Oscar Nomination: Best Makeup and Hairstyling
Until the Oscar nominations were announced a couple days
ago, I had never even heard of the absurdly titled The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared. It’s a rather oddball choice, particularly in
Makeup and Hairstyling, an Oscar category that receives only three nominations
a year and somehow managed to snub the makeup work in Star Wars. But I do
understand why this movie was nominated, as it takes its 50-year-old star,
Robert Gustafsson, and ages him up to the 100-year mark and ages him down to as
low as 20 and everywhere in between for a story of a man’s life lived. It’s an impressive transformation and one
that never feels phony or unnatural. But
with that acknowledgement aside, how does The
100-Year-Old Man fare as a piece of entertainment?
Well, it’s probably worth noting that this is the highest
grossing Swedish comedy of all time, which at least says something of its
popularity in its own country and that the comedy was universally relatable
enough to make its way overseas. And
this is understandable because it is apparent pretty early on that The 100-Year-Old Man’s chief inspiration
is an American classic, Forrest Gump. The modern storyline follows our eponymous
old man, Allan, on an escape from his nursing home where he stumbles across a suitcase
full of money and meets a bizarre cast of characters as he unwittingly flees a pursuing
biker gang. However, the film will
sometimes cut back to earlier periods of Allan’s long life and show how his
simple love of explosives influenced some of the biggest events of the
twentieth century. (Guess who’s really responsible for the success of the Manhattan
Project.)
The humor of this film tends to hover around the comically
morbid, with absurd deaths and Allan’s naiveté played for
laughs as he instigates world-changing events through alcoholic partying and
searching out the biggest bombs. What’s
actually quite clever about all this is that Allan’s tendency to unwittingly
get into troublesome yet grand adventures could easily be attributed to old age
and confusion in the main storyline, but his flashbacks make clear that this is
how he has always been and that this latest occurrence isn’t even all that
unusual to him in the grand scheme of things.
Yet, as much as the film made me laugh uproariously in some
key memorable moments, I do wonder if some of the comedy is lost in the
language barrier and accompanying subtitles.
I think a great example is the character Benny, a perpetual graduate
student who is one credit away from having a degree in just about everything,
yet is filled with so much indecision that he is unable to commit and just
graduate already. Conceptually, this is
a really funny joke and is even funnier in juxtaposition to Allan’s carefree “life
is what it is” attitude. However, a lot
of the humor surrounding Benny is delivered via dialogue, and his awkward
nature just doesn’t translate well as broad comedy. There are moments like this that don’t feel
intentionally slow, but are likely the result of the language barrier.
However, it is reasons like those that usually prevent
foreign comedies from finding their way to American shores, and the fact that The 100-Year-Old Man is able to
transcend those barriers for the majority of its runtime is a testament to the
universality of its humor. I watched
this film to fill my need to comprehensively cover an Oscar race, but I walked
away satisfied that I had seen a really funny movie. It probably won’t win a gold statue, but this
boost in visibility should extend its fame in an otherwise ignorant American
market, and that’s probably as worthwhile a reason to nominate a film as
any. Check this one out.
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