Anatomy of a Fall is the unlikely underdog of awards season
When you're up against the likes of Barbenheimer and Martin Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon, conventional logic would suggest your chances are slim. But Justine Triet's Anatomy of a Fall surprised everyone at the Golden Globes last night when it won the ceremony's screenplay award. (It also beat Jonathan Glazer's The Zone of Interest to the non-English language trophy.) It proves, beyond anything else, that the artsy French courtroom drama has more admirers in Hollywood than some might've assumed.
And rightly so. It might've made a smidgen of Barbie's gross at the box office, but this one's every bit as much a banger, the crowning example of the recent renaissance for the ‘90s-style legal thriller. (See also last year: the final act of Oppenheimer, Tommy Lee Jones and Jamie Foxx's The Burial, which was unfairly buried — sorry — and The Exorcist director William Friedkin's swansong The Caine Mutiny Court Martial). Bringing it into modernity, it's infused with a dash of true-crime seasoning, with equal inspiration derived from For All Good Men and The Staircase, or any one of Netflix's manifold crime documentaries that make for great sofa fodder.
German actress Sandra Hüller — enjoying a bit of a moment recently, having also starred in Jonathan Glazer's acclaimed Holocaust horror The Zone of Interest — portrays a writer accused of murdering her husband after he falls from the top floor of their idyllic mountain chalet. Elaboration would risk spoiling the well-suited and powdered-wigged goodies, but there are eminent bits of Primal Fear in there, too, and the sexiness — if not the schlockiness — of Madonna and Willem Dafoe's appreciably forgotten erotic take on the court drama, Body of Evidence. Such is why it won the screenplay gong, it has whipsmart bi-lingual and twists and turns aplenty.
It's a riveting watch throughout, as all the best legal thrillers should be, never sagging across its two-hours-30 of runtime. It also has one of the greatest (slash irritating) needle drops you'll ever hear in this steel drum cover of PIMP, a dog actor called Messi whose performance is GOATed, and one of the best-written domestic arguments we've ever seen.
Critics have loved it since it premiered in France at the Cannes Film Festival in May last year, where it won the Palme d'Or, the coveted laurel picked up by Parasite en route to its historic Best Picture victory in 2019. Could Anatomy of a Fall follow suit? Truth be told, it's similarly brilliant — but it has to beat out a stellar crop to get there. It shouldn't be lost on any cinema-goer that 2023 was an atypically excellent year for The Movies, from another late-career Scorsese masterpiece to Barbenheimer, David Fincher's The Killer and Maestro. That's a lot of big movies jostling for the biggun. And non-English titles have historically struggled to win the major American awards, with Parasite very much an outlier. Unfortunately for Anatomy, it can't even run for the non-English award at the Oscars because the French elected to put forward Tran Anh Hung's swoony cooking romance The Taste of Things instead. Sacre bleu.
At the end of the day, it's just nice to see the biggest awards going to the best films. Gone are the days of questionable dross like Bohemian Rhapsody and Green Book taking the top prizes: we're in 2024 now, chief, and this year, it's time to be discerning. Whether it's Anatomy of a Fall, or Oppenheimer, or Barbie, or Killers of the Flower Moon, we just know we're eating good. Rejoice!
