Slumdog Millionaire - The Winning Indie that Looks like Oscar Gold

Hopefully, you didn’t miss the column over the Thanksgiving break. With the majority of Oscar-bait films having finished their screenings for the press and Academy members, the buzz on Oscar noms is really heating up. So this week’s column puts together a top 10 list on the leading contenders for Best Picture.

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The plot of Alfred Hitchcock’s classic horror film is so ingrained in pop culture that new audience members going in already know its twists. If remarkably you don’t know the two primary twists then don’t read the rest of this review and just watch this essential film. What it must have been like to be in the audience when this film debuted? A modern equivalent would be THE CRYING GAME, which structurally is quite similar to PSYCHO. Even first time viewers will go in knowing the shower sequence and Norman Bates’s love for his mother. Though I’ve seen the film several times, I went into this viewing with only the famed scenes in the foreground of my memory. What struck me so strongly this time were the subtleties and how slyly the seemingly unconventional plot works.

Marion Crane (Janet Leigh, TOUCH OF EVIL) is a secretary at a real estate office. She’s getting to that age where if she owned a cat, youngsters might call her a spinster soon. She’s having a hotel room romance with Sam Loomis (John Gavin, SPARTACUS), a handsome man with a low-paying job, whose alimony payment puts another ding in his shiny exterior manhood. When Marion returns to the office after one of their lunchtime trysts, a new client pays for a house with $40,000 cash. In a desperate, rash decision, Marion decides to take the money and run. She drives from Arizona heading to California and stops one night at the Bates Motel to get out of a rainstorm. She meets Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins, FRIENDLY PERSUASION), who runs the motel. When Norman goes back up the hill to his looming family house, Marion hears his mother lambasting him. While chatting over sandwiches with Marion, Norman unsettlingly reveals his love/hate relationship with his overbearing mother. When Marion’s work sends out a detective named Milton Arbogast (Martin Balsam, 12 ANGRY MEN) to find her, her sister Lila (Vera Miles, THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE) and Sam team to help locate their runaway loved one.

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Director William Friedkin has made great horror films (see THE EXORCIST) and bad horror films (see THE GUARDIAN). BUG is somewhere in the middle leaning toward the former rather than the latter. A great deal of its success comes from its two leads — Ashley Judd and Michael Shannon. Adapted by Tracy Letts from his own play, most of this psychological horror tale takes place in one rundown motel room. And yet it never feels stagy. It unblinkingly watches two paranoid enablers descent into madness.

Agnes White (Judd, DE-LOVELY) is sure her ex Jerry Goss (Harry Connick Jr., INDEPENDENCE DAY) is out of jail and prank calling her. When she leaves her shabby motel room, it’s to go to work at a lesbian bar or to go to the store to buy liquor. Her friend R.C. (Lynn Collins, THE LAKE HOUSE) tries to hook her up with a guy at the bar. He’s new to town. His name is Peter Evans (Shannon, WORLD TRADE CENTER). He’s quiet, doesn’t drink, very polite, which makes Agnes very nervous and suspect. Yet, he breaks down her defenses like a lost puppy, and they make love. Afterward, he wakes up startled. He believes there are bugs crawling all over him. Before too long, he has convinced her that the bugs have infested their bloodstream and it’s a government plot and that they need to line their entire room with aluminum foil.

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