Road to the Oscars Review: ‘Anatomy of a Fall’ is a Tense, If Dry, Legal Drama
Every year, in the time between when the Oscar nominations are announced and the actual Oscars ceremony is held, OFM movie reviewer and associate editor Julie River tries to watch all the movies nominated for best picture that year. In the years since the pandemic, this has become easier, as a lot of the movies are now on streaming.
So far, she hasn’t made it through all of the nominees since the category expanded from five nominees to as many as 10, but this year, she intends to pull it off and write reviews of each movie as she goes through them. She already saw and reviewed American Fiction as part of the Denver Film Festival, and she already saw Barbie, and it was reviewed by fellow OFM writer Ivy Owens. OFM writer Owen Swallow also already reviewed Poor Things. That leaves seven movies for her to watch and review. Can she make it through all 10? Find out on OFM’s Road to the Oscars!
Rating: 87/100
In Justine Triet’s French legal drama Anatomy of a Fall, a German writer living in France named Sandra Voyter (Sandra Hüller) is accused of pushing her husband, Samuel (Samuel Theis), out of a window and killing him, and her blind son, Daniel (Milo Machado-Graner), the only witness in the case, gets caught in the middle of the unfolding drama. With no other suspects, the defense must prove that Samuel committed suicide, which opens up the trial to an examination of Sandra and Samuel’s troubled married life.
This movie was a very tense legal drama, but not in the typical sense of a pulse-pounding courtroom drama. Rather, this movie opens up a lot of difficult emotions and fails to resolve them, leaving the characters and audience to sit with them throughout the entire film. While the movie follows Sandra’s perspective and heavily implies her innocence, it never explicitly proves it and leaves a lot of ambiguity in the plot.
Daniel’s place in the legal case becomes really hard to sit with, as he slowly starts to learn more about the tumultuous nature of his parents’ marriage and has to grapple with those emotions. There’s a great moment between Daniel and his court-appointed Monitor, Marge (Jehnny Beth, who is also the lead singer of post-punk group Savages), where Daniel has to come to terms with the fact that either his mother murdered his father or his father committed suicide, realizing that both are uncomfortable realities to face.
But for all the tense emotion, it’s a bit of a dry courtroom drama. Even for a highly emotional story, the performances in the courtroom are mostly restrained and understated. It makes it a bit of a difficult movie to chew on for two and a half hours. And yet, as far as pacing goes, there’s nothing in this movie I would have cut. It goes exactly where it needs to go to be able to express this emotional journey, but I could have used a more emotionally compelling courtroom drama.
This marks the second Best Picture nominated film that Sandra Hüller starred in, having also played the role of Hedwig Höss in Zone of Interest, making her the female lead in both films. It doesn’t mark the first time an actor has been in two nominated films in the same year. Probably the most recent example of this was Scarlett Johansson who, for the 92nd Oscars in 2020, was not only in two Best Picture nominated films (Marriage Story and Jojo Rabbit), she received nominations for both (she didn’t win either of them).
Hüller was only nominated for Anatomy of a Fall this year, which makes sense as Zone of Interest was more about the overall feeling of the movie rather than performances or narrative. Hüller does a great job of pulling the difficult emotions from this character, and the fact that her performance is hard to watch is a sign that she was successful.
Unfortunately, Hüller doesn’t have much of a chance in the Best Actress category which is predicted to be a toss-up between Lily Gladstone (Killers of the Flower Moon) and Emma Stone (Poor Things). The movie doesn’t stand much of a chance for Best Picture and, inexplicably, it wasn’t even submitted as a potential nominee for Best International Feature. Justine Triet is considered the least likely to win Best Driector as well, which is a shame as she’s the only woman nominated in that category.
The one category that it stands a good chance of winning is Best Original Screenplay, where it’s a slight favorite over The Holdovers. Vegas odds site Covers.com has this to say about their prediction that Anatomy of a Fall will win Best Original Screenplay: “While The Holdovers has a lot of support, Anatomy of a Fall is similarly beloved and I imagine the Academy is looking to honor it somewhere, especially after France didn’t submit it for Best International Film … Because I expect Giamatti and Randolph to win their respective trophies (for The Holdovers), I lean toward Anatomy of a Fall here.”
Personally, I preferred The Holdovers to Anatomy of a Fall and would prefer to see the former take home the Oscar, but admittedly part of that is my bias towards comedies, which I often believe go under-appreciated at the Oscars. But it’s true that the Best Screenplay categories are often seen as a sort of consolation prize for movies that aren’t likely to win much else, so that logic makes sense that that one will go to Anatomy of a Fall. It’s not completely underserving of the honor, but I personally thought there were better movies this year.
Anatomy of a Fall is available for rent on multiple services including Amazon Prime Video and Apple TV+.
Photo courtesy of Twitter
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