Mustafa Shakir | Through the Shattered Lens

Ever since the Oscar nominations were announced, there have been a lot of people on social media complaining about Kate Hudson’s nomination for Best Actress. She was nominated for the musical biopic, Song Sung Blue, and the argument that I keep seeing, over and over again, is that the nomination should have gone to One Battle After Another‘s Chase Infiniti or maybe Eva Victor for Sorry, Baby.

To those people, I can only say, “Shut up and watch the damn movie.”

In Song Sung Blue, Kate Hudson plays Claire, a hairdresser and part-time Patsy Cline imitator who meets and marries Mike Sardina (Hugh Jackman), an auto mechanic who loves to sing and perform. (When they first meet, Mike has been hired to pretend to be Don Ho at a county fair.) Claire and Mike start performing as Thunder and Lightning, performing covers of Neil Diamond songs and eventually becoming something of a pop cultural institution in Wisconsin. (At their height, they open for Pearl Jam. The actor who played Eddie Vedder looks nothing like Eddie Vedder but you do have to appreciate a celebrity impersonation in the middle of a movie about celebrity impersonators.) Eventually, tragedy strikes. A car accident leaves Claire struggling with pills and her own mental health. Mike, who is 20 years sober when the movie begins, struggles with his sobriety. There are laughs and there are tears. In fact, there’s a lot of tears. I knew the details of the story before I saw the film but, having recently lost both my father and my aunt, I was still sobbing by the end of the movie.

As for Kate Hudson, she’s wonderful in the film and more than deserving of her nomination. Both she and Hugh Jackman give empathetic and sincere performances as the type of people who other movies would probably hold up to ridicule. They’re both eccentric and they both have their demons. Mike is haunted by his experiences in Vietnam and his daughter points out that Mike has essentially switched addictions, from alcohol to music. Claire struggles with depression even before the car accident that changes her life. They’re not flawless. They’re not perfect. But they’re beautiful when they’re performing together. As played by Hudson, Claire goes from being somewhat insecure to being someone who has definitely found her voice and when it appears that she might never perform again, it’s heartbreaking because the viewer understands exactly how much being on stage means to Claire.

As a film, Song Sung Blue runs a bit long but in the end, I was charmed by its unashamed celebration of Americana. Song Sung Blue allows us to enter a world where a bus driver can also be a talent booker and a dentist can double as an agent. It’s a world where anyone with the courage to take the stage and perform from the heart can be a star, if just for one night. It’s a crowd-pleasing film, one that says it’s okay to sometimes sing the popular song that everyone loves. “He has other songs!” Mike says whenever anyone demands that he start his show with Sweet Caroline but, in the end, everyone is really happy when he sings it. How could they not be? He and Claire sing it really well.

One final note about Kate Hudson. I’ve always felt that a lot of her films, for better or worse, were versions of the type of films that her mom could have starred in during the 1970s and 80s. And I do have to say that it’s easy to imagine younger versions of Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell playing Claire and Mike. However, Kate Hudson and Hugh Jackman make both the film and the characters their own. By the end of the movie, you’ve forgotten that you’re watching Kate Hudson and Hugh Jackman. You’re watching Thunder and Lightning!

Assassin tells the story of Alexa (Nomzamo Mbatha), a soldier whose husband (Mustafa Shakir) was a member of secret government program in which people would allow their minds to be transferred into the bodies of strangers so that those strangers could then be used to assassinate America’s enemies. When Alexa’s husband ends up in a coma as a result of trying to assassinate Adrian (Dominic Purcell), Alexa is forcefully recruited into the program and is sent to complete her husband’s mission.

That may sound like it would make for an intriguing film but Assassin is pretty dull. Neither Nomzamo Mbatha nor Dominic Purcell give particularly interesting performances and the film’s plot and themes were far better explored in Brandon Cronenberg’s Possessor. Watching the film, I found it impossible to have much sympathy for Alexa because she was not only murdering people but she was also ruining the lives of the innocent people who she ended up possessing. The fact that her husband was in a coma didn’t excuse any of that. If anything it made Alexa even less sympathetic. After seeing what being an assassin did to her husband, why would Alexa want any of that?

Towards the end of the film, one of Alexa’s targets realizes that Alexa is possessing someone else’s body. Alexa’s handler announces that she’s going to pull Alexa out of the body and then “get the wet team to take this guy out.” If you have a team that can do it, why are you wasting time with possessing other people’s bodies? Why would you decide to use the most complicated plan available when you could just simply send in a team and or have a drone blow up the guy’s house? It’s almost as if the program is designed to be too complex to work. As I watched the film, I suddenly started to understand why the CIA was never able to take out Castro. Sometimes, people just make things complicated for no reason.

Sadly, Assassin is also the final film of Bruce Willis. Willis plays Valmora, the guy who is in charge of the Assassin program. As was typical of Willis’s final films, he only gets a few minutes of screen time and he spends most of that time either sitting down or standing in a corner. Willis, even though he obviously wasn’t in the best of health when he shot this film, still projects enough natural authority to be believable as Valmora. Even though it’s obvious that he’s repeating lines that were fed to him just a few minutes before shooting, Willis still gives the most (and perhaps only) credible performance in the film.

Assassin is a sad note for Bruce Willis to go out on. Of Willis’s final batch of films, the best were Gasoline Alley, Corrective Measures, and Wire Room. Assassin, however, is just dull and anyone tempted to watch it just because of Willis’s presence would be better served to go rewatch Die Hard, Pulp Fiction, The Sixth Sense, 12 Monkeys, or …. well, really, any other movie that Bruce Willis ever appeared in. Bruce Willis was one of our greatest movie stars and nothing, not even films like Assassin, can change that.