All of this is to say that, as it currently stands, my tentative “best of” list would be seriously unimpressive. Winter's Bone stands head-and-shoulders above the rest, an immersive and intense study of a young woman's violent thrust into an insular world that never approaches condescension or slum glamour. A Prophet and The Ghost Writer would follow—two movies that could also be considered 2009 releases, depending on the specific date of release you're using. And the fourth, Shutter Island, would already be a movie that I've defended vociferously but that I still never expected would stand so high on a best-of-the-year-list—it's about as exciting and playful as you can make a rote genre picture, but it is still a rote genre picture. A few notches down from there would be The Human Centipede: First Sequence, and although I do have some kind of masochistic respect for this Euro-horror shock movie, I'd still feel uncomfortable commending it so enthusiastically.
All of this is not to say that 2010 has been a weak year for movies: as always seems to happen, the best movies of the year—the most exciting and original, the ones that come in underneath the radar and that really stand out during awards season—usually seem to pop up after the calendar year has already ended. What this does mean is that the most popular candidates you've seen on best-of lists don't actually, really, seem to offer that much ingenuity, generally speaking. Does this hold true, too, for three recent heralded movies—Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan, David O. Russell's The Fighter, and Danny Boyle's 127 Hours?
I was most disappointed by Black Swan, to my own admitted surprise—it was probably also the movie I was looking forward to most eagerly this winter. There are definitely things to recommend in the movie, most notably Natalie Portman's performance, which takes the plot's cliched character typologies and imbues them with real emotion, pathos, and pain. And a few of Aronofsky's jump cuts are effective shockers, and there's a hallucinogenic scene in which one character repeatedly stabs herself in the face that lives up to the movie's nightmarish premise. But for the most part, that premise is wholly unfulfilled. Black Swan is supposed to be a totally insane hallucination rising out of the main character's psychosexual desires, self-destructive ambition, and severe mental instability. So why does the whole thing seem so one-note, so predictable? It's not some stubborn sense of critical arrogance that makes me say I knew what was going to happen in practically every scene of the movie (or, not just that, anyway). The movie's pseudo-shocking sequences of bodily mutilation, its metaphorical doubling of Swan Lake's plot with Black Swan's own (Portman is the white swan! Kunis is the black swan, get it?!), the numerous scenes overloaded with reflections off of glass and mirrors behaving in unusual ways—the heavy-handedness of these stunts are worse than merely unsurprising, they seem to give the impression that Aronofsky has no faith in his audience to pick up on his themes, and therefore bludgeons us with them, without creativity or sophistication. Black Swan is able to achieve an air of the epic and the macabre, but even during its grandiose finale, the trajectory seems more schematic and self-congratulatory than inspired. The entire thing is spelled out for you in one line of dialogue, during which the ballet company's smarmy director, Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel), summarizes the storyline of Swan Lake; that synopsis, transplanted into the world of Black Swan, is about all the movie has going on conceptually.Over the last several weeks, bloggers and Internet critics have been writing about what may be Aronofsky's most celebrated movie, Requiem for a Dream, in a series of 102 posts commemorating the movie's tenth anniversary. Not all of the posts have been positive, though. John Lingan, for example, on his blog Busy Being Born, writes about how shaken and awestruck he was when he first saw the movie at 15 years old. Now, seeing the movie again ten years later, Lingan writes that he's “embarrassed because Requiem for a Dream is such an overwrought, self-satisfied, and juvenile film, and it appealed to me precisely because I shared all those qualities when I saw it... Requiem for a Dream, with its easy cynicism...and unremitting bleakness, is just the thing to make a person feel like they've lived a little and hardened in the process, particularly if that person hasn't really lived at all.” These are pretty harsh words—there are good things about Requiem for a Dream, and I don't think it's only identified with by bored suburbanite teenagers who want to feel badass—but in a way I think the general idea also applies to Black Swan. The movie, we're supposed to feel, is demented and phantasmagoric and nightmarishly lustful; if Black Swan is all of these things, it is so only in the most juvenile, simplistic, and self-satisfied ways. And if it's trying to be a horror movie (you know, one of those high-pedigree award-garnering horror movies), Black Swan absolutely needs to abandon the fathomable and comprehensible for at least some of its running time—but it never does, in an attempt to remain palatable to the crowd that wants to tiptoe towards the edge of their comfort zone but never really step past it.
Black Swan, at first glance, is a non-generic head trip that actually abides by the narrative and thematic patterns that we're used to; David O. Russell's The Fighter, on the other hand, is at first glance a totally generic underdog boxing story, but much of it is distinguished by aesthetic ingenuity and tricks of audience address that make the movie anything but stale. This is remarkable, considering how much the movie has in it that really should seem dreadfully cliché: it's the underdog story of Micky Ward, a boxer born and raised in Lowell, Massachusetts, who has to contend not only with a mostly-indifferent sports media but also with a larger-than-life mother and brother who care more about remaining in the spotlight than about young Micky's success. His brother Dickie was an aspiring boxer at one point in his life, whose main claim to fame was knocking down Sugar Ray Leonard in 1978 (many boxing fans say Leonard merely slipped). Now, Dickie is a bug-eyed crack addict living vicariously through his younger brother—he's the subject of an HBO documentary (a thought-provoking film-within-the-film) about the dangers of drug addiction. Micky's mother, meanwhile, is an overbearing matriarch still grasping at Dickie's one-time success, apparently unaware that her younger son has a greater chance at attaining the welterweight title. It's telling that Mark Wahlberg is forced to underplay in this movie; Christian Bale and Melissa Leo, as Dickie and his mother, give such grandiose, showboating performances that no one else is really given the chance for speechy, Oscar-baiting thespian moments. These are the kinds of performances I usually detest: the kind that equate tears and the wordiness of speeches and the sordidness of the character with immersive personification. Here, though, Leo and Bale really do inhabit these characters, and the actorly moments remain integrated to what is going on in the characters' heads and lives. For example, during the scene in which Dickie, now imprisoned for a plethora of charges, bombastically hosts a showing of the HBO documentary about his crack addiction in the prison cafeteria, Bale's wildly hyperbolic performance gives way to shame and rueful anger, and we realize that the overacting he offers throughout much of the film parallels Dickie Ward's efforts to convince himself and the world that he is still relevant. Later, when Leo's character intervenes between Micky and Dickie as they fight (verbally and physically) on the day of Dickie's release, Leo's embodiment of the crass Boston-matriarch stereotype softens into a portrayal of a mother torn between two sons—one cyclonic and narcissistic, who uses his personal troubles as an avenue for public performance; one timid and sensitive, who channels his feelings of aggression, inferiority, and neglect into his performance in the ring. There are better and quieter performances than both Bale's and Leo's this year, even though the two of them (or at least one) will almost certainly win an Oscar, but at least they are indeed portrayals rather than opulent shams.
Russell, the director of I Heart Huckabees and Three Kings, here tones down most of his auteurist touches, taking a backseat to the gigantic performances and the by-the-numbers script by Scott Silver, Paul Tamasy, and Eric Johnson. But Russell still visualizes the story intelligently, stylishly, and excitingly. The oft-mobile camera is as athletic as the fighters onscreen, and the seemingly effortless blend of production design, set design, costuming, and cinematography evokes a naturalistically seedy, rundown setting. Russell uses the filming of the HBO documentary within the film as a comment on his own film's fictionalization of reality, and even as a self-criticism of his crew's intrusion into and evocation of Lowell, Massachusetts. And a brutal scene of Dickie's delusional withdrawal in prison superimposes multimedia imagery of Dickie's win against Sugar Ray Leonard as well as him sparring with younger Micky in their front yard as a way of emphasizing how our conceptions of ourselves are essentially montages of filmed scenes (and how self-visualization is a sort of addiction in itself).
Aside from these more attention-grabbing moments, Russell is surprisingly skillful at getting the most out of this cliched underdog story. So much of this should reek with mustiness, especially Amy Adams's character (a bartender—or “MTV girl,” as Micky's sisters call her—perceived as haughty because she went to college for a couple years) and the climactic boxing match in which Micky puts all of his aggression towards his brother into the ring, fights for Lowell, and goes several unimpressive rounds before knocking out his opponent for the title. (The first two of these ideas are explicitly voiced by Dickie in the film—you know, just in case we didn't get it.) But amazingly, Adams's character remains sweet and effective, and that final match is incredibly exciting (the audience I saw it with responded viscerally). It's unfortunate that The Fighter still abides by cliché so much of the time, but the fact that it manages its cliches so well and is still so invigorating is some kind of compliment for the filmmaking prowess going on here.
In between Black Swan's hollowness and The Fighter's sense of excitement lies Danny Boyle's 127 Hours, a film that's frustrating because half of it is so intense and sophisticated, and the other half is totally self-defeating and counterintuitive. First, the good things: James Franco's performance, first of all, is just the right mixture of shallow self-absorption and ingratiating cavalierness. It's essential to the movie that we identify with the main character, Aron Ralston's, desire to abandon modern society and venture into the canyons near Moab, Utah, but we also need to realize that his deluded self-satisfaction and callousness are what lead him into his dire situation in the first place. (For those who don't know the plot: that situation entails Ralston being pinned between a massive boulder and a canyon wall for more than four days, eventually extricating himself only by cutting off his right arm with a pair of mountaineering pliers.) Boyle has often sought to speak to and for the younger generation (Trainspotting, The Beach), and it's obvious that he intends 127 Hours to be the broad story of an impetuous youthful generation whose steely self-reliance may ultimately leave it stranded, emotionally as well as physically. Franco perfectly embodies that generation here; he's a charming asshole throughout most of the film, even when he's immobilized.More problematic is Boyle's typically relentless style. The kinetic whiplash aesthetic that we've grown accustomed to through Slumdog Millionaire, Millions, The Beach, and so on is still present in 127 Hours, which may seem ironic given that the movie is largely about stasis, claustrophobia, abandonment, and helpless desperation. Half of the time, this aesthetic is appropriate: the movie nails the euphoric rush of escaping society and immersing oneself in pure nature, for example. Some of its split-second intercuts of the inner workings of digital camcorders, too, make clear the importance that self-mediation and digital technology hold in the lives of young people (and subtly criticize the main character by revealing that, even when he abandons modern society, he never really abandons modern society). In addition, the increasingly surreal overlays of Ralston's memories, premonitions, and hallucinations sometimes seem to burrow in to the very root of this character—in particular, flashbacks to a traumatic breakup and Ralston's apparent indifferent to a girl who loves him work surprisingly well.
But the movie often seems to be working against its central concept. The idea is right there in the title: the movie is supposed to be about the 127 agonizing, grueling, desperate hours Ralston spent anticipating his own death. We should be stranded in that canyon with him; we should feel the cruel march of time with him, and we should be equally hopeless about his chances to survive (even if we know the outcome of this story, Boyle could have at least temporarily persuaded us through style and plotting that Ralston may not survive this experience after all). The main flaw of the movie is ironic: it's simply too entertaining. The movie is only an hour and a half, and it feels like it: it flies by in a kinetic rush, and those 127 hours spent trapped in the canyon feel like little more than a really extreme sport.
The scene in which Ralston amputates his own arm is actually quite successful: Boyle doesn't spare us the grisly, sinew-snapping brutality of the self-mutilation. We are made quite aware of the horrific extremes that Ralston had to go to to save himself, which is only fair. The rest of the movie, though, lets us off easy, as Boyle's naturally invigorating style holds our hand through what should be a grueling experience. An example is the inclusion of Scooby-Doo in the film, thrown in because two girls that Ralston happens to meet in the canyons invite him to a party the following night with a huge inflatable Scooby-Doo: the first time the animated character appears in 127 Hours, it makes sense as a nagging vision of life's fleeting pleasures that are now unavailable to Ralston; the second time Scooby-Doo appears, it turns a horrific, demented sequence into a jokey prank, deflating the scene of the very real idea that Ralston is now facing his own mortality.
There's another huge, overarching problem in 127 Hours: it seems like the movie is supposed to be about how man's arrogant sense of his own superiority over nature can ruthlessly backfire on him. I haven't read the book on which the movie is based—Between a Rock and a Hard Place, written by Ralston himself—but it seems to entail a recognition that his foolhardy tackling of the extremes of nature, his cocky jaunt through a landscape that remains treacherous and indifferent to humanity, could have very easily killed him. The movie acknowledges this at times, too; it beautifully evokes the 15 minutes of sunlight that Ralston is granted each morning, as he stretches his left leg out into the light that cuts through the jagged canyon, his foot and shin basking in the warmth for a mockingly short period of time. It's as though nature is laughing at him for his arrogance: offering him a scant fraction of the light and warmth he could have experienced so easily, had he not thrust himself into this situation. It seems like the frenetic montages that open and close the movie, with modern businessmen and stockbrokers hustling down metropolitan streets in contrast to the solitude that Ralston will soon experience, is meant as a comment on our naïve assumption that humans can master everything that they come in contact with. (These montages are not at all infused into the fabric of the film, though, so they may just be two examples of Boyle's hollow restlessness.)
This criticism of man “dominating” nature is part of what the movie is about; but how does the film end? Of course Ralston survives, amid a victorious musical score (by A.R. Rahman) and swift editing (by Jon Harris) that turns Ralston into a triumphant victim. (That he may be, but by making the climax in this way, the film totally defuses any criticism it may have posed against its main character or against modern people in general.) Furthermore, after this climax, onscreen titles tell us that Ralston continues to climb mountains and explore canyons and now tells all of his loved ones where he is off to, which is a legitimate, true-to-life, and inspiring ending; but by emphasizing the inspirational aspects (the real-life Ralston also appears at the end with his wife and daughter) and eliminating the self-criticizing aspects, the movie leaves us with the idea that human beings really can conquer anything they confront, including nature, despite the billions of years that is has on us. This is totally antithetical to what the movie is at least partially about. 127 Hours tries to tell us that, by stubbornly believing we can trump any harsh landscape around us and, in fact, proving it, humans are practically invincible.
These problems aside, 127 Hours is still intense, exciting (to a fault), and complex. It is certainly better than Boyle's previous film, Slumdog Millionaire, although I'm one of the few people who thinks that most movies made over the last two years are better than Slumdog Millionaire.
Neither Black Swan, The Fighter, nor 127 Hours are great; I would be disappointed to see any of them on my top ten list at the end of the year. Here's hoping that the upcoming end-of-the-year releases will indeed be some of the best of the year, and that some of the highlights that I've missed will trump most of these award-garnering critics'-best-of candidates in terms of creativity, sophistication, complexity, and beauty.
A final note: you may already know about the recent court decision in Tehran that has imprisoned one of international cinema's foremost modern directors. Jafar Panahi—the director of The Circle, Crimson Gold, and Offside, three of the most beautiful, humane, and passionate films made anywhere over the last decade—has been jailed (along with many other Iranian filmmakers, writers, and artists who have commented upon the current state of affairs in their home country) for purported sentiments against the state. (This, despite the fact that Panahi's newest project is only 30 percent shot, and has not yet been edited.) Panahi has been sentenced to six years of imprisonment, accompanied by a ban of twenty years from writing and making films, giving interviews for the press, leaving Iran, or communicating with foreign cultural organizations. For any artist, such a harsh ruling meant to suppress one's personal creative voice would be a travesty; it is especially tragic in the case of Panahi, for it will deprive us of one of modern movies' most sincere and powerful voices.
If you'd like to sign a petition calling for the release of Panahi, here is a link to an online petition that has just been posted by almost twenty international cultural organizations in tandem: http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/solidarite-jafar-panahi/. Watching Offside again certainly isn't a poor form of tribute either.
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