Top Ten, 2007

Though I see at least one current release a week, there were still tons of interesting ’07 films I missed.   This list, then, is my ten favorites of what I managed to see, pretty much in order of preference.  

1.   Once –  It would take the finest of novelists pages to capture what Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova convey in a glance in this realist Irish musical.   A joy, and my favorite picture of the year.  

2.   Away From Her –  Young Sarah Polley’s wise adaptation of Alice Monroe’s short story about Alzheimer’s, “The Bear Came Over the Mountain”.   A deeply moving look at a loved woman’s fading away, perfectly acted by Julie Christie and Gordon Pinsent.  

3.   No Country for Old Men –  The Coen brothers’ uncompromising translation to the screen of novelist Cormac McCarthy’s existentialist vision: life is random and meaningless, the world dark and cold.   You can’t stop what’s coming, so find brief respite in the warmth of this waking life, in the eyes of others, if you can, for there is naught to follow but cold, darkness.   (In a way "No Country" is the inverse of McCarthy’s more recent novel "The Road", a book about undying hope in the face of as bleak a situation as is imaginable.)   Javier Bardem plays a killer on the trail of stolen drug money who gazes upon human beings with eyes that most of us reserve for something that turned up on the bottom of our shoe.   A modern classic.  

4.   There Will Be Blood –  Oddly enough, P.T. Anderson’s slow-burning powerhouse about the roots of American oil lust and evangelism in the late nineteenth century put me in mind, in its structure and stately pace, of “2001”.   The film takes Daniel Day-Lewis’ sociopathic oil man from a dank well to an opulent manse, traversing a distance almost as far as Kubrick’s leap from bone to spaceship.   Day-Lewis extracts dark, oozing liquid from whatever surfaces he bends might and main to crack, whether it be rock or head.  

5.   Juno –  As a dryly droll and very pregnant teen in this comedy-drama, Canadian actress Ellen Page sells each zinger in writer Diablo Cody’s stream-of-snap script.   As a grown woman yearning to adopt who upon first impression seems rather un-cool, Jennifer Garner gradually makes us see a woman who has so much love to give.   Can’t remember the last time I exited a theater with an audience so smiling, so lifted, so sure they’d just seen something good.

6.   Margot at the Wedding –  Writer/director Noel Baumbach’s verite-style comedy-drama stars Nicole Kidman as Margot, a writer visiting her girlhood home on the sea for the wedding of her sister (Jennifer Jason Leigh).   A tactless, medicated—but deeply loving, in her way—mother of an adolescent, Margot says whatever she thinks, with absolutely no consideration whatsoever of the impact of her words upon landing.   Kidman and Baumbach know a thing or two about the art of crafting character.   As in Baumbach’s previous feature, “The Squid and the Whale”, there’s a startling frankness about the exigencies of pubescent bodies.   With Jack Black, quite good as Jason Leigh’s slacker fiancé.   I like the way Margot’s pink hat stands out against the grey color scheme.  

7.   I’m Not There –  Chasing Dylan through the labyrinth of reinvention, Todd Haynes deconstructs the biopic.  

8.   Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead –  Acting that peers into the abyss from Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke as brothers who fatally botch the robbery of their own parents’ jewelry shop.   A lesson in narrative structure (or syntagma, as we say in film theory) and the soul from veteran director Sidney Lumet.

9.   Eastern Promises –  David Cronenberg and Viggo Mortensen follow up "A History of Violence" with this hard, cold, sleek gem about the Russian mafia in London.   You heard about the elemental power of the naked life-and-death struggle in the steam room scene.

10.   The Namesake –A first-generation New Yorker rebels against his Indian parents and their strange (to him) culture.   The callow youth comes to understand something about parental love, and the perspective that comes from learning to see himself and the world through their eyes.   Feels a bit rushed towards the end, but I guarantee my readers would truly enjoy this one.  

Honorable mentions: Michael Clayton, I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With, Sicko, Gone Baby Gone, The Darjeeling Limited, In the Valley of Elah, 2 Days in Paris

- Jan 10, 2008

I'm Not There

“What folk music is, is based on myths and the Bible and plague and famine and all kinds of things like that which are nothing but mystery, and you can see it in all the songs….All these songs about roses growing out of people’s brains and lovers who are really geese and swans that turn into angels, and seven years of this and eight years of that, it’s all really something that nobody can touch…I think its meaninglessness is holy.”

It’s a remarkable scene in Todd Haynes’ “I’m Not There”: in the backseat of a car moving through London streets, a Bob Dylan symbol (Cate Blanchett) holds forth in words very like the ones above (drawn from actual Dylan interviews from ‘66).   He’s brought his new electric sound to the U.K., igniting a firestorm of rage from ex-fans and inquisitors on both sides of the Atlantic enraged that he’s “turned his back” on folk music.   He goes on:  

“Traditional music is too unreal to die.   It doesn't need to be protected.   Nobody's going to hurt it…‘Lord Edward,’ ‘Barbara Allen,’ they're full of myth.
Q: And contradictions?
A: Yeah, contradictions.
Q: And chaos?
A:   And chaos.   And watermelon, clocks, everything…Everybody knows that I'm not a folk singer.”

And then Blanchett looks directly into the camera and the traces of a grin play about her face.   Brilliant.   Haynes has made a poem about two of my abiding fascinations: Bob Dylan and 60s cinema, and I think somewhere in this scene is a key to enjoying it.  

Dylan has knocked me out like nobody else ever since I first heard “Highway 61 Revisited” in ’86 or ‘87.   Not long thereafter I began to discover many of the films paid homage in “I’m Not There”: the Blanchett section takes place in 60s-cinema-land, as she walks in Mastroianni’s shoes through the black-and-white world of Fellini’s “8½”.   We know that tarantula on the screen: it’s crawled over from Bergman’s “Persona" and is also a reference to "Tarantula", the unfinished novel Dylan was working on at the time.   There are nods to Godard, Richard Lester.   I remember Dylan once said of this golden age for music and cinema that every day was like that line from T.S. Eliot: “In the room the women come and go, talking of Michelangelo”.  

Not that any of the characters in “I’m Not There” is called "Bob Dylan", you understand: as you’ve surely heard by now, six actors incarnate Dylan personas (I’ll call them “Dylan-symbols”).   There’s a young black kid called Woody (Marcus Carl Franklin), hopping freight trains in 1959 (the year Dylan got rolling in his Guthrie-esque troubadour mode).   One “Dylan-symbol” (Ben Wishaw) is called Arthur Rimbaud (the "Dylan" of his era?); one is an actor (Heath Ledger, in segments that feel like a Truffaut film, evoking the “Blood on the Tracks” era circa ’74-75, the years of the tumultuous breakdown of Dylan’s marriage to the love of his life, Sara Lowndes, a version of whom Charlotte Gainsbourg (sigh) plays).   Christian Bale personifies two Dylan-symbols: the folksinger of the early 60s and the Christian Dylan of the late 70s-early 80s.

Richard Gere’s Dylan-symbol (called Billy the Kid) represents the post-motorcycle accident Dylan who retreated into the country seeking shelter from his fame and the terminal years of the 60s.   By making music that embraced tradition and “the old, weird America” (in cultural critic Greil Marcus’s memorable phrase), he seemed to warn the youth counterculture against its tendency to trash all that came before.   “Strap yourself to a tree with roots”, he sang at the time.   (In the film the 60s keeps intruding on Gere’s idyll in short, bursting shots of war and upheaval, like a storm threatening on the horizon).   Gere lives outside of a town called Riddle populated by characters from that “old, weird America”   (I liked Jim James singing “Going to Acapulco” in whiteface a la Rolling Thunder-era Dylan).    

And then there’s the woman.   Blanchett really is genius in her turn as the iconic ’65-‘66 Dylan-symbol, the wild-haired surrealist, the electric dandy chasing that “thin wild mercury sound”, catching grief at every turn from journalists and fans who just don’t get what he’s up to.   (Allen Ginsberg and the Beatles, who did get it, make brief, surreal appearances.)   Blanchett captures not only the fierce intelligence and wild humor, the gestures and impish grin, but also the amphetamine-fueled nastiness. Incidentally, I remember theorizing in high school that “Bob Dylan” died in that famous accident of ’66.   (I didn’t mean to say that I didn’t love records from all phases of his career, just that he was different people after the accident.   But then, he’d already been two or three by that time, really).   Haynes has made these metaphors literal: in the film the Blanchett Dylan-symbol dies in the accident, and the film starts with his autopsy.  

Dylan (the real one this time) granted Haynes rights to his music and the director has used the catalogue in exhilarating, creative ways, mixing Dylan’s own recordings with cover versions.   Best to see it at a theater with a good soundsystem and a nice big screen to see the green countryside rolling by from inside the boxcars.   There’s a strangely moving scene of Gere’s missing dog running across the hillside, chasing the train Gere’s riding as it pulls out of town, Gere calling for him all the way.

On the other hand, while I’ve heard it said you don’t have to be a connoisseur to enjoy this movie, I’m a bit skeptical.   Since almost every situation recreates well-known photos or footage of Dylan, or is based on characters or episodes from his songs, or on tall tales told by the young self-mythologizing Dylan, and/or is a cinematic homage, and whereas much of the dialogue is drawn from real interviews, I would’ve thought that those with no interest in Dylan won’t get these references and will probably just be annoyed.   As for me, I’ll definitely be getting the DVD to analyze it further, but that’s probably missing the point.   Remember what Dylan said about meaninglessness, all those years ago.

Rating: *****

Key to ratings:

***** (essential viewing)
**** (excellent)
*** (worth a look)
** (forgettable)
* (rubbish!!)

- Dec 16, 2007

The Darjeeling Limited

In Wes Anderson’s “The Darjeeling Limited” three empty, wounded American brothers (Jason Schwartzman, Adrian Brody and Owen Wilson) travel by train across India in the wake of their father’s death hoping to meet up with their mother, who found a new life in Darjeeling.   Gamely, the brothers indulge Wilson’s desire that they try to bond, to reach for Nirvana, but when they finally do have a profound experience it’s completely unexpected.   Schwartzman and Brody are always interesting to watch and Wilson is tolerable enough in the context of Anderson’s pictures (haven’t seen him in much else, though somebody—was it Sara?—told me "Starsky and Hutch" is a cracking comedy).   I liked the subtle way the film handles a dark subtext relating to Wilson’s bandaged head, why every experience seems so precious to him: his wounds are the result of a suicide attempt.

“The Darjeeling Limited” is a comedy; it’s a road movie; but in the end it’s perhaps best described as “a Wes Anderson picture”.   If you like his bittersweet drollery, you’ll like this film—the whip pans and zooms, the tracking shots, the dense, colorful imagery.   Nobody puts slow motion and music together more movingly.   Interesting sound track: Indian music lifted from the soundtracks of Satyajit Ray and Merchant/Ivory films next to the Kinks next to Debussy and Beethoven.

The main feature is preceded by a delightful short film, “Hotel Chevalier”, in which we find Schwartzman in a bathrobe holed up in a suite in France.   A writer, he’s barricaded himself behind stacks of books (the only spine I caught was one by Bruce Chatwin, who wrote about art and architecture, travel and his adventures in Patagonia).   He’s trying to escape memories of Natalie Portman, the reason for his heartbroken convalescence, but she hunts him down, ringing him up to announce she’s on her way up.   He dresses; in his sharp suit and wounded romanticism he might have stepped off the cover of “The Best of Leonard Cohen”.   Later we float on a graceful slow-mo shot from the lovely lines of Natalie’s au naturel flank to a window opening up on a grand vista of the Champs-Élysées—all to the tune of “Where Do You Go To (My Lovely)” by Peter Sarstedt.  

Rating: ****

Key to ratings:

***** (essential viewing)
**** (excellent)
*** (worth a look)
** (forgettable)
* (rubbish!!)

- Dec 2, 2007

In the Valley of Elah

This is a drama about a quiet retired sergeant (Tommy Lee Jones) investigating the disappearance of his son, a soldier gone AWOL after returning from serving in Iraq.   Told with scraps of footage from Iraq in such a way that trying to sort out what actually happened is as confusing for the audience as it is for Jones.   He befriends Charlize Theron, a cop and single mom fighting the sexist machismo of a male-dominated field.   In a moving scene he tells Theron’s young son a bedtime story of courage and honor, the tale of David facing Goliath in the valley of Elah.   Jones learns that his own son behaved cruelly and nastily in Iraq and indulged his appetite for debauchery once back in the US.   In a way, the real mystery with which Jones must grapple is what could have happened to make a young man reared on tales of courage and honor behave this way.   Is a clue to be found in the fact that, as he later learns, his son rued running over an Iraqi boy?   As an anti-war movie, the tone of "In the Valley of Elah" is more heartbroken than angry.   Though the sergeant, like the film, is too taciturn to let fly and scream in frustration, the wounded look in Jones’ eyes speaks volumes about the disaster in Iraq.   So does the film’s final image: an upside-down American flag, the universal distress call.   This is a quietly affecting piece; its shots of the horizon, the glittering lights of the city seen from the prairie, convey a feeling of emptiness through vast, dark open space.   Written and directed by Paul Haggis, director of "Crash", writer of "Million Dollar Baby" and "Casino Royale", creator of the TV show "due South".  

Rating: ****

Key to ratings:

***** (essential viewing)
**** (excellent)
*** (worth a look)
** (forgettable)
* (rubbish!!)

- Nov 16, 2007

The Brave One

WARNING: This review contains spoilers.

In “The Brave One” Jodie Foster is in love with New York City, her job hosting radio and her boyfriend, until late one night the couple is attacked by a gang while on a walk through the park.   Emerging from a coma to learn that he was killed, she buys a gun for self defense, but after gunning down a robber in a convenience store soon finds herself wandering the night, looking for trouble and pumping baddies full of lead.   Up until the point that it culminates in a disastrous set-piece in which Foster improbably gets to blow away her attackers from the park, this movie is fairly absorbing, with nice taking-each-other’s-measure interplay between Foster and Terrence Howard as the cop investigating the vigilante killings, whom she befriends, and while it doesn’t come close to the artistry (or ironies) of “Taxi Driver” (the obvious model for “The Brave One”), it does occasionally approximate that film’s feverish intensity.   It was the teenaged Foster, of course, who gave such an unforgettable performance in that picture as Iris, the barely pubescent prostitute.   In “The Brave One” her visage is a taut mask of sorrow, not just a patina of grief but expressive of a deep inner ruin.    

Thinking about why the ending of this film made me sick, I returned to a profile of director Michael Haneke (“The Piano Teacher”, “Cache” et al.) which appeared in a recent issue of the NYT magazine.   Haneke, whose work is deeply disturbing—and to my mind fascinating—recalls attending a screening of his film “Funny Games” to journalist John Wray: “It was funny—funny for me, at least—how the theater reacted [to a scene late in the film when the heroine turns the tables on her captors].   There was actual applause at first—then, when the scene is rewound, making the audience conscious of what it’s cheering for, the theater went absolutely silent.   There was a general realization, even though the victim in this case was a villain in the film, that they’d been applauding an act of murder”.  

The audience with whom I saw “The Brave One” exploded in applause when Foster’s character blasted away the defenseless and prone ringleader of the punks from the park, but director Neil Jordan (“The Crying Game”) doesn’t want us to think about what we’re cheering.   The attack in the park and her first shootings were handled quite differently—those scenes hurt.   In contrast, the killings in the finale are there for the audience to have fun with.   It’s cheap, crowd-pleasing stuff, and I was so disappointed with Jordan.   Revenge movies _can_ be sleazy fun, after all, but a film that takes itself as seriously as this one does must do more than stimulate the reptile brain. Blame the script by Bruce A. Taylor and Roderick Taylor, maybe, or commercial calculations, or the exigencies of Hollywood plotting, to which Jordan is not usually so cravenly and slavishly beholden.   But there is a way that even this scene could have been done properly: by rendering the situation so vividly, so recognizably that we’re made to feel, to understand, to ask ourselves what we would do in her shoes.   To _think_.   I’d love to see what Foster could do in a film like that.  

Haneke again: “Violence in my films is shown as it really is.   The suffering of a victim.   The viewer comes to see what it means to act violently—that’s why the films are often experienced as painful”.   “The Brave One” fails when it stops being painful and starts being slick, consumable Hollywood product.    

Rating: *  

Key to ratings:

***** (essential viewing)
**** (excellent)
*** (worth a look)
** (forgettable)
* (rubbish!!)

- Oct 10, 2007