Spike Lee's latest joint, Da 5 Bloods, was released on Netflix last week and people are already talking about the possibility of Oscar glory. Delroy Lindo, in particular, is getting plenty of attention for what many call the best performance of his career. He's an early contender for the Academy Award. To observe such a reaction is to see how far Netflix has come in the past few years, effectively carving a place for itself in the Oscar race. It wasn't always like this and we need only look back at 2015 to find proof of it. Then, rewarding the cinematic excellence of films produced by streaming companies was still a relative taboo, a bridge too far for many awards bodies.
If it weren't for the early resistance of AMPAS towards Netflix, Idris Elba would probably already be an Oscar-nominated actor…
Cary Joji Fukunaga's Beasts of No Nation is considered to be the first Netflix original film. At the very least, it was its first big profile feature, a prestige production whose distribution rights were secured for a whopping 12 million dollars by the streaming giant. The production itself was a relatively small affair, seeing as it is a severe portrayal of child soldiers in West Africa. Most of the cast is made up of virtual unknowns and people who had never acted before, and, while the visuals are quite admirable, most of the scenery is made up of natural locations. All in all, it's a humble production, more interested in calling attention to its urgent subject matter than in entertaining the spectator.
The prodigious Abraham Attah plays Agu, a young boy living in a war-torn country that is never named. After his village is taken by storm with the invasion of armed troops, our protagonist runs away for survival, leaving behind his former life and embarking on a journey of discovery. This is no innocent bildungsroman, however, and Agu's odyssey is shaped by his experiences once he is forced to join a group of soldiers under the orders of a charismatic commandant. The older man becomes a new father figure for the boy, a mentor who teaches him how to kill and, more importantly, how to blindly obey. Like the country, this commander is never named, though he is played by the only famous face in the cast, Idris Elba.
Coming into Agu's story almost half an hour into the film, the actor's entrance befits his fame and magnetic screen presence. With an open shirt showing off his impressive physique, dark sunglasses, and a lit cigarette dangling from his mouth, Elba looks like a rock star but his demeanor is that of a bloodthirsty predator. The moment he steps on screen, he commands the attention of the audience and vibrates with an aura of impending danger. Fukunaga chose to shot most of Beasts of No Nation per his protagonist's subjective experience, often lowering the camera and looking up at Elba, framing him against the sky and sometimes even blocking the sun as if he were a monument of flesh. The actor doesn't have to do a thing to be a figure of menacing authority.
Thankfully, while Elba works along with Fukunaga's directorial approach, he doesn't let the formal construction do all the work. It's up to the actor to define the parameters of humanity that characterize his character. On one hand, Elba needs to play the archetypal manipulator, the Mephistopheles to Agus' Faust, an expert in indoctrination that manifests like a primordial force of nature in the eyes of his loyal soldiers. On the other, the film is steeped in too much realism to work without the performer grounding the Commandant in the specificities of personhood. For his part, Elba does this admirably, shading his performance with little details that speak of a life lived outside the limits of this particular story.
One of the aspects that most surprises and fascinates is how he plays upsetting scenes with an air of boredom. The scene when he instructs Agu through his first murder comes to mind, for Elba performs it with a relaxed posture and automatic cadence. It feels like the Commandant has gone through this routine many times before, wavering between paternal comfort and cold aggression like a tired actor in a long-running stage show. This is no accident. Whenever things differ from the routine, we can see Elba change his gait and movement, becoming more alert, angrier and suddenly invested in the action.
The Commandant is a man of war who's more at ease in the battlefield among the sickly-sweet scent of dead bodies than he is in any other environment. Like the tyrant's insouciance he brings to the indoctrination scenes, we only ever notice the canniness of the actors' work in establishing this aspect of the character when the film offers an opportunity for contrasts. It happens when the Commandant is put in a setting where politics and not combat are at the center of everything. In a stuffy office talking to a superior, he shrinks and bristles, he loses the cool confidence that seemed so natural to him and becomes visibly uncomfortable. The Commandant needs the battlefield to feel alive.
He also needs to feel powerful so, when in a room with men more who hold more power than him, it's as if this lord of war loses his sense of self. Later on, during his last scene, we see this crisis develop as the Commander loses the respect and blind loyalty of his underaged troops. Furious and lost, looking for someone to abuse and command and finding no one vulnerable enough, Elba's character unravels in a moment that would surely have been his Oscar clip. Unfortunately, the bias against Netflix (and, perchance, other pernicious prejudices) cost him the love of the Academy. For his troubles, Elba received Golden Globe and BAFTA nominations, as well as victories at the Spirit and SAG Awards. Had he been nominated for the Oscar in a more Netflix-friendly environment, he might have been a real contender for the win. We'll never know for sure.
Beasts of No Nation is available for streaming on Netflix.