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.
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.
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