I’m getting close to writing up my year-end summary of the best films of 2009, on my typical six-month delay, as the last DVDs finally come out. Here are several that I’ve watched recently that won’t make the list, two that finished high in the Film Comment critics poll (#13 and #22, respectively) and one that made no one’s list but that I liked better.
I’m not hipster enough to be a real fan of Jim Jarmusch, but I’m willing to give a look to most anything he does. The Limits of Control (2009, dvd, MC-41) has a number of elements that make it watchable, if ultimately frustrating. First mention must go to Christopher Doyle’s eye-catching cinematography of Spanish locations. The acting works as well, with Isaach de Bankolé suitably impassive as the stone-faced operative in the midst of an operatic conspiracy, with a parade of familiar faces as the contacts he meets in turn, including the likes of Tilda Swinton, Gael Garcia Bernal, and Bill Murray. This movie is all “maguffin” -- the dispensable plot mechanism by which Hitchcock drove his audience manipulations -- and no substance. Jarmusch is too laid back to manipulate, so he takes the stalking assassin plot and just riffs on it in theme and variation, much of it amusing and visually striking, but going nowhere despite being all over the place -- just as critical and audience response has been. At best, the film is a surreal tour through old movies and I didn’t mind going along for the ride, even if it didn’t take me anywhere in particular.
I also didn’t mind taking the trip with Spike Jonze to Where the Wild Things Are (2009, dvd, MC-71), another film with a wildly divergent critical response (the Metacritic average comprises rankings from 100 to 40). But in fact it was a huge letdown when the film entered the realm of mopey fantasy, after the promising “real-life” introduction, with Max Records making for an electrically bad-behaved Max and Catherine Keener making the most of her minutes as the stressed mother. After sailing a wild imaginary sea and landing at an island with an equally imaginary variety of landscapes (all in Australia, I understand), Max runs into the Wild Things, a group of hulking creatures, cleverly costumed with digitally enhanced facial expression, and voiced by the likes of Tony Soprano (!). Even with wild rumpuses, the air goes out of the film with the grumpy lamentations of the wild things, a rather depressive lot. For me, there was more magic in the realism, and too much didacticism in the fantasy. A much better collaboration between Spike Jonze and Maurice Sendak was the former’s documentary portrait of the latter, Tell Them Anything You Want, which is also now out on DVD.
Garnering strictly middle of the pack reviews was Adam (2009, dvd, MC-56), and I am not going to single it out for your delectation, but I did enjoy Max Mayer’s debut film, a Sundance-endorsed romantic comedy, with the offbeat angle that the male lead explicitly has Asperger’s Syndrome. While no Claire Danes as Temple Grandin, Hugh Dancy evokes well many attributes of mild autism, without going all Rainman. I thought Rose Byrne was destined to be something, but in this film she disappointed me. Maybe it was the script, perhaps all Mayer’s empathy was with the male character. At times the camera does a good job of conveying Adam’s point of view, but we never get the girl’s, just a lame familial backstory (though it was fun to see Amy Irving as her mother, and Peter Gallagher would have been all right if the father weren’t such an intrusion in the story). And the children’s book that is supposed to make the girl sympathetic struck me as kinda icky. So I was disappointed in the ending (and also the alternate ending on the DVD), but along the way I was well into it, with so much self-identification that I hardly knew myself from Adam.
One more romantic comedy that I liked perhaps more than it deserved was In July (2000, dvd, MC-71). Just as a Cinema Salon Film Club screening of The Headless Women led me to other films by Lucrecia Martel, showing The Edge of Heaven sent me looking for more Fatih Akin, as another young filmmaker to follow. This trifle is slight, and might have made my teeth ache if the road trip were across America, but had the merit of novelty since it followed Akin’s persistent personal route between Hamburg and Istanbul. A somewhat dorky high school teacher (Moritz Bleibtreu) is accosted by a smitten street vendor (Christiane Paul) and sold a ring with a Mayan sun symbol, which she insists will lead him to his one true love. The set up seems obvious, but then chance intervenes and he meets a lovely Turkish traveler whom he immediately believes is the one. After a night of chaste enchantment he puts her on a plane back to Istanbul, but then decides that he must go there to meet her again, and borrows a car to drive through Romania and Bulgaria. On the way out of town, he picks up a hitchhiker and what do you know, it’s the disappointed hippie girl, setting off for wherever the wind takes her. Okay, a huge contrivance and you know exactly where it’s going from the get-go, but there are some amusing Eastern European hijinks along the way, with incidental surprises on the well-worn road trip.
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