One of last year’s best screenplays may be too morally ambiguous for the Oscars
Film Features Entertainment, Culture
Oscar voters have always had a soft spot for villains. In the 90-plus years since The Academy Of Motion Picture Arts And Sciences starting handing out awards, its members have honored the likes of Anthony Hopkins and Javier Bardem for playing remorseless killers, Michael Douglas and Daniel Day-Lewis for playing pathologically greedy tycoons, and Heath Ledger and Joaquin Phoenix for playing Jokers. Just last year, the Academy gave its Best Picture Oscar to Parasite, a movie about a band of con artists manipulating a family of self-centered swells.
There are commonalities, though, between the kinds of bad guys and gals the Academy prefers. Hannibal Lecter and Anton Chigurh are almost supernatural forces of pure evil. There’s a tragic dimension to the ruthlessness of Gordon Gekko and Daniel Plainview. The Joker is both evil and tragic. With Parasite, writer-director Bong Joon Ho set up a pointed contrast between his grifters and their targets, positioning both as cogs in a larger class system essentially designed to generate socioeconomic inequity. In other words, these movies have a point. Their lessons may be subtle or they may be written in neon red, but either way it’s unmistakable: Their antiheroes stand for something.
In last year’s The Burnt Orange Heresy, Claes Bang plays a different kind of antihero, more familiar to fans of tawdry paperbacks than devotees of highbrow literature. Bang’s James Figueras is a failed painter, eking out a living as an art critic, using his talents as a storyteller (or, more accurately, as a liar) to guide his audience’s opinions of fine artists and to burnish his own reputation as an expert. When the fabulously wealthy and plainly unscrupulous collector Joseph Cassidy (Mick Jagger) asks James to interview the reclusive painter Jerome Debney (Donald Sutherland), the critic sees a rare opportunity to make a level-jump in fame and possibly fortune. He’ll do whatever it takes to cross that line.
James Figueras is a bit of a puzzle. He has a surface charm that barely conceals a deep cynicism. From the start, we see him through the eyes of Berenice Hollis (Elizabeth Debicki), an American who joins his Debney adventure more or less on a lark, looking for a sexy, no-strings romp in a Northern Italian villa with a handsome European cad. But even the up-for-anything Berenice can tell pretty early on that something about James is a little off.
The Burnt Orange Heresy was adapted from a 1971 novel by Charles Willeford, a writer who developed a cult following toward the end of his life. (He died in 1988.) There have been three other movie versions of Willeford’s work, each a weird little wonder: 1974’s Cockfighter, 1990’s Miami Blues, and 1999’s The Woman Chaser. Willeford wrote about a lot of different subjects, and in a variety of genres, many of them pulpy. What a lot of his books had in common was their elusive protagonists, the most memorable of whom were edgy yet erudite—and capable of acts of shocking violence.
The big-screen Burnt Orange Heresy is a fine film for multiple reasons. Giuseppe Capotondi’s direction is clean and unfussy, letting the opulence of the setting and the stunning beauty of the cast carry a lot of the visual load. And that cast is phenomenal, skillfully bantering with each other, using witty dialogue and a facade of nonchalance as shields for characters probing each other’s weaknesses. (Debicki delivers what may be the best performance in a film full of magnetic and delightful turns.) But the real star here is Scott Smith’s screenplay, which converts a quirky novel into the blueprint for a gripping, beguiling movie, all while retaining the odd angles and dark shadows that make a Willeford story special.
Smith knows this kind of material well. He’s the author of two one-of-a-kind genre novels himself: the intense crime thriller A Simple Plan and the disturbing horror story The Ruins. His screenplay for the film version of A Simple Plan was nominated for an Oscar. It’d be great if The Burnt Orange Heresy were similarly honored, but that seems like a long shot at this point. What makes the film so good is also what the Academy tends to dislike: its willingness to maintain moral ambiguity, rather than issuing a definitive judgment on the desperate rogue that is James Figueras.
It’s not that the movie lacks a point of view on James. The character’s true nature is revealed slyly throughout the film. In an attention-grabbing opening sequence, we see him prepping for and then delivering an art lecture in which he brazenly lies about a painting—and then lies about the lie—to win over the attendees. Shortly after, we hear a voicemail message from a creditor, indicating something even the savvy Berenice doesn’t know: that her new lover is flat broke. During his meeting with Jagger’s amusingly devious Cassidy, the collector casually mentions he knows that Figueras incorrectly and somewhat clumsily authenticated a rare canvas for a museum recently. It’s obvious to anyone with eyes and ears that this guy is as lazy as he is desperate.
There are other, even more graceful ways that Willeford, Smith, Capotondi, and Bang define their antihero’s fundamental bankruptcy as a person. Scene by scene, we learn what a shallow, social-climbing, self-absorbed creep he is. But by the time he makes his most appalling moves, we’ve been following him—and have possibly been fascinated by him—for about an hour.
And what do we get out of that experience? Do we learn something important about human nature, or find out something essential about the social contract? Really only this: that James’ yearning to be accepted by the likes of Cassidy and Debney is as relatable as it is ugly. That’s the kind of insight likely to make The Burnt Orange Heresy unpalatable, both to Oscar voters and to those who need their movies to have a clear sense of the “acceptable” and the “problematic.” Typical of Willeford, this story asks us to identify with someone who’s bad not in a tragic way or in an instructive way but more in an uncomfortably familiar, “there but for the grace of God go I” way. James Figueras isn’t a dark mirror on the human condition. He’s a flatly reflective gray.
Kudos to Scott Smith and the whole Burnt Orange Heresy team, though, for being willing to illuminate that grayness. This movie, like the novel it’s adapting, is in the tradition of writers like Elmore Leonard, Donald Westlake, Evan Hunter, Jim Thompson, Joe R. Lansdale, and David Mamet, who have cared primarily that their stories and characters be interesting, not that they leave their audience feeling uplifted or enlightened. These writers were bound to follow a plot where it led, even if—or sometimes especially if—it went somewhere twisted. That may not be the stuff that wins awards. But it’s entertaining and it’s honest. It’s great writing.
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Somehow this jogged a dim memory that there was actually a show that was supposed to be called “Let’s Rob Mick Jagger”.The series went through several name changes: the original title, though never publicly affirmed, was Let’s Rob Jeff Goldblum, later changed to Let’s Rob Mick Jagger once Goldblum committed to the NBC drama Raines. ABC announced the series for its fall schedule as Let’s Rob… in May, and the final name change to Knights of Prosperity was reported in July 2006.[4] During the TCA Tour, executive producer Rob Burnett indicated that the title might change again before the show debuts,[5] but the show debuted under the “Knights” name.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Knights_of_Prosperity
on a scale of Knight of Cups to Knight and Day how good or bad is it. This should be an ambiguous enough scale.
I thought the trailer for The Burnt Orange Heresy looked really good, but I never got around to seeing it. Any commenters want to, uh, comment on whether it’s worth seeing?
The novel is great, Scott Smith is solid,the cast is aces. I think it’s definitely worth a watch without knowing anything else about it.
it’s good enough for a watch, but definitely not award worthy. great opening scene tho, but the rest of the movie kinda flounders, I’m sure the book worked better.
great opening scene tho, but the rest of the movie kinda floundersIt’s funny how many movies fall into that trap, even some great ones. Rushmore and Blade Runner are two of my favorite movies (especially Rushmore), but they never quite live up to their first 5 minutes.
I’ll have to check this out. I loved Miami Blues and The Woman Chaser. Never realized they were based on books by the same author. Note: I hadn’t even heard of this film until just now.
If you have not seen/read Cockfighter, get on that too! Closer to The Woman Chaser in its first-person megalomania than it is to Miami Blues, but while the WC adaptation is stylized noir Cockfighter is 70s rural degeneracy, Warren Oates and all. It rules.
Thanks! I’ll look into both the book and the film. If Warren Oates is there, so am I.
A sound movie policy if I ever heard one. I think it’s streaming on Shout/Tubi, although fyi, this is the 70s so there are actual cockfights involved, I believe.
Very enjoyable film. Debicki is mesmerizing in everything
Spoiler Alert:
I could nitpick for a long time, but let me say this. Next time someone unsuccesfully tries to kill you, don’t start pushing your attacker’s buttons. Offer fake forgiveness and get the hell out of there asap.
The Night Manager, even though she doesn’t have much to do, I couldn’t take my eyes off her.
TBOH is a good movie. People should check it out.Noel’s discussion of the Academy liking villains might favor a good candidate to be in the Best Actress race for her latest work. I Care A Lot’s Rosamund Pike is very good playing a really awful character. If she gets nominated, I don’t expect her to win if Frances and Viola are also in the running, but stranger things and upsets have happened.
If the screenplay includes the novel’s immortal line on writing, “a woman is only a woman, whereas 2,500 words is an article,” then it absolutely deserves all the Oscars.Still haven’t caught up with this yet but this is a great reminder. And I really like the capper placing this and Willeford’s other work in the context of “interesting and fascinating over enlightening and uplifting” crime with Westlake et al. Maybe Smith can take on “The Shark-Infested Custard” next.
Christ, The Shark-Infested Custard was dark. Absolutely could not believe those last pages, the guys chuckling over the dead body, and the book ending on a supremely horrific “Well, here we go again!” gag.
Willeford is a total master, but, uh, Wow. That was commitment. I bought that book to give to a friend for Christmas, but couldn’t. Good read, fantastic writing, but the characters and the ending, just as bleak as a neutron bomb.
And that’s not even the darkest thing he ever did! I have yet to read Grimhaven, the rejected second Hoke Moseley book which his publisher forced him to rewrite, but the original is out there to be downloaded and I know the basics. Holy shit. But yeah, Shark-Infested Custard is so damn bleak, and not unrealistic at all in its darkness. I think breaking it up into not just one Willeford psycho but four of them, all warped in different ways, makes the rot cumulative instead of repetitive, it hits differently than the more focused toxicity of stuff like Heresy or Cockfighter..
Figueras is an anti-hero the same way Jerry Lundegaard is an anti-hero.
Right. Just because they’re the protagonists doesn’t mean they have to be some kind of hero. They can be the villains. “Anti-hero” as a category I wish would die. Among other things, it’s reductive.
I don’t think Jerry Lundegaard even qualifies as a villain. He’s a cipher.
I feel like people really slept on this movie like you said — I watched it right after reading the novel and thought both were terrific. Maybe neither are what you’d expect going in but both are entirely fulfilling in different ways, and I love how the movie built out the climax of the book and drew a lot more suspense from it (plus beefing up the main female character to be a lot more human and interesting; Charles Willeford as a writer is not great in that regard)Plus I remember last year there was that whole stink on twitter about how contemporary movies no longer had erotic sex scenes, but then I saw that scene with Claes Bang and Elizabeth Debicki getting it on and almost wept a tear like “there is still such a thing as horniness in the cinema…”
The change with Debicki’s character is what I’m most curious about. Willeford definitely does not give his female characters a lot of definition but that’s generally in line with his male characters’ perspectives, so it doesn’t bother me. (The book does have that hilarious scene where Figuera is going off about some art bullshit for several pages and it turns out his girlfriend fell asleep awhile ago, Willeford might not build up female characters but he can give them some good moments.)
I do get that and recognise it in a lot of pulp books too, but Berenice and Susie in Miami Blues too just left bad tastes in my mouth about how constantly infantilised they were and how often he as a writer emphasises their unintelligence above all else — which does make it more believable as to how they can be manipulated by the terrible main male figures in both stories but still, I dunnoBut that’s what I mean about liking the movie version of Berenice in making her less of a dolt but still understanding how she can be drawn into his scheme. How she pushes back on Figueras toward the end of both versions is probably the best part of both.
“Hmm, I remember Ellita in Miami Blues the novel being a more active female character — I wonder who plays her in the movie?” *looks up imdb* “Ohhhh boy.” Anyway, she’s the main Willeford woman I can think of who is competent and not a femme fatale and even that falls off by the last Hoke Moseley book I think. I can see how that characterization can grate, it’s been a long time since I read Cockfighter but I think the movie does a good job of showing the main female character’s reaction/pushback in a way that is less tied to the lead’s perspective.
😆 Wait you’re telling me when you think of a strong Hispanic policewoman you don’t think immediately of Nora Dunn from SNL??
1. The main reason I ignored this movie is that somehow I thought it was about Trump. I am not joking.2. I was going to say something like “But The Talented Mr. Ripley got a screenwriting nomination!”, but James Figueras sounds like a different sort of desperate anti-hero. I think I’ll watch the dang movie before sharing any more opinions…
I came here to point out The Talented Mr Ripley as well. It sounds as though there are a few similarities.
Claes Bang is fantastic in this (award-worthy) and never was an actor so aptly named. That aside, the movie has some draggy moments, though not while Bang is onscreen.
Veiled spoiler: I had a real problem with Berenice, round two — can’t imagine a woman who’d do that.
This sounds excellent, thanks for the recommendation!
I loved, loved, loved Ruben Östlund’s The Square (more than the more famous Force Majeure), in large part because of Claes Bang’s portrayal of a guy—the director of a museum of art, as it happens—whose lack of moral core is gradually stripped bare while somehow remaining relatable. So I’m very excited to see him play another, apparently sleazier, variation on that.
I finally got around to watching this. I’m kind of glad I waited so long, since in that time I managed to forget all the spoilers in the article and comments.The part I most enjoyed was the highly stylized dialogue with its snappy banter. Especially as Bang and Debicki’s characters seemed to be deliberately emulating forties’ movie-style sparring as part of their relationship.