Digging deeper into the past year

Still catching up with 2015 releases, I’m saving Oscar Best Picture nominees and my final picks of the year’s best for a subsequent post.  In this one, I go down a list of worthwhile titles in roughly the order of my own appreciation, linking as always to Metacritic tabulation of critical opinion and to Netflix availability, also making note of ranking in Film Comment and Metacritic annual polls of critics.

From an unexpected quarter comes a film that is both substantial and entertaining.  Second Mother (MC-82, NFX, AMZ) is written and directed by Anna Muylaert, and stars Regina Casé, an actress and tv celebrity referred to as the Oprah Winfrey of Brazil.  She plays a long-time live-in maid in an upper-class household, called part of the family but in no illusion regarding her inferior domestic status.  She adores the boy she’s raising for parents removed by their own preoccupations, but misses the same-aged daughter she hasn’t seen for years, while sending money for her support.  That daughter shows up on her doorstep, with quite different notions about class relations within the household.  The set-up is simple, the permutations are not.  Sociologically acute, the film has humor and heart in complementary proportions, and is notable for its evenhandedness.  Every character is satirized, but each has his or her own reasons, and intelligible feelings.  For an extensive review deeply informed by personal experience, see Dana Stevens in Slate. 

While Lily Tomlin wasn’t enough to make me stick with the blandly jokey Netflix series Grace and Frankie, she was more than enough for me to rank Grandma (MC-77, NFX) amongst the best films of the year.  While short on story and running time, writer-director Paul Weitz combines hard wit with soft heart in very palatable proportions.  Clearly based on Eileen Myles (who is certainly having a late-life cultural moment, not just deeply enmeshed in Transparent -- as character, actress, and lover of the show-creator --but also winner of the Clark Prize for art writing), and also on Lily’s history and persona, the title character is a lesbian poet, deadpan misanthrope, and survivor of first stage feminism and other Sixties phenomena, who is called into action to help her waiflike granddaughter, as both try to avoid confronting the daughter/mother in the middle, Marcia Gay Harden playing a hard-charging professional in opposition to the generations before and after.  The young and the old hit the road in the latter’s 1955 Dodge (Lily’s own in real life), trying to scare up cash for the girl’s abortion, scheduled for the end of the day, and confronting aspects of their past, present, and future along the way.  Amidst the snark and the sentiment, truth stands out.

After three increasingly masterful films in a neorealist vein, and one Hollywood misfire, writer-director Rahmin Bahrani puts it all together in the unjustly-neglected 99 Homes (MC-76, NFX).  I get it -- watching people being evicted from their homes is a hard sell as entertainment, but this film combines the you-are-there virtues of documentary with superb acting and a thriller-ish narrative propulsion.  It’s Orlando after the housing crisis; Andrew Garfield is a young single-father construction-worker, when suddenly there are no building jobs, and the home where he lives with his mother and son is repossessed.  Laura Dern plays the mother, warm and nuanced as usual, though it’s awfully disconcerting for her to be playing a grandmother, when to me she will always be the mesmerizingly hot teen of Smooth Talk (1985).  You can’t say Michael Shannon is cast against type as the odious real estate agent who has figured out how to make big bucks off other people’s misery, but here more than elsewhere he gets past the demonic menace to a devilish charm that seduces the younger man from exploited to exploiter.  This film puts all-too-human faces on the millions of home foreclosures, and is informative on the whys, hows, and whos of the mortgage crisis.

The Diary of a Teenage Girl (MC-87, FC #19, MC #23, NFX), Marielle Heller’s adaptation of Phoebe Gloeckner’s graphic (in both senses) novel, is unapologetic and uncomfortable, but has the authenticity of lived experience.  It’s San Francisco in 1976 and 15-year-old Minnie is walking through the park with a smile on her face, thinking “I’ve just had sex.”  Minnie’s embodied most convincingly by over-20 British actress Bel Powley, and she’s about to embark on a series of ill-advised sexual adventures, to be recorded on cassette, as we listen to her narration.  Wide-eyed and fearless, bright and dumb, hungry for love, but most of all open to experience, Minnie does -- and has done to her -- many things of which you may not approve, but she keeps her wits about her and comes out okay, despite questionable mothering by a Me Decade party girl (Kristen Wiig), and interference from the mother’s boyfriend (Alexander Skarsgard).  She’s witty and imaginative, and very winning in Powley’s performance, and by the end of the film finds her calling in cartoons, which animate the screen at many points.

A Brilliant Young Mind  (MC-68, NFX) is the flat-footed American title for the charming British indie known, much more evocatively, as X+Y.  The American title mis-appropriates that of Beautiful Young Minds, director Morgan Matthews’ previous documentary set in the same milieu, about the International Mathematical Olympiad.  So the direction conveys a real authenticity, but moreover, the film is well-cast and well-acted across the board.  First honors go to always-impressive Sally Hawkins, as the good-hearted but baffled young widow, mother of autistic teen math prodigy Asa Butterfield (Hugo).  Rafe Spall is his tutor, and Eddie Marsan the head of the UK team -- as they train at math camp in Taiwan and come back to Cambridge for the Olympiad itself – so the film has a flavor of Mike Leigh about it.  As must be in a teen movie, there are potential love interests for the boy, one Chinese girl and one British, both believable and winning as female math nerds, vying to get behind those haunting blue eyes and bring him out of his shell.  Sally and Rafe have their tête-à-tête as well.  And then of course, the competition.  Familiar elements all, but none of them work out just as you expect.      

Like an Academician confronting a Monet for the first time, it may take you a while to realize how impressionist strokes add up to an overall picture in Mia Hanson-Love’s Eden (MC-82, NFX), grounded in genuine sense experience and attentive observation.  She wrote the script with her brother, on whose life it’s based, tracing two decades of his career as a DJ in Paris and America, and the changes in dance music over that time.  Like 24-Hour Party People, this film introduced me to a style of music -- and of life -- quite foreign to my experience, but left me with some appreciation of a new sound.  “House” or “Garage” as styles of music mean nothing to me, and I’ve only heard of Daft Punk because Stephen Colbert once did a bit about their failure to show up for gig on his show.  I’m emphatically not a dancer or a party person, and of a totally different generation, but I got in tune with this production.  Much more so than with a film about my own generation to which this might be paired, Olivier Assayas’ Something in the Air.  In this case, there’s definitely something in the music, and something in the way the story builds out of glancing strokes over decades.  Give it time, feel the beat, enter Eden, and it will move your body and soul.

C’mon, guys, let a girl have some fun!  Show she can still rock out in her sixties, bond with her daughter, bring people together, young and old.  Besides, Meryl Streep is the essential actress of my generation, so I’ll watch just about any movie she’s in.  We go way back -- Shakespeare in the Park, 1976.  So let’s not pretend this is an objective evaluation, but I really enjoyed Ricki & the Flash (MC-54, NFX), however thin it may be dramatically.  Jonathan Demme knows his way around concert films, and maybe he was looking for the antithesis to Rachel Getting Married.  So accept this as a fun evening with a bar band, appreciate the engaging personalities, laugh at some of the jokes, but do not expect any great revelation of character or resolution of plot.  Oddly, the dvd menu page sets the tone perfectly, with Meryl looking a dead ringer for Cindy Lauper.  She’s Ricki, and the Flash is her band at a bar in the Valley outside LA (day job: checkout cashier at Total Foods); she was formerly Linda, and left her family back in Indianapolis, until called home to deal with a family crisis.  Her daughter, appropriately, is played by Mamie Gummer; her ex-husband, Kevin Kline; his second wife, Audra MacDonald; her guitarist, Rick Springfield – all appealing, if given too little to do.

Infinitely Polar Bear (MC-64. NFX) is a cracked family affair.  First-time writer-director Maya Forbes tells the child’s-eye-view of growing up with her bipolar father, and casts her daughter as her pre-teen self in the late Seventies.  Mark Ruffalo is his usual rumpled teddy-bear self as the father, manic-depressive offspring of a declining Boston Brahmin family, unable to keep a job or to stay on his meds.  Zoe Saldana is the wife who’s grown beyond the charm of bohemian squalor and decides she needs to go to business school to save her two girls from poverty, with no choice but to leave them in their unstable father’s care.  While the delightful girls express dismay at their father’s fecklessness, they feed off his manic buoyancy, and their retrospective view is of warmth and adventure, more than fright and embarrassment.  That limits the depth of these memories of growing up with a parent’s mental disorder, but makes for a mildly pleasant viewing experience.

Experimenter (MC-81, FC #26, NFX), like its subject matter, is experimental in a way that raises more questions than it answers.  Director Michael Almereyda tells the story of social psychologist Stanley Milgram and his eponymous experiment, as well as his life beyond it, in a very free way.  Such a blend of fact and artifice made me wonder whether it wouldn’t have been better as documentary, though some strenuous efforts at whimsy -- from direct-to-the-camera address, to transparently fake theatrical stage dressing, to a literal elephant in the room -- certainly disavow that intent.  Still Almereyda offers a lot to ponder (as he did with modern-dress Hamlet with Ethan Hawke), tracing the career path of the famous author of Obedience to Authority in some detail.  Besides his controversial test of how far subjects would go in inflicting pain after relinquishing moral choice to an authority figure, Milgram also devised the “Small World” experiment that established the idea of “six degrees of separation.  Peter Sarsgaard plays Milgram with his usual blend of recessive charm and dubiousness, Winona Ryder is good as his wife, and other familiar faces make the most of small roles, so on the whole this film offers a satisfying mind game, despite some deliberately disconcerting elements.

(Click through for further reviews of films I can’t really recommend, whatever redeeming attributes each may have.)

Circumstances led me to watch the highly-praised Tangerine again, with enhanced appreciation, and then Sean Baker’s earlier film Starlet (2012, MC-74, NFX).  Though the film features Dree Hemingway (Mariel’s daughter) as a young woman on the fringes of the film industry -- not in Hollywood but in the Valley -- the title is actually the name of her pet, a male Chihuahua.  That sort of misdirection seems to epitomize the film’s intent.  The essential story is not her job, or the people she lives with, but the connection she forms with an elderly widow.  Off-beat and on-the-street as in his later work, Sean Baker establishes himself as a young director to watch, someone who finds soul in the most unlikely precincts.

Another director I was moved to look into further was David Mackenzie of Starred Up, so I watched his readily available Perfect Sense (2012, MC-55, NFX), which was not without interest for the flavors it cooks up between Ewan MacGregor and Eva Green, a chef and an epidemiologist in Glasgow.  Meanwhile the world experiences a series of pandemics that remove one sense after another from the population, first smell, then taste, then hearing, and then, well, you’ll have to see the movie to find out, not that I urge you to do so.  

In The Keeping Room (MC-58, NFX), the feminist implications provided by the screenwriter and three excellent actresses are somewhat overridden by the women-in-jeopardy thriller tropes of British director Daniel Barber.  In the waning days of the Civil War, Sherman has marched through Georgia and turned north to inflict the same scorched-earth punishment on South Carolina.  In the Union army’s path are three young women trying to survive alone on a derelict farm.  Brit Marling is the elder sister, Hailee Steinfeld the younger, and Muna Otaro the slave emancipated not so much by President Lincoln or the army, as by the exigencies of survival.  They are menaced by two advance Union scouts, debased by war into beasts of rape, murder, and arson.  I’m a Civil War buff, and a Brit Marling fan, so this film satisfied me, but I’m not going to say you should see it, unless you share these passions.

The Walk (MC-70, NFX), like the incident it depicts, is both pointless and essential.  After the superb documentary Man on Wire, Robert Zemeckis’ film is thin gruel, bland as its title, and superfluous except for the one thing it adds to the story of Philippe Petit and his wire-walk between the just-built World Trade Towers -- mind-blowing CGI effects.  I’m sure all reservations would vanish in air if I had seen the all-important climax of this film in IMAX 3-D, while on a smaller screen I found it amazing in verisimilitude, but not enough to erase the earthbound elements of the rest.  Joseph Gordon-Levitt makes Petit an energetic pixie of character, but thin as the wire he walks on.  The rest of the characters are functional at best.  Not just Man on Wire, but Mordicai Gerstein’s Caldecott Medal-winning children’s book, The Man Who Walked Between the Towers, gets deeper into the significance of the deed, but neither can duplicate the experience with such pulse-pounding reality.

Effie Gray (MC-54, NFX) is a costume drama in the worst sense, in that the costumes provide most of the drama, and Emma Thompson’s script not so much.  It’s the story of the title character’s marriage to and eventual annulment from John Ruskin, in the third (and least convincing) recent film depiction of the eminent Victorian art critic (the others were Mr. Turner and the tv mini-series Desperate Romantics, which follows the early careers of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood).  Dakota Fanning looks quite right as Effie, but Greg Wise is too monumentally stiff and opaque as Ruskin.  Emma T. and other welcome faces fill out the cast, the settings (from Venice to the Scottish Highlands) are sumptuously rendered, as are the clothes, but the story itself is thin and faded.  Richard Laxton’s direction is tasteful but uninspired, and the film as whole lacks depth and resolution, though pretty to look at.

The Overnight (MC-65, NFX) was a trifle that kept me amused for its 80 minutes, but not much more.  Patrick Brice directs Adam Scott and Taylor Schilling as a couple just moved to LA, where at a playground with their young son, they meet Jason Schwartzman, an outgoing neighbor with a similarly-aged son, who invites them over for dinner with his French wife at their swanky home.  He’s too friendly by half, too good a neighbor to be true, but completely wins over the less experienced couple.  They, and we, wonder what his motivation is.  From putting the kids to sleep, to breaking out the drinks and smoke, to skinny-dipping in the pool, he peels away their inhibitions, with his wife in cahoots.  This film dances on the edge of sexual embarrassment without diving all the way in.

Can’t get around it – have to repeat myself:  “I just can’t get with the program on Hou Hsaio-Hsien.”  What I said about Flight of the Red Balloon applies as well to his latest, The Assassin (MC-80, FC #2, MC #10, NFX).  I can’t get in tune with the pace of his heartbeat.  Sure, this film is lovely to look at, with exquisite Tang Dynasty décor and lingering long shots emulating Chinese landscape paintings, in antique aspect ratio, part luminous color, part sumptuous black & white, shot through diaphanous drapes or other distancing elements.  Slow, slow passages of enigmatic stillness alternate with lightning quick action sequences.  No acting, only posing.  Plot and characterization beside the point.  You emerge from Hou’s spell in a state of aesthetic bliss, or with a hunger for something more.  Wanna go get a pizza?

Over and over, I vow never to see another Woody Allen film, and then there’s something that makes me give him another chance.  In Irrational Man (MC-53, NFX), it was the casting of Joaquin Phoenix, as offbeat as usual, playing a depressed philosophy professor, and also Parker Posey, a personal favorite, as an interested colleague, and Emma Stone as a student -- Allen’s inevitable young woman involved with a much older man -- because I still believe she will one day find a decent film to shine in (and for me, Birdman was not it).  Anyway, I thought they were all pretty good, though undermined by poor plotting and fatuous dialogue.  The set-up earned my attention, the resolution bored and repelled me.

The set-up was somewhat repellent, in a different way, for The Kindergarten Teacher (MC-68, FC #45, NFX), an Israeli film in which the title character takes an obsessive interest in one of her students, whom she takes to be a literary prodigy, in ways that become unnatural and unhealthy.  The acting is not bad, but the filmmaking is slow and off-kilter, with a dubious message and some creepy turns – it sustains interest, but does not ultimately satisfy.

This may be the last year I attempt blanket coverage of the year’s most highly-regard releases, but I will have to come back for yet another round-up before commenting on Oscar picks, and my own, for best of 2015.  In the future, I expect my commentary to be more thematic and retrospective.