Looking at the past year in film

As with my previous post on tv shows, I will lead with a somewhat gynocentric approach to the films of 2017, since most of my favorites featured women characters and creators.  That applies to one of the year’s best, My Happy Family, which I’ve already written about here.

Also guaranteed a place on my final best of year list is Mudbound (MC-85, NFX).  Though the film is the product of many voices, and seems to feature male characters, it is overwhelmingly a product of female sensibility, from the author of the original novel, to screenwriter/director Dee Rees (who is right up there with Ava DuVernay in the tiny elite of black female filmmakers) and cinematographer Rachel Morrison (first woman to get an Oscar nom in that category), to Cary Mulligan and Mary J. Blige, who are the soul of the cast.  The film truthfully depicts racial tensions in the Mississippi Delta in the Jim Crow years just before and after WWII, in a way that is both thoughtful and horrifying.  It tells the polyphonic story of two interlocking families: one white, poor and feckless but privileged to own their farmland; one black, hardworking sharecroppers with no rights to the product of their labors.  No Hollywood prettying up here, despite the intimately epic style.  These people are dirt poor, and bound to the mud from which they try to extract a living, and in which they wrestle with historic injustice.

A surprise possibility for my Top Ten is Marjorie Prime (MC-82, NFX, AMZ).  Though Michael Almereyda is the director, the soul of the film feels female, from its title to its two central characters, a mother and daughter played wonderfully well by Lois Smith and Geena Davis.  Jon Hamm and Tim Robbins play their respective husbands, in clearly supporting roles.  You might call this sci fi, or more probably speculative fiction – it could be a top-notch extended episode of Black Mirror – but it plays as a low-tech chamber piece.  I found out after the fact that it was a filmed version of a play, and that makes sense (I had to back up to catch some of the abrupt scene changes), but I did not feel my usual aversion to filmed theater.  The movie is a puzzle piece, and I’m not going to say anything more about the story, except that it’s a film to exercise your emotions as well as your intellect and insight.

Here’s a pair of 19^th-century period pieces, each an unflinching portrait of difficult Victorian era womanhood, in their different ways.   In A Quiet Passion (MC-77, NFX, AMZ), Cynthia Nixon overcomes physical unlikeness to offer a highly credible portrayal of Emily Dickinson.  Terence Davies’ inventive and idiosyncratic approach to writing and directing renders her life with the paradoxical insight of his title, clearly identifying with her mysterious character, subdued and formal yet wild inside.  Jennifer Ehle offers superb support and counterpoint as Emily’s light-spirited sister, while Keith Carradine does the same as her rigid but intense father.  Like Dickinson’s poetry, this film requires submission to its individual vision, but rewards those who succumb to its lovely, subterranean power.

Lady Macbeth (MC-76, NFX) is based less on Shakespeare and more on a Russian novel, opera, and film about a 19^th century character who is a cross between Madame Bovary and Lady Chatterley, with an even darker shade of Gothic horror.  Transplanted from Siberia to the north of England, the story is immaculately filmed in a constrained style, directed by William Oldroyd, and held together by a magnetic performance from Florence Pugh, as the layers of the poor young woman’s abused character are disturbingly peeled away to reveal an amoral heart of darkness.  It’s an intense and unsettling experience, powerful but not at all uplifting.

To me, Kristen Stewart is not the mega-star of the blockbuster Twilight series, which of course I haven’t seen, but an inventive actress who inhabits challenging roles in independent films.  She is decidedly unglamorous but still transfixing in Certain Women  (MC-82, NFX), which Kelly Reichardt adapted from three short stories about women navigating the man’s world of small-town Montana.  You can understand why a lonely young horsewoman develops a crush on her, and your heart aches for that character, played by affecting newcomer Lily Gladstone.  In the other two barely-connected stories, the leads are played by Michelle Williams and Laura Dern, so you know there is some serious acting going on here, which makes it easy to ride out Reichardt’s slow-paced but meticulous storytelling.  Meanings remain elusive, but tangible reality is strong.

Kristen Stewart also made another film with Olivier Assayas, following up on Clouds of Sils Maria.  In Personal Shopper (MC-77, NFX), she is again a personal assistant to a celebrity, but now much more the center of attraction and attention, as she seeks paranormal contact with her recently-deceased twin brother.  I’m not much into ghost stories (or Ghost Story – see below), but this is definitely one that managed to be spooky without being real cheesy.  The film wanders and meanders, but one’s gaze never wavers from the morose Ms. Stewart, who can go from mousey to glamorous with a simple change of clothes.

A change of clothes also does wonders for Gal Gadot, but she is never mousey.  She is Wonder Woman (MC-76, NFX), and makes the movie well worth seeing.  I generally make it a rule not to watch any superhero flicks, but I made an exception for this film’s supposed feminist slant.  That may be overstated – all nine credited writers are male – but it is directed by a female (Patty Jenkins), and certainly is dominated by its actresses.  I was quite taken with the mythological backstory of the Amazon kingdom ruled by Robin Wright and Connie Nielson, and impressed by the transition to WWI Britain.  But the dazzle soon wore off in the inevitable and interminable action sequences.  Not my idea of cinema, but not an unpalatable taste of popular culture.

More my sort of thing, in various ways, was the backstory behind the female comic book superhero, in Professor Marston & the Wonder Women (MC-68, NFX).  First off, it added another black female writer-director for me to follow, in Angela Robinson.  In this cultural moment of female (dis)empowerment, she streamlines and dramatizes the same story told by Jill Lepore in The Secret History of Wonder Woman: how an academic psychologist wrote the comic in the Forties, to advance radically feminist ideas along with B&D sexuality, while living and having children with his wife and another woman.  As always for me, Rebecca Hall stands out in the cast, as the professor’s more brilliant wife and research partner.  Luke Evans is Marston, and Bella Heathcote is the student who becomes the other woman in the long-term triangle.  It’s all quite kinky, but serious and funny at the same time.  The Metacritic rating is decidedly on the low side, but Manohla Dargis’ review in the NYT captures the right note, in my estimation.

Speaking of wonderful women, Billy Jean King is engagingly played by Emma Stone in Battle of the Sexes (MC-73, NFX).  As you would expect from the directors of Little Miss Sunshine, this film is rather obvious and crowd-pleasing, but it does have some genuine period flavor and a lot of appealing performances.  Steve Carell makes Bobby Riggs more manic clown than calculating boor.  Their eponymous 1973 showdown in the Astrodome (watched by 90 million people on tv, including yours truly) provides a foregone conclusion, but also an exhilarating thrill of nostalgia, as the tennis scenes unfold with verisimilitude.  Among the women, Sarah Silverman and Andrea Riseborough provide distinguished support, as Billie Jean’s promoter and newfound lover respectively.  In the year of #MeToo, the creepiest scene of all is the actual Howard Cosell with his arm wrapped around the neck of his co-commentator Rosie Casals.  An enjoyable movie, if not an estimable film.

Not vying for my best of year list, but mentioned here for their female directors, are two quite different films from careers going in different directions.  In Beach Rats (MC-78, NFX), Eliza Hittman takes a further step into the moody, sensual, scary world of teen sex in Brooklyn.  As in It Felt Like Love, this film is carried in all intimacy by its lead performer, in this case the captivating Harris Dickinson (incredible to learn after the fact that he is British) as a boy with a girlfriend, who nonetheless trolls the internet for hook-ups with older men. 

While Ms. Hittman is coming into her own and finding her voice, Sofia Coppola is reduced to repeating herself, and older films.  Her remake of the Civil War drama The Beguiled (MC-77, NFX) is also a reprise of her first film, The Virgin Suicides, in its depiction of the sexual urges of sequestered females.  Style is all well and good, but here it decays into nonsense, without grounding in any sense of truth.  This story of a wounded Union soldier taking refuge in a southern female seminary is pure fairy tale, and its arbitrary transplantation from Louisiana to Virginia is indicative of the film’s carelessness and unreality.  I generally like Colin Farrell, but he is no Clint Eastwood, for better or worse, and this character is just an unmotivated hash.  The schoolmarm is Nicole Kidman, and among the rest are Kirsten Dunst and Elle Fanning, who are of course watchable, even when their actions are either too obvious or too senseless.  I’ve been a follower of Ms. Coppola’s career, but here she leaves me behind.

Now we turn our attention from women to men, as characters and creators.  Ken Loach is among my favorite workingdirectors, and I, Daniel Blake (MC-78, NFX) ranks with his best films.  David Johns is excellent as the title character, a Newcastle widower who has had a heart attack and is unable to return to his job as a carpenter.  As such, he falls into a bureaucratic hell where he is ineligible for either welfare or unemployment benefits, just churned through the system and spit out.  He forms a bond with another of the system’s rejects, a young single mother with two small children (Hayley Squires), and caring for them gives him a reason to persist, and eventually to enunciate the film’s credo:  “I am not a client, a customer, nor a service user.  I am not a shirker, a scrounger, a beggar, nor a thief.  I am a man, not a dog. As such, I demand my rights.”  The lead actor’s background as a comedian does a lot to lift the mood of a film that could have come across as grim, though the residue of outrage remains.  The Criterion Collection disk of this film also contains an excellent feature length documentary, Versus: The Life and Films of Ken Loach.

Working in very much the same leftist vein as Loach, though in a different style, the Dardenne brothers’ latest is The Unknown Girl (MC-65, NFX).  I don’t understand the reservations represented by that Metacritic rating, twenty points lower than their typical score.  Maybe not quite up to the very highest level of their previous films, it’s nonetheless among the best of the year, IMHO.  In the same manner, the actress around whom the film revolves, Adele Haenel, may not reach quite the level of Marion Cotillard in Two Days, One Night or Cecile de France in The Kid with a Bike, but she is quite magnetic.  Maybe some critics were put off by the Dardennes spicing up their austere style with genre trappings of crime procedural, as a young female doctor investigates the circumstances of a death for which she feels guilty.  The setting, as ever for the Dardennes, is among the struggling lower classes of Seraing, Belgium, with a tone of deep human sympathy and understanding.

Lucky (MC-79, NFX) was written as a final starring vehicle for 90-year-old Harry Dean Stanton, and it turned out to be something beyond memorial or reminiscence, astringent rather than nostalgic, as befits the long-time character actor.  Another busy character actor, John Carroll Lynch, makes his directorial debut in this comic meditation on mortality and the meaning of life.  In a hardscrabble desert landscape, a cranky old codger goes through his daily routine, waking up to his first cigarette of the day, doing his set-up exercises in his underwear, walking to the local diner for coffee and crossword, home to watch his afternoon tv shows, then back out at day’s end to hang out with the local eccentrics at his regular tavern, declaiming mordant affirmations of misanthropy and atheism at every stop.  He’s wised up, and dried up, but he’s not giving up.

Another miserable guy you come to like and even admire for his peculiarities is the Ray Kroc portrayed by Michael Keaton in The Founder (MC-66, NFX).  I don’t know why this film was not better reviewed; certainly Keaton’s performance here was much more impressive than in Birdman.  As Kroc, he’s a sharp businessman in every sense of the word, screwing the MacDonald brothers (Nick Offerman and the aforementioned John Carroll Lynch) out of their name and franchise.  He’s by no means a sympathetic character, but he is shrewd and indomitable.  Sure he’s as predatory a capitalist as they come, sure he dumps loyal wife Laura Dern for equally mercernary Linda Cardellini, but somehow you have to grant his energy and drive in transforming the landscape (and waistline) of America, for better or decidedly worse.  With this witty cast and even-handed irony, director John Lee Hancock delivers a smart satire of business to rival The Big Short.

[Click through for a score more films of possible interest]

Here are a couple of films that were well-received, but not my sort of thing.  Many critics admired David Lowery’s A Ghost Story (MC-84, NFX, AMZ), but I didn’t have the patience for it.  Wasn’t buying it either stylistically or thematically.  Rooney Mara and Casey Affleck are wasted in minimalist roles.  Results may vary, but I’d give this a pass if I were you.

On the other hand, I could see the appeal of Good Time (MC-80, NFX, AMZ), and made it all the way through.  Like Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson has used Twilight franchise success to leverage participation in more interesting independent ventures.  He certainly has a way with manic grunge in this film, and makes the whole thing watchable.  He’s a spectacularly unsuccessful bank robber, and a con man who cons no one more than himself, as his flight through the night becomes more baroque and ridiculous.  Josh and Benny Safdie pace their chase film to keep up the kinetic mania.  And if it doesn’t make sense, that’s the characters’ perspective as well.  Reminiscent of Scorsese’s After Hours.

A bit more to my taste in its blend of adrenalin-fueled comedy and action was Baby Driver (MC-86, NFX), which nabbed Oscar noms for film & sound editing.  Talk about kinetic, Edgar Wright’s film is powered by the nonstop pulse of music.  Car chases got old for me about the time of Bullitt, but I have to say this film makes then fun again.  Ansel Elgort is Baby, who is a driver in the sense that Chuck Yeager is a pilot, fearless and headlong, the essence of the Right Stuff.  His incredible stunts are fueled by the music that is always pumping into his ear, and ours.  He’s a good kid with a tough backstory, who finds himself indentured to crime boss Kevin Spacey, and driving getaway with hoods like Jon Hamm and Jamie Fox.  His redemption is glimpsed in the form of a waitress played by Lily James.  Exhilaratingly nonstop, this is an amusement park ride you might want to go on.

Next up, two films that have nothing in common but an identical Metacritic rating, availability for streaming, and absolute reliance on their leading ladies:  The Incredible Jessica James (MC-72, NFX) features the highly credible Jessica Williams, the talented comedian in transition from The Daily Show to 2 Dope Queens.  Just the thing to watch if you want something on Netflix that is light and entertaining without insulting your intelligence, about the romantic travails of twentysomethings in Brooklyn.

Christine (MC-72, NFX) might be a dour portrayal of a descent into mental illness, except for the profound and nuanced full-body performance by Rebecca Hall, of the troubled newscaster who anticipated Network by committing suicide on air in 1974.  One knows where this is headed, but Antonio Campos’ film is surprising and engrossing every step of the way.  Ms. Hall makes a strange, sad, and isolated woman into a sympathetic and even endearing character, subverting her own intelligence and drive by her inability to connect with other people.  Excellent support is provided by anchorman Michael C. Hall and station manager Tracy Letts, if not by the characters they play.  J. Smith-Cameron reprises the role of loving but baffled mother of a troubled adult child, which she also played in the great tv series Rectify.  Tough to watch, but worth it.

Before we get into films mostly of also-ran, watch-if-that’s-your-thing status, let me offer mild approbation to two comedies.   In the The Lovers (MC-76, NFX, AMZ), by writer-director Azazel Jacobs, the long marriage of Debra Winger and Tracy Letts is on the verge of coming apart, as each pursues an affair, with Aiden Gillen and Melora Walters respectively.  You kind of know that they’re going to wind up back together (books have been written about Hollywood’s “comedy of remarriage”), but it’s quite a fun trip to reach that preordained destination.  The film is well-conceived and well-acted, with a decidedly mature viewpoint on immature behavior.

Noah Baumbach is the bard of family dysfunction, and he goes to town in The Meyerowitz Stories (MC-79, NFX).  He’s always bitterly comic, but sometimes just bitter.  Dustin Hoffman plays a self-important minor NYC sculptor and oblivious patriarch of three troubled adult children.  Adam Sandler is the hapless brother, a house-husband being divorced and taking his beloved daughter off to college, meanwhile camping out on his father’s sofa.  Half-brother Ben Stiller is an LA go-getter who flies into town on business.  Elizabeth Marvel is the beaten-down sister, and Emma Thompson is Hoffman’s fourth and current wife, a drunken, aging hippie.  The action and banter is fast, furious, and frequently funny.  Watch for several Berkshire references.

Here’s a handful of foreign films that I liked, but can’t really recommend unless your taste in cinema ranges as widely as mine does.  Every film by Hirokazu Kore-eda is worthy of note, but After the Storm (MC-86, NFX, AMZ) is not among my favorites.  I was unsympathetic to the main character, a failing author and gambling addict, who abuses the love and trust of his mother, his ex-wife, and his young son, not to mention using his fill-in job as a private detective to blackmail the subjects of his assignments.  If you’re a fan of the director and his Ozu-inflected portraits of family life – patient, empathetic, and humorous – you’ll want to see this, but if not, start with Still Walking, Our Little Sister, or Like Father, Like Son.

Martin Provost is another director of interest, and some other aspects make The Midwife (MC-66, NFX, AMZ) more than a generic effort.  First a regal but self-satirical performance from Catherine Deneuve, then a quiet but deep performance by Catherine Frot as the midwife of the title, and finally the documentary reality of the births that she attends.  The former Catherine is the old mistress of the midwife’s father, who abandoned her and him many years ago, to pursue her own profligate and sybaritic life.  The father is dead, and the mistress is dying, without anyone to care for her except the dutiful midwife.  The two women re-form a fraught but winsome relationship.  I’d add a minimum of ten points to that Metacritic rating.

I also had a sneaky affection for Son of Joseph (MC-75, NFX) despite its arch stylizations.  Eugene Green directs a parable of nativity, as a teen boy being raised by a beatific single mother, a nurse named Marie, goes in search of his unknown father.  Green’s style is stripped down like Bresson’s, with the characters declaiming directly into the camera, and his approach is unapologetically arty, while still conveying a sense of humor and humanity.  The acting is excellent (including Mathieu Amalric) within its restraints, and the Dardenne brothers are on board as producers.  This French film streams on Netflix, so give it a few minutes to see if you can take its quirky style.  

Francois Ozon’s Frantz (MC-73, NFX, AMZ), in lustrous black-&-white with an occasional flash of color, is a remake of an Ernst Lubitsch film set in Germany in the wake of WWI.   A former French soldier shows up in town to place flowers of on the grave of a German soldier missing in action.  He is seen by the German’s bereaved fiancée, and they strike up an acquaintance.  The German’s parents are hostile to the Frenchman, who says that they were friends in Paris before the war, the film suggesting that they may have been lovers, before the story takes several further twists.  Elegant and intriguing, but not especially memorable.

Okja (MC-75, NFX) is a gigantic CGI pig, and Ahn Seo-Hyun is the delightful little girl who has raised her from a genetically-engineered piglet, in Bong Joon-Ho’s sprightly satire/adventure.  Tilda Swinton plays twin sisters vying for control of the meatpacking conglomerate behind the scheme, which involves pignapping the girl’s giant pet, and her energetic attempts to rescue it.  The action is fast and furious, from the Korean countryside to New York City.  As such things tend to do, it wearied me by the end, but I did make it all the way through (unlike, say, Snowpiercer).

Now we’re down to a few random remarks on a few unremarkable films, to fulfill my original purpose of comprehensive coverage, to enable me to remember whether I’d seen a film or not, among the hundreds that I watch, and whether I liked it or not.

The Trip to Spain (MC-66, NFX) is the third, and least, of the comic gastronomic tours by Steve Coogan and Rob Bryson, manic bouts of improvisation, impressions, and insult.  You can see why they’d want to keep on doing them, wining and dining in beautiful locations, with Michael Winterbottom tagging along as director, but I’d advise them to quit while they’re well ahead.  I’m not sure how much longer I would be happy to go along for the ride.  (I see the films are edited down from a recurring tv series in Britain, so maybe they will just go on and on.)

It’s worth watching Salma Hayek and John Lithgow square off against each other in Beatriz at Dinner (MC-68, NFX) – written by Mike White and directed by Michael Arteta – but this is a party you wouldn’t want to be at, despite the impressive guest list.  Salma as Beatriz is an immigrant massage therapist with a gift of healing and forthrightness.  Lithgow is an unabashed predatory capitalist, quite Trumpish.  Through a plot contrivance, they wind up together at Connie Britton’s dinner, to intrude questions of gross inequality and social injustice.  It’s a debate worth having, but one that doesn’t have a satisfactory resolution here.

It’s also worth watching David Oyelowo and Rosamund Pike pair up in Amma Asante’s A United Kingdom (MC-65, NFX).  In this true story, he’s an African prince studying in Britain after WWII, where they meet at a missionary dance, fall in love, and marry against all opposition.  But when he’s in line to become the tribal king, his claim to the throne becomes enmeshed in British colonial politics, diamond mining, and the coming of apartheid in South Africa, all in a conspiracy to break up the marriage.  The couple suffers, but perseveres, until he becomes president of an independent Botswana, and racism is over, by virtue and good will.  It’s a feel-good, real-life fairy tale.

Birth of a Nation (MC-69, NFX) is a feel-bad, real-life fairy tale about racism.  I’d heard such different opinions about the film, that I finally decided to watch it for myself.  Nat Turner’s slave rebellion is a subject I’ve studied, and the film was less offensive to my historical understanding than I expected, but rather appalling as the vanity project of writer, director, and star Nathan Parker.  Still, I didn’t hate it as much as I was prepared to.

I know I saw The Lost City of Z (MC-78, NFX, AMZ), but I can conjure no memory of it.  I don’t know whether I was snoozing or the movie was snoozy.  Some people clearly liked it, so you’re on your own with James Gray’s film, starring Charlie Hunnam and Robert Pattison.  I do have a vague recollection that it was another film in which Sienna Miller was underused.

That’s it for now.  In a subsequent post, I will cover the films of 2017 that were nominated for Oscars and other awards.