Wrapping 2016

Here I follow up with last year’s films as they arrive on home video in one format or another, roughly in order of their rating by critical consensus (with some tardy releases to be added later: last update 6/8/17).

About Paterson (MC-90, NFX), let me confess that I adore this film, and also that it’s not for everyone – slow, mundane, and uneventful, but shot through with transcendent glimpses of light.  Jim Jarmusch is sometimes too arch for me, but here his trademark deadpan is alive with signs of grace and humor, love and insight.  Paterson is a place, a person, and a state of mind, a poem about the poetry of everyday life.  The place is the decaying industrial city in New Jersey, famous as the home of Lou Costello and William Carlos Williams, the doctor/poet who wrote a multivolume epic called Paterson.  The person is Paterson, who drives a bus in the city, meanwhile jotting poems in his notebook (which appear in lettering onscreen as he recites and repeats them); he’s played soulfully by Adam Driver, in a role that totally supplants his image from Girls.  Equally spirited, but as outgoing as he is inward, Golshifteh Farahani plays his wife, for whom every phase of life is an art project.  It’s a beautiful relationship, though not without friction, much of it supplied by their pet bulldog.  The city is a character in itself, as Paterson walks to and from work, drives his bus through the city’s streets, with the (in)action returning periodically to the waterfall that gives the city its identity.  Each evening he walks the dog to a bar, where he goes in for one beer, and encounters passing moments of humor and drama.  You could say nothing happens in this film, or you could say nothing happens.  To me, every image and every beat seemed just so.  Unexpectedly, this film vies with Manchester by the Sea as my favorite of the year.  Despite its depressed condition, Paterson’s state of mind is ecstasy.

I can see many of the aspects for which Toni Erdmann (MC-93, NFX) has been so highly praised, but personally I’m just not feeling the love.  Much of what I wrote about Maren Ade’s earlierfilm seems to apply to this as well, yet I am less enthusiastic about the new film, in a reversal of critical consensus.  It may have something to do with the film’s length (162 minutes), and maybe with the central characters (though not the actors, who perform admirably), a father and daughter, he a shambling old music teacher and prankster, she a tightly-wound corporate consultant.  The title character is the name of the improvisatory role the father takes on, to embarrass and humanize his daughter, when he goes to visit her on the job in Romania, where she is ruthlessly bringing German efficiency to the formerly socialist backwater.  The movie could also have been different to watch in a theater, where audience laughter might have jollied me along.  Instead of funny, I found many of the scenes puzzling and marked by a weirdly opaque conviction.  So for this film I can issue neither recommendation nor warning, can only say “see for yourself.”

  

Aquarius (MC-88, NFX) is the name of an aging beachfront apartment building in Brazil, where a widowed music critic is the only remaining tenant of a developer eager to tear down the building and replace it with a lucrative condo tower.  In a prologue that is indicative of the film’s indirect and leisurely approach, we first see her living there as a young mother and breast cancer survivor more than thirty years before.  Then we jump ahead to the present, where she is played by the great Brazilian actress Sonia Braga.  Her ability to command the screen while doing very little is key to the film’s appeal, as she interacts with friends and lovers, grown children and real estate adversaries.  A political or cultural fable about Brazil seems to be implied, but escaped this American viewer (though I could relate bigly to real estate developers as villains).  Nonetheless, the film held my interest through its long and rather slow progression. 

Asghar Farhadi garnered his second foreign film Oscar with The Salesman (MC-85, NFX), and I have no quibble with that choice.  The Iranian director of A Separation and other films is masterful at bringing us into domestic scenes, and absorbing us with small, quiet shifts of perspective, judgment, and emotion.  Each of his films in an inquiry into moral feelings and allegiances.  Each is calculated to engender post-film debate and discussion.  We start as usual with a couple, and work our way out into complicated webs of connection.  The actors’ names would likely mean as little to you as they do to me, but all the performances are layered and excellent.  Both man and woman are actors in the play within the film, a Teheran production of Death of a Salesman.  They are forced to leave one apartment and move into another, where there are complications with a former tenant, and an inciting incident with incisive consequences.  I leave the rest for you to see for yourself. 

20^th Century Women (MC-83, NFX) has so many good elements that it ought to add up to more than it does.  Mike Mills memorialized his father in the excellent Beginners, and here does the same for his mother in what might better have been called “The Women Who Raised Me.”  The specificity of place and time – Santa Barbara in 1979 – vouches for the film’s authenticity, which seems more reported than dramatized.  Luckily the admirable cast fills in many of the gaps, most notably Annette Bening as the mother of the writer/director as a 15-year-old, played endearingly by Lucas Jade Zumann.  Bening commands the screen not just for the immediacy of this performance, but in the context of her past performances – she’s won our devotion going in, so has no need to ingratiate.  She’s a working single mother, who lives in a large, crumbling old house where she takes in not so much boarders as surrogate family members.  Director and star are generous with the supporting roles, Greta Gerwig and Elle Fanning as two young women whom the mom enlists to help raise her fatherless boy, plus Billy Crudup as a live-in hippie handyman.  Throwing visual and musical cues into the mix, Mills does not spin out scenes, or the film as a whole, to the point of resolution, but prefers to pile on glimpses and glances to cumulative effect, shards of memory that combine to create a mosaic, which is striking and attractive but not recognizably coherent.

Diligently working my way through the list of films that Metacritic deems to have received “Universal acclaim,” I started Jackie (MC-81, NFX) with little expectation of enjoyment.  Natalie Portman has held no appeal for me since Beautiful Girls (1996), and I was pretty sure Chilean director Pablo Larrain wasn’t going to have an interesting perspective on events and personalities that were very familiar to me.  But I wasn’t prepared for how annoying every aspect of the film would be:  the acting (absolute antithesis to All the Way, where every historical character was immediately identifiable), the music, the editing, the sheer tone-deafness of the whole production.  I could bear no more than thirty minutes, and fast-forwarded through the rest, so all I can give is my reaction, not a review.  It’s odd to see a film in which the only thing I liked was Greta Gerwig.  When that Metacritic average is unpacked, you can see a bunch of 100 ratings (Ty Burr, what were you thinking, what were you seeing?), but I was reassured to see my most trusted critics (Anthony Lane, Stephanie Zacharek, Dana Stevens) clustered in the 50-60 range.  So I’m pretty sure I didn’t miss something here.

I am not generally a fan of sci-fi, but I held out some hope for Arrival (MC-81, NFX), since Amy Adams stars – as a linguist trying to communicate with aliens who have come to earth in a dozen huge spaceships around the globe – and Denis Villeneuve is not your prototypical action director.  Plus Bradford Young is always a cinematographer worth seeing.  Together they supply enough heart, brain, and eye to make the film watchable, if not a satisfying cinematic experience to me.  Beyond the well-done production values, it is unusually soulful, thoughtful, and beautiful as sci-fi, but for me obscure enough, as well as generic and overblown, to withhold a recommendation.

Fences (MC-79, NFX) represents two types of movie which have little appeal for me – a transposition from theater, and obvious Oscar-bait – but had numerous aspects that did appeal to me.  Starting with the two leads, Denzel Washington and Viola Davis, who are every bit as good as you may have heard.  Having won Tonys for the revival of August Wilson’s play on Broadway, the cast is brought to the screen pretty much intact, directed by Denzel himself.  Not familiar with Wilson’s work, I have to say I was taken with the language, and the passion with which it is delivered.  The characterizations seem true to life, though the stagecraft is creaky, most notably in the final scene.  The setting – narrow enough to avoid “opening out” of the play – is the 1950s Pittsburgh backyard of a former Homestead Gray turned garbageman, a motormouth and force of nature, in whose climate his wife and children, brother and friend, have to exist.  Each performance lives up to the two leads, and the dialogue carries conviction, however theatrical.  Having followed Denzel’s career for decades, it was fascinating to watch him step into the shoes of James Earl Jones as Troy Maxson.  The years go by, as this film will tell you.  

Despite superb performances from Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga as Richard and Mildred Loving, Jeff Nichols’ patient, serious feature Loving (MC-79, NFX) would seem superfluous if more people had seen the moving and revelatory documentary The Loving Story (NFX).  The landmark Supreme Court decision in Loving vs. Virginia overturned state laws against miscegenation, and established marriage as a constitutional right.  Thankfully, Nichols’ film is less about courts and lawyers than the genuinely colorblind love between a white man and a black woman, a bond between two unassuming people that broke the bonds of ancient prejudice.  The film’s approach is appropriately quiet and unassuming as well, showing how deep racism runs without rubbing our face in its more violent aspects, more interested in the heroism of ordinary life than famous judicial triumphs.

In a good film year for African-Americans, it’s no surprise that Hidden Figures (MC-74, NFX) was the highest grossing of the Oscar nominees for Best Picture.  It’s certainly the most sanitized and domesticated, the most Hollywood of them all, in its approach to race relations and civil rights.  Theodore Melfi’s film strains to be entertaining, but does so all the same, because of the true story behind the film. and the three women who play “colored computers” working on the Mercury space program in the early ’60s: Taraji P. Henson, Janelle Monae, and Octavia Spencer.  They endure the double discrimination of being women as well as black in segregated Virginia, at the beginnings of the liberation movement.  A little too much “You go, girl!” attitude, too many sitcom beats, and too little attention to truth of situation or character, meant that I would have preferred a straight documentary, but at least the film is true to its title, and the book on which it’s based, in celebrating some unsung heroes of the space race.

I’m a fan of Martin Scorsese, though not always in agreement about what is his best work, but all I can say about Silence (MC-79, NFX) is that there’s a fine line between passion project and vanity project, and for me this film crossed that line, becoming overt and unconvincing.  C’mon, Marty, 161 minutes on Portuguese Jesuit missionaries in 17^th century Japan?  Given your track record, and the Shusaku Endo source novel, I expected a lot from this adaptation.  I can see that you wanted to make a Kurosawa film, and this film certainly carries over his sense of spectacle, with lots of eye candy.  But Andrew Garfield?  He’s a good young actor, but you expect him to carry more weight than his slight frame can handle.  Adam Driver is surprisingly good in a much smaller role, as the other young priest sent to search for their spiritual guide (a monumental Liam Neeson), lost somewhere in Japan.  And Marty, I hate to say it, but you’re wandering into Mel Gibson pain-porn territory here.  But, but, but – I had to fast-forward through the second half of this film, and for the rest I offer only a polite silence.

It’s a little rich for me to come across as an arbiter of teen comedies, but Edge of Seventeen (MC-77, NFX) strikes me as one of the best, not as edgy as The Diary of a Teenage Girl, but genuinely witty and true to life, from an authentic female perspective.  In a most promising debut, Kelly Fremon Craig writes and directs, with a good cast led by the charming, piquant, and angst-ridden Hailee Steinfeld, as an outsider child who’s lost her beloved father, and is about to lose her best and only friend to her too-perfect older brother, while herself trying to navigate between an elusive dreamboat and the endearing nerd who has a crush on her.  In times of distress, i.e. frequently, she has recourse to her history teacher and reluctant mentor, played by Woody Harrelson with laconic but friendly satire.  It all sounds very familiar, but comes across as fresh and appealing.

Underappreciated despite an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Film, Tanna (MC-75, NFX) is stunningly good.  Named for the South Pacific island where it was filmed by Bentley Dean and Martin Butler, having lived for seven months in a traditional village where men wear penis sheaths and topless women wear grass skirts.  Working with villagers to create a real-life scenario that includes elements of National Geographic, Robert Flaherty, and Romeo and Juliet in an ethnographic paradise (serving as a good companion piece to the recent Disney animation Moana), the filmmakers have put together a beautiful story that is mythic and elemental, but specific to a genuine culture.  The villagers all play roles based closely on their own lives, and the natural expressiveness of the acting is a wonder to behold.  As is the landscape, from jungle to ocean to volcano.  Altogether an experience not to be missed.

A Monster Calls (MC-76, NFX) was another film that exceeded expectation.  In fact I wasn’t sure what to expect at all of this part-animated, part-CGI-wizardry, not-really-for-children story of an 11-year old British boy coping with his mother’s impending death, in the process summoning a King-Kong-sized Green Man from a giant yew tree in the church graveyard.  One expects a lot from Liam Neeson (voicing and motion-capturing the tree), Sigourney Weaver (irascible grandmother), and Felicity Jones (mother with cancer), but the actor who makes this all work is Lewis MacDougall, as the inward boy who finds escape in drawing and fantasy, talents absorbed from his mother.  Sure, there’s shameless tear-jerking, but there’s also flawless production work all round, by a mostly Spanish team, including lovely, painterly animation and convincing special effects.  Mixing fairy tale, creature feature, and family melodrama, director J.A. Bayona strikes me as a cross between Pedro Almodovar and Guillermo del Toro.

Almodovar’s Julieta (MC-73, NFX) could have been called “All About Her Mother,” and as such recalls the best of his films, as well as Douglas Sirk’s.  He disciplines his maximalist style in the material of minimalist writer Alice Munro, in the process transposing her stories from cold, dark, barren Canada to hot and colorful Spain, without betraying their spirit.  If you like Almodovar at this most raucous, this will be a disappointment, but if you appreciate his heartfelt appreciation for the emotional travails of women, then this is a film to seek out.  A glamorous Classics professor, if you can imagine such a thing, is played in the present by Emma Suarez and in flashback by Adriana Ugarte, and in each incarnation the character is transfixing.  The older woman gets chance word of the daughter she has not seen in a decade, and thinks back to how she met her husband and then lost him, in the process getting and then losing the beloved daughter.  This is a careful and caring film that unlocks unexpected depths.

I was inclined to resist Lion (MC-69, NFX), but didn’t entirely succeed.  I suspected it was another production that the Weinstein Company had muscled into an undeserved Best Picture nomination.  And I’m not really susceptible to the presumed soulfulness of Dev Patel, which novice director Garth Davies tries to exploit in repeated wordless close-ups.  There are some pretty things and some touching things in this “based on a true story” tale of a poor young boy (a captivating Sunny Pawar) from rural India who gets separated from his family and winds up on the streets of Calcutta.  After Dickensian adventures, he is eventually adopted from an orphanage by an idealistic Australian couple (Nicole Kidman as fashion victim?), only to grow up into a longing for his unknown birthplace and birth family.  But the self-dramatization of the originating memoir, and the manipulations of its presentation do not come with an aura of truthful exploration of feeling.  Nonetheless I confess to a tear in the eye, at least for the birth mother at the inevitable reunion. 

If, like me, you think that Amy Adams and Jake Gyllenhaal are reason enough to watch a movie, Tom Ford’s Nocturnal Animals (MC-67, NFX) will disabuse you of that notion.  To call this movie a hollow exercise in style is to make the best case for it.  To call it a garish mixture of lifestyle and violence porn is closer to the mark.  Don’t bother.

The Light Between Oceans (MC-60, NFX) is a well-acted and beautifully-shot “woman’s weepie” directed by Derek Cianfrance in a quasi-documentary style.  With Michael Fassbender, Alicia Vikander, and Rachel Weisz giving their estimable all, I was happy (and sad) to suspend disbelief in this over-plotted melodrama.  Fassbender is a survivor of WWI, who embraces the isolation of a job as a lighthouse keeper on a remote outcropping of an unnamed country (presumably Australia, actually shot in New Zealand).  Vikander is the strong-willed and open-hearted young woman he meets and marries on the mainland.  After an idyllic interlude on their lovely but lonely sea-girt promontory, they suffer tragedies, and circumstances that turn tragic after misguided choices.  I can see why some would reject the twists of the source novel as preposterous, but I was so won over by the persuasive acting, and by the immersive direction, that I had no urge to quibble as the story unfolded.  The hypnotic beauty of the people and the place swept away any resistance I might have had to the manipulations of the story, so even if duped, I recommend this film.