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You didn’t need to like football to fall in love with Friday Night Lights, and you don’t have to like patriotic showcases or agree with the War in Afghanistan to be moved by Lone Survivor.
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Last year was an anomalously fantastic year for film, comprising several masterpieces (Before Midnight, Stories We Tell, Inside Llewyn Davis), thought-provoking films (Museum Hours, No), and a wealth of other great movies – or at least movies with truly great elements (the acting in Blue is the Warmest Color) which there was not room for in this list. Rare is the year when my top ten list features several movies I want to watch over and over again, and likely for years to come.
1) Before Midnight
Richard Linklater’s masterpiece, the dialogue-heavy and character-driven Before Midnight, has no illusions about relationships: it’s the romantic story of two people coming to terms with actually getting what they wanted — a life with their soulmate — which also comes with years of built up resentments. The first time I saw the film, it seemed bleak, considering this is a couple that I felt like I’d known for eighteen years since Before Sunrise. By the third viewing, it had morphed and changed into the most optimistic, as well as the most complex, film of the series. The first two films have always changed for me over time as I grew older, finding new nuances with each rewatch; Before Midnight gets more and more interesting with repeat viewings that are only weeks apart. It never misses a beat or slows to a halt.
2) Inside Llewyn Davis
Joel and Ethan Coen’s remarkable Inside Llewyn Davis is a rich character study of the fictional itinerant folk singer Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaac) whose career is going nowhere. Llewyn is not a particularly nice guy but the genius of the film and of Isaac’s performance is that as the film progresses, it slowly peels back his many layers. He can be charismatic, especially in banter with one-time lover Jean (Carey Mulligan), or with new acquaintances. But his deep-seated anger and pain usually turn any potentially positive interaction sour, even though he often exercises admirable restraint.
The Coens impeccably recreate the atmosphere of the 1960s folk scene, but it’s always tainted by Llewyn’s perspective: are the other acts he hears perform truly grotesque or does he merely insist on seeing them that way? The film has some of the funniest scenes of the year, including the recording session of “Please Mr Kennedy” and the Jewish-Chinese couple that name their son Howard Greenfung. Oscar Isaac gives a terrific performance as Llewyn, who, like a real musician, only lets us really inside, past the abrasive exterior, when he is singing and strumming.
3) Stories We Tell**
Part interviews, historical footage, and recreated historical footage with present-day actors, Sarah Polley’s personal documentary Stories We Tell is about her discovery that the father who raised her was not her biological father. It’s a compelling and insightful meditation on storytelling: why we tell stories and why the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves change over time. Polley interviews her family, her mother’s friends, and her candidate biological fathers to assemble some version of the truth of what happened. In so doing, she discovers that there is no absolute truth: memories get distorted for a variety of reasons, including self-preservation, and each person in the film recalls a slightly different version of events. Since Polley is asking the questions and editing the footage together, what we get is her version of everyone else’s version of the story: the film is thus itself a product of subjective storytelling even as it brilliantly highlights the unreliable subjectivity of its subjects.
4) Frances Ha (now on Netflix USA and Canada)
Noah Baumbach’s strongest film, Frances Ha, starring the luminous Greta Gerwig in a star-making turn as the titular Frances, is like Lena Dunham’s Girls meets Woody Allen — in the spirit of the French New Wave’s François Truffaut. It tells the story of the spirited twenty-seven-year-old Frances as she watches her friends grow up while they grow apart. She struggles to find her path and a permanent address. It’s funny, sweet, moving, and very perceptive about the pains of growing fully into adulthood: even the closest friendships can’t stay the same forever, and the dreams you may have had for yourself may be less fulfilling than the ones you discover along the way.
5) The Hunger Games: Catching Fire
The Hunger Games: Catching Fire ushers in a new model for the profitable studio picture: one with a complicated and realistic strong woman at its centre with almost equally interesting and emancipated men that gladly co-exist with her. It’s not great cinema – there are several directorial missteps and some very poor invented dialogue – and it’s an imperfect adaptation of Suzanne Collins’s book, which does what this movie does even better. But it’s one of the most entertaining and emotionally intense films of the year. Katniss’s (Jennifer Lawrence in yet another phenomenal performance) emotional journey gives rise to her heroism and is not just an afterthought. Katniss’s devastation fuels her anger, which she transforms into her resolve to be compassionate and retain her integrity. Her journey is one of the most empowering and feminist stories of the year. It’s also the sort of film that has widespread appeal – you don’t have to be female or young – without being watered down for easy consumption.
6) Enough Said
In some ways, Nicole Holofcener’s Enough Said is like Frances Ha only twenty years later: it’s an uplifting, often hilarious film that moves effortlessly between laugh-out-loud one-liners and tear-jerking emotional moments, to give a mature portrait of figuring out how to mature once you’re already grown up. Eva (Julia Louis-Dreyfus in a career-changing dramatic and comedic performance) is in every way a complete adult, but her divorce and her soon-to-be-empty nest leave her needy enough to get into a problematic friendship with Marianne (Catherine Keener) who turns out to be the ex-wife of her new boyfriend (James Gandolfini). Terrified of getting hurt again, she uses her friendship with Marianne to help her build barriers that threaten to destroy her budding relationship, while her need to be needed also leaves her unintentionally alienating those she loves most.
7) No! **
Perhaps the best argument for the power of positive thinking is the success of the 1988 “No” advertising campaign to defeat the brutal Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in a referendum. Unlike previous films about Pinochet’s reign, like Larrain’s Post Mortem or Costa-Gavras’ Missing which addressed the horrors under the Pinochet dictatorship, Larrain’s newest film is about hope for the future. Pinochet was defeated because René Saavedra’s (Gael Garcia Bernal) inspired campaign pedaled a universal, positive message, about moving forward, and was thus immune to attacks; they deliberately did not dwell on the awful events of the past. One of the best working actors in the world, Bernal (Bad Education, Y Tu Mama Tambien) gives an immensely captivating performance, as the capitalist ad man, like a nicer Don Draper, who helps change the direction of his country as he risks potentially great personal cost.
8) Museum Hours
Jem Cohen’s Museum Hours is the rare character-driven film, much like Assayas’s Summer Hours, about the place and importance of art, and the institutions that house it, in our culture. Set in Vienna, Mary Margaret O’Hara plays a Canadian woman, Anne, visiting a sick cousin in the city, who wanders into the Kunsthistoriches Museum and finds herself striking up a friendship with the kind though lonesome museum guard, Johann (Bobby Sommer). As they wander around the museum and his local haunts, the art from the Kunsthistoriches seems to follow them as posters in the restaurants they eat at. Cohen finds art and beauty in the everyday, from the stunning images of the streets of Vienna to the thoughtful conversations between the two friends.
9) A Hijacking
One of the year’s most chilling and thrilling films, Danish director Tobias Lindholm’s A Hijacking is an incredibly intense suspense film about a Danish ship that gets hijacked by Somali pirates. Lindholm captures the terror and devastation on the ship, personified by the kind cook (Pilou Asbaek), but wisely cuts between the horrors of the hijacking and the headquarters of the shipping company back in Denmark where they are trying to get their employees back alive. The CEO (Søren Molling) insists on taking responsibility as the company’s representative in the negotiations with the hijackers: he’s a man accustomed to staying calm in a stressful situation, but the hijacking is an unprecedented and difficult situation: the best way to keep the men safe is to not give in easily to the hijacker’s demands, which means prolonging the misery. A happy ending is far from guaranteed, but the struggles of these two men on opposite sides of the world, over the course of the hijacking that lasts several months, are always gripping.
10) Nebraska
Although Alexander Payne’s Nebraska is ostensibly about a somewhat senile old man’s delusional journey to claim the million dollars he was promised as part of a junk mailout, at its heart it’s a wise and often very funny film, because of how perceptive it is, about immediate and extended families. Woody (Bruce Dern) is an alcoholic and neglectful aging father, and his middle-aged son David (Will Forte) agrees to take him to Nebraska to claim the winnings he knows don’t exist to let his father live the fantasy for a few more days and to get to spend some time with him. When the trip finds them making a stop in the town where Woody grew up, David and we start to learn a great deal about Woody’s past that made him the disgruntled man he is today, in the way that you really do find out about your parents: through offhand comments made by his friends who don’t necessarily know they’re revealing life-changing information and from those who knowingly broach sensitive subjects with malice. The most moving scenes of the film are of Woody at a graveyard and at his childhood home when we see all the pain of his past subtly expressed on his otherwise stoic face. The film is side-splittingly hilarious in its incredibly real depiction of David interacting with his extended family, with whom he has nothing in common, and Woody conversing monosyllabically with his brothers.
Honourable mention: Her, Short Term 12, Blue is the Warmest Color, Gravity, Blue Jasmine, Juvenile Offender, In A World…, Kill Your Darlings, and Side Effects.
** Since Stories We Tell and No both premiered at the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival, and No was the Chilean foreign language film submission to the 2013 Oscars, these are arguably films of 2012; Stories We Tell was also released in Canada in late 2012. However, both films had their US theatrical release in 2013,and so are included in this year’s list rather than last.
Inside Llewyn Davis opens on a closeup of Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaac) singing and strumming “Hang Me, Oh Hang Me”, surrounded by darkness. It’s a mesmerizing and evocative shot, which immediately renders Llewyn iconic, performing this haunting, bare bones ballad. Slowly, the camera pulls back to reveal Llewyn on stage, and then the stage in the Gaslight, the famous folk music venue in Greenwich Village, and its eclectic patrons. Once the stage is set, we find ourselves focussing intently on Davis again.
It’s a microcosm of the film as a whole, which presents the abrasive Llewyn as an impressive but underappreciated talent, whom we look at both in wonder at his stage presence and in condescension towards his foibles and hopelessness. And while we may feel moved by the music, there’s a dark undercurrent in it, too.
The film impressively paints the backdrop of the 1960s folks scene that Llewyn is a part of, but always through his eyes, and through his story. Working with a new cinematographer, Bruce Delbonnel (Amelie, Across the Universe), the Coen brothers bring a real sense of atmosphere in the film, whether of the dimly lit club full of cigarettes or the snowy, New York City of the past, like an old record cover come to life.
We traverse New York City with Llewyn, our itinerant guide, who spends his nights trespassing on the hospitality of his Greenwich Village friends, until they tire of him. Then he’s forced to camp in the Upper West Side, where his former singing partner’s parents reside and gladly take him in. His career isn’t going well, but he refuses to call it in, even though he can’t even afford a winter coat, let alone rent.
There’s a beautiful sequence of Llewyn making his way downtown from Morningside Heights through the subway, watching the stations pass by: he’s always on the move, but as it becomes increasingly evident, going nowhere in his career or in his development as a person. We follow Llewyn for about a week, as he moves from address to address around New York, drives out to Chicago, and back again. This is very much a Ulysses-esque journey like Joel and Ethan Coen’s previous, also musically-inclined film, O Brother Where Art Thou, but the characters and the landscape here are even richer and more complex.
Llewyn is barely tolerated by his friends since he’s utterly tactless and generally self-absorbed. His former lover, Jean (Carey Mulligan), refers to him as King Midas’s idiot brother who turns everything he looks at to shit. When she first declares it in anger – she’s pregnant, possibly with his child although she’s in a relationship with Jim (Justin Timberlake) – it seems like funny hyperbole, but it proves surprisingly true. You want to like Llewyn because it’s impossible not to like his impassioned music, but he’s very difficult to like or sympathize with: he gets himself into deeper and deeper trouble and repeatedly hurts the people around him.
It’s not that he’s deliberately cruel. He’s just too caught up in his own pain and loneliness to have any room for compassion. He’s frustrated that he’s not any closer to making it big, while showier but less gifted acts, like his friends Jim and Jean, always find gigs, work, and money. He copes with the disappointment by taking on an air of snobbishness. He refuses to sing and play for his friends, who kindly ask him to, by insisting it’s his job and his oeuvre is not for show, which certainly doesn’t help to endear him to them. He also won’t take long-term musical work that he considers beneath him, like working as a sideman rather than having full creative control.
There’s a foreboding feeling hanging over the film, like we’re waiting for Llewyn to come to terms with his own failure and unimportance. Although there are some very, very funny parts, most notably the recording session for Jim’s vapid song “Please Mr Kennedy”, the film is not a black comedy, but rather a sad drama with occasional comic relief.
Oscar Isaac is a musician, and he sings and plays his own parts in the film with a wealth of emotion subtly communicated. As the film progresses, and the disappointments accumulate, we see the fatigue, the desperation, the loneliness, and the sadness mount, especially in his musical performances. And it’s when he’s performing that Llewyn seems the most human, singing someone else’s old words that seem surprisingly fitting for him; this at least prevents him from tripping over his own unkind words. In his daily life, he’s full of anger and indignation at his situation and the cruelty of a world that won’t recognize his talent. He’s unable to form meaningful relationships with others. He unapologetically often fails to even connect with his audience, although the tight closeups on him create a deep connection with the film’s audience,
The Coens put many sign posts of meaning along the way, including a friend’s cat that Llewyn finds himself taking responsibility for although he’s incapable of being responsible for anything else. In a lesser film, these could easily be cliches, but as a film about a man who can’t accept his limitations and fate, which may not be fair anyway, it’s fitting that these aren’t signs that Llewyn or we can read clearly.
When Philomena (Judi Dench) returns to the Irish convent in Roscrea, she almost winces at the sight of it, as she pulls into the driveway with the reporter Martin Sixsmith (Steve Coogan). It was here that her parents abandoned her, where she gave birth to her son as a teenager, and then spent several unhappy years essentially enslaved in the laundry. Martin is accompanying her to write a human interest piece on her quest to find her son who was taken from her here fifty years ago; the convent sold him for adoption to an American family for 1000 pound. We follow her through the halls of the convent, and although we see flashbacks of her time there throughout the film, just watching Dench roam her old prison is chilling: we can see on her face how many painful memories these halls hold.
The nuns aren’t helpful, claiming to have lost all the records of the adoptions in a fire – a bonfire which the local townspeople inform them the nuns constructed themselves for this purpose – though they do still have the contract she signed giving up all rights to her son. She’s nonplussed by this, but Martin, a former catholic, takes this opportunity to show some of his trademark arrogant cynicism: how convenient that God would allow all the useful documents to be destroyed while preserving this one.
It may seem like they react so differently because he’s an educated intellectual, and she’s a simple old Irish woman, who has spent “a lifetime on a diet of Reader’s Digest and The Daily Mail”, as Martin condescendingly puts it to his wife. But this film isn’t just the simple film its premise might suggest – a road movie, in the UK and America, where two opposites unite on a common goal to find her long-lost son – and what may at first make Philomena seem like a simpleton, later shows itself to be actually evidence of remarkable strength of character.
But the film is less focussed on the mission to find her son than on the aftermath of this discovery and how Philomena deals with her guilt and the loss of a life with her son. There’s enormous hurt perpetrated on them both by the Catholic church, by a collection of people who feel no remorse. It turns out her son also has a secret: as a gay Republican, he had to have “a beard”, to quote Philomena, to attend party functions. That Philomena is tacitly and implicitly accepting of her son’s sexuality suggests that her fierce devotion to God is not merely tied to the institutions of worship, which are themselves corrupt, and behave in a manner that Martin likes to point out is “not very Christian”.
Philomena marks comic actor Steve Coogan’s major dramatic debut – he had a bit part in the film What Maisie Knew earlier this year – and he also penned, produced, and persuaded Stephen Frears to direct it. In the script, Coogan has put his wit to good use, maintaining buoyancy for this stark tale by profiting from the odd couple differences between Philomena and Martin without overdoing it. Frears’s direction also succeeds at a difficult balancing act – the film could have easily tipped into sentimentality or exploitive comedy – and any tears the film elicits are entirely earned.
Dench gives an unwavering performance as a woman who is a survivor, with an impressive ability to forgive even those that don’t deserve it. It keeps her kind and warm in spite of everything, including her deeply felt shame at her youthful indiscretion. Coogan is still playing a version of himself – much like the character he played in Michael Winterbottom’s The Trip and Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story — if a subdued one: arrogant, intelligent, wisecracking, abrupt, and occasionally cold in manner even if his feelings are warmer. His world-wearied pessimism and justifiable anger is something that we can relate to, but we learn, just as Martin does, that this attitude has its flaws.
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The Hunger Games: Catching Fire is the rare intelligent mainstream film that’s full of compelling characters and emotional weight.
[Read more…] about The Hunger Games: Catching Fire Review: The Girl on Fire burns on, but not as brightlyTwo landmark National Theatre productions were recently rebroadcast to cinemas around the world via NTLive: Frankenstein starring Benedict Cumberbatc and Jonny Lee Miller, and Hamlet starring Rory Kinnear.
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