Film award wrap-up for 2022

Now that the Oscars have been handed out, I return to finish my survey of 2022’s award-worthy films (see here for my comments on the most-celebrated Everything Everywhere All at Once and other notables).
 
Given the people involved, I was highly disposed toward Women Talking (MC-79, AMZ).  Sarah Polley is one of my favorite active directors (Away from Her, Stories We Tell) and with this film she took the screenwriting Oscar for adapting Miriam Toews’ novel of the same name.  Jessie Buckley and Claire Foy are two actresses I will always watch, and here are even exceeded by Rooney Mara.  The inestimable Frances McDormand produces and contributes a cameo.  Ben Whishaw honorably represents the lone male in the cast, a sympathetic school teacher taking minutes, as the oppressed and illiterate women of an isolated religious community respond to the depredations of the dominant males. They gather to decide whether to leave en masse or stay and fight for liberation.  This deeply wrenching but beautifully made film, based on an extreme and even freakish case, pairs nicely with She Said as an indictment of the malign power of male sexual violence against women.  The film’s constrained circumstance and colorless palette reflect the women’s lives, but so does the subdued beauty and poise of the portrayals.
 
Jerzy Skolimowski’s EO (MC-85, CC) is a beautifully-rendered donkey’s-eye-view of the world, wild with magic and mystery, intimate with fur and flesh, visually dazzling and emotionally resonant.  Part lovely nature documentary, part grim fable of animals in a human world, this film may not satisfy every taste, but I definitely vibrated to its wavelength.  Criterion offers the streaming premiere, and a retrospective of Skolimowski films.  (I was not re-engaged by Deep End, though it was oh-so-1968.)
 
Argentina 1985 (MC-78, AMZ) garnered a number of awards and nominations, and it was a history lesson that I appreciated (especially now that the U.S. itself is under threat of an authoritarian coup), as an elected government puts on public trial the leaders of the military junta that had ruled with an iron fist over the previous decade, with thousands tortured and “disappeared.”  Ricardo Darin is excellent as the real-life reluctant prosecutor, who is hung out to dry professionally, and has to rely on a young law professor and a bunch of students to build the case by interviewing hundreds of witnesses, and selecting the most compelling to offer courtroom testimony.  Santiago Mitre’s film is an effective legal drama, with a wider frame of reference than whodunit? - a modern-day Judgment at Nuremburg in holding the powerful to account.
 
Worlds away from what I would typically watch, I gave Top Gun: Maverick (MC-78, AMZ) a chance based on award nominations and top ten selections.  Wow, what a piece of crap!  It lacks any of the things that lure me to films, except the pleasure of laughing at its formulaic predictability, strictly by the numbers.  A routine Tom Cruise vehicle, written by committee, souped up to Mach 10, though supported by a decent cast and competent direction.  More effective as a video game simulation than as any sort of human drama.  Like the Reagan-era original, it’s one big recruiting ad for the Air Force, without a shred of political context or any unexpected turns of character.  This film seemed especially egregious to me after having recently watched Twelve O’Clock High, a 1948 film that was less jingoistic and infinitely more realistic and truthful about the stresses of aerial bombing runs.
 
Decision to Leave (MC-84, Mubi) is one of those films that demands a second viewing, but nonetheless is dazzling at first look, prismatic shards of narrative pieced together in an artfully-composed mosaic.  Chan-Wook Park’s romantic thriller could be construed as Basic Instinct meets Vertigo, but is very much his own thing.  In fact, it’s pretty hard to construe at all for much of its length, but it’s a virtuoso performance all round, from acting to cinematography to editing to settings to turnabouts of plot and character.  An insomniac Korean detective develops an obsession with a beautiful Chinese woman who’s suspected of murdering her Korean husband.  And the story spins off from that, in whirlpools of mystery and deception, into which the viewer feels compelled to dive and lose all sense of direction.  I may have more to say on second look, but I was certainly led into this film more deeply than I expected.  (Could have used Pachinko's innovation of subtitling in different colors for different languages.)
 
No Bears (MC-92, CC) is intelligent, layered, and filled with humanity, as expected of the great Iranian director Jafar Panahi, who has spent more than a decade in prison or under house arrest, banned from making films or leaving Iran, but nonetheless making four internationally-acclaimed films.  Like his son’s similarly excellent Hit the Road (reviewed here), this was filmed at the highly-fraught Turkish border, where people-smuggling is a major business.  Of necessity, the father continues to star in his own films, in a blend of person and persona.  Here he is directing a film, by laptop through a remote and inconstant connection, set in a town just over the uncrossable border.  Two storylines interweave: the film within the film depicting a couple of Iranian exiles trying to make their way to Europe; and Panahi’s encounters with the folk of a small nearby village where he is hiding out, part ethnographic study, part self-satire.  To appreciate this film it helps to have familiarity with the interrelated world of Iranian neorealism, where films and directors are in conversation with each other, and also helps if you’re patient with uncertainty and open to different ways of being and seeing.  It may seem random as it proceeds, but all fits together in the end.

 

Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris (MC-70, AMZ) is a film I never would have watched without the presence of Lesley Manville, and she is predictably great in a so-so movie, about an English house cleaner and widow who dreams of owning a Dior gown.  It’s a silly 1950s fantasy, as preposterous as Mary Poppins, but Ms. Manville somehow grounds it in psychological reality.  A flimsy contrivance, but not badly made overall, with the oddity of Isabelle Huppert playing essentially the role that Manville herself played in Phantom Thread, plus a sly allusion to her role as Princess Margaret in The Crown, two more substantial productions.

You’re kidding me, right?  The Fabelmans (MC-84, dvd) is one of the best films of the year?  What a sad year 2022 must have been in film.  The novelty here was Steven Spielberg telling his own story in more direct form than he’s been telling in films from E.T. on.  But in terms of introspection, he’s no Truffaut or Bergman, and he’s mining no great material here in writing his own touched-up script, instead of oh, say Lincoln’s.  Spielberg has made some pretty great films, but also some real stinkers, based on the material he’s working with.  He’s a technician, not a visionary.  Or to see it through his eyes, more like his electrical engineer father (Paul Dano) than his ethereal artistic mother (Michelle Williams, in one of her least natural performances).  But instead of looking through the lens of personal insight, he sees his life through the lens of Hollywood movies before his, looking for a smooth surface rather than hidden depth.  Instead of increasing authenticity, he relies even more than usual on phony sentiment.  Though a lot of people see it differently, I kind of resent Spielberg taking up two and a half hours of my time with his movie-fed, movie-fied memories.  I’d be gentler if the film were an hour shorter, tighter, and/or more profound.
 
In compiling my lists of the best films and the best television of 2022, I couldn’t help but notice a disparity in my enthusiasm.  I couldn’t contain my TV list to ten, while struggling to find ten new films I was really excited about.  But I can offer my provisional best of the year list, in reference to Metacritic’s tabulation of hundreds of critics’ top ten lists, yielding an overall Top 30.  In my list, I append the general Metacritic rating for reference to their informative annual ranking.  I’m still tracking down a number of films as they arrive on streaming channels, and will continue to add reviews to this compilation. 
 
These are the leaders in the clubhouse, so to speak, with some likely competitors still unseen:  Tár (92), Happening (86), Women Talking (79), Everything Everywhere All at One (81), Hit the Road (90), No Bears (92), EO (85), The Banshees of Inisherin (87).  Still to be seen, expected to make list: Aftersun (95), The Quiet Girl (89), One Fine Morning (85).
 

Documenting documentaries

I’m spinning this off my film awards season survey (with update soon to follow now that Oscars have been awarded), in order to cover well-received documentary features from the past year.  Navalny took the Academy Award, more for political than aesthetic reasons, and I endorsed its importance here.  But I start this survey with two other HBO documentaries that were also nominated.
 
Laura Poitras’ All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (MC-90, HBO) is several films in one, and only one aspect of it is weak.  The review of photographer Nan Goldin’s career holds up nicely, and her family story (especially the suicide of her beloved older sister) is telling, and so is her ACT-UP activism during the AIDS era, which decimated her artistic community.  But the frame of the story is her post-addiction campaign against the Sackler family’s art-washing of their predatory Oxycontin manipulations, which strikes me as more performative than provocative, enacted for the camera rather than for real-world results. The Oxy subject is better handled in another HBO doc, Alex Gibney’s The Crime of the Century.
 
All that Breathes (MC-87, HBO) is another film that goes in many directions at once, mostly effective but raising more questions that it can answer.  It’s about brothers who run a hospital for injured birds, mostly kites, in Delhi, and the environmental disasters they encounter on a daily basis, compounded by Modi’s Hindu nationalist attacks on Indian Muslims.  The elements of elegant nature photography are present, but they are more about kites scavenging in the world’s largest landfill, or rats overrunning their derelict neighborhood.  The brothers go about their business, inspired by the totemic role of kites in their religion, as the whole world seems to be falling apart around them, while they earnestly discuss the possibility of banishment, or nuclear war between Pakistan and India.  Despite the many layers of interest, I found this meditative and impressionistic film a bit snoozy.
 
Now that PBS documentary series other than Ken Burns have been cut way back, HBO is clearly the premiere venue for docs, and here are some others of note:  Master of Light (MC-81) is the engaging story of George Anthony Morton, a Black man from Kansas City who spent his 20s in prison, after taking the rap for his drug-dealing mother.  While incarcerated he took up painting, and when he got out studied classical painting at the Florence Academy of Art.  Director Rosa Ruth Boesten follows him back to KC where he paints portraits of his family that are both aesthetically appealing and psychologically healing.  Though I would have been happy to see more about Morton’s career in art, it’s edifying to spend time in company with him and his family.
 
The subject is Speaker Nancy, as portrayed by documentarian daughter Alexandra, in Pelosi in the House (MC-66), and this intimate profile just locked in my admiration.  Nancy Pelosi has always seemed an effective political leader but (or maybe, because) somewhat robotic.  This film puts flesh and feeling on the public figure.
 

Also new to HBO is the 2019 profile Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice (MC-77), a fond and fine look back at a heartthrob with one of the memorable voices of my generation, from the Stone Poneys onward, as she followed the beat of a different drum through a varied and highly distinguished career.

Moonage Daydream (MC-83) was quite a different sort of music biopic for HBO.  I never paid any attention to David Bowie in his heyday, but in retrospect I can see his cultural significance.  Brett Morgen’s documentary is not a standard-issue primer on Bowie’s career, but a full-on 140-minute crash-course (with the emphasis on crash).  I don’t know when I’ve seen such a frenetically-edited film, with clips from dozens of classic films as well as Bowie’s artwork, animations, dancing, and acting, in addition to music videos.  Bowie’s own selective and ruminative narration brings some order to the kaleidoscopic chaos of the visuals, and grounds the whirlwind of his widespread artmaking.  When he performs one of his songs live, Morgen intercuts visuals from different eras and different Bowie personas, to highlight his continuous fervid re-invention.  It’s a lot, and could induce epileptic fits, but adds up to an admirable Cubist portrait. 

Fire of Love (MC-83, Disney+) was another Oscar nominee.  It’s the story of an intrepid French couple who annealed their love in flaming volcanoes all over the world, flirting with danger to get spectacular up-close footage of eruptions, until the one that killed them in 1991.  Though the impressive intimacy of their 16mm films has long been superseded by hi-def drone footage, they represent a remarkable feat and legacy, and the story of their relationship adds another dimension to Sara Dosa’s film.
 
Descendant (MC-87, NFX) is a good film about the last ship that illegally brought slaves from Africa to Alabama in 1860.  A rich man in Mobile bet another he could smuggle in slaves despite the long-time ban on international slave trade.  He succeeded, and then burned and sunk the ship Clotilda to avoid detection.  Though he and his family remained the dominant landowners in the area, after emancipation the Black people settled in an enclave known as Africatown, where their origin story became folklore until the recent discovery and raising of the ship, which led to community discussions of how the find might be memorialized and history rewritten.

The most interesting part of the previous film was the work of Zora Neale Hurston as anthropologist and filmmaker around 1930, when she was able to record and transcribe the account of last living survivor of the Clotilda (finally published as a book in 2018).  That led me to the recent “American Experience” documentary on PBS, Zora Neale Hurston: Claiming a Space, which included much of her original footage, but moreover the whole inspiring and infuriating story of her life.  Highly recommended.

As is another recent “American Experience” offering, Ruthless: Monopoly’s Secret History.  Did you know that the ubiquitous board game Monopoly was created as an anti-capitalist exercise by a Quaker woman?  Nor did I, but found out that and many other fascinating facts in this lively and twisty tale.

Favorite TV of 2022 and all-time

Again jumping off from a Metacritic compilation of top ten lists, I review my own choices for the best TV of 2022, but not before commenting on welcome encores for two of my favorite series, which had me back onto AcornTV for a month.
 
Doc Martin (Wiki) gets an honorable mention on my list of all-time favorites, plus this year’s, as my particular exemplar of comfort viewing, having found a durable formula sustained through ten seasons over eighteen years.  The final season ended a great series on a high note, having shown remarkable continuity in its depiction of a seaside community in Cornwall.  Virtually all the village characters remain, ringing changes on well-known personalities, from Dr. Ellingham’s autistic lack of bedside manner through a dozen more.  Intelligent and funny, lovely to look at, with many medical mysteries unpacked, this entire series has my highest recommendation, for a broad audience.
 
Nearly matched by The Detectorists (Wiki), a fantastic half-hour comedy about the members of a metal detecting club in the east of Britain, featuring Toby Jones and Mackenzie Crook, who also writes and directs.  After completing three seasons back in 2017, it returned with a movie-length Christmas special, about another uncovering of unsuspected treasure, under the verdant soil of the English countryside, and in the verdant soil of English comic acting.  Another of my picks to click with many sorts of viewers.
 
If you’re on Acorn, be sure to sample their Short Film Showcase, a series of ten short films, highlighted by performances from the likes of Sally Hawkins or John Hurt.  Each has its own merits, and they share the merit of being brief and distinctive.
 
Long cited as my favorite television show ever (and recently sampled yet again), David Simon’s The Wire has finally been outdistanced, in a photo finish, by the Vince Gilligan/Peter Gould tandem of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, which last year concluded its combined eleven-season run in perfectly dovetailed fashion, fitting together as neatly as the first two parts of The Godfather.  A new series of Borgen also solidified its place in my all-time list. 
 
[Click on “Read more” to see my brief round-up of the year’s best tv (with Metacritic rating for reference), and also my up-to-date all-time Top Ten list.]