Sight&Sound - 04.2020

April 2020 | Sight&Sound | 51

THE FOG OF WAR

Roger Deakins (standing)

with director Sam Mendes

(seated, in flat cap) on the

set of World War I drama

1917 , which earned the

cinematographer his second

Oscar from 15 Academy

Award nominations

ntil not that long ago, it was easy to praise
cinematographer Roger Deakins as the man
who didn’t need Oscars. To see through his
eyes, to speak in his colour palette and luxuriate in his
inky blacks – those were perks enough. Now 70 and in
the prime of his career, fresh from winning his second
Academy Award for his work on Sam Mendes’s 1917 ,
the Devon-born Deakins feels like an institution.
Naturalistic without sacrificing technical discipline,
he is capable of brokering an immediate connection
between director and audience. At the same time, he’s
seen the future, long before many of us did: Deakins
manipulated the image before it became fashionable,
embraced digital, and now makes big-canvas work
that feels decades younger than that of his peers.
Considering Deakins’s evolution means getting to
know Joel and Ethan Coen – you might as well call him
the third Coen brother after the dozen movies they
have made together. But don’t confuse Deakins’s regu-
larity with routine. If anything, their long partnership
is founded on restlessness. It begins in the mouldering
hallways of a run-down Los Angeles hotel, where the
neurotic screenwriter of Barton Fink (1991) toils at the
life of the mind. Deakins crystallises the idea of some-
thing perfect just out of reach: a woman on the beach,
her back turned to us, blocking the sun with her arm.
The subsequent films continue this quest. There’s
pounding Midwestern flatness (Fa rg o, 1995; A Serious

Man, 2009) and the desperate schemes of lonely men;

elsewhere, we feel stifling heat (O Brother, Where Art

Thou?, 2000; No Country for Old Men, 2007) and a kind

of pent-up fury. Just as memorably, Deakins has told

the story, in images alone, of the invention and popu-

larisation of the hula hoop (The Hudsucker Proxy, 1994,

perhaps his most impressive sequence). He’s plugged

us into the holes of a bowling ball rolling toward a

strike in The Big Lebowski (1998).

And he’s taken this elastic-band tension – between

deadpan irony and hopped-up anarchy – and brought

it to other projects that needed it, notably Denis Vil-

leneuve’s crushing cosmic tragedies (Prisoners, 2013;

Sicario, 2015; and Blade Runner 2049, 2017, which

earned Deakins his first Academy Award) and four

wide-ranging, uncommonly intimate adventures di-

rected by Sam Mendes (Jarhead, 2005; Revolutionary

Road, 2008; Skyfall, 2012; and this year’s 1917 ). If it’s

Deakins, we’re often looking at a psychological space,

characterised less by light and dark than by an inter-

nal climate of mood. A story has been widely shared

of his early rejection from the then-new National Film

School for not being ‘filmic’ enough. He made 1972’s

second class after roaming the countryside and de-

veloping his eye. That’s either an example of a lesson

learned, or a joke worthy of its own Coens comedy.

Finding Deakins’s ten stepping stones is an im-

possible task, so let’s try to do it.

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