Who is to say just what it is that causes a motion picture to resonate with us, to linger in our memory for years and years?

That's a rhetorical question, basically because I don't always have an answer to it. Over a lifetime of committed movie-watching, I've encountered countless really good films, pictures of undeniable quality that I admired and then quickly cast aside, never to be seen or even considered again.

Opinions have varied, but I feel this year's crop of Academy Award nominees for Best Picture was a marked improvement over last year's. All were worthy. I watched them all, and on more than one occasion found myself saying, "Well, that was certainly one impressive piece of filmmaking. And gosh, am I glad it's over."

Was "The Revenant" a masterpiece? On some levels, sure. But it was also an ordeal to sit through, all mud and blood and people walking through extremely cold water in the dead of winter. That's a good way to freeze to death, but somehow Leonardo DiCaprio's frontier character just kept trudging onward.

I've been happy to praise "The Revenant" to the hilt, but you will never see it in my personal film collection. As for the titles I do own, I would find it challenging to defend quite a few of them. But they all mean something to me.

I can still recall a day circa 1979 when I happened to catch a movie called "Ode to Billy Joe" on TV. "What the song didn't tell you, the movie will," read the film's tagline, referring to a hit country single by Bobbie Gentry.

In hindsight, I don't know that it was a story worth telling. Movies based on songs don't have the best track record. But on that day circa 1979, "Ode to Billy Joe" left a profound impression on my 16-year-old self, one that has unavoidably faded over time but lingers because of that memory.

A brief plot synopsis — Robby Benson and Glynnis O'Connor play young lovers given to hanging out on the Talahatchie Bridge, somewhere in rural Mississippi. All is well until Benson's Billy Joe McAllister has a homosexual tryst with Sheriff Roscoe P. Coltrane — or rather, James Best, who played Coltrane in the TV series "The Dukes of Hazzard."

At any rate, Billy Joe questions his sexuality, jumps off the Talahatchie Bridge to his death, and O'Connor's Bobbie Lee is presumably left with a lifetime of walking along that darn bridge, lost in thought and clueless as to why her one best chance at happiness evaporated.

I think that's what got to me. In fact, I think that's why most movies get to me if they're ever going to, for their depictions of emotional fragility.

Of this year's Best Picture nominees, I had no choice but to get behind "The Big Short," only because I felt it had something important to say about how this nation has allowed corporate priorities to dictate governmental policy to our peril.

"The Big Short" is focused on how the mortgage meltdown led to the Great Recession of 2008. I'm still waiting for the movie that dramatizes how Big Pharma's pushing of prescription opioids created a heroin epidemic in big and little towns across America. Maybe next year.

It was a little, largely overlooked Best Picture nominee called "Room," however, that really grabbed me this year. Set in Akron, it's based on a novel about a mother and young son held captive in a tool shed for seven years by a man who regularly uses the woman for his sexual pleasure. The storyline brings to mind the real-life experiences of three women held captive from 2002-04 to 2013 by Ariel Castro in Cleveland.

"Room," for which Brie Larson won the Oscar for Best Actress, certainly doesn't sound appealing. It's hard to watch, no question. But halfway in, mother and son escape, and life, alas, gets no easier, especially for the little boy, terrified by the big, wide world.

"Room" got to me, and it will get to you if you take the trouble to see it. It got to me in the way that Tom Hanks did in "Big" (1988), as a child in a man's body, alone and crying in a seedy Times Square motel room. It got to me for the same reasons that stupid "Ode to Billy Joe" flick did, back when I was naïve enough to be swept away by such claptrap.

But I get it, I think I get why. We are only human beings. Handle with care.


Twitter: @ToddHillMNJ 

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