At the Altar of the Handgun: Beneath the Surface of Face/Off

(Note: I wrote the following essay for a "classy movie night" with friends, in which we dressed up, served wine and cheese, and immersed ourselves in the utter ridiculousness that is John Woo's Face/Off. If you haven't seen it ... well, I don't know if I would recommend it, necessarily, but it certainly must be seen to be believed.)

The famed French auteur François Truffaut once said that there was no such thing as a truly anti-war film, for the very act of rendering combat cinematically would rob war of its intrinsic horror. Craftsmanship was useless—striking camerawork, propulsive editing, and impassioned acting would make war into either a glamorous pastime or a cathartic drama, easily analyzed and applauded away. The only alternative seemed to be to forsake craft entirely, which makes for good polemics but poor films. Bedeviled by this conundrum, most filmmakers simply tried not to think about it. Oliver Stone cast Charlie Sheen as the lead in Platoon. Matters seemed hopeless.

A tectonic shift in the cinematic landscape arrived with 1997's Face/Off. To modern ears that may sound like hyperbole; if so, that is only because it is so difficult to imagine a world that has not been altered by the ripples Face/Off created in artistic culture. Like The Battleship Potemkin, Citizen Kane, and Pulp Fiction before it, its innovations have suffused cinema so thoroughly that they seem commonplace to us now. But back in 1997, there was no denying that Hong Kong action maestro John Woo had created a masterpiece: a rousing spectacle, a searing deconstruction of action-movie violence, and an anti-war allegory all built on the familiar framework of the body-switching comedy.

Sir Nicolas Cage (1964–      ) as "Sean Archer Wearing Castor Troy's Face"

The most remarkable of these feats, of course, is Woo's confident dismantling of Truffaut's maxim about war in cinema. By sublimating the atrocities of warfare into an operatic struggle between two individuals who switch faces and engage in an endless series of acrobatic gunfights, Woo frees himself from the requirements of verisimilitude. No longer shackled by the need to do justice to war's literal realities, he can chart its emotional and spiritual topography instead. Face/Off 's cinematic texture, not its narrative proper, is his instrument in this endeavor. The audience feels the awful surrealism of sustained conflict rather than watching a dramatic re-creation of it. Once FBI agent Sean Archer is trapped inside a floating super-prison whose inmates must wear magnet-boots at all times, Woo's tapestry of fever-dream "realism" is complete. We become numb to the senselessness of it all. Only the shocking bursts of violence remain to remind us that we are alive and wakeful.

However, like most of Woo's films (1989's The Killer, in particular, comes to mind), Face/Off  has more on its mind than simply creating a portrait of violence. There is a spiritual component to the mayhem. Woo foregrounds this theme by intercutting shots of doves fluttering through a church with shots of his characters somersaulting over pews and filling the air with gunfire. Such thematically weighty use of mise-en-scène has always been one of the director's signatures, but it comes to full fruition here. The dual nature of violence—both transcendental force and threat to the innocent and fragile—echoes the duality of the face-swapping protagonists, who exist simultaneously on both sides of the good/evil divide. The church is gradually destroyed in the fracas, reflecting the damage inflicted on the souls of those who resort to violence. Woo's characters worship at the handgun's altar and feast on a Eucharist of bullets.

The director's understanding of this push-pull dynamic of action filmmaking—we desire to see thrillingly orchestrated atrocities even though we are keenly aware that their real-world equivalent is deplorable—is what has allowed Face/Off to stand the test of time. Woo gives us all the action we can stomach, subtly undercutting it with sublime self-parody as the plot spirals into madness. In the climactic police-boat chase, Cage and Travolta's stolen speedboat has become Elijah's fiery chariot, transporting them and us to a celestial realm of gun-fu and gigantic explosions. In that transition, the scales fall from our eyes and we realize that we have gotten exactly what we asked for—and then some.

The Best Films of 2011

2011 was a strong year for movies. On balance, this makes me happy, but it has its downside. Because I have a day job and am not a movie-watching cyborg, I was not able to see all the great stuff that got a theatrical release in the past year. Here is a probably incomplete list of everything that I've heard good things about but haven't been able to catch yet:

50/50
The Descendants
Margaret
Melancholia
Mysteries of Lisbon
Project Nim
Shame
The Skin I Live In
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
Tuesday, After Christmas
War Horse (okay, practically nobody seems to have thought this was anything other than superficially pretty awards bait, but since I tend to like Spielberg in that mode more than most, I'm going to give this the benefit of the doubt until I see it)

Given that I was still easily able to fill out a top-10 list even without having seen these films (I probably could have put together a top 15 and still been comfortable recommending any of them to other people), I'm prepared to call this the strongest movie year since at least 2007. Not everyone agrees, though—one article I read cited a Hollywood insider who called it "the worst year EVER." I suppose that's true from Hollywood's perspective. Less than half of the films on my list were even made in the United States, and only one came anywhere close to being a traditional studio picture with bankable stars and so forth. Fortunately for the rest of us, there's this thing called "the rest of the world," and that thing produces films, too! Damn good ones, too. So, Hollywood: stop whining and start making something besides 'Splosions 3: The Fightening, if you want people to take your award nominations seriously.

THE TOP TEN

10) The Interrupters (dir. Steve James)
One of art's primary functions, and something for which documentaries are particularly well suited, is to enrich our perspective on the world around us—to reveal it as simultaneously more complex than we'd ever dreamed yet easier to intuitively understand. The Interrupters takes the hot-button issue of inner-city violence in Chicago and divorces it from political agendas and impotent hand-wringing. Everything is boiled down to a single question: People are killing other people for no good reason; how do we make it stop? The solution of the CeaseFire organization is to personally intervene, one individual at a time. Steve James (Hoop Dreams) follows three volunteers, all former gang members with prison records, for a year as they make connections, get in people's faces, and even physically interpose themselves between would-be combatants. James's street-level footage accomplishes two things. First, it shows us the true face of those who commit shocking acts of violence, revealing them to be not the shadowy gangbangers of network news reports but simply angry, desperate human beings. Second, it's inspiring in the best sense of the word. When we watch CeaseFire's volunteers being passionate about something that matters, it reminds us how to do the same.

9) Poetry (dir. Lee Changdong)
If there's another film out there that does a better job of encapsulating the power of poetry, I haven't seen it. Plenty of films are "poetic," but when a film attempts to explore how actual written poetry works, the result is usually platitudinous fluff like Dead Poet's Society, where poetry is this romantic, mysterious, quasi-mystical pursuit that has more in common with the Force than anything else. Writer-director Lee Changdong, on the other hand, understands that most poetry's purpose is to reflect the world back at us in ways that cause us to see it all afresh, and his film finds a way to do just that. In contrast to most films that strive for lyricism, Lee's is not ostentatious about it. Like its protagonist, an aging maid who takes a poetry course for neophytes, it seems to discover the beauty in its story of Alzheimer's, tragedy, and selfishness as it goes along. Very few works of fiction could be called Poetry and make that title seem earned, but this is one of them.

8) Martha Marcy May Marlene (dir. Sean Durkin)
It's been a while since another film frightened me as much as Martha Marcy May Marlene. Best classified as a psychological horror movie, it centers on a young woman, Martha (Elizabeth Olsen), who flees the backwoods cult she's been living with for two years and seeks refuge with her estranged sister. Her experiences with the cult and its leader (a quietly menacing John Hawkes) have left her with deep emotional scars, so deep that she's unable to articulate them to herself, let alone to anyone else. All she knows is that she's terrified the cult will find her and drag her back. The film orients us so firmly in her headspace that we're terrified, too, even though it avoids most action, violence, and predictable thriller-movie scares. Sean Durkin composes his shots in such a way that we are constantly aware of Martha's surroundings and of the threat that may (or may not) be there, while Olsen projects a potent mixture of dislocation, numbness, and repressed hysteria. The expression on her face in the film's closing seconds stuck with me after I went to bed, listening to the small sounds outside my apartment and wondering what, if anything, was making them.

7) 13 Assassins (dir. Takashi Miike)
The samurai movie tends to be one of the most unvaried genres out there. That's not a criticism. Feudal Japan, unwavering codes of honor, the strong defending the weak, graceful confrontations between master swordsmen—one of the genre's chief pleasures is how effective its formula is, even as its most basic. And 13 Assassins certainly delivers in this regard. Being a Takashi Miike film, it's heightened to a fever pitch almost from the beginning. The entire second half is one continuous, immensely satisfying action sequence, pitting the titular heroes against the 300 bodyguards of the evil nobleman they've been tasked with assassinating. What elevates the film beyond its genre trappings is its ambivalence toward the attitudes that other samurai movies simply take for granted. It's stirring to watch men of action place honor above all other concerns, but isn't the obsession with those things futile in the end? When you come right down to it, personal honor is meaningless to a dead man.

6) Meek's Cutoff (dir. Kelly Reichardt)
Early in Meek's Cutoff, the entire plot is neatly encapsulated in a single edit. As the wagon train of the pioneer protagonists rolls past the camera in the foreground, the shot slowly dissolves into the next, with the line of the horizon staying constant. Then the same wagon train appears from the right side of the frame, traveling along that horizon line, silhouetted against the sky in the distance. Within that dissolve, Kelly Reichardt shows that these characters are literally traveling in circles, thoroughly lost in the trackless American West. The plot is simple and the pace slow, but Reichardt wrings plenty of suspense from the situation. This isn't the Oregon Trail computer game. If a wagon wheel breaks, these people will die of thirst before they can repair it and make it to the next water source. The sound design here is extremely effective—the creaking and groaning of the wagons in motion constantly reminds us of the knife's edge on which survival stands. And when the men of the expedition consult with their guide about which path they should take, their murmurs are barely audible to the women, who are obliged by social mores to stand back while their husbands decide their fates.

5) Certified Copy (dir. Abbas Kiarostami)
These days, it's uncommon to encounter a film as unapologetically challenging as Certified Copy. Even writing a satisfactory, succinct summary of the plot is difficult. Having just written a book arguing that artistic replicas are every bit as valuable as the original paintings, an author (William Shimell) encounters an antiques dealer (Juliette Binoche) who immediately challenges him on the topic. They decide to take a day trip to a rural Italian village to continue their debate, and inspired by a misunderstanding, they end up feigning a married relationship with each other. The thing is, they're really, really good at pretending, right down to the complexly wounding things that only lifelong partners can say to each other. Are they actually married, or aren't they? The film slips between these two possibilities with the same fluidity that the two polyglot characters switch between French and English. The parallels with the question of whether a copy can be just as authentic as the original are obvious, but the wonder of the film is that it never fully tips its hand as to which category the characters' relationship belongs to. Fortunately, it's so gorgeously photographed that second, third, and fourth viewings are just as pleasurable as the first.

4) The Arbor (dir. Clio Barnard)
The technique used to make Clio Barnard's documentary The Arbor sounds fatally self-conscious and artsy at first. The film consists almost entirely of interviews, but instead of presenting these interviews in the straightforward talking-head manner of most documentaries, Barnard chooses to film actors lip-synching along to the audio recordings. This device has its roots in a theater movement known as "verbatim theater." It's fitting that it would be employed in service of a documentary about the British playwright Andrea Dunbar, but it still might have collapsed under the weight of its own artifice if it were not so perfectly suited to telling the heartbreaking personal stories of the troubled, alcoholic Dunbar and her children. Living in the low-income public housing communities of West Yorkshire, they were surrounded by—and participated in—all manner of horrible situations, from drugs to violence to prostitution. We almost need the slight remove created by Barnard so as not to be overcome with despair ourselves. Paradoxically, though, the lip-synching also fosters a closer connection to the stories themselves. If we were watching these individuals telling their stories on camera, we might distract ourselves with analyzing their physical demeanor or with questions of artistic exploitation. Barnard instead gives us the distance of drama, where we can engage more deeply with these people's stories of the sins of a mother being visited on the following generations.

3) Heartbeats (dir. Xavier Dolan)
One of the most frustrating things about 2009's 500 Days of Summer was how it kept interrupting its wry, sensitive portrayal of the vagaries of romance with cloying indie-quirk, as if it were contractually obligated to insert focus group–friendly clichés (Chloe-Grace Moretz's sassy prepubescent advisor is just the worst) to satisfy a meddlesome producer. Xavier Dolan's Heartbeats takes everything that's good about 500 Days and jettisons the rest, replacing it with scenes that flesh out all three of the characters involved in the love triangle at the film's center. Marie (Monia Chokri) and Francis (Dolan) make fools of themselves vying for the affections of a self-centered Adonis (Niels Schneider), but the characters and situations are so sharply observed that we see ourselves in them even as we laugh at them. If you've ever suffered the awkwardness of trying to get a crush object to like you, you can relate to the scene of Marie quietly berating herself in the bathroom at a party, or to the faux-documentary interludes where an unnamed woman confesses her inept attempts to get a handsome stranger to notice her. Romantic infatuation has a way of turning us all into bumbling idiots, something that Dolan clearly understands. The resulting film is funny and human, and it's filmed with a visual panache that's the icing on the cake.

(A final note: Try to ignore the banal translation of the title. Why American distributors thought it was an improvement over the French Canadian Dolan's original Les Amours Imaginaires is beyond me.)

2) A Separation (dir. Asghar Farhadi)
On paper, A Separation sounds exactly like the sort of eat-your-broccoli arthouse film that mainstream American audiences avoid: a subtitled foreign film (not even from Europe!) that centers on the unsexy domestic struggles of everyday people. In practice, though, it has one of the most white-knuckle plots of the year. A married woman wants to leave Iran to attain a better life for herself and her daughter, but she can't because of the technicalities of Iranian divorce laws. Her husband, in turn, loves his family but has his hands tied by the demands of caring for his Alzheimer's-stricken father. The female caretaker he employs needs the work but must keep her employment secret from her religiously conservative spouse. When these three strands become tangled, they create a Gordian knot of conflict. Asghar Farhadi constructs the entire plot out of unstoppable forces and immovable objects, and the way he keeps turning the screws on his characters over the two-hour running time is breathlessly thrilling.

1) The Tree of Life (dir. Terrence Malick)
An obvious film to compare with The Tree of Life is Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, in that both films are interested in the Big Questions: life, the universe, and everything. What makes The Tree of Life superior (yeah, I said it) is its ability to go small, grounding all its high-minded ambitions in human stories. In this case, the story is rooted in Terrence Malick's experiences growing up in 1950s Texas, which partly explains how he was able to capture the perspective of his young protagonists with such grace and sensitivity. An entire essay could be written on just his depictions of childhood's vicissitudes: the sense of boundless possibility, the mystery and terror that grown-ups wield, the sudden onset and equally sudden dispersal of stormy emotions.

If The Tree of Life consisted only of these sequences, it would be an enviable accomplishment. What elevates it to greatness are those other parts, which most reviews tended to gloss over because it's impossible to adequately express in words exactly why they are so good. Most people were content to describe these sections, which bookend the film, as sketching out the story of the universe, from the Big Bang to the present day. This is accurate, but a Christian viewer can go further: Malick is telling God's story. He begins the film with the image of a flame-like light in the darkness, accompanied by voiceover. "In the beginning was the Word." From there he launches out into a chronicle of Creation, and in the story of a childhood spent in small-town Texas he finds a microcosm of the human experience: innocence, then rebellion, and finally reconciliation. When we reach the final act, with its shots of people of all descriptions walking barefoot together along a sandy shore, it's moving because it touches something deep in us. We long for reunion.

I would hazard that one reason The Tree of Life met with such widespread praise is that it was able to make this feeling resonate across the oceans of unbelief, whispering some honest-to-God Truth in the ears of people who have long given up listening to evangelists. If this is true, then surely it's one of the most important films made in this generation. When you move an avowed atheist to write that he's "not sure if I should dance or cry from the unutterable glory of it," you know you're doing something right.

It belongs in a museum!

If you've stepped, Indiana Jones–like, into this deserted crypt of a blog, you may be wondering what happened. Over there in the corner is a cobweb-strewn skeleton of a post about the best films of the last decade—written in 2009. Various other posts about the Chicago International Film Festival litter the floor like so many femurs in a lost Aztec temple. You step carefully, looking for a tripwire for the humongous boulder-trap.

I do plan on firing this blog back up someday, but for now I'm busy with another project. It's not film related, but it's still pretty cool. You should check it out.

Yes, we (my friend Duke and I) are playing through a videogame together and blogging about the experience. But you should read it, even if (or perhaps especially if) you're not a gamer. This isn't your typical videogame. It's not all "there is an alien standing over there so now I shall blast it in the face with my space-shotgun I guess." It's going for something much more subtle, challenging the way one typically approaches a game. It may not even be a "game" in the traditional sense. Certainly, it's frequently unfun and occasionally maddening. However, that just makes it more interesting to write and think (and hopefully read) about. Feel free to comment and ask questions. There's much to discuss.

If you want to learn more about the game (called Pathologic) before diving in, there's an intriguing overview of it at Rock Paper Shotgun. Come join us in our descent into the rabbit hole. Who knows what's at the bottom?

Let's have an argument: The Top Twenty Films of the Decade

I was slightly startled when best-of-decade lists started popping up online. Is the decade coming to an end already? I asked myself. Let me tell you something: Nothing makes you more conscious of mortality's tightening grasp than finding yourself wondering where the last ten years went. The subsequent realization that you can't remember what films you saw during the first half of that decade also does not help.

It was daunting, this prospect of reviewing ten years of films and picking favorites. I take listmaking very seriously--perhaps too seriously. I devote the sort of meticulous attention to it that others might exhibit in translating ancient Sumerian tablets. The selection matters; the order matters. Woe to me if I forget about a film that should be included.

I decided to make a list anyway. I don't want to be left out. This is the internet, after all; fostering the herd instinct is sort of what it does.

A couple of notes: I wanted this to be more than just a rundown of Kevin's Favoritest Movies Evar!!!, while still keeping it personal. This is my list, so I did show preference to films that (pardon the nebulous term) moved me, while excluding others that, while accomplished, left me cold for some reason. That said, I did try to weed out sentimental favorites (sorry, Road to Perdition) that, objectively speaking, weren't quite up to the standard set by the best the 00's had to offer. Hopefully, this will make the list at least somewhat interesting to people who are not me.

I didn't consider documentaries for inclusion, since I approach them differently from films with fictional narratives. Also, I'm not sure I've seen enough of them this decade for my opinion to really mean anything. I'll post a follow-up later with a list of some excellent docs that I did manage to catch.

Feel free to incredulously impugn my taste in the comments section. I included some honorable mentions to partially cover my back, but I may have forgotten some films and neglected to see others. And some films I think are just plain overrated. Part of the fun of geekery is arguing over minutia, so have at me!

THE LIST

20) Hot Fuzz (dir. Edgar Wright, 2007)
It's obvious from the get-go that the people behind Hot Fuzz love movies, and their affection is so infectious that it achieves a curious alchemy by the end of the film. It's extremely funny: visual and verbal jokes abound, there's plenty of wacky physical comedy, and it's structured so soundly that its final half hour consists almost entirely of callback after callback. However, I found myself laughing hardest not at those things, but at the sheer exuberance with which it's all executed. Edgar Wright and his cast are having so much fun with their sendup of brainless cop movies that the viewer is swept up by their energy, even if he's never seen the movies that Wright is parodying. Wright loves those movies, and his craft, so much that he makes us love them too.

19) The Man Who Wasn't There (dir. Joel and Ethan Coen, 2001)
One of the reasons I love the Coen brothers is their ability to imprint their distinctive vision on all of their films even as they work within the confines of a given genre. The Man Who Wasn't There lovingly pays tribute to all the elements of classic film noir, from its smoky black-and-white cinematography to its twisty plotting to its whipcrack dialogue. At the same time, it's unmistakably a Coen film (not to mention one of the best noirs of recent years). Their trademarks--deadpan visual style, existential pessimism, and a keen awareness of human degeneracy--are all here. And Billy Bob Thornton, as a barber trapped in a dead-end existence, is the quintessential Coen hero (or antihero): laconic, put-upon, and possessed of deep currents of unarticulated emotions and desires. His Ed Crane probably has fewer lines than any other character, yet he emerges as the most vivid and sympathetic of them all, despite his schemes. The final sequence, in which he surveys the haircuts of the people surrounding him, stands as one of the most unexpectedly haunting moments in the Coens' entire oeuvre.

18) Million Dollar Baby (dir. Clint Eastwood, 2004)
By 2004, many people probably assumed that Clint Eastwood's best filmmaking days were behind him. Not counting the solitary example of Mystic River, he hadn't made or starred in a good movie in years, and his advancing age looked to relegate him to a retirement punctuated by Lifetime Achievement Oscars and cameos on television. Then he made Million Dollar Baby. Controversial ending aside, the film is breathtaking on every level, with its soulful performances, visceral boxing sequences, and lovely shadow-dappled cinematography. And that ending ... wow. Few other films in this decade packed a more devastating emotional gutpunch, wrenching viewers out of their comfortable detachment and demanding that they inhabit the characters' headspace for longer than the time it takes the credits to roll.

17) City of God (dir. Fernando Meirelles, 2002)
Fellow Latin American director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu seems like he got the lion's share of arthouse recognition this decade for his trifecta of everyone-is-interconnected films (Amores Perros, 21 Grams, and Babel), but Fernando Meirelles' City of God is, for my money, superior in every way. Both directors presented complex narratives with huge casts of characters, but Meirelles' epic about life in Rio de Janeiro's innercity gang world remains absorbing on repeat viewing, while Inarritu's "Character A gets deported because Character B's wife got shot with a gun sold by Character F" stories seem more contrived with every passing year. City of God revealed to audiences a world that was wholly new to most of them, and it did so in a way that was at once beautiful, fascinating, and saddening. It's a one-of-a-kind film, evoking the fleeting, exceedingly fragile joys of a life spent in the midst of danger and poverty.

16) Solaris (dir. Steven Soderbergh, 2002)
Steven Soderbergh's Solaris is that rarest of creatures: a remake that is neither unnecessary nor inferior to its source. In fact, I prefer it to the Andrei Tarkovsky classic, though both are excellent. Soderbergh strips away most of the three-hour original's ponderous philosophy and exposition, focusing instead on the human story at its center. Even in such a simplified form, the story is difficult to summarize without sounding stupid and pretentious,¹ but its mercurial nature just enriches the viewing experience, as the film shifts smoothly from science fiction to ghost story to spiritual contemplation all while maintaining a hushed, reflective mood. It certainly doesn't hurt that it's a pleasure simply to watch; the sound design and lovely ambient music deserve special mention, though the whole package is so immersive that it's difficult to separate its parts until after the whole thing ends.

15) Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (dir. Michel Gondry, 2004)
Given how similar their sensibilities are, it's a shame that Michel Gondry and screenwriter Charlie Kaufman haven't collaborated more often. Gondry's offbeat visual sense fits well with Kaufman's absurdity, and when those two things were combined to make Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,² the end result was the best romantic comedy in recent memory. I don't know of a single person who has seen it and disliked it. It's enormously gratifying to find something so inventive in a genre that typically produces movies with all the creativity and intelligence of your average Scooby-Doo episode. But the thing that will keep people coming back to Eternal Sunshine years from now is its willingness to admit the truth: sometimes relationships fall apart and we are helpless to prevent it. That's a gutsy theme for a romance to explore, and it's made all the more poignant by the film's conclusion that it's all worth it anyway.

14) Oldboy (dir. Park Chan-wook, 2005)
Was there a film this decade that embodied cinematic excess more than Oldboy? The only ones that even come close are Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill movies, and even they don't quite surpass it. Park Chan-wook out-Tarantinos Tarantino; his film oozes movie-ness from every pore. He throws every provocation and filmmaking flourish he can think of onto the screen to see what sticks. Describing the plot is fairly pointless, as it's too twisty and over-the-top to make much sense outside the context of the film itself, and it moves forward with such furious momentum that it's practically impossible to stop and analyze plot points anyway. I'll try anyway: a man is imprisoned inside an apartment for 15 years, then inexplicably set loose to seek revenge on his captor. Obviously, there's a lot more to it than just that.

What's even more remarkable about Oldboy is how it smuggles in a keen sense of tragedy underneath all the violence and bravado. I wasn't sure at first about including it on this list because of its extreme subject matter, but I think its depth of feeling justifies it in the end. It has an emotional grandeur on par with classical Greek tragedy and evokes the catharsis to match. Oldboy is not for the faint of heart (or stomach). But if you're feeling brave, it will give you the ride of your life.

13) Nobody Knows (dir. Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2005)
Hirokazu Kore-eda has gradually revealed himself as the spiritual successor to Japanese master Yasujiro Ozu, making films that scrutinize domestic life and linger, quietly observing, in the intervals between speech and action. In an environment that seems more and more to be filled with movies about strife and noise and violence, sitting down with a Kore-eda film feels like taking a slow, deep breath. I don't mean to imply that his films are slow or boring. Nobody Knows, a heartbreaking story of children who have been abandoned in their apartment by their mother, wrings plenty of tension from its premise. What sets Kore-eda apart, and saves his film from accusations of shameless emotional manipulation, is his unobtrusive style, which manages to be matter-of-fact and lyrical at the same time. When one youngster stands tiptoe on a chair to reach a high shelf, the camera's soundless focus on the precarious, wobbling chair legs serves as both a breathless moment of suspense and a poetic summation of the entire film. We want to save those kids, not because Kore-eda is manipulating us with melodrama and music cues, but because his film stirs in us the reserves of common human compassion.

12) Good Night, and Good Luck (dir. George Clooney, 2005)
Want to feel depressed about the state of contemporary American society? Watch Good Night, and Good Luck, then compare Edward R. Murrow's takedown of Joseph McCarthy with the accomplishments of people like Wolf Blitzer and the good folks over at FoxNews. If you feel a sharp pang in your chest, it's probably just your body trying to force itself to have a heart attack, out of shame. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on your state of mind), studies have shown this to be impossible.

Good Night, and Good Luck is a portrait of a kinder, gentler time for broadcast journalism, a time where there was more news and less shouting. Lest it be accused of idealizing the past, it shows the seeds of the kudzu of "celebrity news" already being sown, but overall it is unapologetically nostalgic. The period detail is lovingly recreated, from the haze of cigarette smoke in the newsroom to the charmingly low-tech methods used to film broadcasts. This seeming lack of sophistication serves to highlight by contrast the timeliness of the film's message. "This instrument," Murrow says of television, "can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends." Here's hoping that somebody other than movie geeks was paying attention.

11) The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (dir. Andrew Dominik, 2007)
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford seems to have been the best movie of 2007 that nobody saw. Or at least, that very few people saw. The problem was probably that it was perceived as a Western when it's really an anti-Western. To put an even finer point on it, it's The Anti-Western. There isn't much action to speak of. There's only one real showdown, and it's staged in a cramped bedroom between two thugs who have trouble hitting each other even at point-blank range. The true star isn't really Brad Pitt's Jesse James; it's the fawning pipsqueak Robert Ford, played brilliantly by the relatively unknown Casey Affleck. The main plot is punctuated (and the film's running time lengthened) by dreamy interludes, which fill in the story's gaps with narration that has the rhythms of a campfire legend. These aren't characteristics most people expect from the genre, but The Assassination of Jesse James just isn't interested in the myths of the Western, traditional or revisionist. It wants to create its own myths. By the time it reaches its moving conclusion, it's succeeded in doing just that.

10) Lost in Translation (dir. Sofia Coppola, 2003)
I saw Lost in Translation at exactly the right time in my life for it to have the greatest impact. I had just graduated from college and was stuck in a tedious temp job that had nothing to do with my education. I hated working there, but I didn't know what I'd do with myself if I quit. If it hadn't been for my church and a couple of friends, I would have been completely adrift.

Lost in Translation understands that feeling better than any other movie I've seen. Sofia Coppola finds the perfect blend of enchantment and alienation in the way her protagonists perceive their Tokyo surroundings; they are physically present in it, but spiritually disconnected from it. Coppola takes her time exploring their detachment. She doesn't allow their ennui to turn into navelgazing, and she doesn't let their relationship devolve into a trite romance. Their uncertainties about themselves and each other are complex, and Coppola is content to leave them that way. We're unable to hear Bill Murray's parting words to Scarlett Johansson, and that's as it should be. What he says is the key to the film, but Coppola won't give it to us. We have to decide ourselves what it is.

9) Synecdoche, NY (dir. Charlie Kaufman, 2008)
Synecdoche, NY belongs to a dying species: films that are dense and genuinely challenging, and unapologetic about it. It comes as no surprise that the scribe behind mindbenders like Adaptation and the aforementioned Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind should make his directing debut with such an insane, messy masterpiece. Kaufman takes as his subjects nothing less than life, death, identity, and the relationship of art to all three, so it's understandable that most people didn't know what to make of it when it first came out. It rewards multiple viewings, however, revealing itself gradually as the most mature, multilayered meditation on the meaning of life ever committed to celluloid. Understanding the plot--a neurotic playwright (Philip Seymour Hoffman, in one of his finest performances to date) decides to stage a play about capital-L Life inside an improbably huge warehouse--is just the first step of peeling back the film's layers. Watch it again and again, and you'll find yourself noticing things within Kaufman's overstuffed frames that you hadn't seen before. And please, before you see it for the first time, look up the word in the title. You'll make things so much easier on yourself.

8) Brick (dir. Rian Johnson, 2006)
It's easy for detractors to dismiss Brick by calling it gimmicky--it essentially maps the conventions of noir murder mysteries onto a high-school setting--but they're missing the point. True, one of its biggest pleasures lies in hearing hard-bitten Bogartisms coming from the mouths of teenagers. Far from being a hollow gimmick, though, the contrast between the actors' age and their worldly cynicism gives the film its heart, creating strong thematic undercurrents of youthful innocence lost without once making that subtext explicit. It's heightened further by Rian Johnson's unsettlingly desolate locations, almost entirely devoid of adult interference. The teenagers of Brick are schemers and smartasses, but underneath all the affectation is a raw vulnerability that belies their toughness. They may be young, but they're not too young to feel the hurts that accompany an encroaching adulthood.

7) The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (dir. Peter Jackson, 2001)
Peter Jackson's mammoth Lord of the Rings saga was easily the most audacious moviemaking risk of the decade. It's difficult to imagine now, after the trilogy's overwhelming critical and popular success, that they could have flopped, but everyone was holding their breath in the days running up to December of 2001. A $300 million, multi-part fantasy epic, based on a book that was widely regarded (even by its author) as unadaptable for the screen, burdened with logistical constraints ranging from issues of scale (4-foot hobbits fighting alongside 6-foot elves) to casting (how do you depict the subhuman Gollum?).

It could have been so bad.

Now, of course, the trilogy is justly regarded as one of the biggest blockbuster triumphs of its generation, and The Fellowship of the Ring is the strongest of the three. Unlike the other two installments, its unapologetic bombast never becomes wearisome. It boasts the strongest momentum and most unified plot, and it features the most genuinely moving, human moments of the series. Who can forget Gandalf's fall in Moria, or the ultimate sacrifice of Boromir (played by Sean Bean in the most underrated role of the trilogy), or Sam and Frodo looking at Mordor on the horizon and wondering if they'll ever see their friends again?

Spoiler alert, I guess. But you didn't need one because you've already seen these movies, maybe even multiple times. That's how important The Lord of the Rings was this decade.

6) WALL-E (dir. Andrew Stanton, 2008)
Whenever a new Pixar movie gets released, the word "groundbreaking" gets thrown around a lot, but it was never more true than when it was applied to WALL-E. Seeing it for the first time, I got the exhilarated feeling in the pit of my stomach that one usually feels when watching a daredevil perform impossibly dangerous feats. WALL-E is a movie of high-wire brinksmanship. It's set in a desolate future where Earth has been rendered uninhabitable by the blob-like humans who now cavort vacuously inside a giant Playplace of a spaceship. It combines revolutionary animation with live action, including a cameo by Fred Willard and clips from an old movie musical that almost nobody these days has seen. And it bets all of its emotional capital on the adventures of and romance between two nonverbal robots. That it all works, and works so beautifully, is a testament to the power and versatility of animation. We live in sad times where most people will praise an animated film simply for not insulting them. Far from doing that, WALL-E enthralls us, kids and adults alike.

5) Munich (dir. Stephen Spielberg, 2005)
A slew of politically charged films came out of this decade, but none was more powerful than Munich. Its based-on-true-events story, centering on the efforts of government assassins to mete out vengeance on those responsible for the 1972 terrorist attack on Israeli Olympic athletes, is tremendously resonant for a post-9/11 world. What's most remarkable about it, besides Spielberg's characteristic technical mastery, is how it balances both viewpoints on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict without simplifying it or pandering to either side. The very real human cost of such politics is Spielberg's subject, not ideology. Munich becomes more and more gut-wrenching as it progresses and the consequences of the assassins' sins begin to catch up with them. By the end of the film, the protagonist carries the memories of his actions like amputations, all in the name of a greater good that never comes to pass.

4) Memento (dir. Christopher Nolan, 2000)
Part of what made The Dark Knight so interesting was how Christopher Nolan quietly infused the comic-book blockbuster with his pet thematic concerns: obsession, the warping effects of isolation, and the myriad ways in which one's personal identity can be fragmented and manipulated. All of these themes, and others, are present in Memento, which was Nolan's breakout film and still stands as his best. It's most famous for its brainbusting narrative structure--which begins at the story's chronological ending and progresses backward, scene by scene, to the beginning--and how it reflects the perspective of its protagonist, an insurance investigator with short-term memory loss and a thirst for vengeance. Far from being so much stylistic showing off, though, the inverted structure actually enriches repeat viewings, as the complicated plot comes into sharper focus and reveals the sad, disturbing implications underlying it. Even the opening credits are mesmerizing. Memento is intricately constructed yet perfectly airtight; not a single minute of its running time is wasted.

3) There Will Be Blood (dir. Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007)
As I watched There Will Be Blood for the first time in the theater, I got the sense that I was watching a genuinely Great Film, one that people will be watching and discussing many years from now. In the desolate landscapes and firelit cabins of the American West, P.T. Anderson finally finds a cinematic canvas grand enough to frame his characters' outsized egos and emotions, and he needs it. Few other films would be capable of containing a character like Daniel Plainview, for instance, an oil man who dominates everything and everyone around him, seemingly by sheer force of will. There are many ways to read There Will Be Blood--as political allegory, philosophical screed, or Kubrickian existential horror--but it's most interesting as a character study of this man, who knowingly allows his will-to-power to corrode his soul. It builds to an astonishing final scene in which Plainview browbeats his pious nemesis Eli into submission, delivering an incandescent harangue that crescendoes to a feverish pitch. By the end of it, he has become practically diabolical. Daniel Plainview is a man who stares into the abysses of human nature and responds by surgically excising all human-ness from himself. It's a portrait that is magnetic, timeless, and completely frightening.

2) No Country for Old Men (dir. Joel and Ethan Coen, 2007)
If I had to pick a film that best captures the zeitgeist of the 00's, it would be either the #1 entry on this list or No Country for Old Men. No Country is steeped in the feeling that the world is spinning out of control, that mankind is fighting a losing battle against the tide of chaos and evil that threatens to engulf it. To a society mired in war and menaced by terrorism--and arguably gripped by even deeper worries about the guttering flame of basic human goodness--it's comforting to have a film that so directly addresses such fears, even if it's profoundly pessimistic about our chances.

The Coens find the perfect boogeyman for such times in killer-for-hire Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem). Chigurh is the stuff of nightmares: a cunning, emotionless, implacable adversary who is so confident of his inevitable triumph that he never moves faster than a stroll and never speaks above a silky rumble. Tommy Lee Jones, as Sheriff Bell, is Chigurh's polar opposite, but, tellingly, he is not Chigurh's equal; he can only react with bemused horror to the wake of destruction the killer leaves. In a way, Sheriff Bell is the audience. His helplessness in the face of Chigurh's rampage is our own. Because of this, No Country for Old Men can be seen as despairing--I suppose it is, to some extent--but it's a bracing kind of despair. We are not alone in our dismay, the film tells us. There are others, too.

1) Pan's Labyrinth (dir. Guillermo del Toro, 2006)
Pan's Labyrinth captures so much of what it means to be a human being in an often scary world, that I don't know where to begin in describing it. It resonates, I think, because we sense the deep truth behind the way its two universes intersect. Guillermo del Toro's fairy world is just as richly textured as his "real" world, and he edits them together so seamlessly that it's impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins. Stories and myths don't just inform our lives, del Toro argues, they are our lives. The myths we choose to believe in determine what kind of people we are. The despicable Captain lives to propagate the Fascist ideal and to pass on a legendary legacy to his infant son. The child heroine Ofelia believes passionately that she has a place in the strange, perilous fairy world. Their respective devotion to these life narratives is what drives their actions for the entire film. Myth shapes reality.

This is why Pan's Labyrinth will endure. Like No Country for Old Men, it exists in a dangerous and often inexplicable universe. Unlike No Country, however, it admits the existence of guiding lights in the darkness, certainties that people can cling to. It is beautiful as well as bleak, acknowledging the darkness without capitulating to it. Most good stories are that way. People need stories--Myths, truths smuggled under the guise of fiction--to console them and help them through a hurting world. After all, that's partly why we go to the movies.


¹ SPOILERS, SORT OF: A guilt-ridden widower investigates strange phenomena aboard a space station orbiting a planet-sized alien intelligence, which may or may not be creating physical manifestations of the crew's memories of loved ones.
² They did make one film together before Eternal Sunshine--the middling Human Nature--but I'm counting that one as a mulligan.

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Honorable Mentions: Movies that just missed the cut

The Royal Tenenbaums (dir. Wes Anderson, 2001)
Why it's great: Wes Anderson was one of the most influential filmmakers of the decade, and this is his best (perhaps tied for top honors with 1998's Rushmore). The controlled direction, the immaculate mise-en-scene, and delightfully dry humor (which manages to be quirky without being annoyingly precious) are a joy to behold.
Why it missed out: I find Anderson a lot easier to admire than to love, mainly because I have a hard time getting involved in his stories about emotionally constipated, dysfunctional families. Against this decade's stiff competition, Tenenbaums was fighting an uphill battle.

Shattered Glass (dir. Billy Ray, 2003)
Why it's great: Hayden Christensen finally finds the role he was born to play in Stephen Glass, a snivelling liar who created a scandal by outright fabricating many of the articles he wrote for the prestigious New Republic magazine. The plotting is taut and surprisingly absorbing, considering that (a) it's a true story whose outcome was widely reported and (b) it's essentially a movie about journalists slogging through typical reporting. No All the President's Men romanticizing here.
Why it missed out: As much as I love a movie about writers that doesn't involve Sean Connery spouting urban slang, it doesn't have quite the broad scope that I was looking for in a top-20 movie. It's still definitely worth a rental, though.

The Passion of the Christ (dir. Mel Gibson, 2004)
Why it's great: This may be the most emotionally wringing experience I've ever had in a movie theater. Gibson tells the Passion story with unparalleled artistry and boldness; his no-holds-barred direction makes sure you feel every whiplash and pounded nail. The extreme violence, far from having a numbing effect, jolts you out of your comfort zone and keeps you there. All of which would just be so much meaningless masochism were it not for that transcendently triumphant ending.
Why it missed out: I hated hearing about churches renting out theaters and using this film as an evangelism tool. From conversations with nonbelieving acquaintances, I've learned that the film holds little meaning if one doesn't believe the subject of the film is one's Lord and Savior, making The Passion's appeal a little too narrow to make the cut.

Children of Men (dir. Alfonso Cuaron, 2006)
Why it's great: With its famously lengthy, elaborately staged shots and obvious directorial polish, Children of Men was one of the most technically impressive films in recent memory. It's also a damn good bit of sci-fi, with a scarily plausible futuristic setting and a good grasp of how to establish that setting without becoming show-offy.
Why it missed out: To be honest, I was impressed but not blown away when I first saw this in theaters, and I didn't have a chance to revisit it before making my list. I'll let you know if my opinion changes on a second viewing.

United 93 (dir. Paul Greengrass, 2006)
Why it's great: Paul Greengrass's shaky cinema verite style was perfectly suited for the extremely thorny project of making the first major film about 9/11. Where Oliver Stone's World Trade Center veered predictably into hamhanded sentimentality (what do you expect, it's Oliver Stone), Greengrass intuited that the only way to make the material work was to present it as unemotionally as possible and let the events speak for themselves. United 93 brought back the horrific feelings associated with that day so vividly that there were reports of people walking out of theaters because they just couldn't bear living through it a second time. I don't blame them.
Why it missed out: As much as I admire the film, and as much as it affected me, I can't imagine wanting to watch it again. Once is enough.

The Fountain (dir. Darren Aronofsky, 2006)
Why it's great: This is one of those movies that people either love or hate, with no exceptions. I loved it for its visual lusciousness (none of the special effects were computer generated) and for its fearlessness in jumping headlong into mysticism and ambiguity. I want to watch it again and again to see if I can unpack the significance of Aronofsky's imagery.
Why it missed out: It could be that there is no significance behind Aronofsky's imagery, just a bunch of beautiful pictures thrown up on the screen with some vague symbolic associations attached. Aronofsky himself has even hinted that this might be the case.

Once (dir. John Carney, 2007)
Why it's great: Most musicals seem to insist, for no good reason, on staging their musical numbers as exuberant setpieces, bringing the narrative to a grinding halt so they can impress us with choreography and stylistic flashiness galore. Once, on the other hand, integrates its songs with the story in ways that actually make sense, which gives the film as a whole an agreeable, low-key rhythm. Because it doesn't call attention to its artificiality, as most musicals inadvertently do, the central romance feels natural and unforced. And, of course, the music is wonderful.
Why it missed out: Though it's good for a musical, it's still a musical, which makes it feel a bit fluffy. Don't get me wrong, I really like it; I just don't see much reason to watch this unless you're really jonesing for a folk musical. If that's a common state of mind for you ... well, make your own list.

Mother (dir. Bong Joon-ho, 2009)
Why it's great: It's a detective story, family drama, psychological thriller, and character study all swirled together into one sprawling, involving, and extremely poignant blend. The performances are uniformly good, especially Kim Hye-ja in the title role, who deserves every best-actress award in the world this year. I could not tear my eyes from the screen. It may not make the top 20 of the decade, but it's easily the best movie I've seen this year.
Why it missed out: Sadly, Bong Joon-ho still has trouble trimming the fat from his films, so Mother suffers a bit from pacing problems and is a bit longer than it needs to be. If he manages to fix this problem for his next film, I'm there.

Blogging CIFF #3: Police, Adjective

I have a test for you. Read the following comic. If you don't laugh at it, or at least understand why it's great, then you probably will not enjoy Police, Adjective.



If you can't laugh at talking, monocle-wearing punctuation marks, then Police Adjective, with its deliberately paced scenes of characters discussing the finer points of semantics, will probably fail to excite you. "Exciting" is not a good word to describe Police. Its rewards are more subtle.¹

The story centers around Cristi, a detective whose age lies heavily on him despite the fact that he can't be a day over 35. He carries himself with a slump-shouldered, brooding weariness that suggests years of soul-crushing drudgery in his work, a drudgery that we witness in the film's opening sequence. Cristi has been assigned to keep tabs on a teenager suspected of possessing and selling marijuana, and the audience gets to feel his boredom as he follows the boy through a typically uneventful teenage day. Cristi doesn't see the point of making a fuss over a kid who gets high with friends occasionally--especially considering that the rest of Europe has already more or less legalized weed--but he goes through the motions anyway because that's what is required of him.

Before long, though, Cristi begins to have qualms about whether the punishment will fit the crime, and it's his crisis of conscience that gives forward momentum to the lengthy, single-take scenes of him waiting outside the high school or eating his lunch alone. This isn't a new idea, of course--throw a rock in a field full of crime-drama cliches and you have a good chance of hitting a policeman who has doubts about the true justice of his actions--but Police, Adjective explores it from a fresh angle. Instead of having angst over the true justice of Cristi's actions, it asks how we define truth and justice themselves. Words matter in this film. When Cristi tries to argue for clemency in the teenager's case, the ruthlessly pedantic chief of police argues with him, not on moral or legal grounds, but linguistic grounds, making him look up the definitions of words in a dictionary that just happens to be lying around his office.

This is the climax of the film.

It's a riveting scene. After all the slow-paced, quiet scenes (again, often unfolding during a single take of five minutes or more) that have come before,² the sudden outpouring of argument--goes off like a firecracker. The entire film has been building imperceptibly to this payoff. The conflict between the chief's dogged insistence on one philosophy of law enforcement and Cristi's equally dogged insistence on another evokes the familiar cinematic rhythms of a boxing match. A boxing match using words. Police, Adjective is, in part, a film about words and ideas, and its climax illustrates how these are more than mere abstractions. For me, this theme practically thrums with intrigue and vitality. Of course, I laugh at comic strips with punchlines about dangling participles. Your mileage may vary.

(3.5 / 5)

¹ I realize that this statement carries certain pejorative connotations, to the effect of "oh, the plebeian masses just won't get it" (best said with a sniff and a limp-wristed wave of one cigarette-cradling hand). These connotations, both pejorative and otherwise, are justified. See following footnote.
² This is the sort of film that spends ten minutes (or what feels like ten minutes, anyway) on a character cooking and eating some stew for lunch without once cutting away or providing any sort of context/deeper narrative meaning to it all. I don't find fault with this as long as it works, and Police, Adjective does have a purpose for indulging in such moments. That said, it's grueling to sit through, even for a film lover like me, so I can imagine its mind- and butt-numbing effects on a more casual viewer. There's something to be said for the importance of the entertainment factor in movies. If I had the choice between rewatching this or, say, The Fugitive, I'd choose Harrison Ford without hesitation.

Blogging CIFF #2: Sweet Rush

I have a confession to make: I don't like Ingmar Bergman's Persona. It's not Bergman's most famous film, but it's one of his most well regarded among art-film enthusiasts, with none other than Roger Ebert giving it a write-up in his "Great Movies" series. The following passage from that write-up makes me wish that I see what Ebert sees.

The opening sequence suggests that Persona is starting at the beginning, with the birth of cinema. The break in the middle shows it turning back and beginning again. At the end, the film runs out of the camera and the light dies from the lamp and the film is over. Bergman is showing us that he has returned to first principles. "In the beginning, there was light." Toward the end there is a shot of the camera crew itself, with the camera mounted on a crane and [cinematographer Sven] Nykvist and Bergman tending it; this shot implicates the makers in the work. They are there, it is theirs, they cannot separate themselves from it.

This metafictional approach, the peeling back of cinema's layers of illusion, is central to Sweet Rush as well, which was why Persona was the first film to spring to my mind after the lights went up and I started to process what I had just seen. I reached the same conclusion I reached after seeing Persona. I understand what the director was going for, and he more or less succeeded in reaching his goal. I just don't think his goal was particularly worth reaching.

Sweet Rush comprises two stories—one factual, one fictional—that, over the course of the film, touch one another as they separately unfold. The former takes shape as a series of autobiographical monologues delivered by Krystyna Janda (who also plays the lead role in the film's fictional half) about the slow death of her husband from cancer. These monologues are interspersed periodically with the main (fictional) plot, in which a mother, grieving the loss of her grown sons in World War II, encounters a much younger man in her village. He reminds her of her lost sons, and she quickly develops a relationship with him that is a strange mix of maternal affection and romantic attraction.

Perhaps, after reading that description, you'd say that the fictional half sounds vastly less interesting than the nonfictional half. It is. Director/screenwriter Andrzej Wajda adapted it from a short story, with plans for Janda to play the lead, but he ended up reworking the script after the death of Janda's husband. He doesn't seem to have realized that, by simplifying the already rather shallow psychodrama of the short story so that it would fit alongside Janda's wrenching narrative of real-life tragedy and loss, he doomed the fictional half to irrelevancy. Who cares about an imaginary woman's Oedipally tinged grief issues when we have the rare chance to witness a real woman bare her soul? Janda the person is much more fascinating than Janda the actress.

Wajda's solution is to fracture the partition between fiction and reality that we unconsciously erect whenever we go to the movies. We tell ourselves that the actors on the screen are playing characters, that whatever personalities and emotions they display are not the actors' own. What if, Wajda speculates, that line between actor and character is erased? What if, during a particularly emotional scene, Janda breaks character and rushes off the set in tears, as the frame widens to include the cameras and the film crew that is watching her outburst? How would that change the way we engage with a story that is admittedly a little stale?

As I wrote that just now, I thought, "You know, that's actually kind of a neat little trick." By intertwining the two narratives, and filming the fictional narrative in a way that draws attention to the mediated, filtered reality that we take for granted in a movie, the director creates an interesting meditation on how and why we respond to stories. With movies in general becoming less and less interested in challenging audiences to think about the inherent artificiality of the medium—to think at all, really—it's gratifying to encounter one so self-aware (that doesn't use that self-awareness in the service of congratulating itself on how smart it is—looking at you, Tarantino).

I think my problem with Sweet Rush (which was the same problem I had with Persona) is that, while the film is conceptually interesting in retrospect, as an experience—as a movie—it's inert, dry. Watching it was like reading a textbook. Maybe I learned something, maybe it helped me think in new ways. I could write an essay about it, one with a thesis statement and half-page paragraphs with topic sentences. But the reading felt like a duty, and I'm probably never going back to that textbook again unless I have to. Exploration of the cinematic medium's nooks and crannies is all well and good, but art should be about more than just itself. In the case of Persona and Sweet Rush, with their flat, inscrutable characters and avant-garde ambitions, my overwhelming reaction is "Huh, interesting. So what?" That question never gets answered satisfactorily.

(2.5/5)

Blogging CIFF #1: Mother

[Note: I recently had the chance to see some films at the Chicago International Film Festival (CIFF), as part of my compensation for the writing I did for the organizers. Over the next week or so, I'll be writing about the films I got to see.]

"One might prefer to be stabbed [rather] than shot. Optimally, one isn't stabbed or shot. Optimally, one eats some cake! But there are times when cake is not available, and instead we are destroyed. This is the deep poetry of the universe."

—Tycho, of Penny Arcade

Being a pessimist by inclination, I find the above quotation springing to mind whenever I try to express my perspective succinctly. The degree to which I give myself over to its ruthless pragmatism varies depending on how depressed and/or hungry I am at any given time, but it more or less articulates the way I believe the world generally works, with its dual suggestions that a) there do indeed exist some good things for us to cherish and enjoy, but b) the times that we are able to do so tend to be few and far between. To me, this is merely realism. There's a reason that one of the first lessons you had to learn as a kid was "Life isn't fair." The world is full of office workers who didn't grow up to be actors or astronauts. The odds are good that at some point you will seriously hurt someone you care about.

This is before you take into account more serious problems.

Many people seem to think that pessimism is some kind of character flaw, as if I walk around all day wearing black and intoning bleak truths at any innocent child unfortunate enough to get within intoning distance. What they're probably thinking of is despair, which isn't the same thing. If your pessimism leads to despair, you're doing it wrong. Which, yes, implies that there's a right way to do it.

It didn't occur to me until I'd wrestled with this blog entry for a few days¹ that the entire book of Ecclesiastes is (without putting too fine a point on it) an illustration of what this right way looks like. In some ways, it's a bleak read, what with maxims like "the dead, who had already died, are happier than the living, who are still alive" and its constant insistence that everything is meaningless. Yet the author does not succumb to hopelessness or nihilism. For him, life's inexplicability, difficulty, and occasional cruelty only sharpen his resolve to enjoy its pleasures, no matter how small or fleeting. I can't think of a more rousing expression of the carpe diem sentiment than the one in Ecclesiastes 9:7-9:

Go, eat your food with gladness, and drink your wine with a joyful heart, for it is now that God favors what you do. Always be clothed in white, and always anoint your head with oil. Enjoy life with your wife, whom you love, all the days of this meaningless life that God has given you under the sun—all your meaningless days.

This, surrounded as it is by pages filled with the recognition that life is brimming with injustice and pain and idiocy, is what I'm talking about. Maybe the word "pessimism" doesn't quite fit, though I can't think of another one that does the job any better. The word hasn't been coined yet that fully describes the strange brew of happiness and misery, exhilaration and drudgery, that is the human condition.

Which brings us (finally, after much extraneous philosophical noodling) to Mother. Mother comes awfully close to bottling that strange brew in cinematic form. Certainly it's one of the best films I've seen all year. The latest effort from South Korean auteur Bong Joon-ho moves fluidly between moods and genres—it's a comedy, then a family drama, then a detective story, then a drama again, etc.—and he knits these disparate elements together so smoothly that he practically dares the viewer to find a seam. Bong (and South Korean cinema in general) has a distinctive cinematic personality that disdains genre boundaries and uniformity of tone in order to follow the narrative bread crumbs wherever they take him. His jagged tonal shifts and idiosyncratic visual style evoke the complexity of lived experience better than any screenplay about those things could. Our lives don't fit neatly within certain dramatic conventions; why should our films be any different? The mental whiplash that occurs when Mother suddenly veers in an unexpected direction feels right, somehow. It's jarring yet familiar.

Fittingly, Bong introduces us to his protagonist (Kim Hye-ja) in an odd little dance number that manages to be simultaneously comical (for the sunny blandness of the music) and touching (for the extreme gravity with which the character performs each dance move). It's a tricky moment, but it works thanks to Kim's commitment and expressiveness, as she manages to convey vulnerability and sadness even as she is absorbed in a slightly goofy dance. It also sets the tone for the rest of the film—it's as if Bong is warning us not to get too comfortable. Anything can happen in this film, including surreal dances in the middle of a wheat field.

This woman dancing in the field, we learn, is Hye-ja, an herbalist and unlicensed acupuncturist with a small apartment; a mentally handicapped, adult son; and little else. She loves her son Doon-jo fiercely and does her best to protect him from an uncaring world, taking on his pain as her own, even though his handicap renders him incapable of understanding the full extent of her sacrificial devotion. She doesn't seem to mind. After all, he's all she has left. So she's understandably a bit upset when the police suddenly show up at her shop and arrest her son for murdering a teenage girl.

It's impossible to overstate just how good Kim is in this role. She's small—she looks like she'd crumple under the weight of a full sack of groceries—and meek-looking, but she has a remarkable screen presence. Her character exudes both fragility and a lean determination to prove Doon-jo innocent, whatever the cost, and her zeal is captivating yet heartbreaking in its singlemindedness. It all begins to pay off, as she uncovers clues that the police, having extracted a confession from her guileless son, never bothered to search for in the first place. However, her amateur sleuthing also drags into the light things that she'd rather have left hidden. Soon she is forced to deal with fallout from her own actions, both past and present, and the audience gradually becomes uncomfortable with the lengths to which she'll go to take care of her son.

Have I mentioned how good Kim Hye-ja is in this movie? She is excellent.

If all this sounds rather dark and serious, well, it is. But Bong Joon-ho's genius is in how he infuses even the tensest moments with traces of absurd humor or off-kilter beauty, as in a sequence where Hye-ja is trapped inside the closet of a prime suspect and forced to stay hidden and watchful, as the suspect and his girlfriend engage in an awkward lovemaking/word-game session.² It's like a Monty Python sketch directed by Alfred Hitchcock.

Or maybe (#2) his genius is in his flair for images. Consider a shot early in the film where Hye-ja tries to get Doon-jo to drink his medicine as he relieves himself against a wall. Bong angles the camera down at Doon-jo so that his head and the sidewalk are both in-frame. As his mother tips the medicine down his throat, the growing puddle of urine is also visible, expanding at the same rate as he drinks.

Or maybe (#3) Bong's genius is that he can do all of this in the same film and produce something so striking and true. Mother isn't totally perfect, but it's alive in a way that other, more technically flawless films are not. It seems to realize that life is beauty and absurdity and tragedy, all mixed together and inseparable. This is evident in its final minutes, in which that slightly goofy first dance is performed a second time in a completely different context. It doesn't seem so funny, this time.

(4.5 / 5)

¹ This is the reason this post is going up a week after CIFF closed. I set out to write a film review with a two-paragraph introduction concerning my pessimistic bent, then discovered that I had a lot to say about Christian pessimism and that it's actually kind of a complex issue, and before I knew it I was trying to cram an entire philosophical/theological essay into an introduction, which was really frustrating and not at all feasible and also was making me kind of hate writing, so instead of continuing down the path of madness I gave up and wrote this footnote to let you know that what you see in the main body of this post is truncated and that I'm probably going to turn my non-truncated thoughts into their own essay. But I doubt that I'll ever have occasion to publish that version on this site, so I don't suppose it really matters that I told you about it, other than to cover my back in case you vehemently disagree with the truncated version. Also, I have been reading a lot of David Foster Wallace, who has drawn me into a torrid love affair with verbose footnotes.
² Yes, lovemaking slash word-game session. As in, concurrent.