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I have almost finished watching the list of films from 2019 I wanted to check out. Now that Little Women is available to rent, once I watch that and circle back to Ad Astra my task will be complete. Recently I spent back-to-back days watching critically-adored 2019 movies that are both built around tension and kinetic energy. They just do them in very different ways.
First up is 1917, San Mendes’ World War I epic. Forever this movie was the presumed favorite to win Best Picture. My plan was to check it out in theaters based on this fact. Then, Parasite, which I saw two days before it won Best Picture, pulled the upset, and then the world fell into chaos and I never saw 1917 in theaters. Which is a shame, because it’s definitely a “big screen” sort of film. However, the tension is still present on a TV screen.
The movie is about two soldiers who are asked to set out across no man’s land to get a message to British soldiers about to charge into a trap. It’s claims to fame are entirely cinematic. Not just the massive scope of the shots and the cinematography, but also because it has only a few cuts in the entire film. That certainly adds to the tension. You see everything unfold in front of you. Also, there’s a war on! Stuff is going wrong left and right. I will say I wasn’t even really paying attention to the “gimmick” of the lack of cuts, because I was absorbed in what was going on.
1917 is epic, and it is built on epic tension. Soldiers running from bullets and crashing planes. The other movie I watched was Uncut Gems. Adam Sandler didn’t get the hoped-for Oscar nomination, but he definitely gave one of the most-memorable performances of his career. The scope is smaller. We are following Howard Ratner, a jeweler and degenerate gambler, as he goes about his life for a couple days. And yet, Uncut Gems is even more tense. From the word go the Safdie Brothers put their foot to the pedal and never lets off. It’s what they do. They are experts at creating a sense of ease. Their movies aren’t “loud,” but they feel deafening. Everybody is talking all the time in Uncut Gems. The camera is swirling around them. It’s practically disorienting, and it ratchets up the tension as a result.
There is very little that 1917 and Uncut Gems have in common. What they both do, though, is successfully fill you with tension. They just go about their business is strikingly different ways.
