The Academy also awarded Woody Allen with a screenwriting statue for Midnight in Paris, another movie teeming with rose-colored, freeze-dried nostalgia. Supposedly, that movie's main character comes to the realization that simply looking backwards while dismissing the present and the future is stifling and suffocating, although that's a lesson the movie itself failed to learn. (The primary pleasure the movie offers — recreating larger-than-life historical figures like Hemingway, Dalí, and Gertrude Stein — basically amounts to a slightly stuffier version of the historical menagerie seen in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure.)
The nostalgia wasn't all facile in 2011, though: two superior movies embraced the past, either cinematic or otherwise, in radically different ways. Martin Scorsese's Hugo mastered cutting-edge digital technologies in order to lionize Georges Méliès, the unofficial founder of cinematic fantasy. The montage of Méliès films that appears late in Hugo — including a few painstaking 3D recreations — offered what may have been the most purely thrilling, and surprisingly emotional, rush for movie-lovers in 2011. While Scorsese's movie (along with Pina and Cave of Forgotten Dreams) finally convinced me of 3D's vitality and beauty, Aki Kaurismäki's Le Havre pitted the fairy-tale optimism that we associate with older movies against a jaded, cynical modernity complete with cell phones and bureaucratic immigration laws. Furthermore, it did so on glimmering, pulsating celluloid, often reveling in the simple, marvelous beauty of objects and light on film, magnified via close-up. Taken together, Hugo and Le Havre can be seen as a repudiation of the whole film-versus-digital debate: while I would have considered myself an obstinate supporter of the former up until about a year ago, the movies of 2011 convinced me that excitement, beauty, precision, originality — in a word, greatness — can be overwhelming onscreen regardless of the format.
Maybe it's not all that surprising that this wave of nostalgia surged at the same time that movies' technologies and business practices are transforming. Economic and/or technological flux in cinema seem to inspire periods of creative fertility among moviemakers: think, for example, of the great early-1930s sound pictures of Fritz Lang, Rene Clair, Ernst Lubitsch, and Howard Hawks, or the boundary-pushing New Waves of the 1960s and '70s (in France, Japan, the United States, Czechoslovakia, Germany) that accompanied new handheld cameras, societal upheavals, and economic turbulence. (Could the American New Wave have happened if Hollywood hadn't been experiencing such a drastic crisis?) The artistic liveliness that seems to accompany industrial change was exhibited once again in 2011, a remarkably good year for movies that featured knockout performances by a roster of the world's most esteemed auteurs (Kiarostami, Kaurismäki, Herzog, Wenders, Weerasethakul, Malick, Lynne Ramsay, Kelly Reichardt, Raul Ruiz, et al.) at the same time that it offered breakout new works by relative newcomers such as Sean Durkin (Martha Marcy May Marlene) and Andrew Haigh (Weekend).
A note about my (mostly arbitrary) criteria for a 2011 release date: the movie in question must have had at least a limited release during the calendar year. This means that films that snuck in a premiere in New York or Los Angeles just before the new year (such as Coriolanus or Rampart) are 2012 releases in my book. It also means that movies that had their Twin Cities premiere in 2011, yet had received a limited release in late 2010, are added retroactively to my 2010 list. Again, mostly arbitrary, not to mention convoluted: I realize that releasing films in a staggered, hierarchical manner (to the "film capitals" of New York and Los Angeles first, then the major metropolises, then the "small" big cities) is a successful business model that drums up anticipation, but it also gives the impression that smaller big cities (like Minneapolis-St. Paul) are being tossed distributors' hand-me-downs when they receive movies half a year (or more) after their initial premieres. There were a few movies initially released in 2010 that I finally saw in Twin Cities theaters in 2011; a couple of them were good enough to have made my 2011 list below, but my feeble attempts to abide by more-or-less standardized release information means I couldn't include them on my list.
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| Hadewijch |
The most egregious absence in this regard is Bruno Dumont's Hadewijch, which saw a limited US release in December 2010, although it finally premiered at Minneapolis's Trylon theater in June of 2011. Hadewijch would be fairly high on the list below if I had included it therein. It's beguilingly cryptic, volatile, angry — all appropriate descriptors for a semi-sacrilegious film about religious extremism, self-flagellation, terrorism, divine resurrection, and other hot-button issues. When I saw it, there were only about half a dozen people in the audience; all of them, including myself, were gasping repeatedly at what Dumont was ballsy enough to attempt. There have been a few movies about the violence spawned by religious zealotry — the one-two punch of The War Within and Paradise Now, released within a month of each other in 2005; the moody indie drama Day Night Day Night; elaborate epics like Spielberg's self-consciously "adult" Munich or Olivier Assayas's globetrotting, punk-rock Carlos — but most of them have stopped short of actually ripping into their difficult subject matter; the simultaneous blasphemy and piousness that such a theme entails are mostly missing from those titles. (Granted, some of them aren't interested in exploring that aspect of religious extremism; one of Carlos's main points is how dismissive Carlos is of the spiritual dogmatism he purports to espouse, reveling instead in the shallow celebrity accorded by terrorism.) Hadewijch, on the other hand — the story of a harshly austere nun who is expelled from her convent, eventually becoming involved with a Muslim fanatic who's as desperate as she is to find God and self-discovery — confronts its uncomfortable aspects head-on. It's offensive at times, but only because it takes off the kid gloves and takes its main characters to task for their foolish, destructive zealotry. Beautifully spare and highly disturbing, it all ends with an ambiguous reversal of Bresson's Mouchette: instead of suicide by drowning, Hadewijch's main character may or may not find resurrection from the unlikeliest of sources. Like much of the film, this ending has stuck with me since I first saw it about eight months ago; violence and existential doubt carry real weight here, which can't be said about many movies.
2011 Movies I Unfortunately Missed:
Aurora
The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu
Beginners
House of Pleasures
The Interrupters
J. Edgar
Moneyball
Nostalgia for the Light
The Rise of the Planet of the Apes
THE TOP TEN MOVIES OF 2011
1. Certified Copy (d. Abbas Kiarostami, France/Italy/Belgium)
Love Story for postmodern theorists? On the sun-dappled, cobblestone streets of Lucignano, Italy, two intellectuals meet-cute: he's an art theorist on a promotional tour for his latest book (also called Certified Copy), about the emotional and institutional value of mechanical duplications of an original artwork; she's the owner of an antiques store in Tuscany, who (it is revealed as the movie progresses) places great value in emotional legitimacy.
At first it appears that these two strangers are engaging in a capricious fling, batting intellectual questions and theories back and forth, yet in a flirtatious manner. At some point, though, the tectonic plates of Certified Copy shift, transforming everything that's come beforehand: at a cafe following a particularly heated dispute, a nearby waitress assumes that the couple is married and asks how they met. The two of them play along through the rest of the movie, dutifully portraying a husband and wife who both bicker and reconcile with the intimacy of longtime spouses. Which is the truth? Are they self-conscious performing artists enacting their possible future, or an actual married couple obscuring their relationship beneath a curtain of playacting? Whatever is the case, would they behave differently otherwise?
This might all make the movie sound cold and self-satisfied, but what thrills me most about Certified Copy is that its intellectualism is buoyed by great humanism: the head and the heart go hand in hand here. For sure, the central relationship is refracted, funhouse mirror-style, by the subtle yet mind-bending themes: why do people behave the way they do? Are all of our relationships mere performances, ordained primarily by the way we assume other people expect us to behave? What is a character on film and a character in reality, and are they any different? (In other words, are the things we do and say copies of what has come before?) Honestly, I don't know if I'm decoding Kiarostami's abstractions accurately, but I also don't think it matters all that much. (He'd probably say there's no single "correct" interpretation.) The movie ends in mystery and confusion; we shouldn't be surprised that we never really learn what the relationship is between them. But are relationships ever easy to categorize? Aren't the evasions and half-truths in Certified Copy more honestly, intricately human than the neat patterns of behavior most movie characters perpetrate?
2. Meek's Cutoff (d. Kelly Reichardt, USA)
One of the best directors currently working in America sets her sights backwards: Kelly Reichardt's first historical film (it's set on the Oregon Trail in 1845) is as spare and carefully-detailed as you'd expect from the director of Wendy and Lucy and Old Joy. Three pioneer families have banded together to make the journey west via covered wagon; their blustery guide Stephen Meek (Bruce Greenwood) spins tall tales about his frontier prowess, all the while leading them further astray into the hellish, desert-like wilderness. Despite this synopsis, Meek's Cutoff has as much in common with Jeanne Dielman as with The Way West or McCabe and Mrs. Miller: Reichardt takes care to convey the pioneers' grueling labor with exacting detail, mending wheels, preparing the wagons, or sewing clothes in the blistering sun. In particular, the movie nudges the audience towards the female perspective, emphasizing their lack of power in the face of their male counterparts' wrongheaded decisions; even the sound design muffles and mutes the men's conversations at seemingly crucial times.
Meek's Cutoff can be viewed as allegorical from several different perspectives — as a feminist drama of errant male power, or a political parable regarding our leaders' abuse of their people's trust — but it's more simply impressive as a minimalist existential thriller: a group of doomed strangers wander through an arid wasteland, with every white hill of sand and endless stretch of desert leading to death's door. It's not wrong to call Meek's Cutoff at once one of the scariest and most pared-down movies of the year, achieving intensity through the agonizingly slow crawl of daily life while death is imminent.
3. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (d. Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand/UK/France/Germany/Spain/Netherlands)
J. Hoberman called Uncle Boonmee "the fullest expression yet of Weerasethakul's singular sensibility" — the fullest and, one might add, the most concise, as the Thai master of everyday magic seems to pare his interests in reincarnation, storytelling, alternate realities, and the bending of time to their mind-bending basics. The movie's simple and cosmic at the same time. Boonmee is an elderly man suffering from kidney failure; at death's door, he is able to access and communicate with a spirit world replete with red-eyed monkey ghosts, slowly-appearing apparitions of deceased loved ones, princesses charmed by amorous catfishes, and a luminescent, mysterious cave that must be some kind of portal between this world and the next.
Both less silly and more hypnotic than it sounds, the world that Uncle Boonmee conjures is not easy to fathom, but that might be because we simply don't know the rules of reality yet. As far as we know, reality is immediate, perceivable, rational: it abides by the laws of science and reason. But there may be more laws out there, those that we're not aware of, and these may be the realities that Boonmee becomes acquainted with in his few remaining days. (Is our reality more "real" than the one this movie shows to us? Maybe our universe is just too tunnel-visioned to encompass others.) This sounds like surrealism, but it's more genuinely spiritual and achingly humane than surrealism typically is; the style that Weerasethakul forges (a mad mix of influences, from the Thai horror movies he enjoyed as a kid growing up in the rural northeast jungles of the country, to the American avant-garde films he became fond of at the Art Institute of Chicago) can't be relegated to a particular school of thought. We may not always know where he's leading us when he watch his movies, but the destinations are hypnotic almost to the point of bliss.
4. Hugo (d. Martin Scorsese, USA)
Hugo cites some of the earliest films available to us (Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat in 1896, A Trip to the Moon in 1902) with technologies and production equipment as cutting-edge as possible. (This excellent Film Stage article offers a thrilling short-list of some of the movie's influences.) Just as audiences 120 years ago may have gasped and thrilled at the new medium of cinema that was being introduced to them, modern audiences can gape at Scorsese's 3D images with the sensation that we're discovering the movies all over again. I had always assumed (like, I believe, many others) that 3D was a gimmicky technology designed to suck more money into the studios' box office coffers — fine for silly escapism like Avatar or Tron, but not a serious stylistic tool for directors. My mind was changed last year, partially by innovative documentaries like Pina and Cave of Forgotten Dreams, but mostly by Hugo. I can't remember another movie that so euphorically excited me practically as soon as it started: a digital vista of Paris circa the early 1930s gives way to a racing camera that fluidly wanders the halls of a bustling train station. The lengthy first part of the movie is devoted to exploring this space in a breathlessly visceral (and an invigoratingly new) way.
The story concerns a young orphan living in the walls of the train station; he eventually connects a mysterious automaton left to him by his deceased father to an irascible old merchant who turns out to be the cinema's original magician, Georges Méliès. Maybe the story of Hugo, the young orphan boy, and his budding friendship with Méliès' adventurous goddaughter Isabelle is less awe-inspiring than that of Méliès and his begrudging return to the seventh art that ultimately destroyed him, but it doesn't matter; the whimsical energy of the movie's young characters tempers the unabashed cinephilia that reigns throughout the rest of the movie. (One of the most inspiriting things about Hugo is how widely palatable it is, as it introduces Méliès, the Lumière brothers, and Edwin S. Porter to audiences who might otherwise have no interest in those names.) The earnest, aw-shucks proclamations delivered by Hugo about how movies can transport and comfort and inspire us could have been clumsily cheesy if Hugo itself didn't convince us of these attributes so incontrovertibly.
It all culminates in a montage of classic Méliès movies from the first 15 years of cinema, some of which are painstakingly recreated in Scorsese's own glorious, colorful 3D. This climactic montage is emotionally overwhelming partly for its narrative context (Méliès being pulled from the brink of destitution by the art form that sent him there in the first place) but also for what it means beyond the context of Hugo itself: always an avid film historian and preservationist, Scorsese brings his respect and enthusiasm for film history to spectacular cinematic life.
5. A Separation (d. Asghar Farhadi, Iran)
The most humane movie of the year, and also perhaps the most meticulously constructed, albeit in subtle ways — as such, it recalls some of Jean Renoir's empathic masterpieces, among them The Crime of Monsieur Lange and The Rules of the Game. A Separation's plot unfurls slowly, with mounting apprehension; we take our time observing the characters, regarding them as fully-formed individuals rather than mere cogs in a narrative machine. It is because of this sensitivity that, when the gears of the plot do start chugging away and even interlocking precisely, the acrobatics of the storyline (the juggling of numerous subplots, the brief gestures and conversations that reappear with great significance later on, the character motivations that must be fully conveyed so we can become convinced of the narrative's complexity) overwhelm us emotionally more than conceptually.
I brought up The Rules of the Game, a cause célèbre that was notoriously met with caustic reviews, riots, and bans when it was first released. Indeed, Renoir's film was an impassioned satire of French social hierarchy and the pettiness of the Parisian upper class, but that's not what A Separation has in common with it. What the two films share is an ardent respect for human life, a profound consideration of human complexity and volatility. It's become commonplace to commend certain films for their moral ambiguities, for their unwillingness to condemn or celebrate characters as either villains or heroes, but I can't think of a movie that demonstrates that complex empathy more ably than A Separation. Characters who at first seem like vilified plot devices take on astonishing depth and pathos as the movie progresses. It's a movie in which people take on agonizingly real dimensions, something that's a lot less common in the movies than it should be.
But A Separation, as I mentioned, does not share with The Rules of the Game an embittered commentary on the society in which it was made: while it does portray some of Iran's social institutions (especially its penal system) as absurdly labyrinthine, the movie's concerns are infinitely more humane than political. The hardline Iranian officials who have condemned A Separation for catering to Western perceptions of the country and emphasizing its social inefficacy are astonishingly misguided in their accusations. The poignancy, the believability, of A Separation's ensemble of characters extends to its social relevance: in addition to the vivid, immersive snapshots of modern-day Tehran that it offers, the movie makes it clear that there are no villains here, simply people struggling with the pressures of everyday life. More benevolent and beneficial than a hundred Hollywood message movies, such humane simplicity is vital in a politically antagonistic climate, one in which pundits have been debating the likelihood of war between Iran and either Israel or the United States. It might be obvious, but no less significant, to recognize that one of the many glories that movies (and art in general) offer us is to connect emotionally to people half a world away.
6. The Mill and the Cross (d. Lech Majewski, Sweden/Poland)
One of the very best movies about painting that I can think of (Henri-Georges Clouzot's The Mystery of Picasso also comes to mind), The Mill and the Cross is as cinematic as it is painterly, giving credence to that old aphorism that the art of film entails "painting with light." Polish director Lech Majewski (who's been making films since 1980, although most of them have found only limited exposure in the States) dives headfirst into a behemoth of a masterpiece: Pieter Bruegel the Elder's 1564 painting "The Procession to Calvary," which places the crucifixion of Christ obliquely amid a huge ensemble of characters, most of whom pay no attention to his suffering. One of the mystifying paradoxes of Bruegel's painting is that he infuses the setting of Christ's crucifixion with his own immediate world, incorporating the lives of the peasants and millers and noblemen around him into his quasi-historical document — an anachronistic simultaneity that the film duplicates as well.
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| Pieter Bruegel the Elder's "The Procession to Calvary," 1564 |
Bruegel had an ethical reason to commingle his own world with that of Judaea in the first century: Flanders in 1564 was overrun with Spanish Catholics terrorizing Belgian Protestants. The painting, then, is more a commentary on the eternal cruelty and barbarism of man than a historical representation of the crucifixion. The Mill and the Cross achieves the same breaking-down of historical timelines, allowing the executions of both Christ and two innocent peasants to parallel each other, to take on equal significance. If both the painting and the movie suggest the unchanging capacity for violence that people are capable of, this may prod the audience into relating such ideas to our own time: have such forms of merciless, deadly prejudice been eradicated, or they have simply taken on new, more "civilized" appearances?
More prominently, though, The Mill and the Cross asks us to deconstruct artistic forms and question the varying modes of vision that different arts utilize. The Mill and the Cross uses computer-generated imagery, a complex interlaying of backdrops and studio-shot footage, and even a full-size replication of "The Procession to Calvary" (painted by Lech Majewski himself) to concoct a hypnotically new visual style, halfway between painting and film. The use of stasis or movement on various simultaneous planes (complete immobility in the foreground with only a few characters stuttering around in the background, for example) is meticulous and transfixing; it really does seem like Bruegel's painting is being slowly kickstarted into motion (which, after all, is the general aim of the movie). It is because of this that The Mill and the Cross ultimately ends up in that mysterious middle ground between fantasy and reality, in which demonstrably real people can act in front of vivid, larger-than-life brushstrokes.
7. The Skin I Live In (d. Pedro Almodóvar, Spain)
Almodóvar's films are typically steeped in the vivid colors, lurid melodrama, and propulsive plots of cinematic soap operas, citing such genre antecedents either implicitly (as in the sweat-soaked Matador or my personal favorite, Live Flesh) or explicitly (All About My Mother, Bad Education, the scopophilic Broken Embraces). There's no doubt his films take place in Movieland, but his allusions are usually good-natured and irresistibly self-deprecating rather than empty, soulless references that aim for artificiality.
But never before has Almodóvar made a film as densely referential as The Skin I Live In: this movie latches on to (and reappropriates) ideas from Eyes without a Face, Vertigo, Island of Lost Souls, Frankenstein, even a little bit of Persona. Almodóvar, though, never fails to revitalize this fodder in ingenious ways, spinning a few of those earlier movies on their heads and turning their concepts into a tortured expression of sexual confusion. The Skin I Live In can be accurately described as a lurid mad-scientist psychosexual horror movie, but its genre trappings convey a highly disturbing, genuinely shocking obliteration of both genre and gender identity.
The puzzles and cinematic allusions that Almodóvar concocts seem entirely devoted to complicating the emotional trajectories undergone by the characters. Also as in Eyes without a Face, the horrors we see aren't supposed to be campy or tossed-off; this is meant to be horrific and painful, even serious. Almodóvar's ruse is in conveying this pain with the same pop-colored bravado that he usually does. But the movie is, after all, about at least one person trapped in a body that doesn't belong to them (that's the closest I'll get to a spoiler); since The Skin I Live In tackles sexual malleability and ratchets that theme's intensity up to the nth degree, it only seems fair that this movie isn't all fun and games to watch. (It seems necessary to point this out, since that skin-crawling anxiety is exactly what critics like Roger Ebert and David Edelstein criticized, though that's entirely appropriate to the movie's subject matter.) The Skin I Live In takes place in traumatized, horror-movie territory, not in Almodóvar's usual sphere of exuberant melodrama; what sense does it make to criticize him for tackling something uncomfortably new?
8. Pina (d. Wim Wenders, Germany/France/UK)
My second-favorite 3D experience of 2011: hearing an arthouse-film crowd gasp in astonishment at the very first image of Pina, which is nothing more than a nighttime street scene in Wuppertal, Germany. (My favorite 3D moment: seeing the title to Hugo fly past my bewildered eyeballs after what seemed like an hour into the movie.) That first image in Pina may be nothing more than an unspectacular building on a street corner (how many of those have you seen during your lifetime?), but at the same time it's so much more than that. Think of the train arriving at La Ciotat station in the Lumière Brothers' 1895 film: today such a scene is commonplace, but at the turn of the century it presented the onset of a brand new form of vision. And so it is with 3D (or so it could be): a transfixing new space in which filmmakers can experiment.
Primarily, Pina is about movement, about the human body, about the strange and unexpected directions in which creativity can lead us. It's a movie that moves quickly and irrepressibly, which is apt for a documentary about dance. Director Wim Wenders and celebrated choreographer Pina Bausch, longtime friends, had actually discussed a performance documentary for decades, but Wenders remained uncertain how he could capture the visceral movements of her and her dancers on film. With the increasing prevalence of 3D filmmaking over the last several years (Wenders specifically cites U23D as an influence), they finally found their answer. Bausch died suddenly in 2009 (two days before shooting was set to commence) and Wenders was about to abandon the project, but her dancers convinced him to see it through to the end, turning the documentary into a commemoration of her legacy and art.
Almost as much as Hugo (but in a totally different way), Pina perfects a burgeoning 3D aesthetic, wowing us with its newness. An endless parade of dancers mimes the four seasons, snaking across a stage and along a dusty ridge, seemingly smiling directly at us. We then leap into Bausch's staging of The Rite of Spring (the still above), a remarkably intense primal scream that, of course, involves no screaming at all. (The few words we hear in Pina make us realize how much more potent the images are on their own.) Bausch's Café Müller, Kontakthof, and Vollmond are also performed (the last of these leaps off the screen with soaring arcs of water beneath shimmering lights), along with seemingly spontaneous dances by members of Bausch's troupe. The film embraces a healthy surrealist streak (my favorite example: a rabbit-eared bystander witnesses a white-clad woman attacking a pillow on an el train) but its silent performances suggest untold pain and desperation as well.
What point is there in saying more? This is that rare kind of movie that has to be seen to be experienced — a plot synopsis or thematic analysis would simply result in the supremacy of words that Bausch and Wenders were trying to avoid. ("There are situations that leave you utterly speechless," Bausch says in the film. "All you can do is hint at things.") This simpleness has caused some reviewers to describe the film as slight, but there's a difference between simpleness and simplicity, and Pina is simple in a ravishing, all-encompassing way. To say it's "just" about the artistry that Bausch and her dancers created is akin to claiming that the movie is "just" about life.
9. Melancholia (d. Lars von Trier, Denmark/Sweden/France/Germany)
How can a movie about extreme depression and the end of the world seem so invigorating, so restorative? I remember leaving the theater on a chilly November day, moments after bearing witness to the destruction of earth and the termination of humanity's petty problems, and feeling inexplicably happy. In fact, I remember feeling similarly vivified moments after watching Antonioni's L'Eclisse, the bewildering ending of which seems to suggest that the characters' feelings of detachment and desperation didn't mean all that much when nuclear war could end it all in an instant anyway. The endings of both movies and how perversely happy they made me brought to mind an aphorism that Roger Ebert wrote a long time ago: no great movie is boring, even if it's a movie some people might deem "difficult." We might extend the formula: no great movie is depressing, even if its subject matter is bleak as hell.
A strange paradox distinguished 2011: it was filled with nostalgia, yet at the same time populated with hopeless apocalyptic fantasies. Melancholia, The Turin Horse, 4:44 Last Day on Earth, Take Shelter, Contagion — all of these movies looked ahead to the end of times while other movies looked backwards, towards some kind of purity. (Whether this end-of-the-world mindset was sparked by actual social crises or something more existential is another question.) Of all these movies (besides maybe 4:44, which I haven't seen), Melancholia provides the clearest illustration of the destruction of earth (thanks to a blindingly annihilative special-effects-laden climax), so why is it also, perhaps, the most electrifying of them all?
A lot of it has to do, I think, with Lars von Trier's extravagant modernism: he never tries to hide the fact that his films are thoroughly inflected with his skewed worldview, his neuroses and obsessions, his dark yet entrancing ideas and stylistic whims. This was extreme to the point of repugnance with his previous film, Antichrist, but with Melancholia it seems like we're bearing witness to von Trier's self-therapy, and it somehow feels cleansing for us, too. (What better way to exorcise one's demons than to manifest the end of the world?) In interviews (including that notorious Cannes press conference), von Trier has admitted that he was undergoing severe depression during the making of both Antichrist and Melancholia, yet while the former exhibits nothing but hatred and ugliness, the latter seems to approach some kind of acceptance, maybe even a self-reckoning.
Melancholia also exhibits more sympathy with its characters than any von Trier film to date. The director has often been criticized for brutalizing his lead female characters (Emily Watson in Breaking the Waves, Björk in Dancer in the Dark, Nicole Kidman in Dogville), but here the violence is almost all psychological, and it's a pain that von Trier apparently understands all too well. Kirsten Dunst was also reportedly recovering from severe depression while making the film; her Justine seems fairly clearly to be a stand-in for von Trier (at least in some ways), and her recklessness and cruelty always seem to emanate from a very real psychological wellspring. All of this led Salon's Lindsay Zoladz to reasonably posit that von Trier "is the misogynistic author of a feminist film," in that Melancholia deals sensitively with the mental anguish undergone by Justine (instead of simply blaming "female hysteria" for her behavior). There's so much going on in Melancholia (conceptually, visually, stylistically, psychologically) that its artistic vitality counters the movie's undeniable existential despair.
10. Margaret (d. Kenneth Lonergan, USA)
A movie that's almost entirely comprised of rough edges, Margaret's first cut was actually finished more than six years ago, with a running time of about three hours. Then, from late 2005 to last year, the movie languished in editing purgatory: contractually obligated to provide a cut of two-and-a-half-hours or less (the kind of arbitrary and draconian stipulation that movie studios love to exert), Lonergan labored to provide an acceptable compromise, eventually bringing in Martin Scorsese and his longtime editor Thelma Schoonmaker to help with the process. What they ended up with — and what was barely released (in NY and LA) late last year, with an eventually staggered release towards the beginning of 2012 — was a sprawling, nervy, unforgettable, absurdly ambitious project that attempts to encapsulate post-9/11 life in New York City, through the eyes of a self-absorbed high schooler.
The extent to which you like Margaret depends on your fondness for messy, rambling, multifaceted, strident movies that emphasize emotions and ideas over story. Moviegoers looking for lean, economical, well-told narratives may groan exasperatedly during the film (as many did in the Minneapolis theater that showed Margaret for about two weeks in late February). Others, though, will find much to appreciate (and mull over, and grapple with) in the movie's jangly combination of Cassavetes' raw emotions with Godard's scattershot pontifications.
At its most basic, Margaret is about a high-schooler (significantly not named Margaret) grappling with her feelings of guilt after indirectly contributing to the death of a pedestrian on a New York City street. But the emotional fallout from this tragedy shares screen time with the high-schooler Lisa's loss of virginity, her combative relationship with her mother, heated arguments in class seminars about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the role (or lack thereof) that works of art play in our everyday lives, a modern America defined by money and isolation and sensationalism, and a baker's dozen of tangential themes.
This all does comprise a jagged patchwork of sorts, and the multifaceted nature of Margaret does serve a purpose: it reflects, with jarring complexity, the daunting heterogeneity of both entering adulthood and living in a huge metropolis (like New York City). Life is difficult, or at least dynamic, and there always necessarily exists a breach in communication between people: Margaret is one of the few movies that fully conveys those ideas, or even cares to think about them. Ultimately, the movie provides hope in the form of creative expression, the kind of artistry that Lisa has repeatedly denounced as solipsistic: by the end of the movie, she begins to believe that creating art is a way of dealing with the monumental difficulties that modern life has to offer.
THE NEXT TEN
In a phenomenal year for movies, Le Havre's low-key delights were somewhat overshadowed by grander, more hypnotic films, but the subtle magic that Aki Kaurismäki evokes in his latest is no small achievement. Ardently, unabashedly sentimental (to the point that its happy ending poignantly defies all logic), Le Havre harkens back to silent cinema's ability to turn ordinary, everyday life into something otherworldly and fantastic. (Kaurismäki and his cinematographer, Timo Salminen, remind us how gorgeous a simple ray of sunlight can be on 35mm.) Which isn't to say that dialogue is unimportant in Le Havre: the deadpan dialogue for which Kaurismäki is known (and which Jim Jarmusch occasionally emulates) is as ingratiating as ever, making the movie as funny as it is emotional.
A dazzling Möbius strip of a movie, Mysteries of Lisbon is all about the pyrotechnics of storytelling — the shuffling of narrators, the manipulation of vision, narrative recursion and refraction and so on. This four-and-a-half hour adaptation of Camilo Castelo Branco's 1854 novel was also one of the last films of the celebrated Portuguese director Raúl Ruiz (The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting, Time Regained), who has directed more than 90 films since his debut in 1963 (he died on August 19 of last year — exactly two weeks after Mysteries of Lisbon was released stateside). Comprised of gorgeous, acrobatic tracking shots, lush costume and set design, an unforgettably romantic musical score by Jorge Arriagada, and a plethora of stylistic tricks (so many diopters!), Mysteries of Lisbon constantly makes you aware of its elaborate construction, which paradoxically makes its story (or make that stories) more engaging rather than less. Maybe by the end you'll be feeling the 270 minute running time, but primarily because your eyes and brain will become exhausted from all the dizzying opulence.
Naming your film Poetry seems to entail at least some kind of overreaching pretense, but Lee Chang-dong's South Korean drama distinguishes itself as one of the most humane and empathetic movies of the year. The director of Secret Sunshine focuses on another female protagonist: a 60-something woman who impulsively begins studying poetry partially in an attempt to combat the onset of Alzheimer's, and who simultaneously learns that her grandson (for whom she's the primary guardian) has committed an unspeakable and heinous act. At 140 minutes, Poetry takes its time getting to where it's going, but that provides plenty of opportunities for character development, slowly mounting suspense, and a visual palette that is, admittedly, poetic. The film's uniqueness and sincerity is epitomized by its ending, a jarring conclusion that radically deconstructs character identification, first-person perspective, and linear storytelling in poignant ways.
Martha Marcy May Marlene provided two of the most impressive breakout performances of 2011: for Elizabeth Olsen, the doe-eyed actress who manages to make her character, a refugee from an abusive, identity-demolishing cult, terrifyingly paranoid and constantly relatable at the same time; and for writer-director Sean Durkin, who's able to sustain an astonishingly consistent and oppressively eerie atmosphere throughout the entire movie. It's not really a horror film, but it's still one of the scariest movies of the year, with an agonizingly unresolved ending that puts us in exactly the same position as the main character.
A soul transmigrates through human, animal, vegetable, and finally mineral form in Michelangelo Frammartino's Le Quattro Volte, a sublimely simple still life-in-motion shot in the countryside of Calabria, where — 2,500 years beforehand — Pythagoras developed his theory regarding the cyclical, harmonic nature of the universe. More than a philosophical head-scratcher, though, Le Quattro Volte is a charming and sometimes blissful observational work, infused with simple beauty and the kind of meticulous visual comedy that Jacques Tati perfected. Unconcerned with the stifling structures of narrative and (to an extent) character development, here's one of the few movies that embraces the underlying pleasure to be gleaned from movies: the act of looking at the world.
Mind-boggling and beautiful as Cave of Forgotten Dreams is, I far prefer Werner Herzog's 2D documentary from 2011 to his 3D one. Into the Abyss finds the German auteur casting his lens on the American penal system and capital punishment; the film details Michael Perry and Jason Burkett, who received the death sentence and life imprisonment, respectively, for a triple homicide in Conroe, Texas. The men's guilt isn't really in question here — although Perry and Burkett both blame each other for the murders, there's no doubt that both men are at least indirectly culpable. Rather, Herzog uses their guilt to question the morality of capital punishment in a complex way: whether or not they're guilty, what are the repercussions of state-ordained retribution? Herzog hardly hides his anti-death penalty bias, but he also allows all of his subjects to speak for themselves, quietly respecting their polarized reactions to this tragedy. Especially memorable are interviews with Jason Burkett's father (a man also facing a life sentence in prison, regretful and ashamed of the legacy he feels he's passed on to his son); and Fred Allen, a former execution supervisor for the Texas Department of Corrections who abandoned his career and pension after he became haunted (perhaps literally) by the ghosts of those he'd killed. Unshakably emotional (I was probably tearing up, if not outright weeping, for the last 45 minutes) and thematically complex, it's yet another movie that demonstrates Herzog's penchant for depicting the uncompromising firestorms provided by real life (though it's to the movie's credit that it somehow ends on a note of hope and rebirth).
A number of David Cronenberg's movies have injected Freud's psychoanalytic theories into corporeal horror (Rabid, The Brood, Dead Ringers, Crash), so it's not too surprising that he would eventually tackle the Viennese analyst head-on. Cronenberg's real ploy with A Dangerous Method is to suggest the characters' neuroses, drives, and desires in restrained, mostly invisible ways, relegating their psychosexual urges to a subterranean (or at least cerebral) realm. The movie also has the most affecting doomed romance of any 2011 movie, or rather (as David O'Hehir points out in his Salon review) two doomed romances: between Carl Jung and Sabina Spielrein, the doctor and patient who would become lovers and who were aware of the bearing that their psychosexual theories had on their own behavior; and between Jung and Sigmund Freud, the two hotheaded scientists whose personal rivalry established one of the prevailing psychological movements of the twentieth century.
Jonathan Romney called The Tree of Life "the least good masterpiece in recent memory," which sounds about right: its monumental vision and overwhelming beauty have to coexist with faux-transcendental voiceovers, off-kilter pacing (we know next to nothing about the adult life of Jack yet are still expected to care about what happens to him), and a schmaltzy ending (surely such a visionary work could have created a more awe-inspiring afterlife than some doorways lugubriously propped open on a windswept beach). So it's saying something that The Tree of Life still seems so magisterial and overwhelming despite its flaws; it's hard to disparage a movie that overflows with so much beauty, ambition, and aching emotion.
Take Shelter falters a bit in its final moments, but before that it's an unshakably intense look at a man grappling with apocalyptic visions and the possible onset of paranoid schizophrenia (a disease with which his mother became afflicted in her mid-30s). As such it's the second movie of 2011 (with Melancholia) to sensitively draw an analogy between mental instability and the end of the world, but Take Shelter is distinguished by its respectful look at lower-middle-class America, not to mention awe-inspiring performances by two of the best actors working today (Michael Shannon and Jessica Chastain).
A digital movie doesn't have to be stereoscopic to be visually impressive, a fact that Andrew Haigh's Weekend reminds us of constantly. With gorgeous (often nighttime) videography and a minimalist, removed aesthetic, Weekend details the burgeoning relationship between two men after a capricious (supposed) one night stand. It's a resolutely modern Brief Encounter that even ends with a bittersweet farewell in a train station. Written and acted with an incredible ear for naturalistic conversation, it's the kind of movie that offers us guarded yet intimate access to what seems like the lives of two real individuals.
