Boston Globe film critic Wesley Morris was awarded the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for criticism Monday, for essays and reviews that embodied what Pulitzer judges called “smart, inventive film criticism, distinguished by pinpoint prose and an easy traverse between the art house and big-screen box office.”
Morris, 36, who joined the Globe staff in 2002, won the prize for a range of movie reviews and essays published in 2011. Among the pieces submitted with his nomination were reviews of The Help, Drive, Water for Elephants, The Tree of Life, and Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol. His essays included two written upon the deaths of Oscar-winning director Sidney Lumet and Apple cofounder Steve Jobs.
Here are excerpts from his work:
[blockquote]Race, class, and Hollywood gloss in The Help[/blockquote]
In The Help, one woman’s mammy is another man’s mother. What can you do? It’s possible both to like this movie – to let it crack you up, then make you cry – and to wonder why we need a broad, if sincere dramatic comedy about black maids in Jackson, Miss., in 1962 and ’63 and the high-strung white housewives they work for. The movie is too pious for farce and too eager to please to comment persuasively on the racial horrors of the Deep South at that time. (Aug. 10, 2011)
Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life open to interpretation
Tree of Life is a collection of conversations that lost souls and true believers have with themselves while keeping their heads to the sky. But the movie is church via the planetarium. It’s as if Malick set out to paint the Sistine Chapel and settled for a dome at the Museum of Natural History. The movie heaves with ambition and accomplishment. It kneads together into a single cinematic loaf the start of the universe, the activities of a Texas family in the 1950s, and several beach-bound, New Age promenades. (June 3, 2011)
Tom Cruise’s latest Mission, should you choose to accept it
Ghost Protocol is the fourth Mission: Impossible in 15 years, and his decision to keep making these ridiculous movies – this one’s “A Tom Cruise Production” – doesn’t feel desperate. It feels like a workout. For him. For us. For whoever on the set was responsible for saying, “Tom, that’s a union job” or “Mr. Cruise, we have stuntmen to run along the surface of that skyscraper and fling themselves inside.” But Cruise knows we’ve come to see him accomplish the absurd. We’ve come to see him do the mission-impossible. (Dec. 16, 2011)
Why a movie about car thieves is the most progressive force in American cinema
The most progressive force in Hollywood today is the Fast and Furious movies. They’re loud, ludicrous, and visually incoherent. They’re also the last bunch of movies you’d expect to see in the same sentence as “incredibly important.” But they are – if only because they feature race as a fact of life as opposed to a social problem or an occasion for self-congratulation. (And this doesn’t even account for the gay tension between the male leads, and the occasional crypto-lesbian make-out.) (April 24, 2011)
[blockquote]Drive delivers brutal violence without breaking a sweat[/blockquote]
Sometimes a movie knows you’re watching it. It knows how to hold and keep you, how, when it’s over, to make you want it all over again. Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive is a work of swift, brutal violence, but it’s not the violence – a viciously stomped head, say, or the way a shotgun blast sounds like a bomb – that’s sexy. It’s the confidence to bring off the violence without appearing to break a sweat, to blatantly steal from Michael Mann without fear of being hauled off to movie jail, to deliver a hero whose signature jacket isn’t leather. It’s a white, quilted Starter number with a giant gold and orange scorpion embroidered on the back. On anyone else, it’s a garment that says “karate parent.” On Ryan Gosling, the embroidery’s an advertisement for a poison sting – from both Gosling and Refn. (Sept. 16, 2011)
For better or worse, he tamed technology
Steve Jobs was the Ernest Hemingway of technology. Jobs removed the fear and essentially hid the computer: the iPod (computer as record crate), the MacBook (computer as personal office), the iPhone (computer as lifeline), the iPad (computer as, well, we’re). He took computers and turned them into something to play with and love. He turned them into toys. And he turned us into worshippers and fans. He also made us more confident with technology. (Oct. 7, 2011)
Remembering Sidney Lumet, a prince of New York City filmmakers
The late director Sidney Lumet’s chief preoccupation wasn’t art. It was right and wrong in the American city, nearly always in New York. Lumet made his first film in 1957, in his early 30s, after having spent most of the 1950s directing television – serious television. That first movie was 12 Angry Men, and has there been a more sincerely volcanic movie about the law — or a family of addicts (Long Day’s Journey Into Night), police corruption (Serpico), bank robbery (Dog Day Afternoon), TV (Network), or a botched heist (Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead)? (April 12, 2011)
[blockquote]Scream returns, and (surprise!) people are dying[/blockquote]
When Scream 3 arrived in 2000, Bill Clinton was still in the White House, most cellphones could make only calls, reality television was a novelty, and Lady Gaga was just some girl named Stefani from the Upper West Side. Everything’s changed in the intervening 11 years, but, sadly, not the Scream franchise, which has coughed up a needless fourth installment that coasts on the winking ironies and Teflon self-awareness of its predecessors. (April 15, 2011)
