Oscars 101: Best Film Editing

In which I run down on the nominees (and likely winners) of the Academy Awards.

Tangential to the visual aspects of filmmaking is the editing: the manner in which shots and scenes are strung together into a cohesive narrative.  These categories have always been difficult for me, as an outsider to the filmmaking process, to judge, since I don't know how much material there was to work with in the first place and how much ended up on the cutting room floor.  While I can certainly judge the final product as-is, I feel that so much is lost on me as an audience member that any evaluation will be partial at best.  Still, I never let something like that stop me before.

American Sniper
Boyhood
The Grand Budapest Hotel
The Imitation Game
Whiplash

2014 was filled with films that against all odds were able to construct simultaneously segmented and easy to follow narratives: where multiple story arcs taking place along multiple periods of time are strung together into sequences that are not only functional, but inspired.  And while one such film did get nominated (The Imitation Game), two others were left by the wayside, presumably looked over because of the supposed trashiness of their genres: Oculus and X-Men: Days of Future Past.

Oculus featured two intersecting narratives: one in the protagonists' childhoods and one during their adulthoods.  Each portion of the story starts from its respective beginning, then unfolds in a seemingly conventional way: flashing backwards and forwards with increasing rapidity until all temporal lines between them vanish entirely.  Past and present intermingle indiscriminately, culminating in a double climax that is twice as rewarding as it could have been.  It is without a doubt the best directed horror movie since John Carpenter's Halloween and will likely remain as such for decades to come.

X-Men: Days of Future Past achieved very nearly the same result as Oculus.  It's twin climaxes intercut between one another: two sets of identical characters fighting two separate (although strongly mirrored) battles decades apart from one another, and yet the audience never once loses track of who's punching what or what's happening on the screen.  In fact, these climaxes augment one another, rather than compete for screen time: each existing to make their companion climax more, rather than less, exciting to watch.

American Sniper - What surprises me most about this nomination is how ordinarily told American Sniper is, both aesthetically and narratively.  There are no cinematic flourishes, no bells and whistles: just an extraordinary man's life simply told.

And even then, Eastwood's imitation of Katheryn Bigelow's photo-realistic style can't help but draw negative comparisons to its forebear if only because, although good, it fails to be extraordinary.  The intensity present during Chris Kyle's first kill - with dry intercuts whose normality only seems to heighten the anxiety of the moment - fails to continue as the narrative progresses through his multiple tours through the Middle East.  While American Sniper will likely walk away with something, this probably isn't it.

Boyhood - I can't help but feel that Boyhood's nomination here has less to do with being a superbly edited film as much as it has to do with its central gimmick.  We see a group of characters grow up and grow old in real time as the movie.  Others come in, stay a while and then silently exit off-screen.  Others reappear after nearly a decade of absence.  And all the while this is happening, we stay glued to the narrative core of the story: one boy amidst a sea of characters that inform the man he will one day become.

It's like I mentioned earlier: there is so much happening behind the scenes - on the cutting room floor - that we are wholly unaware of that is likely informing the decisions behind its nomination.  There are, after all, twelve years of footage that Richard Linklater's crew had to sift through, make sense of, and string together into a cohesive film.  I can't help but think that that kind of silently monumental undertaking is what will ultimately weigh in on Boyhood's chances of winning.

The Grand Budapest Hotel - While Oculus', Days of Future Past's and The Imitation Game's editing is defined by threading together multiple narratives into an increasingly intersecting presentation, The Grand Budapest Hotel prefers to layer them one on top of another.  First you have a woman grieving her father, then the father's video-taped story, then the father's interview of a nostalgic hotel owner, before getting to the primary narrative of a concierge's conspiratorial tale shared with a young lobby boy.

Despite the complexity of its narrative, The Grand Budapest Hotel's careful and timely editing keeps the audience from getting lost among the details.  It simplifies an inexplicably complicated story until it is once again manageable.  While it certainly is a far cry from a front runner, those appreciating its ability to reign in an on-the-surface unruly narrative will find a lot to love in this film.

The Imitation Game - Well at least one of my favorites made it into this category.  Coming from the same tradition as the two aforementioned snubs, The Imitation Game easily transitions between any one of three separate narratives in the life of Alan Turing: the brilliant cryptologist who simultaneously broke the Nazi code during World War II and invented the predecessor of the modern computer.

In less capable hands, The Imitation Game would have been a complete mess: utterly incoherent and impossible to follow.  Or, what's worse, it would have been blandly conventional, restructuring the intersecting narratives into either a fully linear story or a single story framed in a flash forward.  Either way, the a-typical editing allowed for a far more organic narrative to be told than otherwise could have: allowing certain revelations of the character to be made when it seemed most appropriate, rather than when the story caught up with it.

Whiplash - Of this year's crop of editing nominees, none surprised me more than Whiplash.  Although a profoundly intense film, whose fan base is beyond fanatical in their devotion to it, I can't see anything exceptional in the physical way that the story is told: in how the strung-together shots add up to being a film.

That is simply not where Whiplash's strengths lie.  As such, I cannot see this film winning the editing branch over.  It simply loses out to far superior and far showier nominees.

Safe Bet: Boyhood

Long Shot: The Imitation Game

Longer Shot:  The Grand Budapest Hotel

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