Last batch of 2011

I have obviously fallen way behind with my film commentary, but not with my viewing.  I need to resume to-the-moment responses, but am weighed down by a huge backlog to weigh in on.  Having finally worked my way through all but a few of the top fifty films in Film Comment’s critics poll, I will soon offer a summary of my own final rankings for 2011.  For now, a few words on a number of them.  To make up for limited detail, I link as usual to Metacritic’s compilation of reviews, and to Netflix listing for DVD or streaming availability, as well as giving the Film Comment ranking.

On the shelf for years, disappearing from theaters in a minute, late to video, Margaret (2011, MC-61, FC#20, NFX) proved well worth the wait, and well worth the two and a half hour running (or slo-mo walking) time.  In fact, I may write at greater length once I’ve seen the three hour director’s cut.  I was eager to catch up with Kenneth Lonergan’s follow-up to You Can Count on Me, one of my favorite films of this millennium, and I was not disappointed.  Anna Paquin is excellent as a Manhattan prep school girl who witnesses - and is deeply involved in – a fatal pedestrian encounter with a bus.  The likes of Alison Janney, Matt Damon, Matthew Broderick, and Mark Ruffalo make their brief appearances count.  Despite widespread dismissal, I would put this film just below A Separation among my favorites of the past year, sharing an unwillingness to settle into an opinion of a character and assume a firm handle on who’s right and who’s wrong.  The film is, as a character says, “a moral gymnasium,” and the exercise is a good workout.

I have not shared most of the cognoscenti’s enthusiasm for recent Romanian films, and could not watch two that appear on the Film Comment list (#13 Autobiography of Nicolae Ceasusescu unavailable, and #29 Aurora unwatchable), but one I found pretty terrific (in both senses of the word) was Radu Muntean’s Tuesday, After Christmas (2011, MC-81, FC#28, NFX), a romantic triangle remarkable both for its ordinariness and for its scalding honesty.  The actors who play a married couple are really married, and clearly know all about how couples fight.  The man has fallen for their young daughter’s orthodontist, and the emotional fallout is portrayed in extended scenes that offer a slow drip of reality and truth.  Sometimes amusing, sometimes lacerating, this is another film that doesn’t take sides for or against its characters, but unfolds their choices with sympathy and satire.

Aki Kaurismäki’s  Le Havre (2011, MC-82, FC#12, NFX) is a pleasant pastel fable of human solidarity with deadpan wit and political kick.  The dour but playful Finnish director travels to Normandy and pays homage to classic French film, most particularly Children of Paradise.  The female lead, though played by Kaurismäki’s favorite Finnish actress Kati Outinen, is called Arletty.  For a great inside joke, the villain of the piece -- the one member of the harbor’s working class community who does not silently conspire to protect a young African boy escaping a round-up of illegal immigrants and trying to reach his mother in London – is played by Jean-Pierre Leaud, Antoine Doinel grown up to be a malevolent snitch fifty years after The 400 Blows.  If this tickles you, -- or the Buster Keatonish impassivity of male lead André Wilms, or the terrific canine actor -- you will get a kick out of this film.  Otherwise, it’s strangeness may put you off.  There is a Bressonian severity to the way it is shot, but also a goofy once-upon-a-time quality to its old-fashioned color design.

In Shame (2011, MC-72, FC#21, NFX), Michael Fassbender -- now appearing on screen as everything from Mr. Rochester to Carl Jung, not to mention one of the X-Men -- re-teams with the director who first brought him to my attention, Steve McQueen (in Hunger), and delivers another impressive performance.  He plays a sex-addicted Manhattan yuppie, with an equally damaged sister, played by Carey Mulligan.  She’s a would-be chanteuse and her slo-mo rendition of “New York, New York” in intense prolonged close-up is one of the highlights of this stylish film.  Another is long, long tracking shots along nighttime city streets.  But everything comes down to Fassbender’s character, and he is ferocious and unsparing in his self-hate, naked in more ways than one.  Not for the weak of heart or stomach, and by no means a perfect film, Shame has an undeniable power.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011, MC-85, FC#24. NFX) I found well-made but incomprehensible.  I also wondered at the contemporary relevance of this late adaptation of John Le Carré.  It’s so difficult to follow the plots and counterplots that I just gave up on getting it, despite old familiarity with the book and the Alec Guinness tv series.  Nonetheless, Gary Oldman is excellent as Smiley in this remake by Tomas Alfredson, and the rest of the cast is made up of familiar and welcome faces such as Colin Firth and Ciaran Hinds.  The craftsmanship makes this film haunting, if not quite intelligible.  It would take another viewing to make sense of it, but I do not feel moved to give it a second chance.

I have latterly become a fan of Almodóvar but his latest, The Skin I Live In (2011, MC-70, FC#31, NFX), has already evaporated from my mind.  He’s an extremely accomplished filmmaker, can do whatever he wants, but I wonder why he wanted to do this densely-layered genre exercise, with Hitchcockian suspense, mad scientist horror, romantic melodrama, and the kitchen sink.  It sure looks good, as do leads Antonio Banderas and Elena Anaya, but the mystery of the doctor and his patient-prisoner is not one that drew me in.

We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011, MC-68, NFX) would have been empty and showy without Tilda Swinton, who is always worth watching, but the film squanders any chance it had to be illuminating about the growing up of a “bad seed” who goes on to a Columbine-like massacre.  Tilda rings a symphony of changes on the mother’s guilt and grief, and the three actors who play the sociopathic boy at different ages look spookily similar, but Lynne Ramsey’s arty, convoluted direction does not redeem the horror of this suburban monster story.

If  I list the foregoing films in declining order of my appraisal, here’s an unnoticed sleeper that I would add somewhere in the middle:  The Music Never Stopped (2011, MC-60, NFX) is a fictionalization of an Oliver Sacks case study about a brain-damaged patient who regains cognitive and affective function though connection to music.  Reliable character actor J.K. Simmons plays the father who reaches out to his estranged and amnesiac son by adopting the music the young man loved before a brain tumor erased his memory.  Lou Taylor Pucci is the Deadhead son, also enamored of Dylan and the whole pantheon of late-Sixties rock.  Julia Ormond is the music therapist (and Sacks-surrogate) who finds the key to reclaim their connection.  Jim Kohlberg’s sincere if not artful film worked for me largely because the music touched off similar sorts of timewarp memories, and the father-son relationship resonated as well.

Also on a more favorable note, I mention two documentaries that I found exceptional.  The Interrupters  (2011, MC-86, FC#26, NFX) is the latest from Steve James, best known for Hoop Dreams and here returning to similar neighborhoods of Chicago to follow several of the title characters, street-level interveners trying to contain the epidemic of urban violence.  If you love The Wire (and if you don’t, what’s wrong with you?), then you will be swept up in the stories of these sharply delineated individuals, who have gone from gangbanging to frontline conflict resolution.  The Loving Story (2011, MC-81, no NFX yet but on HBO) offers the human side of the Supreme Court’s Loving vs. Virginia decision overturning laws against miscegenation.  Richard Loving looks the part of a total redneck, but grew up in a mixed rural community not infected with racism.  Mildred Loving is a tall, lovely, and charming mix of black and Native American.  Though no sort of activists, there could have been no better couple to overturn a monstrous injustice.  It’s a pleasure to make their acquaintance, and applaud their vindication.

What with the election year and all, I’ve been watching a lot of political movies.  Somehow J. Edgar (2011, MC-59, FC#48, NFX) made it on to the Film Comment list, I suppose because Clint Eastwood is now taken to be a grand old man of cinema, though maybe not so much after his bizarre performance at the GOP convention.  It’s not a badly made period film, and Leonardo di Caprio convinces as Hoover, as he he did with Hughes in The Aviator.  But the film’s portrayal is more confused than multi-layered, as is the closeted cross-dressing character; you have to bring your own memories of the malevolent long-time FBI chief to appreciate the significance of the proceedings. 

On my side of the fence, I expected more from George Clooney in The Ides of March (2011, MC-67, NFX), both more nuanced direction and more screentime as an actor.  He’s a Presidential candidate, and Ryan Gosling is his devoted young aide.  With Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Paul Giamatti as duelling campaign managers, Marisa Tomei as a NYT reporter, and other welcome faces filling out a competent cast, this movie would have been more successful if it were not so “shocked, shocked” at political and personal mendacity, and did not feel the need to descend to melodrama.  They talk about tv series “jumping the shark,” and for me this film went from engrossing to preposterous in one shark-jumping scene.  Not worthless, but a missed opportunity.

Meryl Streep’s Oscar-winning turn as Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady (2011, MC-54, NFX) is indeed enough of a reason to watch the film, but director Phyllida Lloyd does not have enough of a point of view to make the story compelling.  Again the viewer has to provide his or her own viewpoint to the subject.  I certainly had my own, and appreciated a review of the relevant facts, developed a sense of the character’s history but not her significance, despite the signposts of her rule.  Is she feminist heroine or political disaster?  Maybe both, but this film doesn’t sort it out.  Nonetheless, it’s an amazing impersonation by the ever-amazing Meryl.  I first saw her doing Shakespeare in the Park in the mid-70s, and she’s never let me down since.

Speaking of Shakespeare, Ralph Fiennes directs and stars in Coriolanus (2011, MC-79, NFX) as modern-dress political parable, about the conflict between aristocratic martial honor and democratic values.  Violent in execution and emotion (borrowing the DP from The Hurt Locker, shooting in Serbia), the film has plenty of power, but limited relevance.  Vanessa Redgrave is his mother and Jessica Chastain his wife, Brian Cox his senatorial advisor, so this Coriolanus has plenty of worthy support, but will never be a successful politician, too rigid, too angry to be consul.  This film of this play is a bludgeon, a military thriller, but effective within its limits.

That leaves as my favorite recent political film, the HBO movie Game Change (2012, MC-75, NFX), in which Juliane Moore gives a performance as Sarah Palin that rivals Meryl as Maggie, offering understanding without whitewash or evisceration.  Based on the bestselling chronicle of the 2008 campaign, this Jay Roach film follows Recount in turning recent politics into intelligent entertainment.  Ed Harris makes for a sympathetic and plausible John McCain and Woody Harrelson stands out as campaign manager Steve Schmidt.  As with everything else in our partisan environment, reaction to this film seems to split along political lines, so I tend to find this film as even-handed and truthful as the ludicrous Grizzly Mom deserves.  Opinions will no doubt vary. 

Going back to some old favorites, I confirmed The Candidate (1972, NFX) as the best political film I’ve ever seen, provocative, funny, and truthful.  Michael Ritchie’s film stars Robert Redford as a California governor’s radical son, who is recruited and co-opted to run for U.S. Senator.  Its jaundiced view of the Hollywoodization of politics not only holds up, but seems remarkably prescient.  Warren Beatty’s Bulworth (1998, MC-75, NFX) retains interest and amusement, but eventually wears out its welcome.  And the Watergate comedy Dick (1999, MC-65, NFX) remains broadly funny, but its greater distinction is the early pairing of Kirsten Dunst and Michelle Williams, the two outstanding movie actresses of their generation.