DVD Chronicle

I wrote this Chronicle during the run-up to the Academy Awards. This year, discussion about the nominated films had an unusual political dimension, since Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty, a leading contender for Best Picture, seemed to raise troubling questions about torture in the war on terror. Did the film depict waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation” techniques as being essential to the finding and dispatching of Osama bin Laden? For the record, I think three things about Zero Dark Thirty: it’s a superb piece of filmmaking; its script never articulates a case for torture, just as it never articulates a case against torture; in action and imagery and sound, that is, in the ways films most powerfully “say” things, it indisputably links torture with bin Laden’s death, leaving the exact nature of the link and the rightness or wrongness of torture open to question. What I really want to say about the Academy Awards, however, is that they are fallible. Amidst all the prognosticating and publicizing and prize-giving, we should remember that excellent films don’t always walk away with the little statuette—which is why I’ll be recommending a group of Oscar also-rans here.

In 1980 the Best Picture nod went to the divorce melodrama Kramer vs. Kramer, scarcely a surprise considering the acting talent deployed in the film (Dustin Hoffman, Meryl Streep) and its seriousness of tone. One of the 1980 losers was Breaking Away, directed by Peter Yates; it’s much lighter in tone, with a cast of young up-and-comers and a couple of seasoned character actors, but fully deserving its nomination and still highly watchable thirty years later. Nominally a Twentieth-Century Fox production, Breaking Away is really an indie film, though one made before “indie” was a recognized film category; it’s modest in scope, personal in approach. Steve Tesich, who wrote the screenplay (he did win the Oscar for it), had graduated from Indiana University in Bloomington and shaped his story around Bloomington, and Yates filmed it on location there. Breaking Away is about as local a film as can be imagined. It’s very good at capturing the feel of a small town which the locals are devoted to—they call themselves “cutters” after the limestone quarrying industry in the region—but which a few of them want to escape from, maybe to some more glamorous place like Italy, maybe just away from used car lots and factory lines to an education in the limestone halls of the University.

So the film’s title points to breaking free of parochialism and class boundaries, but also to something more literal, the racing bicyclist’s breaking free of the peloton and accelerating to the finish line. The young hero Dave Stoller dreams of cycling greatness, to be attained—in those innocent, pre-Lance Armstrong days—purely by hard work, plus emulation of the Cinzano-sponsored Italian racing team which is touring Indiana, dazzling one and all with speed and stylishness. Even before the team arrives Dave has made himself into an Americano italianato, tossing off ciaos or grazies in his midwestern accent and giving his family, including the cat Fellini, an Italian makeover. Meanwhile bikes whizzing down country roads or circling in a stadium are brilliantly photographed (there’s a great shot taken from main sprocket level) and often accompanied by Rossini on the soundtrack. The best musical moment, however, is a sequence crosscut between Dave serenading...