Year-end round-up

Between the period when critics issue Top Tens and the period when annual awards are handed out, I’ll be doing my best to catch up with the best films of 2023, from streaming channels or on DVD, and adding them to this post.

With Barbie (MC-80, Max), the question is whether Mattel has coopted Greta Gerwig or rather the reverse?  And the answer is that it doesn’t really matter, since the brainy result is so effective and entertaining, confirming Gerwig as an auteur to be followed, wherever her career may take her.  Starting with a hilarious parody of the start of 2001, this film takes its wild and wonderful way from Barbieland to La-La-Land and back again.  As “Stereotypical” Barbie and Ken, Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling are outstanding, but all the other Barbies and Kens are pretty good as well, peopled by various celebrities and even some graduates of Sex Education.  Boldly pink, meticulously detailed, and comically lavish, the décor and costumes are delightfully over the top, along with music & dance routines to match.  It’s all giddy fun, the quintessence of pop art, with some serious points to make about feminism and the patriarchy.  So, is it a commercial for Mattel or a witty deconstruction?  Who cares, since the movie grossed a billion bucks, and worked out for all involved?  But I am highly unlikely to watch any more of the toy-branded blockbusters inevitably coming our way (unless Scorsese decides to direct one, ha-ha).

Instead the greatest filmmaker of my generation delivers a 3½ hour epic that mixes Western, gangster, historical, and romantic genres in the powerful but overstuffed Killers of the Flower Moon (MC-89, Apple+).  Scorsese’s adaptation of the David Grann true-crime bestseller shifts the focus from the birth of the FBI to the oil-rich Osage people, and their systematic murder by predatory white men, right around the time of the Tulsa Race Massacre in the same state.  Indigenous people are given a voice in this telling, though subsequently sidelined in a tale of crime and punishment that revolves around the white villains, with Robert DeNiro as the most duplicitously evil of the crime bosses he has portrayed for Scorsese (with more than a hint of contemporary political relevance), and Leonardo DiCaprio as the most dimwitted of his henchmen, somewhat offset by his love for his Osage wife, despite his involvement in the murder of her family members.  Lily Gladstone caught my eye in Certain Women, and her profound presence here has earned well-deserved Best Actress nominations.  As if to sum up his distinguished career at eighty, Scorsese flourishes all his strengths except concision, and packs recollection of so many of his films into this valedictory that it feels like a career retrospective in one big film.  So many good things, yet so protracted I wished it were a series (like Deadwood) rather than a single film.  Let’s hope it’s not the last masterpiece from the maestro.

For another glowing performance from Lily Gladstone, track down The Unknown Country (MC-82, Mubi).  She is the lodestone that holds together the heterogeneous elements of Morrisa Maltz’s debut feature.  After the death of the grandmother she’s been caring for, Gladstone hops in her old Cadillac and heads out on a roadtrip to recapture her ancestor’s early life.  She drives from Minnesota through the Dakotas to a cousin’s wedding on the Lakota reservation, and then follows grandma’s own wanderlust down to Texas.  That quest anchors disparate semi-documentary scenes amidst grand and degraded landscapes, finding humanity in unexpected corners of Trumpland, as heard on the car radio.  With echoes of Nomadland and Terrence Malick, Maltz mixes lush and hardscrabble imagery with Gladstone’s watchful depth, in this all-over-the-map but deeply-felt film.

 

Oppenheimer (MC-89, Peacock) is all that, and deserving of the many awards it will accumulate, an important story boldly and brilliantly told.  Cillian Murphy is uncanny (as different from Tommy Shelby as humanly possible) impersonating the title character, the brilliant physicist and “father of the atomic bomb.”  Oppy despaired of how his child was used and abused, only to lose his security clearance to a McCarthy-era kangaroo court.  A sterling supporting cast contributes a constellation of shining performances, too many to enumerate.  I might have wished that writer-director Christopher Nolan was not so given to bending and fracturing time, but hey, that’s his brand, and uncertainty of position in time and space was one of J. Robert Oppenheimer’s principles, along with Heisenberg himself in a cameo.  My comprehension was aided by watching documentaries, Day After Trinity before and the dvd bonus To End All War after, to keep up with and confirm Nolan’s veracity in the telling.  I don’t need to tell you what the film is about, but just to add that it is dazzling, engrossing, and truthful.  Let the laurels be bestowed.

In style and setting, The Holdovers (MC-82, Peacock) is a 1970s throwback that revisits two of director Alexander Payne’s great early films, Election for its high school setting and Sideways for cranky star Paul Giamatti.  Here the school is a New England prep (filmed partly at Deerfield Academy, where co-lead Dominic Sessa was discovered), and Giamatti is a cantankerous old teacher of ancient history.  He’s flunked the son of a major donor and hence been assigned the duty of watching over the students whose parents have abandoned them over the Christmas holiday.  His charges are soon reduced to one troubled boy, watched over by the school’s Black cafeteria manager (Da’Vine Joy Randolph, deserving of her supporting actress nominations), whose son recently graduated from the school but, lacking money for a college deferment, was killed in Vietnam.  The three eventually take off for a revelatory holiday roadtrip to Boston.  Working from David Hemingson’s semi-autobiographical script, Payne is somewhat less sardonic and more sentimental than usual, conspiring to produce a new breed of "Christmas classic," with a pleasant mix of wit and heart.

With American Fiction (MC-82, MGM+), Cord Jefferson debuted as director and won an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay.  Oscar-nominated Jeffrey Wright is the film’s center of gravity (and levity) as a college professor who writes erudite novels based on Greek classics.  Angry at his publisher’s demand to write Black, he composes a satiric ghetto novel that meets unexpected success.  Meanwhile, he has returned from the distant West Coast to his well-educated and well-to-do family, and their homes in Boston and on the South Shore.  With mother, brother, and sister (all well-portrayed), he seethes with barely repressed anger (derived from his father, whose prior suicide overshadows all) in a quietly comic manner.  A welcoming neighbor lady might soften his rough edges, but he’s just too abrasive.  A movie deal leads to the film we are watching, which is given three different endings in a meta twist that definitely worked for me, preposterously funny, clinching the film’s theme of the twists and turns of blaxploitation.

In Fallen Leaves (MC-86, Mubi), the accomplished Finnish filmmaker Aki Kaurismäki deploys a minimalist style reminiscent of Bresson or Fassbinder, but overflowing with humor and humanity.  This understated rom-com about two deadpan characters leading dreary lives is spare and constrained in its 81 minutes, but potent in its nonstop cinephile allusions and precisely-chosen pop songs, which serve to universalize the poignancy of this unlikely pairing.  She’s a lonely fortysomething moving between various menial jobs, he’s a drunk of similar age working in railroad yards or construction sites.  They meet in passing, then connect but lose touch, meet again but have a falling out, before a crisis brings them together again.  Though the underclass social milieu may be compared to a Loach or Dardenne film, the whole is infused with a wry wit that shines through, even when the woman turns on the radio and it’s always playing news from the war in Ukraine, of particular interest since Russia also borders Finland (no trace of that country’s high happiness quotient here).  If you ever sample the Mubi channel, don’t miss this film. 

Another worthwhile film from my brief stint back on Mubi was Full Time (MC-83), a social realist story in an action film style, mundane but jacked up, about a stressed-to-the-max single mother with two young children commuting from a distance to her job as head chambermaid at a ritzy Paris hotel during a rolling series of transit strikes.  Eric Gravel’s film also plays against type in starring Laure Calamy, who is more familiar in romantic comedy roles, but the desperation that draws laughs there is effectively distraught here.  The film hurtles through a transformative week of her life, demonstrating all the hurdles she must surmount to make a living and a life for her kids, a mission that may seem impossible. 

 
I certainly appreciated the authenticity and genuine feeling of Past Lives (MC-94, Kanopy), a rendering of real life that resonates through many lives.  First-time writer-director Celine Song tells her own story of emigrating from Korea to Canada at 12, then to New York at 24, but with the titular flourish of in-yun, a Korean concept of reincarnation where people are connected from one life to the next.  So at 36, the central character so wonderfully incarnated by Greta Lee confronts the past she left behind, when her childhood boyfriend (now the soulful Teo Yoo) comes impulsively from Seoul to NYC, where she lives with her writer-husband (John Magaro).  For a couple days of walks and talks around Dumbo and the East Village, they explore their might-have-beens and never-weres, in meticulously written and shot scenes of buried feelings and bruising disappointments among well-intentioned people.  I was involved with these characters and settings throughout, but in the end I liked the film without swooning over it.

Judy Blume is having a moment in her mid-80s, in the news because her YA books are being banned again, with a good new documentary on Amazon, and after fifty years an excellent adaptation of Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret (MC-84, Starz) by writer-director Kelly Fremon Craig.  As a follow-up to her striking debut, The Edge of Seventeen, this might have been called The Edge of Twelve, about a sixth-grader negotiating a move from NYC to NJ in 1970, and meeting a new group of friends eagerly anticipating breasts, menstruation, and first kisses.  Abby Ryder Fortson is outstanding as Margaret, charming and believable, and matched by Rachel McAdams as her mother and Kathy Bates as grandmother.  Besides physical maturation, Margaret is on a quest for religion, since her parents’ mixed marriage led to family ruptures and an agnostic upbringing.  It’s all funny and truthful, and rivals Pen15 as an exploration of the tween girl experience.  I expected modest entertainment, but got one of the best and most enjoyable films of the year, just a missing scene or two from perfection.

Sofia Coppola delivers another of her bird-in-a-gilded-cage films in Priscilla (MC-79, Max), adapted sympathetically from Priscilla Presley’s memoir Elvis and Me.  It’s an effective counterpoint to the previous year’s Elvis, without a note of his music.  Instead the focus is on the title character, wonderfully embodied by Cailee Spaeny, from the 14-year-old ninth-grader he (played with some plausibility by the towering Jacob Elordi) met and groomed while still a soldier in Germany, to when he later brought her over to Graceland in semi-chaste intimacy bordering on captivity, finally marrying her and fathering her child, until she ultimately awakes from the drugged dream of their relationship.  Clearly the story is told from her perspective but - as is Coppola’s wont - through surfaces and styles rather than interiority.  We see Priscilla/Cailee go from adorable little teen to pompadour-ed arm-candy doll to 70s mad housewife letting her hair down.  We don’t know what she’s thinking, but we do know how her look is changing, which is emblematic of her life and times. 

I seem to preface my response to any Wes Anderson film with the proviso that I’m no fan (except for Fantastic Mr. Fox and French Express) and Asteroid City (MC-75, AMZ) is no exception, another all-star piece of whimsy most notable for the cast list.  He must be able to lure A-listers, in addition to his regulars like Jason Schwartzman and Tilda Swinton, by promising them only a day or two of shooting on a stage set in Spain.  So, as usual it’s a very mixed bag of bits.  Some incongruous jokes land, and some do not, but nothing much holds together, in this story of a young people’s science fair in 1955 at a remote desert town, famous for the ancient asteroid that hit there and the more recent testing of atomic bombs, presented as a play within a play.  It moves fast, with clipped dialogue and rapid set changes, but the hypertrophic invention sometimes drags as the viewer tries to keep up.  I didn’t hate the movie, but can offer no recommendation.

By now the Oscars have been awarded – with the anticipated and deserving sweep by Oppenheimer – and there are still some nominees I have yet to see, so I will be catching up with them as I can, including two that arrive on Hulu in March that will provide the finishing touch to my long composite review of recent offerings on that streaming channel.