The Oscar for atmosphere

A GOOD HOUSE CAN redeem a bad movie. I don’t remember exactly how many times I rented “Love Affair” with Annette Bening and Warren Beatty a decade ago -- at least four, I’d guess -- just for the few minutes of pleasure I got from seeing Katharine Hepburn’s remote island house on a high misty hill.

Over and over I pressed pause on the clicker so I could study the graceful, compact interior, the staggered way the pictures were hung, the louvered shutters filtering the light, the rich mahogany floors, the dark old wicker and faded chintz and fat white sofa. Briefly, I lived there, which is what a fine movie interior will do for you. “Your house is beautiful,” Bening tells Hepburn in the film’s truest line of dialogue. “I would never leave here.” My sentiments entirely.

Architecture and decor have always played central roles in films, however subtle the impact and whatever their manifestation, and a house can be every bit as powerful a character as the protagonists. Try to imagine “Gone With the Wind” without Tara: It’s like trying to imagine it without Scarlett or Rhett.

And how about the house as metaphor or the embodiment of the deep recesses of the psyche? Recall the pointedly titled “Life as a House” with Kevin Kline, and Woody Allen’s “Interiors.”

If most exteriors and interiors in films are less blatantly symbolic, they still carry a strong subliminal weight. On the most obvious level, they reflect their particular eras, their characters’ stations in life, the general psychological atmosphere. Styles of living and their revelatory inferences run the gamut -- from the substandard to the sublime -- in this year’s five Oscar-nominated best movies: “Million Dollar Baby,” “Sideways,” “Ray,” “Finding Neverland” and “The Aviator.”

When homes are visually compelling -- or disturbing or mystifying -- they can momentarily distract you from the action. I lost my place in the plot during every movie that’s up for an Academy Award and a few others that aren’t but feature actors who are. But curiously, houses and their interiors were not given much more than cameo roles in most of them.

What a wonderful choice of colors, I thought when I saw walls of melon and robin’s-egg blue in Ray Charles’ Houston honeymoon house. Ach, can’t you just smell the carpet mildew and old cooking odors? I thought when I saw the apartment of Paul Giamatti’s mother in “Sideways.” Why do I never have real estate luck like these slicksters, I thought as I watched Julia Roberts take photos in her cool loft-like space in “Closer.” Why don’t I move to London?

Mostly, however, the side roads I took in my mind were off into nature, into the parks and gardens of “Finding Neverland,” into the vineyards of “Sideways,” into the sky and on top of mountains and mesas in “The Aviator.” Why don’t I move to the wilds? In each case, the outdoors played a bigger role than the indoors, and to tantalizing effect.

The Spanish countryside framed by the bedroom window of Javier Bardem’s entrapped quadriplegic in “The Sea Inside,” nominated for best foreign language film, is as much a part of the room as the hospital bed and floor-to-ceiling bookcase, lending it a spiritual calm that settles over everything. The drama of Howard Hughes’ planes as they pierce swells of clouds in “The Aviator” is far more telling of the man than the few perfunctory glimpses we get of his estate, the baronial splendor of which is pretty much what we expect of a man this rich.

At the other end of the spectrum of the moneyed world of Hughes and Hollywood is the grim, impoverished sparseness of Morgan Freeman’s living space, a dump of a room in the gym where he works in “Million Dollar Baby.” “It’s real nice,” Hilary Swank says to him, and you don’t question the sincerity of the compliment as she looks at his neatly made-up cot.

Home to Swank is more an ideal notion than an ideal place. It’s what it represents and what it gives you or, in her case, takes away -- the primal need for love and family. When her trailer park mother and sister cruelly reject the simple frame house she buys for them with her first big boxing win, you know what Swank knows at that moment: She is homeless in the most profound way.

Ray Charles, on the other hand, keeps his family intact, even as he beds one woman after another on the road. A steady progression of houses tracks the course of his success: from a shanty to a bungalow to a tasteful two-story traditional to a modern 8,500-square-foot mansion with a white marble fireplace soaring two levels from a white marble floor, all of them evincing a keen sense of home (including, yes, the shanty where he spent his early childhood in the segregated South).

A drear Victorian propriety marks the finely appointed interior of the townhouse Johnny Depp occupies as J.M. Barrie in “Finding Neverland,” accurately reflecting the state of his glacial marriage. This is a house one doesn’t care to linger in for very long, and heaven knows, he doesn’t. Bring on Modernism and good wattage. Stiff furniture and the dull yellow cast of low lights contrast sharply with Barrie’s fanciful imagination and the sweeping green of the public park where, no small wonder, he retreats to write, and where he plays with the four brothers who become his muses and surrogate sons.

Give me instead the free-spirited, post-collegiate, paycheck-to-paycheck, latter-day-hippie funk of Sandra Oh’s scrapheap of a house in “Sideways,” made for letting the good times roll. What better setting, slouched in those yard sale armchairs on the open porch, for Giamatti and Virginia Madsen to have their lusty analysis of Pinot Noir and the poetry of the grape? Couldn’t have happened with crossed legs on a straight-backed parlor settee in a proper house.

Lustiness, red wine, fresh air, a comfortable place to sit: I’ve talked myself into it. The Oscar for the most appealing space goes to “Sideways.” But don’t expect me to live there. I’d just like to visit now and again.

Barbara King can be reached at barbara.king@latimes.com.