A Face in the Dark

Below is the second chapter of a short story that I've been working on. The first chapter was published on this blog in early December.


Chapter two 'a certain logical conclusion'

His face was thin and sallow, with deep, cutting wrinkles on either side, running from underneath the eyes to just above the chin. His mouth was firmly set into a displeased, dour grimace, stretching pronouncedly downward at the corners, which seemed to elongate the skin that covered his face, pulling it tautly over the features of his skull. He was almost hairless, with only a shadow of gray hair running up to the edge of his bald scalp. Worst of all were his eyes. Eclipsed by the sharp features of his skull, they were buried deep within a pair of black-hole eye sockets. The glint of two beady pupils, barely visible within chasms of darkness. Because the overhead light was still on in Lena's office, it cast a sharp backlight upon the man; the oblong tip of his head gleamed brightly, but his facial features could only struggle through a murky fluorescent pall. Nevertheless, I saw him now with an almost supernatural vividness. He was four stories above me, his appearance partially obscured by the reflection of city lights on the glass in front of him, but he could have been two feet away. For those features that I could not quite make out in the darkness, my brain did the rest of the work, filling in the blanks in order to complete the hideous picture. I had never seen the man before, but I was certain that the vivid picture that now arose within my mind was absolutely correct. Not once did I doubt my fleeting apprehension of him standing there, across the street, in my dead wife's office.

It was not only that I did not question the cosmic coincidence of it, it was not only that the moment's cruel illogic did not even occur to me. More than that, I immediately recognized that there was, without a doubt, a connection between this man and my wife's death. I became convinced almost instantaneously when the thought first occurred to me, with the kind of steely positivity that accompanies only those immense truths of which you become certain far before there is any tangible, concrete evidence to assure you of its validity.

Vivified, shaken awake, I spun around violently and found the nearest stairway. No time for the machinery of the elevator. I bolted through the exit door, leaped down six stairs at a time, my hands clutching the rails on either side. I almost slipped, missing stairs completely, numerous times, but I was made agile by my sudden action, impelled into swiftness. I made it to the ground floor of the hospital and raced down two hallways, oblivious to the bewildered stares and disparaging glances cast in my direction. Made it to the automatic front doors and was momentarily detained while I waited for the doors to open, impatiently. Took three bounding strides forward until I came to the curb. Glanced frenetically down the street towards oncoming traffic, then bolted into the street anyway, fairly certain that there was enough room between me and the rush of steel vehicles. Horns blared and tires screeched, but I ran madly, and made it to the curb without incident. As my right foot pounded heavily down upon the concrete of the sidewalk, it occurred to me, with a lightning bolt of rage and helplessness, that I had narrowly avoided the fate that had befallen my wife only hours earlier. Being reminded of this, my legs pumped away even more violently, and I hurtled myself forward without hesitation. I knew only that I must come face to face with the man who had materialized in Lena's office; had to become absolutely certain that he was no horrible trick conjured by my bedeviled mind.

I flung open the heavy glass door at 92011 Lexington Avenue, abruptly disturbing the sleepy silence that filtered through the lobby. The security guard at the front desk raised his head with a jolt of alarm. I glanced at him, mostly in annoyance—I had not even considered the fact that there would be anyone to impede me—and, after realizing that I couldn't possibly explain myself in my current state, simply rushed past him with an awkward gait between a walk and a run. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him stand up in a panic, then half-jog toward the bank of elevators at the far side of the lobby to cut me off. I still avoided looking at him. He extended his right arm towards me—hoping, I suppose, that I would politely respond to his gesture and offer an explanation. He had been shouting at me ever since I entered, but I didn't have the time or inclination to respond. I glanced at his belt; he had a walkie-talkie and a nightstick that I did not want to provoke him to use. He looked middle-aged, I had surmised from the split-second in which I had looked at him, and a layer of doughy fat surrounded his midsection, but I still hoped to avoid any altercation. I kept on moving forward towards the elevators, picking up my pace; the guard was only a few feet away. For a brief moment, I wondered whether I should explain to him that I was a detective who had been called out for some semi-plausible reason, but I then remembered that, in the disorienting rush of events that had confronted me that night, I had never even thought to bring my badge with me. I concluded that this security guard would be hard-pressed to believe that this frenzied character running through the lobby was, in fact, an officer who inconveniently had forgotten to carry his identification.

Finally, we met, he and I, less than ten feet from the row of elevators, and he placed his hand roughly on my right shoulder. I took half a step back and looked him in the eyes for the first time. First, I saw panic, then fear, then simple curiosity; he was ready to restrain me forcefully, if necessary, but at this point I did not yet pose a physical threat. Only an abrupt intrusion. I empathized with him, this man who had simply come to work and had expected yet another night of dull, uneventful surveillance; but I didn't forget the face of the man who had forced me to race here so single-mindedly, and I knew I needed to get to the eighth floor without delay.

“What do you want?,” the security guard asked.

I wondered whether I should try to explain what had actually happened as concisely and reasonably as I could, but immediately recognized that, even if he did happen to believe me, my hurried anecdote would cost me too much time. In any case, I severely doubted my ability at the time to speak cogently and sanely, and even questioned whether or not my mouth would be able to perform the physical actions required to voice the words conceived of by my brain. So after a moment of awkward and alarmed silence, a jumble of words, the first things that came to my mind, spilled out.

“My wife...Lena Davenport, she works here.”

I left it at that, and the guard continued to gape at me in bewilderment. Finally, he nodded slowly and exaggeratedly, as though he needed to slow down and emphasize everything he did in order for me to comprehend. Maybe he was right.

“Okay...is she here now? Do you need to see her?”

I didn't want to explain myself any further, so I jerked my head away from him and took one assertive step forward towards the elevators. He took two quick running steps after me and placed his hand on my shoulder again, tugging roughly, spinning me around towards him.

Before I knew what I was saying—before I thought about how mad I would sound—nonsensical words that approximated my insanity began to ooze from the space between my lips. “There's a man in her office. I've seen him. Just now.” I turned around, walked again towards the elevators, was close enough to lean over and press the button.

The man swore at me, his frustration growing by the second. “Listen, you're gonna have to explain.” He stepped after me; his black boots clicked loudly on the floor. The echoes reverberated.

I didn't turn around to face him, and in mid-step I responded, “I don't have time to explain.” I leaned over and pushed the button placed halfway between the two elevators before me. The circle with an up arrow emblazoned on it suddenly illuminated itself. A digital readout above the elevator began counting down from the twenty-first floor. I felt a rough hand on my shoulder again, as I heard the guard behind me unclasp his walkie-talkie from his belt and a burst of static erupted from it. The man said, “John, I may need you in the lobby, I think I have a situation here,” and the series of words sounded entirely abstract and ludicrous to me. I was, it now seemed, a “situation”; the revelation amused and infuriated me at the same time.

While I waited for the elevator to descend, I came to the conclusion that the man behind me did, in fact, deserve an explanation, or at least that a fumbling half-explanation of my frenzied state of mind would allow me to think through my discombobulation. So lethargically I planted my left foot and spun on my right heel, pivoting in the man's direction. I remember thinking, halfway through this movement, that I should have been tired, emotionally if not physically, and it's true that a dull throbbing ache was rapidly spreading throughout my legs and calves, but my mind was overworking itself into hyperactivity; it was as though I was coursing to the peak of a caffeine fix, my heart was racing and my arms and hands were twitching and moving of their own volition, and I felt idle and deadened if I didn't just force myself to do something.

I turned towards the guard and I'm sure he recognized my current state of anxiety. To my surprise—and, I can only assume, to his as well—we traded looks for a long, silent interval, as though we realized that verbal communication would accomplish nothing and tried to fathom each other through piercing observation. What would I have seen if I had been in his place? I'm unnerved by what that image may have been: desperate, pleading, beseeching him to trust the madman in front of him. He, meanwhile, remained at least as curious as he was alarmed, and although he still held the walkie talkie in his hand, ready for a response, and his other hand hovered over his nightstick, and his eyes flicked back and forth between mine kinetically, there seemed to be some compassion in his uncertainty. I may have been incomprehensible and frenetic, but he seemed to detect that that precarious state had been instigated by something tragic, awful, intense. Maybe the empathy that I saw in his eyes was only a product of my own imagination; maybe I convinced myself, within fleeting moments of meeting this stranger, of the sensitivity and rightness of his character, simply because I wanted to believe that this man would provide a humane counterbalance to the rest of the night.

Before realizing how unstable I would sound, I tried to reassure the man before me. “I'm not crazy. Something happened to my wife tonight. And I've just seen a man in her office, a stranger, someone who shouldn't be there.” The word that had swung towards me on the doors to the room where my wife's body currently lay came back to me, all of a sudden. “This is an emergency. Really. I need your help.”

Either through compassion or exasperation, the guard who stood before me seemed to accept my state of anxiety as a plea for help. His left hand, which had been hovering over the club hooked into his belt, slowly moved forward towards me, and the palm stretched itself out in a gesture of consolation. He half-opened his mouth, about to respond, when the walkie-talkie in his right hand erupted with a blip of static and a harsh alien voice. It must have been “John”—some agent of authority hovering above me somewhere in the building. In my irascibility, I assumed that John was only waiting for a transmission like this from my security guard, a transmission that would allow him to exert some unrestrained yet justified force. John said: “I read you, Henry. Some uniforms are on their way. I'll be right down, try to detain the situation. Over.” Despite my distress, I chuckled at his sign-off, at the pleasure I assumed he felt at uttering it so officiously.

No response from my brother Henry was necessary; he hooked the walkie-talkie back onto his thick black belt. Now, I was sure, panic mode had given way to overwhelming curiosity. Meanwhile, the elevator was on its way; it had just passed the tenth floor. Two more floors and, maybe, the cypher I was hunting for would board the elevator. I wondered if the hideous sharp face would greet me when the doors opened. Would he take the stairs? Would he simply wait for me in my wife's office, smirking cruelly, waiting for me to confront him desperately?

Henry spoke to me now sensitively, with a voice usually reserved for socially-challenged adolescents. “What happened to your wife? Is she okay?”

After a moment:

“No.” Shook my head.

“And there's a man in her office. A stranger.”

“Yes.”

I wondered how he was going to detain the situation.

He nodded, consolatory.

“Alright. What floor?”

“Eighth.” I thought that was unclear. “Eight.”

I looked back up at the digital readout. It had just switched from seven to six. I didn't turn around, but I assumed that Henry had noticed the same thing. I wondered what I wanted, what I hoped to see when the doors opened. To see that horrible skeletal face again, in such close proximity—the thought made me shudder, the idea chilled me inside; but, at the same time, nothing was of more crucial importance, to question that man, to alleviate my distress, my uncertainty. I felt confident in the power of my loss: to meet the awful hellish emptiness of his eyes with the pain of my own, I felt certain that he, whoever he was, would be unable to resist my frenzied plea for answers.

Henry and I remained locked in this curious dual pose: me, head arched upwards towards the digital readout, hands clasped within one another, skin rubbing against skin, restless; him, standing behind me, presumably in a similar pose, waiting in anticipation for the elevator to alight. The silence that drifted throughout the lobby was distinct and abrasive; hums of heaters and fluorescent lights commingled to create a devilish chord. Never before had a handful of brief moments seemed more like a taunting eternity.

Before the uniforms had a chance to arrive, the elevator finally counted its way down to three, then two, then L. Only a few seconds elapsed until the foreboding metallic doors churned open, but in these few seconds a whirlwind of doubts and anxieties flickered through my tortured head. What would I ask the man before me, if indeed he was waiting within the elevator when it opened? What basis did I have to suspect him of my wife's death, besides the taunting coincidence of his appearance in her office so soon afterwards? In those few haunting seconds, two images flitted back and forth before me like the pages of a flipbook, skipping kinetically: one, a face of pure evil and cruelty, glaring at me, haloed by the sickening glow of fluorescent office lights; the other, Lena's face as she smiled at me in her happiest moments, beaming carelessly. It sickened me to see these two faces intercut with one another, dissolving into one and the same creature; good, evil; until my mind could no longer distinguish one from the other, and I suddenly, in disorientation, forgot which face I expected to greet me when the doors of the elevator opened.

They opened, at last—more slowly than usual, I thought, as the metal doors lazily churned aside. Inside, the image that met me was deflating: nothing, a pocket of fluorescent light, no body, nothing. The spark of desperate outrage that had compelled me in the first place was now suddenly extinguished, crushed out by prolonged uncertainty, ignorance, helplessness. Anything—any altercation, inconceivable revelation—would have been better than this nothingness, any face better than the hollowness of that elevator.

I was snapped out of my dejection by a slight cough behind me; Henry cleared his throat, almost politely, I thought. His forced noise was inquisitive: inside the noise was an unasked question—was I crazy? Did the man I was looking for exist?

I placed my right hand against the elevator door to keep it from closing, and I pivoted back towards Henry, looking him in the eye. The skittish, desperate energy with which I had burst into the building was now gone; my exhaustion, and my encroaching doubt, had flattened it into meek and deluded hope. There was a shrug in my eyes as I turned to Henry, and he simply kept that pose of readiness, confusion, alarm, and sympathy.

“I need to see her office,” I said. The life was gone from my eyes but there was still an aching urgency in my voice. Henry nodded and walked past me into the waiting elevator car.

“Alright then,” he said.

The enormous door began shoving restlessly against my arm as I held it open, and I stepped inside after him. The doors closed behind us. We traveled the eight floors in silence. There was syrupy and absolutely hellish jazz music oozing out of the speakers. The floor under us was a thin blue-and-gray carpet that seemed to soak up the nauseating light like a sick sponge.

On the eighth floor, the doors spread open with a ding. Across the hallway was an elegant desk with a light-blue glass top, and behind it a series of cracked glass panels that obscured the dark offices within. On one of these panels was a board listing office numbers and employees' names, with the name and logo for Perpetua Financial Consulting etched across the top. I stepped wordlessly from the elevator and peered at this list of offices; Henry unhooked a flashlight from his belt and swept it down the hallways, illuminating only a dim and eerie intersection of drab office architecture. I squinted, and in the dim light that still filtered there, I could make out her name—Lena Davenport, #817D. It offered a small reassurance that I had remembered her office number correctly—at least this was a sign that I still had control of my mental faculties, I told myself. Then a cruel realization followed: if this was true, if I hadn't simply been the victim of illusion and warped hallucination, then that man had in fact been in my wife's office. May still be there now. I stepped off quickly to the right. Henry followed me. The floor was made of smooth white tile and the footsteps of our shoes clacked in echo of each other—loud high ominous reverberating clicks. We worked our way down half of another hallway when we both realized that a sharp fluorescent light was slanting towards us from the intersection of another hallway. The light was on in one of the offices. We walked hurriedly down the hallway, took a sharp turn into another, dread and urgency commingling. The office light was emanating from behind a thick glass door at the center of this hallway. I took a step forward until I felt Henry's hand on my shoulder; he gently held me back and stepped in front of me, flashlight extended and what looked like a taser gripped firmly in his other hand. Apparently he didn't doubt my story any more, and although, in any other situation, I may have resented his overeager vigilance, here I welcomed it. We neared the door to a bank of offices, one of which, we could now see, was harshly lit by a single overhead light. Its door gaped open forebodingly—a warning.

I glanced at the number stenciled next to the outer door as we approached it: 817. As Henry pushed against the door with his outstretched flashlight—unlocked, it swung easily open—I could squint into the yellow light and make out the smaller number next to the inner office. 817D. My wife's office. Her name was painted on the wall next to the open door.

Henry stood there for a moment, holding the door open with his body, his gaze still firmly locked on the open office door and the light that cut through it. I could tell he was scared. So was I. I wished I had brought my gun.

I slipped past the open door, past Henry, and took three long uncertain strides towards Lena's office. The sound of my footsteps disappeared into the thick carpet. Henry walked up beside me. I was close enough now to see inside the office, through the half-open door; but all I could make out was a thick old mahogany desk, the side of a bookcase, and diluted neon lights filtering in from the city outside. I reached my right hand out, pushed gently on the door, and opened it the rest of the way. I couldn't hear Henry breathe.

The door made no noise as it swung open until it tapped lightly against the wall. Lena's chair, behind the desk, its back to the row of windows, was empty. There were two dark red padded chairs on the other side of the desk, facing the windows. There was a man in one of them. He was not moving. He was sitting and looking out the window. I could only see the back of his head. He was almost bald and the tip of his head came to a sharp and ugly point. Thin, short black-gray hair ran up to his scalp. He was an ugly silhouette. There was a file open on the desk—Lena's desk.

Henry stepped up next to me. He saw what I saw. I heard him unable to suppress a gasp.

I took one more decisive step forward and rapped loudly on the door as I passed, wanting to make our presence known—as though the man before us was somehow not aware of it. He still didn't move. My eyes darted to the reflection of his face in the window; it was smudged and distorted, but it seemed to be the same hideous face that had returned my stare minutes earlier. I kept taking half-steps forward in trepidation, but his absolute stillness was beginning to make me shudder. It could have been a skeleton sitting before me.

“You,” I finally said, absurdly. Henry stood standing at the doorway. The figure didn't move. “Get up.”

No one moved for a long moment. Slow deep breathing and melodic city sounds were all that could be heard. Then finally the man placed both hands on the armrests. He stiffened his arms and pushed himself up. He stood facing the windows. He was incredibly tall, and the ceiling light, mere feet away from his bald sloping head, struck him harshly, and a horrible jagged shadow was cast across the office floor.

“Turn around,” I said.

The man obeyed, pivoting towards me slowly. Though I tried to interpret some emotion from the features of his petrified face—I expected, I suppose, a look of gloating condescension or merciless self-satisfaction, something that would betray his guilt—the man's skeletal face told me nothing. He simply returned my inquisitive gaze, though his eyes were lifeless. His hands hung awkwardly at his sides as he stood there, absolutely rigid. The suit he wore was an elegant dark gray, well-tailored, but somehow it still seemed too small for him.

I didn't know what to ask him, what to say—too much was on my mind. I began with the most obvious question I could think of.

“Who are you?”

The man stood there blankly for a moment—either unwilling to answer or unsure how. I could sense Henry standing next to me.

Finally, the man responded. His voice was as guttural and monotone as I had presumed it would be.

“My name is Mark Voland. Who are you?”

Before I could answer, a harsh burst of static erupted from Henry's walkie-talkie, followed by the voice of the man that Henry had contacted earlier: “John,” the top-middle-level security officer who I had imagined cooling his heels in some dank room outfitted with a bank of television monitors. “Henry, I've got two officers in the lobby down here,” John said. “Where are you? Is the situation under control?”

Without peeling my eyes away from the man before me, I heard Henry unclip the radio from his belt and take four long strides out of the office. Henry's response came from the outer office a few feet away, muffled: “Not exactly. Come up to room 817D now. There's someone here.”

A moment later, John's response: “Copy. We'll be there as soon as we can.” Another blip of white noise and the radio became silent. I waited for Henry to return to the office until I addressed Mr. Voland. My confidence was slowly rejuvenating itself within me, and I could feel a hot white energy rising inside of me again—the same kind of wild anxiety that I had felt upon seeing that face less than twenty minutes beforehand. I wasn't crazy, I could now tell myself with certainty; the man before me was not a phantom. I took a step towards him. He did not react.

“What are you doing in my wife's office?”

I thought this question would affect him somehow; if he really didn't know who I was, and if he had had anything to do with Lena's death, surely he would not have been able to conceal some kind of surprise at discovering that I was her husband. But as I peered desperately at him, I realized with dismay that, again, I could not read any discernible reaction from his stone-set features. I had spent the last six years interrogating suspects, reading and interpreting their reactions and gesticulations, studying the physiological behavior of people who lie, and I believe I can claim, with no boastfulness, that I have become an expert on visible human behavior and the ways in which it reflects those psychological undercurrents we would rather keep concealed. I could read nothing on Mr. Voland's face, besides a haunting emptiness.

“Lena Davenport is your wife?”

I was going to say was—not is—but instead I just nodded. It was then that I believe I detected the first trace of an emotion on his face: a smile.

“What are you doing in her office?,” I repeated.

He sighed, then, as an answer, reached behind him and picked the manila file folder off of Lena's desk. It was an enormous file, overflowing with sheaths of paper and color-coded Post-It notes that were overloaded with my wife's frantic scribbling. I grabbed the file from him, with some reticence, and noticed the name written upon the blank tab: Consolidated Metropolitan Insurance. My eyes shot up to Mr. Voland's face once more.

“This is the case your wife has been working on. Have you heard of my company?”

“Your company?,” I asked, unable to suppress my astonishment. “You own Consolidated Metropolitan?”

He shook his head, though his eyes did not leave mine for a second. “No. I'm just mid-management. Low on the totem pole. But two of my colleagues and I have been meeting with Mrs. Davenport—with your wife—in a consulting capacity. Maybe she's told you...our company has been experiencing both legal and financial difficulties recently, and she's been helping us—well, you know, get ourselves out of the red.”

I glanced at a few of the papers that I currently held in my hand, but they were banking ledgers, accounting statistics, information regarding insurance policies and potential payouts versus foreseeable profits, and so on—they may as well have been written in a foreign language. I took another step forward, reached past Mr. Voland, and threw the file back onto Lena's desk.

“Okay, you're a client of my wife's. That still doesn't explain why you're here.”

“Well, we had a meeting this afternoon. Or yesterday afternoon, I guess. Maybe she told you?”

He seemed to expect an answer, but there was something impertinent, even mocking, in his question. He must have known about my wife's death; another fraction of a smile crept across his face, and I was sure that he was taunting me.

I didn't answer his question, so he continued: “The meeting went late, and we must have left around 5:30 or so. My two colleagues and I had a drink around the corner. It was a celebration, I suppose—things started to seem promising, you know? Mrs. Davenport is incredibly good at her job, I hope you know. So we had a few drinks and then were going our separate ways. I was walking home and was passing by—” (he turned his head around and arched it towards Lexington Avenue, eight flights down from us) “—right down there in front of the building, when something occurred to me. Mrs. Davenport had suggested a course of action involving subrogation of corporate entities who had been responsible for certain losses that had been incurred by our clients. Do you know insurance fairly well, Mr. Davenport?”

“No.”

“Well...I don't want to bore you with the specifics. To put it simply, Consolidated Metropolitan had compensated some of our individual clients for certain policies—health insurance, unemployment, liability, things of that nature—when in fact I thought we could prove that certain corporate parties could be held responsible for the losses that those individuals had incurred. Lena pointed out that we were within our rights to pursue legal action against these corporate entities, as long as we could document, in court, their culpability regarding our clients' payouts. About three hours ago, as I said, I was passing by across the street there, when certain policies came to mind—namely health insurance policies for construction workers who had experienced some respiratory problems after working at a job site just north of the city. We were unable, at the time, to prove that their employers had knowingly put them at risk, but we had always thought that the documentation supplied to us by those employers was somewhat specious, and Mrs. Davenport agreed with us after we showed her the risk assessments that the construction company had supplied us with.”

I was growing tired with his lengthy response, and I wondered if he wasn't trying to talk circles around me—impressing me with the minutiae of insurance coverage while avoiding an explanation of why he was actually in Lena's office. So I said, simply, “So?”

“So, I came back up to her office before going home, hoping to catch her at work and hopefully come up with another solution before calling it a night. I don't know if that makes sense, considering we had already been discussing possible solutions all afternoon, but I hope you understand that Consolidated Metropolitan is more than simply a job for me; I've been an employee since the company was founded four years ago, and I've been a witness as the company made some unforgivable mistakes and, in a way, dug its own hole. Anything I can do to help the company, to restore the potential we once had, I will do, and the opportunity to do so earlier tonight proved too propitious to resist.”

I balked at his wording; I wondered if someone in his position would actually explain himself so convolutedly, with such rehearsed precision. As I mentioned, I had had considerable experience in observing the gestures, the oversights, the slips of the tongue, of criminals and liars and people with something to hide; and I had encountered numerous people who had explained themselves with similarly ostentatious rhetoric. In almost every case, they had had plenty of time to rehearse their defense, and had made the mistake of scripting their own dialogue with overzealous exactitude. I distrusted him now more than ever; his defense was self-incriminating.

“What time did you come back up to my wife's office?”

“Uh...it must have been about ten.”

I turned to Henry, who was still standing next to me with a taser gripped in his right hand and a walkie-talkie in his left. He watched the man before us, Mr. Voland, with a similar combination of anxiety and distrust. I asked Henry, “Did you see him earlier tonight?”

Henry shook his head, but never took his eyes off of the stranger. “No, but my shift started at ten. If he came back earlier, the other guard might have seen him.”

I recounted the events of the night before, and for the first time the actuality of what had happened to me—not on an emotional level, but on a tangible, physical level—struck me with a vivid clarity, an almost cruel mundaneness. When had I fallen asleep on the couch, watching some idiotic cop show? When had that telephone call from the hospital shaken me awake? When did I start to walk across town, and when did I arrive at the hospital? I concluded that I must have gotten the call at about 10:30, eleven at the latest. My mind raced as the hypothetical timeline formulated itself: Lena could not have left her office later than ten o'clock. Conceiving of the previous night's events in such a methodical, exact fashion was both mercilessly mocking and a reassuringly tedious enterprise: reassuringly tedious, because I could conceive, at least momentarily, of Lena's death as mere happenstance, yet another natural (if horrific) occurrence removed of its sadistic metonymy; mercilessly mocking, because it forced me to re-experience the night of my wife's death with a cold practicality that now seemed vulgar, and because the insignificant and unbearable things that brought me to the hospital constituted (I was now sure) a rift in my life, before which my completeness was so uncomplicated that I took it for granted, and after which I could never be complete again. Abjectly hopeless, I now realized that there was a part of me (not only Lena's part, the part of me that Lena controlled exquisitely, but the part of me that thought it knew what life was and who I was) that was irrevocably lost.

My mind was pulsating, throbbing, trying (and failing) to process the man's words objectively. Without doubt, there was something suspicious in his story—his explanations were convenient, well-thought-out. And of course, there was the question of what he was still doing in Lena's office, so long after (what? how to say it?) the incident. But I tried to work through his sequence of events anyway, seeing if there was any way to corroborate his story. I looked at Mr. Voland silently, my mind overexerting itself. Henry was silent next to me, his right hand resting on the unclipped taser lodged in his belt. The silence in Lena's office was heavy, tense, even foreboding—the muffled sounds of city life far below us sounded harsh, alien. A moment later, Henry's words broke the grim atmosphere.

“I'll call the other guard—Tom. He was in before me. He'll remember if anyone came to see Mrs. Davenport.”

I nodded, half-glancing at Henry—appreciating his calmness, his intelligence. He was a man doing his job. He did it well, without any kind of self-congratulation. His understanding and his support on this night, though, amounted to selfless heroism, at least in my eyes.

“I'll keep an eye on him,” I said gruffly, without thinking.

“You'll be alright?,” Henry asked before he left, casting an anxious glance in Mr. Voland's direction.

I nodded yes. Henry took four steps away from us, back into the dimly-lit outer office. He took his cell phone out of his shirt pocket; I heard the plastic buttons clicking as he dialed. It was then that a tall, gangly man with balding hair and a dirty black goatee entered the outer door. He wore a plain white buttoned shirt with a cheap badge on it, and the belt he wore was equipped with the same gadgetry as Henry's: taser, radio, handcuffs, nightstick, even the outline of a 9-millimeter pistol in its holster. He must have been John—Henry's supervisor. He moved awkwardly, in long, emphatic strides that seemed unsure of their direction—a man on a mission who didn't know what the mission was. Behind him, two uniformed policemen followed, looking about the offices casually, if not with outright indifference—they seemed dubious that there was, in fact, a “situation” in progress. I half-hoped that I would know them; if they vouched for me and my history on the force, my suspicions, I believed, would carry greater weight, and they would respond to Mr. Voland with a similar sense of alarm. But I had never met them before.

John sidled up next to Henry, shooting a spiteful, distrustful stare in my direction. (Trying to assert his authority in this place? Territorial, aggressive—a bad combination of traits for a job like his.) One of the officers joined them, looked inquisitively at Henry, expecting an explanation. Henry held up one index finger to the two of them as he brought his phone to his ear.

The other officer walked slowly to the open door four feet to my left. He held back there, resting his hands on the doorframe and leaning his head into the office. He saw the grim, silent showdown between me and Mr. Voland—an exchange of unwavering stares, mine uncertain and desperate, Voland's cool and half-smirking, cruel. The officer stood there and looked between the two of us with rapidly increasing concern, even alarm; he may not have been aware of the night's events, but the heated, sinister tension flooding the office, temporarily dormant but ready to erupt, could not have been mistaken. His disinterest from only a minute ago had transformed into grim unease. He took three cautious steps towards me, his gaze volleying back and forth between me and the man in front of me, waiting uneasily for what would come next. A storm, a terror.

We heard Henry's voice. He asked someone on the other end of the line—presumably the security guard who had worked earlier that night—if he remembered someone coming to visit Lena Davenport. No, no, Henry said—later, late at night. Around ten, he thinks. Pause, for a moment. Then Henry leaned back towards the open doorway, arched his head around so he could look once more at Mr. Voland, who had since sat down in one of the chairs facing the glass windows—he had turned his back on me.

Henry looked intently at Mr. Voland's profile. What does he look like?, Henry said, seemingly repeating what the other man had asked him.

You'd remember if you saw him.

Tall.

Black eyes.

Almost bald.

Short black-white hair.

Thin, yeah. Emaciated.

Another pause, for a moment.

No? You sure?

Then another pause. Very long. I took my eyes off of Mr. Voland, moved them in Henry's direction. He listened for a long time. His eyes widened, then narrowed. Shock? Anger? He returned my stare. No—compassion.

No, I didn't know. What time did that happen?

Almost ten?

Yeah...what a hell of a way to end your day. Yeah.

Yeah...her husband.

Henry took his eyes off of mine. Looked at the floor.

He hung up a minute later. I was staring at the back of Mr. Voland's head. He had been silent for minutes now, since the other men had arrived.

Henry looked at me again. John and the other two officers looked at him expectantly. I stared at the pointed awful head of Mr. Voland until it became a blurry, senseless shape.

“Tom said he doesn't remember anyone coming to visit Lena after her meeting this afternoon. He said he doesn't remember seeing anyone checking in at the front desk who matches Mr. Voland's description—but he said to remember that we get almost a hundred visitors here each hour, if not more. He”—Henry's voice faltered here—“also said that he only saw Lena just before ten o'clock, when she left. She worked late. She walked out of the front doors and was crossing the street, when...she was hit. The car was white, and it was one of those big old ones, like a Buick or something. He said he only saw the color and the shape of it as it drove away; it ran the light and sped off. Luckily, Tom said, the hospital was across the street, and they got her into surgery in less than five minutes...he said.” Out of the corner of my eye, I could tell Henry was still watching me. I didn't look back in his direction. “That was at the very end of his shift; I saw him when I came in, but he looked a little shaken, and he didn't stop to mention it to me. He said he hopes she's okay.”

“She's dead,” I said. Water in eyes, too tired to cry though. The back of Mr. Voland's head, three feet in front of me. Wish I had brought my gun.

I stepped up to the red padded chair in front of Lena's desk, the one to the left of Mr. Voland's chair, gripped the right arm, pulled it right up close next to the other one, angled it towards Voland, stepped around the chair, and sat down. I leaned in close to the stranger we had found in my wife's office, my elbows resting on my knees. So close I could see where his skeletal face was pocked with abrasions from a razor; so close I could see small scars from old wounds. He looked at me with no emotion.

When I spoke, my voice was a shaky monotone. I tried to hide the fact that I needed to subdue myself, restrain myself from what I really wanted to do, but I couldn't hide it; my rage was painted on me.

“What are you doing in my wife's office?”

“I told you—,” he began calmly.

“You haven't told me anything. Why are you in my wife's office?”

“I wanted to see her about some old insurance policies—some payouts we could be compensated for. We're in hot water right now—”

“Cut the bullshit, why are you in her office?”

One of the officers—the one who had been standing next to me, the short and stocky one, whose muscle you would confuse for beer-bellied flab if you didn't know better—took a step up to me and put his hand on my shoulder. He knelt down next to me, spoke quietly.

“We should wait—put in a call, get a detective here. They'll question him, you can be present at the interrogation. And after, you can ask him anything you want—you'll just have to have an officer present.”

“I don't mind answering your questions,” Mr. Voland said, looking at me with feigned compassion. “It's fine.”

I didn't look at him, or at John or Henry or the other officer, who had all uneasily entered the office and were lingering by the doorway. I responded to the cautious advice offered by the man next to me, but my words were directed at no one in particular—all of them and none.

“Call 718-555-9898. That's the 184th Precinct in uptown. Ask for Detective Sean Ammond, he'll still be there now. Ask him about me, Michael Davenport. My badge number is 07464498276. I've been a detective for three years. I know the protocol. And I'm going to question this man now.”

The officer next to me shrugged and stood back up. “Alright, I'll call, but...you should know this isn't a good idea. Just...be careful.”

I knew what he meant—any information I might be able to glean then would be totally worthless in court (and I was increasingly unsure of my ability to keep from doing to the man before me what I really wanted to, fingernails digging into bloody palms)—but I was too heated, too stubborn, too proud to take the advice. The officer stepped back out into the outer office, picked up the phone on the receptionist's desk, asked John how to dial out, and punched in the number I had just given him. As he was calling, John asked Henry to go to the lobby for the sign-in sheet at the front security desk (though I was already convinced that Mark Voland's signature would be nowhere on it); Henry eyed me and Voland worriedly before leaving the office, but, unsure of what to say, exited without a word.

Only four of us now remained in the office: John and one of the two police officers, both of whom lingered at the doorway, watchful, ready to intervene if necessary; and Mr. Voland and myself, seated in the two leather chairs in front of my wife's desk, my face (eyes narrowed, teeth clenched) less than a few inches from his. He continued to stare straight ahead, out the window, though I'm sure I dominated his peripheral vision.

“What do you want to ask me?,” he said without moving. Without blinking.

“First, let me recount your story. I want to get this right. You had a meeting with my wife yesterday afternoon, you and your colleagues, and it ended around 5:30. You got drinks at a bar nearby, and you said before you went home you wanted to see her about one more thing—one last thing you thought of. You said you returned here, to my wife's office, around ten. Is that right?”

“I can't be sure of the exact times, but yes, that sounds about right.”

“You were drinking for four hours? How many did you have?”

A slight crooked smile crept onto his face—I think he was going for sheepish embarrassment, but he didn't know how to recreate the emotion. “Well, we went to a bar that was a bit of a walk away—a colleague of mine, Steve Bennetton, knew about it, it's his favorite, over at 82nd and 1st—my guess is it was about a twenty minute walk there. I suppose we were there for about three hours. I had three drinks. I think Steve and Kevin—that's our other colleague—might have had a few more. But we were wrapped up in conversation. You know, we were trying to save the company. We were optimistic, we were brainstorming. Time got away from us. Call the bar, they'll tell you. I even remember our server's name.”

“We will, don't worry. So you must have left at, what, 9:00? But you didn't come back to my wife's office until ten or so? How is that?”

“Like I said, I don't remember the timeline that precisely. Maybe we left about 9:15. They caught cabs back home. I went for a bit of a walk—I live a little north of Morningside, so I was going to walk home anyway. On the way, I thought of a few recent cases where I thought we could recoup our losses—you know, prove in court that corporate entities who held policies under us were actually responsible for losses incurred by individuals they employed. I wanted to talk to Lena about them, see if she thought we had a chance. So I walked back over here and I suppose I got here around 9:40 or so.”

“And you checked in at the front desk then?”

“Yes. How else could I have gotten up here?”

“How is it that the guard doesn't remember you? Especially if you came so late, so soon before my wife's...” (words failed me again) “...accident, and requested to see her? Seems strange, doesn't it?”

He shrugged defensively. “Yes, it does, but you're going to have to ask him about that. I can't speak for his state of mind. I signed it at the front desk, you'll see my signature.”

“Fine,” I said. “Finish your story.”

Mr. Voland returned my unwavering stare, finally averting his eyes from the windows in front of him. “There's nothing else to say, is there?,” he said. “The man at the front desk said your wife was still here, but when I got up to the office there—” (he nodded his head towards the outer office, past John and the two policemen) “—it was empty. The receptionist must have already left. I can only assume your wife and I crossed paths on my way in.”

“Quite a coincidence.”

“Maybe. But I don't have any other explanation.”

“How did you get into her office if no one was here?”

Once again, he averted his eyes from mine, and directed them squarely towards the pulsating electric lights of the city outside. He instantaneously seemed to adopt a look of apologetic shame, as his shoulders—which had previously been staunchly held in a posture of guiltless pride—drooped ever so slightly. “Well...that, I suppose, was somewhat dubious on my part. The cleaning man was just making his rounds on the floor, and he happened to be approaching this office shortly after I arrived. I knew where Mrs. Davenport kept our files—I had seen them earlier in the day, of course—and I desperately needed to check on those few cases. I honestly thought I had landed on a solution that might save us. So I persuaded him to open her office for me.”

He abruptly halted himself in the middle of his explanation, despite how unsatisfying and questionable was his recounting of events. His rigid stare did not falter, but I sensed he was waiting for me to respond—eager, even quietly giddy, to see whether or not I would buckle under the weight of his ridiculous story. And it was ridiculous: if his narrative didn't make me so intensely angry, so sure of his culpability, its sheer absurdity would have made me laugh. Too many coincidences, too many cover-ups—no outright cracks in his story, but plenty of tenuous perforations to make it completely porous, absolutely weightless. For a moment no one said anything; I noticed myself exhaling protractedly, my rage now affecting me physiologically. With some effort I subdued myself and arched my head back towards the three men standing at the doorway; I caught their glances and raised my eyebrows, indicating how unbelievable I found his explanation. John and one of the officers nodded slightly, apparently corroborating my disbelief; the other officer furrowed his brow and looked back towards Mr. Voland—certainly dubious, yet unable to come to a conclusion regarding the man before us.

I stood up. I had to move. My close proximity to Mr. Voland had started to make me feel queasy. I walked to the glass windows that he had been resolutely staring at throughout his account. His stare met mine, coldly, emotionlessly.

“And you've been here for the last three hours, is that right? Poring over files? A diligent employee of Consolidated Metropolitan Insurance?”

He smiled—antagonistically this time—and shrugged. “You don't believe me. But yes, I swear that's true. All of it.”

“You must realize how stupid that sounds. All of it.”

“Does it? I don't know. Check the sign-in sheet. Call the bar. Ask the cleaning man. Call CMI. My information can be verified.”

Another tense period of silence. I heard Henry enter the outer office and approach the three officers at the doorway. He handed John a clipboard. I walked over to them, leaving Mr. Voland momentarily.

Henry flipped over two sheets on the clipboard and pointed to a signature far down on the list. Under his breath, Henry remarked, “His signature is there. 9:42pm. And there were two other visitors since then—it doesn't look like this has been forged in any way. And look—” (he pointed at a series of initials on the right-hand side of the page) “—those are Tom's initials. He did check him in.”

John shook his head, bewildered. “Why didn't Tom remember him? He's been with us for years, there's never been a problem with him. I don't understand.”

One of the officers glanced up from the clipboard at me. “I talked to Captain Ammond a couple minutes ago. He vouched for you. He and another detective—Ciposetta—they're on their way. They'll be here soon. Ammond told me to tell you not to do anything stupid.”

I couldn't resist a tired smile. “He knows me too well.”

The other officer—the short, stocky one—interjected. “Mr. Davenport, I'm sorry about all of this. I'm sorry about your wife. But...I mean, there's definitely something wrong with this guy, his story doesn't make any sense, but...what could he have to do with your wife's accident? If it's true that he was up here when she was hit—well, how could they be related?”

I shook my head and glanced back at Mr. Voland. He hadn't moved from his position: motionless in a red padded leather chair, in the middle of Lena's office. “I don't know, but there's something. There are too many overlaps. He's lying about something.”

“So what now?,” Henry offered uneasily.

I shrugged. “Wait for Ammond and Ciposetta. We need as many opinions as we can get. In the meantime, check security cameras, take a look around the office—see if we see anything out of the ordinary. I'm gonna ask him a few more questions.”

Henry and John left the office a moment later, retreating to the security office in order to peruse the night's security videos. One of the officers began investigating the hallways, the offices, the stairways for anything—any sign of a struggle or forced entry—while the other (who professed to have some knowledge of the insurance industry) began combing through Lena's file on Consolidated Metropolitan Insurance. I appreciated their support, the unspoken camaraderie shared by those in our line of work, and I wondered what I would have done without them there. I looked at my palms, which were red and raw from my nails tearing into them for the last thirty minutes. I wondered what would have happened if I had been alone with Mr. Voland for that half hour—if it would have been him, instead, that would now be red and raw, if my rage and my staggered confusion would have physicalized themselves in such a direct manner. The human presence of Henry and John and the two officers had tempered me, had restrained me—I was unwilling to abandon myself when I knew I would be witnessed and judged by other people, when I knew it was not simply myself and God who would have to deal with the repercussions (moral and otherwise) of my actions. And I wondered if people only do good—act rightly—when they're concerned with the responses of other individuals. And if, left only to our own moral self-motivations, divorced from the inquisitions and reproaches of others, the world would be ruled by anarchy and cruelty and despair.

As we waited for Ammond and Ciposetta to arrive, I sat down in the chair across from Mr. Voland's—Lena's chair, a cheap black leather thing on wheels, less comfortable than the red padded seats she offered to her guests. I wheeled her chair in front of Mr. Voland's, about four feet away, confronting him directly. I leaned forward, resting my elbows on my knees, rubbing my chin and running my hands along the unshaven stubble, exhausted and hostile. I said nothing—scrutinized the features of Voland's face. He met my gaze directly.

“You're inspecting me?”

I said nothing.

“Tell me what you find.”

The guilt on his face was deepening, as I saw it—like the stubble of a five-o'-clock shadow as night progresses.

After a moment, he leaned in towards me, paralleling my own posture: elbows on knees, leaned in close.

“I heard what your colleague said before, and I have to ask you again: What could I possibly have to do with your wife's death? You don't believe me, fine, but...it's simply illogical to think I could have any kind of relation to a hit-and-run that happened eight floors below me.”

“Why don't you explain it to me?”

“Explain it to you?,” he asked incredulously. “Mr. Davenport, I don't want to sound callous, but what is there to explain? I am sorry, sincerely, for your wife's tragedy—for your tragedy—but there is no conspiracy here. No plot. You don't want to hear this, but there is no meaning here.”

“Maybe. But there is something going on.”

“If there is—and I'm saying this to you because you're a detective, and you will understand this—what is going on here is cause and effect. Something happens, and because of it, something else happens. I'm sure you've seen this many times before, so why can't you apply it to yourself? To this?”

“Now you're interrogating me? Judging me?”

“No, I'm not judging, I understand. You're human. It's natural to give things meaning when you think they need them. But it's also foolish.”

“I don't need you to tell me, Mr. Voland, about the meaning of things. About fatalism. I'm not looking for any kind of grand design here. I'm trying to get to the truth about what happened to my wife.”

“And if the truth is less meaningful than you hoped it would be? Or simpler? Will you supply your own truth then?”

“No. I never have.”

“Because the truth about things has never affected you personally. In your line of work, I mean.”

“How can you pretend to know about that?”

“I'm sorry, I'm just...hypothesizing. But there's no harm in that, right?”

I said nothing.

“My hypothesis is that your line of work allows you, even requires you, to judge human action, or even non-human action—simply happenstance—or even cosmic action, if you want to look at it that way—objectively. Scientifically, empirically. You can observe people and the things that they do, or the things that happen to them, as a series of cause-and-effect patterns that leave behind a trail of verifiable data. You see gestures and responses, and you hear inflections or promises or lies, and you don't see them as human behavior—I mean, you see them as evidence. Indicators of the truth, or of lies. And that's what makes you good at your job, am I right? Their lives—not just what happens to them, but the way they feel about those things, why they do the things that they do—they don't overlap with your life. You don't concern yourself with those things, that's not your job. I'm not blaming you—it makes sense. But if you've always been able to observe the people that you investigate with that kind of logic—that rationalism that has no room for...whatever you want to call it, cosmic motivation, a deeper meaning—why can't you apply these things to yourself?”

My anger and bewilderment had started to make room for trepidation; my uncertainty was propagating, spreading, within me.

I said, slowly, methodically, stressing each word: “Who the hell are you?”

He gave me a smile that was more malevolent than anything he had yet said or done. “You mean, do I work for Consolidated Metropolitan Insurance? Am I an insurance salesman? Is my name Mark Voland? Now, those questions you can answer absolutely. With facts. I'll leave that to you.”

“How did you know my wife? The truth, this time.” When I said it, even I was able to recognize the desperation and futility that went into uttering it—I knew already that his answer would be no different.

“Really, I only met her this afternoon. She seemed like a really good person. And I am really sorry for what happened to her, even if you don't believe me. But some things we just can't change.”

I leaned back in the chair; I could no longer stand to be so close to him. Fatigue and despair afflicted me. There was pain behind my wizened eyes, a deep abyss of pain.

“You were waiting for me, weren't you?,” I asked him. “When I was across the street, in the hospital. You were watching me. We were meant to have this meeting, is that right?”

“Meant to? Mr. Davenport, you have destiny on the brain tonight. I'm sorry, that's a cruel thing to say—I understand why you might.”

I shook my head at him. I still felt an unbridled rage towards him, but now, by this point, I would have no idea how to unleash it.

“Forget what I actually am for right now,” he whispered to me. The other two officers were single-mindedly inspecting the outer office, the hallway, a stack of files—most likely, they didn't hear a word of what was being said. “Tell me what you want me to be. Or what you're scared that I am. It seems you've already come to your own conclusion anyway.”

I couldn't answer. I believe I did actually ponder this question—I did ask myself those things—but I had no answers for them. I knew that I wanted him to be more than simply an insurance salesman whom I had found, coincidentally, in my wife's office.

“Well, I can tell you this,” he said finally. “I'm no...celestial accuser. I'm no great deceiver. How can I be, in my line of work?” He whispered these words in a thin rasp, uttered close to my left ear. Then he leaned back in his chair and a narrow serpentine smile stretched the skin taut against his face. “Now you're wondering where you've heard those words before. And now, again, you're asking yourself what I really am.”

2010: The Year in Film

Most people who make movies (and those who distribute and market them) like to believe that bigger is better—that film is the art of bombast and overstatement, that subtlety and elusiveness and fine-tuned simplicity are better left to art forms less visceral (and expensive). This overgeneralization may seem unfair, but it especially rang true in 2010, a year that seemed uncommonly populated by Big Movies.

This was predominantly true in Hollywood, as it often seems to be. Inception sought to astound us with its gravity-defying action sequences, its trippy conundrum of a plot, the obvious precision (and money) that went into the movie's set design, visual effects, and overall conception. (If it failed to awe, that was likely because half of the movie was wasted on mundane exposition.) The Social Network, meanwhile—one of the year's most critically acclaimed movies—is a good, solid, intelligently-made tragedy, but its marketers (and some critics) told us that it did nothing less than define our digitized generation, that it amounted to an instantaneous classic that encapsulates our era—overblown claims that make it all too easy to dismiss the movie's significant simpler pleasures and concentrate on what the movie doesn't achieve. This isn't even to mention the typical glut of sequels and remakes that substitute an overproduced style and predictably “cutting-edge” visual effects for anything approaching creativity.

This predilection for hugeness and self-aggrandizement at least makes more sense in the world of Hollywood—after all, America's movie factory does peddle flashy excess more reliably and consistently than any other movie industry in the world. Also, when it's done well, that larger-than-life splendor can admittedly make for more exciting, even more magnificent, cinema than some quieter, humbler movies. This year, the spectacular dream factory that is Hollywood pumped out a few amiably “big” movies—namely Shutter Island, Martin Scorsese's flippant but nonetheless immersive genre puzzle; True Grit, a solid remake that excels by not trying to be a Coen Brothers movie; Predators, an unnecessary but kinetic and surprisingly beautiful series reboot; and gorgeous, compelling animated movies like Toy Story 3 and How to Train Your Dragon.

Delusions of grandeur also afflicted smaller-scale American indie movies and foreign arthouse exercises, though here the sense of self-importance is more pedantic than juvenile. (Such movies, when they fail, know they're brilliant when they're not; bad Hollywood movies, on the other hand, usually don't pretend to be.) Again, the off-putting sense of condescension and pretense we get from such overreaching movies can be the result of overzealous marketers and self-conscious critics rather than bad filmmaking (though that's often to blame too). For example, we were told that Black Swan was the most insane, mind-bending horror-camp mashup of the year, when really it just uses a lot of tried-and-true aesthetic tricks to disguise its predictability and rampant cliché; we were told that The Kids Are All Right was a brave, honest, raw exploration of human sexuality, when it's actually just a dull, simplistic study of overprivileged characters; and we were told that The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and its sequels (or the Millennium trilogy or whatever it's called) were unflinchingly sordid, post-feminist indulgences in modern depravity, when in fact they're the braindead foreign equivalents to torture porn like the Saw movies. (For a foreign trilogy that really does immerse you in stylish yet horrific grime, check out the British Red Riding movies.) Meanwhile, in France, the predictably self-involved Gaspar Noé made probably the biggest, most overindulgent, most ridiculous experiment of the year: Enter the Void. Like his previous Irreversible, it's not actually good, but it's good that it exists, and it's worth watching if only to experience Noé's insane aesthetic gimmick (he basically places you in the head of a recently-deceased former drug dealer whose soul is floating over and throughout Tokyo) and to appreciate his almost stubbornly excessive ambition.

I say all of this because most of my favorite movies of the year did not pretend to be huge, groundbreaking achievements. They were, for the most part, focused, compact, and clever—stemming from a central concept or idea, and subtly branching out to encompass a plethora of unexpected tangents. Small-scale absurdity, subversive political commentary smuggled into a solid story via razor-sharp aesthetics, an astonishingly maintained atmosphere of encroaching dread, a sincere scrapbook of a turbulent relationship, an ironically-plotted murder mystery—these seemingly small achievements overshadowed the Inceptions and Social Networks of 2010. The best movies of the year demonstrated deceptive simplicity—they revealed the difference, in fact, between simplicity and simpleness. (The former can be an attribute, a dilution and magnification of compelling themes and ideas; the latter follows a single, uncomplicated course—namely, a plot—and does not concern itself with its own most fascinating nooks and crannies.)

On the other hand, some of my other favorite movies of the year included a five-and-a-half-hour epic miniseries about a notorious terrorist, an unabashedly opulent foray into “sensorial cinema” whose every sight and sound seems to pulsate electrically, a grandiose historical opera about Benito Mussolini, and a very long and very exciting crime drama set in a French prison. So maybe, sometimes, the people who make and market movies are right: bigger is (or can be) better. (We return to that common-sense, but often-overlooked, platitude of filmmaking and criticism: every movie must be made and responded to on its own terms.)
A final note: for a movie's “official” release date (meaning, official to me), I arbitrarily use the earliest date that that film had at least a limited release throughout the United States. While most critics use the movie's premiere date in New York or Los Angeles, I don't think it makes sense to abide by the moviegoing schedules that only a small handful of people on either coast are able to experience. This means that there are a few movies on this list—like numbers two and ten below—that were considered by many critics to be 2009 releases (and there are also several movies that were considered 2010 releases that I haven't seen because they haven't even had a limited release in the U.S. yet—movies like, say, The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu or The Strange Case of Angelica).

1. Dogtooth (d. Yorgos Lanthimos, Greece)
Dogtooth is both the funniest movie of the year and the most disturbing—a seeming contradiction that attests to the movie's singular wavelength of traumatic absurdity. The dictatorial patriarch of a bourgeois family in Greece has apparently imprisoned his three children (one son, two daughters) in their closed-off family estate since birth. They are led to believe that the outer world is treacherous and impregnable—even airplanes that pass by overhead are re-presented to the children (now apparently in their late teens) as tiny model planes that have landed in their backyard.

The father in the film runs his family sternly, tyrannically. With his wife (who participates in the cruel game but apparently has no say in it), he orchestrates bizarre and pointless contests, peddling out an arbitrary number of stickers to the “winner” (the prizes mean nothing but a sense of accomplishment for the three siblings). The unnamed mother and father have also imposed their own mangled language system on their children, swapping definitions of words for others simply, it seems, to show that they can. When one daughter asks her parents the meaning of the word “pussy,” mother replies that it means “a bright light”; more significantly, father informs his children that they'll only be allowed to leave their home once their “dogtooth” falls out.

The patriarch's injustices against his family go further than pointless contests and the deconstruction of language. Incest is not only permitted in this closed-off world—it's mandated. Having become aware of his son's burgeoning sexuality (unsurprisingly, he's indifferent to the sexual awakening of his daughters), the patriarch initially enlists the help of one of his employees to provide sexual initiation for the boy (a partnership which, for the father, has all the gravity of a mundane business relationship). When that arrangement proves disastrous for the family (after the sexual liaison brings material goods from the outside world to one of the daughters, in exchange for sexual favors), the father forces his son to choose between his two sisters for a sexual partner. This results in one of the movie's queasiest scenes: a seemingly endless static medium shot of the three siblings packed into the family's bathtub, naked.

Sometimes the movie's absurdity is presented as a minimalist joke (such as a scene in which the son anxiously stalks a tiny kitten that has strayed into their backyard, mistaking the animal for a vicious predator); most of the time, however, the movie's premise (and its sense of humor) is haunting and unsettling. Two abrupt acts of violence (both committed by the father) rescue the movie from potential glibness: there are disturbing, unavoidable ramifications to the parents' tyrannical reign over their children's lives.

There is no overt allegory made in Dogtooth; the father, for example, is not meant to symbolize Greece's modern political state, nor is he a stand-in for some dictatorial capitalist overseer. Nonetheless, there are parallels that may be drawn, especially thanks to a few scenes that depict the father in a cold modern workplace defined by rigid, deadening geometric lines and drab pastel colors. (The fact that he rewards his children's competitive natures with meaningless compensation in the form of stickers furthers the capitalistic analogy.) But I think the movie works just as well as a disturbing satire of bourgeois insularity, removed of its sociopolitical undertones (this is why comparisons to Buñuel seem mostly appropriate).

The movie is brief and concise, but it sticks with you. Late in the film, after a frenetic dance-off performed by the sisters that perfectly encapsulates the movie's funny-frightening tone, one of them attempts to forcibly remove her “dogtooth”—thereby allowing her to leave the family home. (This brutal scene, like much of the movie, is shot in a static, direct medium shot, which makes Lanthimos' attitude towards his characters akin to that of a scientist studying specimens under a microscope.) We'll never know, however, if her attempt to escape her father (and her family) is successful—the movie cuts off at an agonizingly uncertain moment. Dogtooth, then, leaves us in an anxious state that approximates the one experienced by the three siblings: oppressed by uncertainty and helplessness, dominated by an omnipotent ruler (in the siblings' case, their father; in the audience's, the director). We hope for escape, desperately, and maybe futilely.

2. The Ghost Writer (d. Roman Polanski, France/Germany/UK)
Polanski may still be the best director in the world at infusing seemingly simple stories with dry, acerbic sociopolitical commentary, a skill that may reach its pinnacle in the half-silly, completely off-kilter The Ghost Writer. This isn't just a movie that's as funny as it is suspenseful (which isn't really all that rare in the movies); its bizarre achievement is that the forces of evil in this movie are so unexpected, so pervasive, so phantasmic, and at the same time so stolidly mundane that the overpowering sense of dread reaches levels of sinister farce.

Ewan McGregor's modestly successful writer is tasked with ghostwriting the memoirs of former UK Prime Minister Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan—the casting is so obvious it's sublime). Lang has moved his family from the UK to the perpetually gray coasts of a New England island, allowing Polanski to frame a seemingly unending series of masterfully atmospheric widescreen compositions: a lone, baffled McGregor in the sharp foreground, and a whole morass of unknowable peril in the misty background. McGregor's writer seems to accept the assignment not because he believes in it (he seems, at least at the beginning of the movie, totally apolitical), nor because it will allow him to flex his intellectual muscles (he regards the assignment as hackwork); more than anything, his character seems capricious and aimless, and may be attracted to the mystique of an army of security guards and the suspicious circumstances of his predecessor's death (the corpse of Lang's first ghostwriter washes up on the New England coast at the beginning of the movie).

Polanski has, of course, always embraced the darkly comic, but what's surprising about The Ghost Writer is how willfully tongue-in-cheek it is. It sometimes resembles a workmanlike cable-TV political thriller, or an adaptation of a seedy paperback thriller: wives, mistresses, and menacing politicos recite crackling dialogue; Eli Wallach shows up as a grizzled old witness spouting conspiracy theories; late-night rendezvous at tiny seaside motels pulsate with spy-movie intrigue; there are secret files and cryptic messages, and everyone, at one point or another, seems absolutely villainous (besides our beleaguered hero). The grandest joke comes at the end of the movie, a brilliant gag that slyly treats the film's main character as its punchline.

The fact that the movie is not self-serious, and is sometimes indulgently cheesy, should be taken as a stroke of comedic genius. After all, the parallels to reality are obvious: a British PM whose zealous war on terror and close ties with the American government simultaneously makes him a political superstar and a travesty of modern diplomacy. The name Adam Lang even echoes that of Tony Blair, and Brosnan's Cheshire Cat-charm makes for a fascinatingly contradictory character. (He may be a villain, but we're attracted to him anyway.) Torture is a predominant theme, and one of the main villains is a noted American scholar from an Ivy League university. The Ghost Writer seems like a tawdry spy show (albeit an exceptionally intelligent one), and because of this it makes international politics of the last decade seem like a farcical potboiler. I like it when movies treat real-life intrigue with the zippy over-the-topness of pulp fiction, especially when their subject is international politics (which often seem so hollowly convoluted anyway).

Mostly, though, The Ghost Writer functions as Polanski's incredibly clever exercise in aesthetics-as-theme—the entire thing is staged, shot, and edited to evoke a litany of real-world parallels and satirical commentaries that otherwise may have been completely absent from the movie, in a lesser director's hands. Again, a perfect example is the final shot of the movie, an extremely complex snapshot of basically all of the movie's predominant themes that could function as a lesson plan in Film Studies classes: how to present an idea visually, solely through form, without relying on a didactic screenplay. This may well be the most cinematic movie of the year.

3. Let Me In (d. Matt Reeves, USA)
A remake (slash-adaptation) that's infinitely better than anyone could have expected it to be, Let Me In is a like-minded but subtly different sibling to the already-excellent 2008 Swedish film Let the Right One In. How to describe the small but significant differences in personality between the two movies? If the Swedish film resembles, in part, a grungy, rough, fiery punk mini-masterpiece (even its quieter moments have a burning hostility to them), Reeves' American remake is like its lonelier, more melancholy, more plaintive cousin. Imagine a lush symphony covering a Black Flag song; the sentiment is the same, it just affects you differently.

Casting is key in Let Me In, not only for the two young protagonists (Owen, an alienated young boy whose parents are divorced, played by Kodi Smit-McPhee; and Chloe Moretz as Abby, a world-weary centuries-old vampire trapped in the body of a young girl) but for the supporting characters as well. Richard Jenkins has never been better as her human father-figure-slash-lover: he has aged and watched her remain a young woman, and now simply provides fresh corpses for her to feed off of. (In one of the movie's most powerful unspoken moments, Owen—helplessly in love with Abby—learns the painful backstory between her and her pseudo-father, and he seems to wonder if, decades from now, he will meet the same lonely fate.) Elias Koteas plays a detective who has the misfortune of investigating the girl's victims; a peerless character actor, his mournful delivery and quiet dismay at the carnage that surrounds him provides a vital emotional entryway for the audience.

Just as importantly, though, Let Me In marks a triumph for director Matt Reeves: the meticulous style and flawless pacing of the movie mark him as an undeniable new American talent (and not only in the horror genre). After working in television, Reeves made 2008's gimmicky monster movie Cloverfield—a solid feature debut, but its stylistic conceit (the film is ostensibly all a first-person account shot on digital video of a catastrophic invasion in New York) told us little about Reeves' proficiency as a storyteller, stylist, or commentator. Let Me In nails all three categories. It's a wonder of digital video composition, with razor-sharp blacks, reds, and glowing yellows creating a gorgeous (and haunting) kaleidoscopic backdrop; Reeves and cinematographer Greig Fraser frame their actors more tightly than many filmmakers seem comfortable with, which emphasizes the emotional intensity of this story more than its grisly horror tropes. (The best and saddest example: Owen forces Abby to enter his house without explicitly inviting her in, dubious of her claim that she can't enter unless he directly asks her to. She enters, in an apparently extreme self-sacrifice, and in an unforgettable medium close-up begins bleeding from her scalp and her facial orifices. The boy begins to cry and hugs her in desperation. Horror has rarely seemed so poignant; this scene was effective in the original, but it's absolutely devastating here.)

Arguably the distinguishing feature of both Let the Right One In and Let Me In is its scary-sweet genre hybridization: they're essentially love stories, though the bonds forged between characters arise from extremely distressing, bleak situations. This may be even more subtly evoked in Reeves' film: Owen is severely disturbed before he even meets Abby, as he spies on his neighbors, dons a Hannibal Lecter-ish mask and poses with a butcher knife before the mirror, and withdraws anxiously from his school swimming team (he doesn't want to reveal the bruises on his back to other students—a brief and frightening touch that points to some kind of domestic abuse). Companionship in Let Me In is a vital escape from violence and ugliness, though the desperation of these relationships doesn't make them any less sincere.

Let Me In, if it is a genre movie (it is horrific, but there's more than horror going on), reveals how expertly-made films can transcend their genres, using the tropes and styles of their genealogies as a springboard and bursting forth into unexpected emotional and thematic territory. (An interesting undercurrent in Let Me In is its transplantation of the story from Sweden to late-Reagan era Midwestern America: Reagan's notorious Evil Empire speech even plays over an incredible early scene, suggesting that forces of evil in our world are more amorphous and ambiguous than we might assume them to be.) Passionate, intelligent, beautiful, and unshakeable, it almost makes up for the preponderance of abysmal American horror remakes that have been made over the last decade.

 4. Carlos (d. Olivier Assayas, France/Germany)
The version of Carlos that I saw is 330 minutes long (that's the one that premiered at Cannes and showed on French television; there's also a 165-minute “roadshow” version that was distributed last year), but it still might be the most entertaining movie of 2010. This epic biography of Venezuelan-born terrorist Carlos “the Jackal”—who came to represent the Palestinian, anti-Zionist cause seemingly by happenstance—is kinetic, visceral, multilayered filmmaking. Early in the film (it seems most appropriate to call it a film, even though it was commissioned for television), Carlos tells a lover that he will deliver “with every bullet, an idea”; while we don't quite buy his claim in the context of the movie (Carlos regularly spouts revolutionary aphorisms that, usually, he does not follow through on), it seems apt to apply Carlos's quote to Olivier Assayas's filmmaking: this is action cinema at its best, but each scene comes loaded with its own set of contemporary socio-political parallels and divisive attitudes towards terrorist violence and counterterrorist retribution.

Assayas's filmmaking prowess shouldn't be too surprising: even when his movies fail to follow through on their extravagant premises (as in Demonlover, for example), they're never less than fascinating. (And when his movies do follow through on their ideas, as in Irma Vep, he makes the strangest, most electrifying cinematic concoctions imaginable.) What may be most surprising about Assayas's approach to Carlos is how heavily he tones down his own auteurist touches in bringing this story to life; aside from the use of a number of grimy, propulsive New Wave punk songs in the soundtrack, Assayas pre-dominantly allows the narrative to play out without obtrusion. The political interpretations are entirely up to the audience; Assayas doesn't impose his own morality upon us.

There's no way Carlos could be confused for a movie that glorifies terrorism: throughout the entire thing, Carlos is a narcissistic, pompous, self-made celebrity who uses revolutionary dogma to justify his bloodlust and his shallow carnality. Early in the movie, Carlos is ordered by “the armed branch of the Palestinian Liberation Struggle” to toss a bomb into a crowded streetside cafe; as he walks away from the ensuing blast, a shudder of remorse seems to pass over him, and we wonder how Carlos feels about the carnage he creates. But in the following scene, we see Carlos fondling himself, naked, in front a full-length mirror, and we recognize the primary concern that always motivates Carlos: himself, his own notoriety, his own celebrity.

This becomes unavoidably true by the end of the movie. The third part of the miniseries details Carlos' devolution into a bloated, power-hungry has-been who relies upon the unquestioning obedience of a few cronies. This last part of the movie is the least engrossing and the most repugnant, but this seems to be purposeful: by the end of Carlos, we can't really see the main character as anything but a desperate self-promoter. (Even this third act, though, comes with its own astonishing set-pieces, like a scene in which Germans from both the Eastern and Western parts of the country storm Stasi headquarters in liberation after the fall of the Berlin Wall, trashing its hallways and offices to the invigorating strains of an angry punk band. I need to get my hands on this soundtrack.)

Carlos isn't the only character to indulge in the hedonistic pleasures of a terrorist lifestyle; the compelling theory that underlines the often-slapdash carnage in Carlos is that, for audiences today, terrorism is rock and roll. (In a way, Carlos is like the cinematic manifestation of the theories elucidated in The Dream Life, J. Hoberman's fantastic book on how politics and the media have become inextricably intertwined over the last six decades.) Most obviously besides Carlos, there is his East German counterpart Johannes, both of whom supply arms to the East German government. Debilitatingly drunk most of the time, Johannes enjoys the sexual favors of two prostitutes obviously hired by the Stasi to act as spies on him and Carlos (the movie's ugliest scene: Carlos sexually manhandling one of these unwitting political courtesans), but he sporadically also seems to realize how fully he is betraying the well-being of his home country.

Just as tellingly, Carlos's cravings for notorious celebrity are reflected by his cohorts during the sprawling OPEC raid that comprises the movie's centerpiece. During this ninety-minute sequence, Carlos is tasked with leading a mission that would result in the kidnapping of OPEC ambassadors from Middle Eastern nations during a conference in Copenhagen, thus forcing the ambassadors' home nations to abide by the Palestinian Liberation Struggle's demands. Ultimately finding themselves in an unmanageable situation, Carlos gives in to the compromises offered by Algeria's moderate government (and accepts their hefty financial compensation) to the vociferous protests of his terrorist cohorts. But, almost inevitably, as they are driven to an airport in limousines, Carlos as well as his previously outraged compatriots smile and wave for the ubiquitous cameras of newspapers and TV stations, apparently unable to resist the fame that accompanies grandiose bloodshed carried out under the name of “liberation.”

Carlos is careful not to decry the Palestinian struggle itself—it prefers to withhold any explicit interjection regarding the validity of their mission (or of other contemporary armed revolutionaries). The movie is, instead, a criticism of murderers (or “executioners,” as Carlos is called at one point by his Palestinian superior) who use political slogans to justify their actions. By the end of the movie, even Carlos seems to realize this: after undergoing foolishly vain liposuction surgery and suffering from horrendously painful testicular cancer, he appears to breathe a sigh of relief as he's finally apprehended by the French police, seemingly happy that the entire charade has come to an end.

Carlos could have suffered from its central contradiction: how to ruthlessly condemn its main character for almost six hours and simultaneously make him irresistibly attractive? (The movie would fail if we weren't repulsed by and enamored with Carlos at the same time.) Much of the credit, of course, goes to Edgar Ramirez's lead performance, which is naturally magnetic but unafraid to take the character into extremely unpleasant depths of chauvinism and violence. And Assayas, too, orchestrating this sprawling firestorm, walks this tightrope with sublime dexterity: he conveys violence and terrorism with all of their necessary absurdity, revulsion, cruelty, romanticism, energy, sexiness, and evil; he makes us realize that real-world sociopolitical intrigue carries more weight and intensity than any fictional action movie, and reminds us that happy endings (in this context) are fabrications unavailable to us in reality.

5. I Am Love (d. Luca Guadagnino, Italy)
I Am Love has the best performance given by anybody in 2010 (by Tilda Swinton), the best musical score (comprised of snippets from Pulitzer Prize-winning composer John Adams' works), the best opening credits sequence, and the best sex scenes. (That last distinction may seem like a juvenile compliment, but Roger Ebert makes the point that Tilda Swinton, often called upon to portray sexually active women onscreen, embodies that sexuality differently with each character, realizing that carnality is as deeply personal as speech or gesticulation or subtle indicators of emotion. The sex in I Am Love is so overpowering because it makes us realize more about these characters, unlike the sex scenes in most movies.) If the movie's not higher on this list, that's mostly because it's the kind of film that is transfixing when you watch it but kind of silly in retrospect; your esteem for it will likely depend on how willing you are to forgive the filmmakers for their unabashed indulgence in cinematic sensationalism.

Parallels to earlier masterworks are unavoidable: most obvious, perhaps, is Luchino Visconti's The Leopard (also a movie about the collapse of traditional Italian bourgeois morality), but I Am Love also tips its hat towards the operatic melodramas of Douglas Sirk. At first, I thought this comparison was unflattering towards I Am Love; after all, beyond his candy-colored visuals and sweeping über-romantic tone, Sirk's real achievement was his passionate subversiveness, his ability to convey unspeakable sexual desires solely through form and elusive symbolism. I Am Love at first seems to contain little subversiveness (it is, essentially, the tale of a Russian-born matriarch of a wealthy Italian family who irresistibly gives in to an affair with a much younger, and much poorer, friend of her son's), but it may require a second look. Repressed homosexuality, xenophobia, incest, helpless lust towards something that one knows is unattainable: these things are hinted at, suggested through brief looks and certain inflections in dialogue readings, but rarely exposited clearly. Subversive, indeed.

What makes the movie silly (if it is)? Maybe, I thought initially, its complete emotional extravagance, its giddily dramatic evocations of lustful human relationships, the kind of grandiloquent symbolism that includes flowers waving and bees pollinating as two characters have sex on a field of grass. On the other hand, after all, the film's director, Luca Guadagnino, and Swinton had been intending to make what they deemed a “sensation film” for years (that intention is right there in the title), and that kind of hyperbolic sensationalism does evoke, quite nicely, the singleminded bliss that accompanies a new sexual relationship. Maybe, then, the movie isn't silly at all—maybe what's off-putting about it is the result of the audience (that is to say, me) and not the film. So few movies now are willing to convey love or sex unabashedly, without restraint, without some kind of ironic self-commentary; perhaps we've become inured to a postmodern cynicism that teaches us to respond to sincere proclamations of love skeptically (at least in cinema). I Am Love may be trying to rectify that, and even though its ending is too grandiose, too schematic, and too aggressively climactic for my tastes, it nonetheless has a point: love does make any kind of sacrifice worth it, even the kind of sacrifice that dissolves familial, financial, and social well-being. I realize how hokey that sounds, and I could try to contradict such an emphatically romantic conclusion with some cold-hearted postmodern rationale, but what's the point? The title is apt; the movie is love; I can't compete with that.

6. Blue Valentine (d. Derek Cianfrance, USA)
On paper, Blue Valentine may have read more like a blueprint than a movie: its achronological structure, which shuffles back and forth in time to relate to us the violent collapse of a relationship, is a little too schematic. These painful (or, sometimes, blissful) domestic scenes could have come off as little more than pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. So the fact that the finished product is overwhelmingly emotional—the whole thing teems with passionate sincerity—is a testament to the care, creativity, and dedication brought to the filmmaking process by everyone involved.

I remember seeing Scenes from a Marriage years ago at a time in my life when, personally, its sentiments and motivations resonated deeply with me. I'm not always the greatest Ingmar Bergman fan and, admittedly, Scenes from a Marriage displays some of the greatest faults I find in his filmmaking (like a stagebound theatricality, an overly-scripted nature that contradicts his attempted profound impressionism, and a redundant and didactic enunciation of themes that could be conveyed more succinctly through visuals). But no one watches movies with complete objectivity (nor should they)—especially not a movie as unabashedly emotional as Bergman's. The flaws I detected meant nothing to me when I watched the film; what really mattered was that Bergman, it seemed, empathized with a very recent and very difficult experience of my own, and Scenes from a Marriage constituted a compassionate and humane form of reassurance. The movie is raw, passionate, turbulent (at least in Bergman's own highbrow way); it felt like it was made to console viewers who were dealing with their own recent emotional wounds, to let them know that they were not alone.

Blue Valentine represented almost the same exact experience for me when I watched it last November: I can complain of its overly scripted nature, but that means nothing in comparison to the semi-cathartic experience I had while watching it. I've never been married, and no relationship I've been in has disintegrated as violently as the one between Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams' characters; but a recent breakup after a long relationship meant that I could relate, with almost uncanny and painful intimacy, to much of what happened onscreen. This is a difficult, and ultimately a bravely sincere, endeavor for a filmmaker to undertake: the cinematic equivalent of tough love. You may not enjoy watching it, but when it's over, the scars it inflicts feel liberating.

Much of the credit goes to Gosling and Williams, two of the best actors working today, who embody these characters with a lived-in subtlety that allows their relationship to avoid grungy sentimentality. And while I usually don't like the kind of shaky handheld 16mm camerawork employed here (by cinematographer Andrij Parekh)—it sometimes feels like a too-lazy substitution for gritty naturalism—it must be admitted that it's the perfect visual manifestation for these characters' states of mind. (It also turns the lengthy sequence set in an outer-space-themed suite at a fantasy hotel into the most hellish embodiment of despair and anger seen in any movie from 2010.) So even viewers who don't have any recent emotional traumas to reflect back onto the film have much to appreciate: a rawness and a sincerity that are uncommon for movies of any kind (but especially for American indie dramas, which are too often defined by cutesiness and predictability).

The end of the movie is more than simply ambiguous: it barely seems to be an ending at all, as it leaves these characters in an almost-cruel state of suspended animation. But, if the ending is at first disappointing (either because of or despite the fact that it's so tragically sad), its brutal open-endedness ultimately seems appropriate: whatever happens to them after the movie is over, they will suffer, they will recover, and the cycle will repeat itself again.

7. Vincere (d. Marco Bellocchio, Italy/France)
The second great Italian movie of the year is veteran filmmaker Marco Bellocchio's opulent historical biography of Ida Dalser—a passionate, proud woman who (nobly and foolishly) dedicates herself singlemindedly to those whom she loves. Her tragedy was to fall hopelessly in love with Benito Mussollini in the years before the first World War, when he was dark and handsome and politically idealistic. She bears him a son; Mussollini goes off to fight for the army, then returns to lead Italy into turmoil and tyranny. They are reunited years later, after he has become a political demigod and (more tragically in Ida's view) after he has married someone else and started a family. Ida—still enamored with the dictator despite his loathsome transformation—is not content to part ways, nor simply to be his mistress. She demands recognition for herself and for their son; before long, with the powers of Italy's fascist state behind him, Mussollini has her locked up in an insane asylum, and has their son shipped off to an orphanage.

Bellocchio's sympathy is entirely with Ida: she may be self-destructively in love, but she's also resourceful, proud, carrying herself with dignity even through suffering. (I've never seen another performance that so closely resembles Maria Falconetti's in The Passion of Joan of Arc—as Ida Dalser, Giovanna Mezzogiorno owns every single close-up she's given.) When, during a dreamlike snowfall, she climbs the gates of the mental institution that has imprisoned her, disseminating pamphlets that declaim her true identity as Mussollini's lover, Bellocchio treats it as her own (small) personal victory: a triumphant declaration of the truth that is a testament to both her love and her ferocity. Her greatest self-sacrifice comes later in the film, though, when she realizes that she must behave timidly in the insane asylum in order to be released and reunite with her son—a sacrifice she makes in the name of familial love.

Bellocchio treats Mussollini with palpable disdain; he's not at all concerned with this character, with the insecurities and delusions that led him to play second fiddle to Hitler. This could have been a shortcoming in other, more historically-minded dramas, but Bellocchio isn't exactly concerned with the sociohistorical circumstances of Italian fascism per se. He's more fascinated by emotional and sexual fascism, and by political chauvinism in general: Mussollini is portrayed predominantly as a self-involved bully, whose callous treatment of Ida points towards his desire to inflate his own self-importance in any way possible (politically and sexually most of all). This is firmly established in the movie's opening scene: during a political meeting early in his career, Mussollini gives God three minutes to strike him dead; his survival is presumably proof of God's nonexistence, or of Mussollini's self-perceived superiority over Him. Bellocchio's underlying theme is actually pretty ballsy, especially for a political state that continues to be mired in corruption and nepotism: men in positions of political power may use their authority merely as extensions of their personal and social egoism.

Cleverly, in the second half of the film, we only see Mussollini in newsreels and film footage, as the actor portraying him, Filippo Timi, vanishes from the film for a while. (He returns towards the end as Mussollini and Ida's full-grown son, Benito Albino—which is itself a canny reflection of how tragically and how completely the son has transformed into a warped byproduct of his father's cruelties and dementias.) By portraying Mussollini only as a black-and-white mediated image, Bellocchio not only gets around the problematic issue of portraying an older, bloated, more rabid incarnation of Mussolini's earlier self; he also indicates the significant role that the cinema plays in the personal and political lives of Italian citizens post-World War II (or for any modern society since the early twentieth century). Early in the movie, a propaganda short at a small theater in Rome instigates a violent riot between Mussollini's supporters and opponents; later in the film, a screening of Chaplin's The Kid at Ida's mental institution brings her to tears. Other snippets of early silent cinema make their way into Vincere. This isn't even to mention how unabashedly Bellocchio models this movie after the opulent, larger-than-life qualities of silent cinema (including long dialogue-free stretches, booming orchestral music, titles and icons splayed across the screen—only slightly distracting in their obvious computer-generated origins—and, again, Mezzogiorno's iconic performance, delivered through an uncommonly high number of close-ups). The cinematic audiences in Vincere, to a large extent, base their opinions on contemporary Italian politics on the portrayals and images they see in newsreels and movies. Cinema also constitutes the only link between Ida and Mussollini for the second half of their lives—it's her way to see and hear him, to “be with him”—and, as Rob Nelson points out in his Village Voice review, the cinema may mark Ida's real victory at the end of the film, as she finally is able to tell her story via the attention of a film camera. Vincere acts as an unexpected corollary to Inglourious Basterds, then—another pseudo-historical movie about the extent to which we fashion ourselves and our societies' pasts (and presents) based on things we see on movie screens. But while both movies are equally bombastic, Tarantino's sincerity towards his characters (scant though it may be, he does identify with the character of Shosanna) can't compare to Bellocchio's idolizing commemoration of Ida Dalser.

8. Mother (d. Bong Joon-ho, South Korea)
If a classicist of dramatic irony—say, O. Henry or Guy de Maupassant—wrote violent crime stories, they may have resembled Bong Joon-ho's Mother, a movie that seems like a typical (though stylish) genre exercise until its painfully ironic final half-hour. The celebrated director of Memories of Murder (which I haven't seen, sadly) and The Host (a gleefully subversive monster movie) takes us to a sordid small town where a neighborhood girl has recently been murdered. All evidence points to a mentally-challenged young man who responds to the mocking taunts of neighborhood kids with sudden spurts of violence. But the movie is really about the attempts by the man's severely-devoted mother to prove his innocence, especially after the local police force and a surreally smarmy defense lawyer prove unwilling to seriously investigate the case.

Incest is suggested between mother and son (they sleep in the same twin-sized bed on the floor), and her devotion towards him borders on the maniacal: in the opening scene, for example, she nearly slices off her finger while cutting up some roots because she's so concerned with her son crossing the street safely. But she's never really vilified: we see her primarily as a single mother doing what she can to protect her child, who has been dealt a difficult life. Hence the ironic twist at the end of the movie, which I wouldn't dream of giving away: an unforgivable act of violence, a torrent of shame and confusion and self-victimization. The preponderance of idiotic twist endings over the last decade can make you forget how powerful they can be when they're done well: everything you thought you knew about the characters and their relationships for 90 minutes is overturned by the ensuing thirty.

More than anything else, Mother is a stylistic achievement for Bong: he veers from off-kilter surrealism to gritty naturalism to poetic despair sometimes within a single scene, and he handles the movie's suspenseful setpieces with flawless precision. (A scene in which the mother hides in the closet of her son's best friend while he and a lover sleep on the floor might make you forget to breathe; a flashback to the murder of the young girl that instigates this story is at once fantastically gorgeous and absolutely horrific.) It's style over substance, at times to its detriment: the opening and closing scenes, which act as bookends, are beautiful and strange but don't really say very much about what the titular character has gone through. Most of the time, though, Bong's film is ingenious, unique, clever, and haunting—thrilling as much for its sheer entertainment as for its audacious manipulations of form and narrative.

9. Restrepo (d. Tim Hetherington & Sebastian Junger, USA)
The scariest movie of the year? Restrepo addresses the War in Afghanistan through distanced observation, following a single company of the American military stationed in Afghanistan's Korangal Valley (described by a number of authoritative voices as the scariest place on earth) throughout its fifteen-month assignment. We bear witness to firefights, although the Taliban fighters remain almost entirely unseen throughout the movie (as they do, in fact, for the American soldiers themselves); we observe the Americans biding time, tensely venturing through the arid valley, bonding, talking about the war and their families, going through daily routines; we watch the captain of the regiment try to relate to a group of local farmers (who themselves are caught in a tug-of-war between the American military and the omnipresent Taliban) and we are shocked and dismayed by the seemingly unbridgeable rift between the captain and the beleaguered Afghans.

These observations are assembled into seemingly chronological order, aside from a series of first-person interviews conducted with the American soldiers at an Italian base after the end of their service. Things happen—at times traumatic, hopeless things—and in the very next scene the soldiers are simply moving on, doing what they have to do. What other choice do they have? There is no narrative arc to the movie, no convenient logic (rising action, climax, denouement, etc.) to systematize the order of events. This is mostly a benefit rather than a drawback: while the movie is not structured like most narrative films (and the majority of documentaries, it must be said, do act as narrative films), this somewhat disorganized feel, this most basic compounding of events, places us in an aimless swath of time that parallels the uncertainty experienced by the soldiers onscreen.

This organizing structure, along with Tim Hetherington's and Sebastian Junger's unwillingness to impose their own editorial voices into the film, also means that Restrepo is not political in nature. It doesn't rationalize or condemn the things that the soldiers have to do; conservatives and liberals could watch the movie and presumably walk away from it with their opinions unchanged (although the opposite response is certainly also feasible). The approach taken by Hetherington and Junger is more sympathetic: they identify with the soldiers being placed in this drastic situation, having no choice but to survive and defend themselves. Political motivations have little credence for them; even the captain of their outfit motivates them not by convincing them of the justness of their cause, but by reminding them that they are surrounded by enemies who want to kill them, and that they simply have to survive.

The movie almost automatically carries with it immense sociological and historical value. I can think of few war documentaries that simply hope to place us alongside the soldiers, to make us experience their anxieties without explaining or editorializing them; most documentarians approaching a project like this would develop their thematic talking points and organize their movies around them. (Even a movie as great as No End in Sight adopts this technique.) Restrepo is even trickier because it tackles the War in Afghanistan, an issue that seems more abstract—less fathomable—among the American populace than the War in Iraq. The War in Iraq may be defended by conservatives or lambasted by liberals for its vague motives (preemptive strike? war on tyranny? terror?) and neo-imperialism; the War in Afghanistan, though, seems to have arisen out of clear and verifiable facts, yet simultaneously seems unresolvable. Again, these opinions are neither voiced nor refuted by Restrepo; it simply hopes to provide us with empirical evidence, and (perhaps) to encourage political debate once the movie is over.

It seems tacky to lionize the efforts of the filmmakers when the entire movie is about the valor and courage of the soldiers—and, of course, our admiration and respect should go predominantly to the men and women onscreen, and thereafter to those behind the camera—but it still should be said that journalistic photographer Hetherington and author Junger undertook this project at great personal risk, and furthermore completely eliminate themselves as explicit authorial voices from the movie itself. (Unlike, say, Michael Moore, Bill Maher, or even Sacha Baron Cohen, all of whom would call emphatic attention to the dangerous and confrontational situations in which they place themselves.) The risks undergone by Hetherington and Junger for the sake of objective journalistic reporting are sadly reified by Hetherington's recent death while covering the rebellion in Misrata, Libya (in an attack that also killed photographer Chris Hondros). At a time when most documentaries feel compelled to offer self-involved opinions on divisive issues, Restrepo's main achievement may be its resolute desire to remain objective, to observe and convey—to provide photojournalism of the most vital and respectful sort.

10. A Prophet (d. Jacques Audiard, France/Italy)
I don't know if we really need more gritty crime stories about small-time hoods who rise to gangster stardom in microcosmic prisons, but if such stories are done as well as A Prophet, I guess we can't complain. Jacques Audiard—the propulsive, stylish, intuitive director of The Beat That My Heart Skipped and Read My Lips—helms A Prophet as though it were his Mean Streets: in every scene, with every shot, it's as though Audiard is trying to make a name for himself. He's directed six movies, but he treats A Prophet like it's his breakthrough—and, given the moderate stateside success of the movie, maybe it is (in a monetary sense, anyway).

Tahar Rahim gives an incredible performance as Malik El Djebena, a poor Parisian Muslim of Arab descent who is sentenced to six years in prison for, it seems, scuffling with some cops (a petty offense he nonetheless claims he did not commit). In The Shawshank Redemption, Tim Robbins's character claims it took going to prison to actually turn him into a criminal; too bad there's not a single believable moment in that entire movie. A Prophet, though, gives actualization to that idea (as have numerous other prison movies and TV shows): an insecure loser outside of the joint, Malik is approached by a group of menacing Corsican thugs almost as soon as he's imprisoned, and is forced to do their bidding by a terrifyingly unpredictable crimelord named César (who simultaneously serves as the movie's supervillain and father figure). At first a gutless errand boy who is manipulated due to his inexperience and his desperation to survive, Malik quickly ascends to the top of this prison hierarchy, thanks to the movie's most grueling scene: the assassination of a fellow Muslim inmate, carried out by a razor blade concealed in Malik's mouth.

In epic fashion, A Prophet details Malik's transformation from ordinary street kid to indomitable gangster. Beyond this compelling story and Audiard's incredible stylistic verve, there's actually little going on in A Prophet: if the movie is going for an allegorical portrayal of ethnic strife in modern Paris, it doesn't achieve it, and it doesn't really say anything about the allure or capitalistic motivation of violence, aside from the fact that you do what you have to do to survive. (One late scene, in which Malik solidifies his super-criminal status, actually seems to unequivocally glorify violence.) Thematically speaking, A Prophet is most interesting when it establishes how completely criminals are made by societal and economic forces, not by inherent personality: there's no doubt, by the end of the movie, that Malik is pressured into drug-dealing, assassination, and coldhearted brutality simply because the economic and ethnic stratification of modern Paris have led him into a situation where no other recourses are available to him.

If the movie is somewhat simple conceptually, it is endlessly compelling on a narrative and aesthetic level. At times, we may accuse Audiard (perhaps unfairly) of trying too hard: some of his stylistic flourishes (such as surreal visitations by the ghost of a man he's killed, or dreamlike visions of wild deer) come off as hokey and distracting instead of powerful. (At the same time, such sporadic surrealism distinguishes A Prophet from the glut of prison-set films and television shows that are already available to us.) But most often, this is a story told as powerfully and viscerally as powerful, observing characters' actions with a claustrophobic intensity (the cells that comprise the movie's setting are fully felt) yet hesitant to vilify or glamorize them. When César—who commits hideous acts of brutality throughout much of the movie—realizes that his reign over this prison kingdom has come to an end, we are surprised to find ourselves suddenly sympathizing with him; and when Malik kills his fellow prisoner (who is at first vilified, in predictably homophobic fashion, because of his predilection for screwing young male inmates), this victim reveals a shy, tender side that makes Malik's messy attempted throat-slitting that much more unbearable. The characterizations are almost too convenient, too heavily mapped-out to come off as realistic; but in the larger-than-life, bombastic style of A Prophet, they seem to work nonetheless.

In retrospect, A Prophet seems to work so well almost in spite of itself. It makes numerous mistakes, it missteps too often, and its moralism is almost adolescently pat. So why do I still remember it as such a powerful experience? The main reason, I think, is Tahar Rahim's lead performance, which is awkward, timid, shy, internalized—the exact opposite of what we would expect from such a violent and visceral character study. We watch him and we're willing to overlook the flaws that Audiard commits behind the camera: we believe that we're watching a genuine character's transformation, almost against our better judgment. It may not be an exaggeration to claim that Rahim singlehandedly turns a mediocre movie into an almost-great one, and if he doesn't experience a long and stellar career, it will be a travesty. (I was going to say a crime; then thought better about ending this short response with such a hideous pun...)


The Next Ten:

Winter's Bone walks the difficult tightrope of offering us access into a gritty, poverty-stricken, violent world without indulging in sordid slum glamour. It excels particularly as an unflinching character study, elevated by a knockout performance by Jennifer Lawrence.

It feels almost routine by now to place Toy Story 3 so high on this list: the reliably solid craftsmanship and heartfelt emotion of Pixar's films continue at an impressive level, even if this sequel feels less ambitious or influential than Wall-E or Up. But it's nonetheless a perfect conclusion to the trilogy, with an appropriately wistful finale and a melancholy world-weariness that would be affecting in any film (but especially so in one that centers around an ensemble of plastic figurines).

White Material may be a subpar Claire Denis movie (in my opinion), but a lesser film made by her is still better than most other movies out there. She and Isabelle Huppert, incredible as always, make an ideal pair: they turn the central character in White Material, a French heiress to a wealthy coffee plantation in an unnamed African country, into a fascinating, enigmatic contradiction. As Civil War erupts around her plantation, Huppert's headstrong businesswoman remains behind to rescue the floundering company: she's naïve and brilliant at the same time, manipulative and sensitive, a Frenchwoman and an expatriate deeply in love with her adopted land. The spell that Denis casts here may be less transfixing (perhaps because it's more direct) than in L'Intrus or 35 Shots of Rum, but it's still a haunting, gorgeous dreamscape of a movie.

The King's Speech may have won Best Picture at the Oscars this year—an achievement that would usually inspire severe skepticism on my behalf—but what's pleasantly surprising about the movie is how small and tightly focused it is. It may turn a momentous and destructive period of modern history into the inspiring story of one man's self-actualization, but it also intelligently comprehends the vital role that mediation plays in modern politics, and admirably allows its central character to remain difficult and unapproachable for much of its running time. Also, a rousing and inspirational climax is usually not a selling point with me, but this king's speech, when it finally arrives, is a flawless lesson in how to use aural and visual cinematic form in order to evoke an emotional response in an audience.

David O. Russell's The Fighter should be nothing more than a cliched biopic about a boxer who struggles against the odds; its storyline and screenplay suggest a rote, rousing sports movie that offers its cast a number of meaty showboating performances. But Russell and his crew are too sensitive, and his cast is too attuned to the subtleties of this story, to let the movie lapse into mindless predictability. At its best it portrays a complex and ambitious intersection of themes—athleticism, visual self-mediation, drug addiction, the self-destructive (and potentially redemptive) nature of family, class stratification, the elusive nature of memory—with a visceral force that makes it into the year's most rousing hybridization of genre entertainment and self-proclaimed ideas.

The best parts of Exit Through the Gift Shop are the least self-consciously clever ones: moments that simply allow us to observe the practice, appreciation, and precarious nature of street art, made by somebody who should know these topics better than anyone else (the notorious and ingenious street artist Banksy, who appears in this movie's interviews as a shadowy, voice-manipulated cypher). But even the less exciting parts of Exit Through the Gift Shop are intellectually stimulating, as this pseudo-documentary turns into a pranksterish commentary on the facile nature of artistic celebrity. Of all the documentaries this year that pondered the fact-and-fiction dichotomy, this may be the only one that has a clear, thought-provoking motivation for its sly manipulation of the truth.

Shutter Island basically amounts to Martin Scorsese dicking around in the stylistic sandbox that Hollywood has to offer: despite its artsy (and viscerally invigorating) flashbacks to the traumas of World War II, the movie is really just an excuse for Scorsese to deconstruct the editing and narrative structures that American movies are so accustomed to. As such, it's incredibly exciting—a trippy indulgence in formal insanity that's most successful only if it's never taken remotely seriously. In other words, the Rubik's-cube apex of style over substance, and maybe only Scorsese could make this tomfoolery so effective.

I'm not buying what the critics have told us: The Social Network is not an age-defining encapsulation of what it means to be a young person born in the digital generation. I'm not even entirely sure the movie tells us anything that any regular Facebook user couldn't already acknowledge intuitively. But the movie is a stylish, intense, perfectly-acted tragedy of self-destructive hubris and capitalistic competition. Aaron Sorkin's script sometimes seems a little too clever (in real life, I don't think anyone ever recites one-liners that conveniently summarize their characters' emotional mindstates and psychological motivations, snappy though those one-liners may be), but even that indulgent cleverness may have a purpose: only on social networking sites can people formulate their own snappy dialogue for hours before they recite it.

Marwencol doesn't do anything new with the documentary format, but its story is enough to make it immensely powerful: it's about Mark Hogancamp, a man who suffered a brutal beating from five assailants outside of a bar, and (after months of recovering from severe brain damage) creates an alternate world named “Marwencol” in his backyard. Marwencol is a one-sixth-scale recreation of a (wholly fabricated) small French town during World War II, populated by dolls and plastic toys (most of whom are modeled after Mark's loved ones and acquaintances) who enact a fantasy story involving villainous S.S. agents and voluptuous Belgian witches, dreamy love stories and violent, torturous treachery. To the movie's credit, it never tries to psychologize Mark's artistic “second life,” as he terms it: it simply observes Mark after this recovery, trying to deal with the anger and fear that have afflicted him since the attack, and it quietly appreciates the redemptive power of art. It may be formally unspectacular, but it does what more documentaries should do: it makes us fully experience the complex and overwhelming mysteries of human life, without trying to simplistically explain them away.

Finally, Splice distinguishes itself as the best cheesy idea-driven horror movie of the year: fans of Black Swan should watch this movie to discover what trippy psychosexual monstrosities actually look like. Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley play two genetic scientists, an unmarried couple who successfully infuse human DNA with that of other organisms in order to make an entirely new creature. The movie's ideas about parenthood, incest, human ingenuity and divine retribution are only half-formulated, but they're fascinating nonetheless. The director, Vincenzo Natali, also made 1997's Cube, another film marked by a fantastic idea that was only partly realized; Splice at least marks a maturation in the director's career, though he has yet to make a movie in which the execution equals the potential of its premise.