Best of 2013: Screenplays

Best Original Screenplay

• Jean-Pol Fargeau & Claire Denis for Bastards, for slipping into so many cryptically rattled heads while concealing their sawtoothed secrets and motives, ingeniously operating within and testing the formal limits of noir/mystery storytelling mechanics.

• Noah Baumbach & Greta Gerwig for Frances Ha, for conceiving such a slinky and apropos refusal of a more rigid structure and a specific, tragically funny portrait of one of the most daunting protagonists to come from the often perfunctory American indie trend of late-20s ennui.

• Ethan Coen & Joel Coen for Inside Llewyn Davis, for layering in deliberate steps instead of simply piling on static, misanthropic oddities, supplying sad, ambiguous, tender-hearted, and tragicomic edges to a story haunted by unspoken grief.

• Abbas Kiarostami for Like Someone in Love, for imbuing his knack for mystery, intimacy and elliptical characterization into a delicate and concise polygon of the types of love (and their implications) that constantly shapeshift with the roles that the two protagonists play.

• Darci Piccoult for Mother of George, for adorning a semi-commonplace story with peculiar notes and risky insights into the culture and practices of the family at its core, withholding enough information to keep it from feeling too on the nose.

Honorable Mentions kick off with a trio of scripts that the Academy sprung for, but ultimately brought one too many reservations for me to embrace quite as fully as their cohorts, starting with Richard Linklater, Julie Delpy & Ethan Hawke for Before Midnight (I know some, including the Academy, consider it adapted, but I think it belongs here), who craft some stellar sequences like the hotel argument or the Byzantine-era church conversation that come very close to matching the incisiveness of their predecessors while infusing the glowing personal attachment of the trilogy's protagonists and our own investment in their possibly crumbling relationship. But, especially with return visits, the film as a whole shows its stress marks from the weight of audience expectation, forcing awkward, desperate-to-please exposition and thematic foreshadowing in its first 30 minutes or so, which I think is most evident during the film's choppiest scene in which it actually literalizes these concerns as Jesse is having a very long conversation with his writer friend about the large expectations held in regards to his third novel. We then move to Eric Warren Singer & David O. Russell who present American Hustle as a vertiginous amalgam of Russell's typically bristly showcase of character/actor personalities and loopy, caper-soaked plot tropes that aligns so smoothly with the director's sensibilities that it's easy to dismiss how the script isn't entirely up to the tasks laid out by its modest ambitions, focusing a little too intensely on the con by the last act while letting the initially spiny entanglements of its characters fall slightly to the wayside. But some of the script's most bracing moments are a result of the way it's narrative is sculpted, so it's hard to complain too much. Meanwhile, the script that walked away with the whole thing, Spike Jonze's Her, spins a tale from the director's highest concept yet (give or take Being John Malkovich) and takes a distinct and achingly tender-hearted swerve into an emotionally honest adult parable. My only wish is that it would have taken a somewhat subtler approach to its themes to balance the softness of Jonze's tones, and that it could've been about 15 minutes shorter, but, like Hustle, there's just too much to savor here to fixate on the negatives. With my recent second screening of Hustle fresh in my mind, I still think that I'd be a Her voter, though I find a lot of merits in both. There were admirable aspects in the remaining Original Screenplay nominees (the vivid father-son bonds of Nebraska, the tight past and present weavings of Blue Jasmine, and the impassioned but ambiguous relationship between Ron's rancid politics in Dallas Buyers Club), but others that unfortunately rankle (like Nebraska's flat jokes and reliance on stereotypes, Blue Jasmine's generic and unconvincing conceptions, or Dallas Buyers Club's clunkier emotional devices). While I don't revile any of these scripts, it's still hard for me to accept that all three managed to sneak in over Inside Llewyn Davis (or any of my other favorites, for that matter, not that they actually had a chance).

Taking a significant step away from the movies on Oscar's list we'll now turn our attention to scripts that were nowhere near their radar, like Kim Nguyen's familiarly textured but unexpectedly subversive script for his coming-of-age child-soldier drama, War Witch; Ulrich Seidl & Veronika Franz's best entry into the Paradise trilogy, Paradise: Love, which is relentlessly austere, yes, but is counterbalanced by a richly realized protagonist and surprising swerves into empathy; Jem Cohen's spatially complex and involving world-building of Museum Hours, which balances just the right amount of humor, intellectualism and specificity to keep it on its feet; Travis Matthews' revealing and concise, I Want Your Love, which steadily unfolds the relations and details of its tightly-knit queer community with warmth, laughs and introspection; Xavier Dolan's bravely messy debut script, I Killed My Mother, which somehow manages to be the young filmmaker's crowning achievement of jagged, multilateral perspectives on relationships, whether romantic or familial (haven't seen Tom at the Farm or Mommy as of yet, though, not that the opportunity to do so has arisen in the states); Brandon Cronenberg's (yes, that Cronenberg) vicious and tightly-wound body horror-as-satire, Antiviral, which grows wittier and tougher in its conceptions and plotting the further it goes; and Stacie Passon's modest but candidly detailed character study, Concussion, which can feel contrived and just a smidge judgmental but stokes real compassion and tough-edged convictions.

Best Adapted Screenplay

• John Ridley for 12 Years a Slave, for overriding some overly florid dialogue that, I imagine, feels more awkward actually spoken than it does on the page with powerful construction, historical insight, emotional investment, and subjective POV, treating the subject of slavery with unflinching honesty.

• Sofia Coppola for The Bling Ring, for acclimating her laconic and diaphanous gifts to an acerbic and unusually witty stranger-than-fiction satire, painting characters, loyalties, celebrities, commodities, and chains of events in a deliciously detached fashion.

• Sergei Loznitsa for In the Fog, for imposing a workable, patiently-structured narrative onto the bones of the livid, nonlinear dreamscape of his previous film, still probing his own concerns regarding Russian society and leading us to predatory places no one else would go.

• Pedro Peirano for No, for balancing the tricky trigonometry of political tensions in Pinochet-era Chile and of the allegiances held by its central characters, sliding nimbly between the beats of its Unbelievable True Story conceit without sacrificing context or spirit.

• Clio Barnard for The Selfish Giant, for starting with Oscar Wilde's four-page, allegorical children's fairy tale and erupting into a bustling story of childhood, friendship and social realism, gracing its disparate narrative with thematic parallels that pay crushing emotional dividends.

Honorable Mentions do not include Captain Phillips, Short Term 12, The Wolf of Wall Street, or Phiilomena, all of which inspired their ardent devotees. I like Captain Phillips' script the most, which lends surprising complexity to the Somalians, but gets a hefty amount of assistance from Greengrass's direction and its actors. It was close, but not quite Honorable Mention-worthy. The next two on the other hand had some intriguing moments,  particularly those catered to their leads, but were ultimately too inconsistent to benefit from any of them. The Wolf of Wall Street's script especially feels undone by its director's commitment to ornate but colorless scenarios and by flabby improvisations that abstract any sense of the full-veined characters that many of its fans seemed to find it chock-full of. As previously mentioned, I never saw Philomena.

It wasn't exactly a banner year for this category, but there were a few scripts that I was sad to exclude from the shortlist, like Jennifer Lee, Chris Buck, Shane Morris & Dean Wellins' spiffy and progressive repackaging of Disney formula with Frozen's moving story and convincing characters, retaining the sweetness and beguiling innocence of its kid-friendly core; Abdellatif Kechiche & Ghalia Lacroix's sprawling and multi-layered portrait of Blue is the Warmest Color's protagonist and the relationship explored between she and her beloved; Scott Neustadter & Michael H. Weber's funny, engaging and sympathetic teen dramedy, The Spectacular Now, which has more interesting things to say about blooming young love and misplaced affection than their (500) Days of Summer script; Richard LaGravenese's smartly proportioned breakdown of Behind the Candelabra's romance of convenience that turns into one of tetchy necessity, landing empathetic tenderness and playful flamboyance even through its appropriately bittersweet final images; and Hayao Miyazaki's unapologetically sentimental adaptation of his own comic, The Wind Rises, which coaxes his typical fondness for odd and lovely flights of visual fancy and fairy tale-ish conceits, but shows him chasing thornier ideas than he has in years.

I gave some thought to showing Tracy Letts some love in the Honorable Mentions, if only for August: Osage County's best moments, like Barbara taking control of the house during the raiding of Violet's drug supplies or the dinner and fish lunch scenes. But, as easy and justifiable as it is to blame John Wells and Weinstein interference (Jesus, that ending) on the overall film being underwhelming, I'm not so sure that Letts's script is doing the film that many favors either, despite a few compelling scenes. As much as Wells fails to deliver on Letts's acrid dramatic spark, the script itself never feels distinctively reformatted for its shift in medium while its best scenes alternate with stale, self-satisfied calculations about its characters, half of which only click as much as they do because of its MVP actors.