a worldwide crowd reaches up and turns out the light, I think it’s fair after a decent interval to (a) ask what really happened, and (b) to expect a candid answer. Life is constantly about experience and facts and questions and learning, and I want to know, dammit, what the hell led him to that bridge. It happened four months ago, and I think enough time has elapsed for Scott’s widow or brother Ridley or someone in the family to just man up and tell it straight. I didn’t know Tony Scott personally, but I talked with him three or four times and I felt as if I did know who he was through his films. We all felt that to differing degrees. And it doesn’t feel right for this this issue to just sit there like a blank sheet of paper.

Producer Friend: “I have to say that I’m stunned that you liked Les Miz. I really thought that our tastes were in synch. Not always, I guess. Did you see Todd’s Hollywood Reporter review? I expect many of those to come. Zero Dark Thirty is the movie of the year (along with The Grey, which stands not a chance).”

Me: “I didn’t ‘like‘ the film exactly. Certainly not as a gathered-together whole. I was swept up and intensely moved by the last 40 minutes. There’s a difference between giving the entire film a pass and succumbing to the final act, I think.”

Producer Friend: “The truth is that Tom Hooper‘s use of constant close-ups, the dutch angles and the wide-angle lenses were very odd choices. I was bored to death by much of it. I thought Cohen/Carter were silly and over the top and that Russell Crowe was just dismal. Kudos to Anne Hathaway, though. When I nominate do you recommend that I put Les Miz ahead or behind Zero Dark Thirty?”

Me: “Zero Dark Thirty is a far more rooted and relentless film of our time than Les Miz…please. It is genuine instant history, and so on-the-stick.”

Producer Friend: “Duh, I was joking.”

Nick Clement, a Connecticut film buff who has always burned brightly and has always celebrated the important stuff in the right way (even when he falls for films that I consider dubious or worse), wrote the following this morning: “I’m just wondering if you can shed any light on WTF is going on with the release of Silver Linings Playbook? It still hasn’t opened anywhere in CT — another weekend comes and goes and it’s still not here…and it seems like it’s crested at around 500 screens total — what are they doing?

“Same goes for Anna Karenina, which isn’t playing in any decent theater in the Hartford area. What gives? Why make these movies, promote them for MONTHS on end in trailer form, and then never release them? There are plenty of people in CT who would watch these two movies…don’t get it, makes no sense — do you know anything?”

Response: I said from the very beginning that the girly-girls who’ve supported generically coy dumbass romcoms staring Kate Hudson, Katherine Heigel and Cameron Diaz may not show up right away for SLP even though it delivers exactly what they like and want because it also traffics in anxiety and meds and sports and therapy and other cross-currents that dippy girls aren’t familiar with and/or feel a little bit threatened by.

I’m presuming that the Weinsteiners are looking to tough it out with SLP in limited release throughout December in hopes of being named Best Picture or snagging Best Actress (Jennifer Lawrence) or Best Actor (Bradley Cooper) or Best Supporting Actor (Robert De Niro) trophies by this or that critics group or from HFPA or Oscars noms in January, and then break it wide. But it does seem odd that avid film buffs can’t see it at all in Connecticut or at least in your area, according to your letter.

In fact SLP is now playing in Greenwich, and will break open a bit (i.e., show up in the Hartford area) around Christmas, I’m told by a Weinstein rep.

“Still thinking about how brilliant Killing them Softly is,” Clement adds. “My father and I went to see it over last weekend and we loved it.”

A friend told me this morning that “every time I ask an actual Oscar voter ‘what are your favorite films?,’ they all say the same thing: Lincoln and Les Miz.” I admit that I flinched at first…aaack. And then I weighed it on the scale, and I thought it all through, I sighed, I exhaled. And I wrote him back:

“‘Lincoln or Les Miz‘ — that’s your standard sleepyhead sentiment talking…the current chant of the tired, the aging and (no offense) those who are not busy being born. People who are defaulting to safe & familiar emotions…to the old and crusty idea of what a Best Picture winner has looked, felt like, strutted & sounded like in the past. Tried and true. Fortified by history. Tradition. Same old. Belongs to the ages. Blah blah.

“Having seen it last night I completely get and feel the beating heart of Les Miz (particularly during the last act) and I’ve worshipped the great Abraham Lincoln my entire life (or since I was seven or eight), but we’re talking about the movies here. Not the play and the music and the great sadness & heartache behind Les Miz (which is unmistakably there) but the Tom Hooper film that delivers it on a screen (big or teensy). Same with the effort by Mr. Spielberg. It shouldn’t be a vote for the great patience and political finesse and tragic ending of Abraham Lincoln, but for the honorable and finely acted but mildly stodgy and milky-white-light Janusz Kaminski movie that Spielberg composed.

“The only truly alive & crackling movies on the planet earth in the Best Picture competition right now are Zero Dark Thirty and Silver Linings Playbook. These are the only completely honorable choices that have fresh juice and truly pronounced spit and conviction and vigor to burn, and which are about life as it’s being lived & felt & grappled with right now (or at least over the last three or four years). Yes, Silver Linings look at the present through the prism of ’30s screwball mixed with Russell’s own anxious, edgy mentality, but it belongs to the here & now. Les Miz‘s here-and-now factor is in the echoes of the Occupy movement in the lamentations of the early 19th Century poor, but only to a degree. It is basically generic compassionate humanist schmaltz, albeit done with great feeling during the last act.”

“I have to separate myself from the haters on Les Miserables,” I explained to friends this morning. “Because as uncomfortable as I was during the first two hours, I succumbed once Eddie Redmayne and the fiery young lads (including the very noteworthy Aaron Tviet) raise the flags and man the barricades, which starts about 40 minutes before the end. And it sunk in. It got to me.

“And I finally understood, having never seen the stage musical, what Les Miz mania is all about. And I became, at least as far as this section was concerned, a Les Miz queen.”

Otherwise the film, as passionately and energetically composed as it is, felt like a chore to me, something to endure and get through rather than sink into and revel in with my heart wide open. All that agony, all that cruelty. “This is a movie about grime and dirt and suffering at the hands of cruel horrid gargoyles,” I muttered at the halfway mark. One can only stand so much horrific behavior and the infliction of agony in any realm.

For me the tattered, labored, forced-march emotions and general intensity, those constant closeups and that relentless operatic warbling wore me down more and more. I wanted to retreat about an hour in but I stuck it out, and was glad, finally, that I did.

My first glance at my watch happened at the 40-minute mark. I checked it two or three times over the next hour or so. But I forgot all about the time once the the 1832 June Rebellion in Paris began. Although it’s a grind getting there.

Anne Hathaway will definitely snag a Best Supporting Actress nomination for those looks of panic and ache and desperation as she sings her Fantine role — she really does have to play Judy Garland over the next two or three or four years. Hugh Jackman fully deserves a Best Actor nomination as the tale’s moral heo, Jean Valjean — the feeling and the vocal reach are entirely there and sustained start to finish. I had no problem at all (unlike some I’ve spoken with) with Russell Crowe as Inspector Javert — he can sing well enough and holds his own and brings the necessary gruff steel. And Redmayne is surprisingly strong, steady and solid as Marius, a student revolutionary who tumbles for Amanda Seyfried‘s Cosette (adopted daughter of Valjean, biological daughter the late Fantine).

Also excellent are Tviet, Samantha Barks (as the jilted-in-love Eponine), Sacha Baron Cohen and Helena Bonham Carter as the scummy Monsieur and Madame Thenardier, and little Daniel Huttlestone as Gavroche, a street kid who stands with the barricaders.

And yet if you remove the sweeping effect of the final 40 minutes I mostly agree with today’s reviews by The Hollywood Reporter‘s Todd McCarthy and to a somewhat lesser extent by Variety‘s Justin Chang.

Key McCarthy quote: “A gallery of stellar performers wages a Sisyphean battle against musical diarrhea and a laboriously repetitive visual approach in the big screen version of the stage sensation Les Miserables. Victor Hugo‘s monumental 1862 novel about a decades-long manhunt, social inequality, family disruption, injustice and redemption started its musical life onstage in 1980 and has been around ever since. But director Tom Hooper has turned the theatrical extravaganza into something that is far less about the rigors of existence in early 19th century France than it is about actors emoting mightily and singing their guts out.

For Les Miserables “is a film that, when all the emotions are echoed out at an unvarying intensity for more than 2 1/2 hours on a giant screen, feels heavily, if soaringly, monotonous. Subtle and nuanced are two words that will never be used to describe this Les Miserables.”

Two ladies that I came with were weeping, and I get it, I get it. Their feelings are absolutely valid. The aches and passions of this classic tale are strong and elemental and speak to compassion and charity and cries for social justice, which is why it has played so long on stage and touched so many. But how many Les Miz fans have ever participated in an Occupy demonstration?

God help me and call me a sap, but I really fucking love the ending with the banners waving and the barricades up and the proudly defiant “Can You Hear The People Sing?”