And the Oscar Goes to . . . the Top Talent Films of 2023
Hey movie fans, it’s Oscars season again! Time to grab some popcorn, watch celebrities stroll the red carpet, and wait expectantly for winners to be announced.
But this year, let’s include a new category: best movie focused on talent. Considering that the average person spends 90,000 hours at work over a lifetime, it seems only fitting to celebrate films about the workplace. We’re talking about big screen stories that highlight how people spot great talent, foster growth, and find purpose in work. Luckily, 2023 offered an abundance of such films.
Here are the nominees for “Best Talent Film.”
The Beanie Bubble
This semifictionalized dramedy, about the company behind the 1990s Beanie Babies craze, is a primer on how not to treat your talent.
The story centers on Ty Warner (played by Zach Galifianakis), cofounder of Ty Inc., and the three women who helped him succeed. There’s Robbie (Elizabeth Banks), with whom he started the company that created Beanie Babies — and whom he later mostly cut out of the business. There’s Sheila (Sarah Snook), his fiancée, whose young daughters created several Beanie Babies — work he eventually claimed as his own. And then there’s Maya (Geraldine Viswanathan), the college student who created the company’s pioneering website but who he woefully underpaid. If anything,The Beanie Bubble is a cautionary tale about taking credit for other people’s work.
But this fun romp of a movie also delivers a skills-first message from the otherwise unscrupulous Ty. “All the greats quit school early,” he tells Maya, when she admits her parents want her to become a doctor. “You don’t need degrees to succeed.”
The Barber of Little Rock
“Economic justice is actually having an opportunity, a real opportunity,” Arlo Washington, founder of the Washington Barber College in Little Rock, Arkansas, says in an early scene of this deeply inspiring documentary short.
The movie, which explores the racial wealth gap in the U.S., follows Arlo, whose college has helped 1,500 barbers learn their craft since 2008. Scenes of barbers cutting and styling hair alternate with those of the People Trust, a community development financial institution (CDFI) Arlo founded in 2014 in a converted shipping container in the school’s parking lot.
Arlo created the bank because he realized his community needed not just jobs, but also capital. Home to 30,000 people, the neighborhood had no banks and, even now, the People Trust is the only financial institution within a 10-mile radius.
The directors intersperse bank customers’ stories into the film — the woman to whom Arlo gave a small grant, so she could start her life after being released from prison; the hair stylist who needed a loan to open her salon; and the auto mechanic who dreamed of owning his own garage. This film brims with humanity and compassion, as bank employees listen to the dreams and heartbreaks of their customers. But Arlo’s mission always remains clear: to create opportunity. “You can’t develop a community,” he says, “if you don’t develop the people.”
Oppenheimer
Although this sweeping and thought-provoking epic focuses on J. Robert Oppenheimer’s role in creating the atomic bomb and the efforts to discredit him because of his political leanings, it also has a strong recruiting theme.
Robert (played by Cillian Murphy) is hired to direct the Manhattan Project by U.S. Lt. Gen Leslie Groves (Matt Damon), who says, “Let’s go recruit some scientists!”
Sounds simple, except that Oppenheimer had to assemble a team at lightning speed — and he needed nearly every team member to be a “unicorn.” That is, a leading expert in their field who was educated at one of the top universities in the world. Job descriptions weren’t exactly enticing, either. The famed theoretical physicist was asking scientists to relocate to a remote location — “a secret laboratory in the middle of nowhere” — to work on a project he couldn’t tell them about until after they were hired. And that would be only if they could pass in-depth security checks.
When one scientist asked “Why would I want to do that?” Groves shouts, “Why? Why? How about because this is the most important thing that ever happened in the history of the world?”
Oppenheimer and his mission — to beat Germany in building the bomb — were persuasive enough that many of the world’s top physicists signed on. And, for better or worse, their work did change the world forever.
Air
If ever there was a film about the ability to spot great talent, this is it.
Air opens in 1984, when Ronald Reagan is the U.S. president and Nike holds only 17% of the basketball shoe market, trailing both Converse and Adidas. Sonny Vaccaro (played by Matt Damon), a workaholic and compulsive gambler, is Nike’s basketball talent scout. He’s on a mission to find two or three NBA rookies who will partner with Nike and wear and promote their shoes.
But Sonny wants to bet the whole farm (a rather small $250,000 budget) on one player who he thinks is so special, he’s the one: Michael Jordan. Sonny sees something in him that no one else seems to see.
As other Nike execs (including Phil Knight, comically portrayed by Ben Affleck) squabble over which players to pick, Sonny quietly but tenaciously pursues a contract with Michael, wooing the Jordan family and in particular, Michael’s mom, Deloris (Viola Davis). In the end, he secures the contract by showing respect for great talent and compensating them for what they’re worth.
The deal made Nike and Michael Jordan rich beyond their imaginations — but it never would have happened without Sonny’s keen eye for talent.
The Last Repair Shop
Pull out your hankies for this deeply moving — and joyous — documentary short about the largest remaining workshop of its kind in the U.S., the musical instrument repair shop for the Los Angeles Unified School District.
Created in 1959, the workshop maintains and repairs the 80,000 instruments played by students in LA’s public schools. The film moves seamlessly between interviews with student musicians talking about what their violins, saxophones, and pianos mean to them and the stories of the master craftspeople who maintain these instruments.
If anything, this film is about how anything that has been broken — instruments, lives, people — can be repaired. Scenes of soldering, hammering, and gluing bring the workshop to life while Dana, who repairs string instruments, talks about the brokenness he felt as a young gay man many years ago and the courage it took for him to come out. Paty, a single mom from Mexico, describes the times she and her children had to go without food. Then she got her job, repairing brass instruments for the LAUSD.
The movie teems with the joy that comes from making music — and from knowing that your work benefits others. “It’s not easy being a kid,” Dana says as he works on a violin, “but we try to make at least the playing of the instrument part as good as it can be.”
And the Oscar goes to . . .
. . . all five films. Because each of these movies has something different and important to say about what talent and work means in this world, it was impossible to pick just one.
So sit back, fire up your favorite streaming service, and enjoy the show.
