What am I, a month late? A thousand pardons, to the few out there who
mind, but the mucky business of constructing the annual year end Top
Ten list, conjoined with a writer sort of losing his voice due to myriad
real life pressures, plus the problem of a Midwest film critic unable
to see quite a few qualifying 2014 releases until after the Oscar
nominations have been announced, to say nothing of lingering over a
little thing you may have heard of and unwisely dismissed called Blackhat, makes one necessarily a little bit, and unfashionably I admit, late. And what you have here remains imperfect!
I was tempted to cheat by coupling my selections and linking them with
particular themes (as I do for #4 here), but laziness got the better of
me and I chose to write about 11 movies instead of 20. (Though I
continue with a somewhat overlong introduction, but there you go).
As far as the runners up, I would have loved to include the new
heavyweight champion of “It’s 2 a.m. and I’m drunk and want a frozen
pizza” flicks, Keanu Reeves’ gung-fu opus John Wick, along with Luc Besson’s deliriously fun and beautiful Lucy (it’s the best thing Besson, whose The Family was probably 2013’s worst film, has ever done). Or Godard’s acclaimed and hypnotic film essay Goodbye to Language, featuring the most ingenious use of 3-D cinematography I’ve ever seen. There’s Ava DuVerney’s Selma,
the first major film about Martin Luther King Jr. (an excellent David
Oyelowo), which is a masterfully calibrated and surprisingly spiritual
consideration of history and a great individual’s intimate doubts
(there’s a moment at the bridge when King’s followers wait for him to
lead that seems to channel Jesus having second thoughts in Martin
Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ). The film overleaps hagiographic trappings and accomplishes a sense of King many of us have never considered.
In need of some defense was Big Eyes, Tim Burton’s best film
in years, a gorgeous pop fairytale with an over-the-top Rumpelstiltskin
(Christoph Waltz) so entrenched in his solipsistic fantasy world that
he’s like an abusive and exploitative reconsideration of Burton’s title
character from Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure (I thought it resembled that film more than Burton’s previous collaboration with writers Larry Karaszewski and Scott Alexander, Ed Wood). I also wanted to cite Gina Prince-Bythewood’s Beyond the Lights, maybe the most affecting romance of the year, a pop-star-in-love scenario that could have easily been hackneyed Bodyguard
stale bread if not for Prince-Bythewood’s talents as writer/director,
the story dreamily floating in tune to Tami Reiker’s photography, and
Gugu Mbatha-Raw’s Good-God-Great performance, probably the year’s most
overlooked job of acting.
And so it goes with Mommy, Stranger by the Lake, Gone Girl,
Calvary, Jealousy, Mr. Turner, Blue Ruin, The Double, The Better Angels,
National Gallery, Foxcatcher, Listen Up Philip, Winter Sleep, Whiplash,
Wild, A Most Wanted Man, Venus in Fur, American Sniper, Joe, Noah, and The Lego Movie. I was also very close to including one of the year’s most widely celebrated films, Alejandro G. Inarritu’s Birdman, or the Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance,
which I initially disliked but with two subsequent viewings have come
to feel was probably a few steps ahead of me, its
much-much-too-on-the-nose pitfalls I now feel as being part of the point
(and represented by what happens to Michael Keaton’s unfortunate
schnozz in the climax). As Borges figures into it (a copy of Labyrinths
is read by Edward Norton’s misanthrope actor while in a tanning bed),
I’ll say somewhere in the infinite Library of Babel or along an
alternative direction in the garden of forking paths, Birdman is on another one of my Top Ten lists.
However much I’m reading into things, maybe erroneously, the
recurring theme of last year felt like Life as Literature, the
frustrating separation and influence between the real world and textual
fantasies or reflections feeding into how we experience our lives. In Birdman,
Keaton’s Riggan Thomson (like director Inarritu) has the famed Don
Quixote facial hair, and in/around the theater, struggling to reinvent
himself, he often ridiculously trudges through a perilous path of real
life and the specters of fiction that inspire—or pollute—the wider
world. It’s as if Inarritu were mining the gamut of Latin literature’s
Magical Realist tradition from Cervantes to Borges to make a significant
reflection on “the cultural genocide” (as Inarritu puts it in
interviews and Norton’s character says in the film) of today’s superhero
franchises alongside the self-serious melancholy of Raymond Carver,
expressing the impulse, from the profane to the sacred, to put human
experience on paper—or in his film’s case, toilet paper (which Riggan
uses to wipe his nose).
That longing to communicate, however futile, is central to the Spielbergian wistfulness in Interstellar,
which goes so far as to recreate Borges’ Babel Library in a black hole.
On the other side of the cinephiliac aisle, it’s in Godard’s wonderment
about how cinema evolves in Goodbye to Language. It’s in the expression covered up by menacing artifice in Beyond the Lights, the overlapping convolutions of Inherent Vice, and in Big Eyes’ domestic abuse and sensationalism. It’s the mystery of “Kezjo” graffiti in Boyhood, the fetishes and fantasies of a director in Roman Polanski’s Venus in Fur, and in “Boy With Apple” from The Grand Budapest Hotel,
a grand tale steered by another exemplary Quixote, Ralph Fiennes’
Gustave H., the whole picture considering history as narratives within
narratives, fictions and non-fictions commingling and reflecting off
each other toward infinity. I need not even mention Gone Girl,
with its entanglements of truth and fiction, sex in libraries and
engagement rings delivered through notepads. And the tiresome boloney
spewed in smearing “What X Gets Wrong About” pieces dealing with Selma and Clint Eastwood’s flawed but admirable domestic horror story American Sniper (the
latter film whose subject may not be about a Quixote so much as he was a
Munchausen). In the flurry of constant information, always
accelerating, it’s harder to reach something tangible through a
panopticon of abstraction (relating to 2015’s first extraordinary film, Blackhat; more on that in coming weeks, I hope).
And so, getting on with the list: where we grieve for what I’ve left
off and may legitimately complain about what I left on. “What Niles Gets
Wrong About the Best Films of 2014,” and what have you. But then again,
as with such think pieces, I can only say, “Let’s not really give that much of a shit and move on, okay?”
1. THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL (Wes Anderson) I’ve always admired Wes Anderson, but this selection isn’t a long-standing, in-the-bag grab win. Starting with Fantastic Mr. Fox in 2009, and then with the heart crushing romance of Moonrise Kingdom (for me 2012’s best film), he hit a new stride. You could say that The Grand Budapest Hotel doesn’t have the quiet emotional punch of Moonrise
(there are such complaints), but that should hardly count against what
is an uproarious compact adventure, falling through the present to
Central Europe’s past regimes with an ever ascending comic momentum, as
the art of narrative and poetry is rudely interrupted by history, mostly
in the form of 1930s-styled fascists. Some criticized it for an
apparent apoliticism, but when a villainous child of privilege with ties
to the fascistic Zig Zag Party (Adrien Brody) cries out at an Igon
Schiele painting, “What’s the meaning of this shit?!” I was reminded of
Hitler’s Degenerate Art exhibitions and the totalitarian drive to stamp
out subjective creativity (just like, ergh, people who just want Wes
Anderson to stop being so damn…Wes Anderson-y). Stefan Zweig was cited
as a literary influence by the filmmaker, but this all-star journey up
and around magic mountains also stems from the Thomas Mann tree. We have
Anderson’s most exquisite creation, Gustave H. (Ralph Fiennes), a
courtier worthy of Castiglione and idealist worthy of Cervantes, the
embodiment of refined kindness and reflective understanding, his
concierge post a dedication to holding high civilization above
barbarity. The scene where he sternly scolds his apprentice Zero (Tony
Revolori) and then, upon understanding the young man’s circumstances,
begs for forgiveness, is sublime poignancy wrapped up in hilarity. Moonrise Kingdom
is a masterpiece about love and history that’s difficult for me to
watch because of its sad mien with life falling and fading through
passing seasons; Grand Budapest meanwhile is an ode to joy to
have on repeat, similarly full of death and regret, but with
storytelling defiantly usurping our baser qualities.
2. P’TIT QUINQUIN (Bruno Dumont) I loved True Detective, but
Cary Fukunaga and Nic Pizzolatto’s internet think-piece factory wasn’t
the best blend of murder mystery, history, and the occult in the last
year. P’tit Quinquin is possibly the best serial killer thriller since David Fincher’s Zodiac
(2007); it’s a bizarre, at times Tati-esque, offbeat riddle, originally
released in France as a four episode TV series, its episodic titles
making no secret of the dark heart veiled by bouts of grotesque comedy
(1. The Human Beast; 2. The Heart of Evil; 3. The Devil Incarnate; 4. Allahu Akbar). There’s even the coincidence of True Detective‘s
eternal recurrences, as Bruno Dumont repeatedly brings up historical
circularity (“Everything…revolves…”) followed by the dismissal of such
hefty matters (“This isn’t the time for philosophy,” remarks the lead
investigator). The murders are also atrocity exhibitions, in this case
the victims shoved up a cow’s hind quarters–which leads of course to the
question, how did they get the people in the creature’s ass? And
then…how’d they get the cow (elevated above the northern French village
like Christ in La Dolce Vita) into an old WWII bunker? Bernard
Pruvost and Phillipe Jore play the bumbling detectives in charge, their
physicality out of step with the grim scenes and small town discontent,
but beneath the play between multiple generations there’s that haphazard
graffiti–“The blood of the wars still flows”–indicating how modernity
gives rise to more hatred, more blood revolts, and more nonsensical
violence (in a way that’s very disconcerting in light of the Charlie
Hebdo massacre). Solving the mystery isn’t the goal here (the
perpetrator actually slips right by us very early, wearing his
conspicuous balaclava at a victim’s funeral!) Rather, it’s to escape the
circle of hell.
3. THE MISSING PICTURE (Rithy Panh) The unfortunate allegations of historical inaccuracy between Selma and American Sniper, or lesser fact-based movies like The Imitation Game and The Theory of Everything,
drive home this point of information overload, where we’re so caught in
the flux of moving data, deciphering what’s factual or not that, to use
the parlance of Blackhat, there’s no time to grieve. The image
denotes some kind of evidence for something that happened, one’s
reality, one’s suffering, one’s love, a prosthetic memory that should
coalesce with our experience and not numb us. The Missing Picture is
a tremulously moving documentary about Cambodian filmmaker Rithy Panh’s
attempt to reconcile the oppression suffered under the Khmer Rouge, a
regime so careful about its self management that its crimes were almost
impossible to capture on a medium other than the memory banks of those
who suffered and lost. All Panh can do is recreate his personal
experience using clay figures, set pieces that are played against state
sanctioned documentary footage. “I seek my childhood like a lost
picture,” the narration tells us. The Missing Picture isn’t
only a heart wrenching documentary about trauma and grief caused by
genocide, but also tells us something about how we respond to the
abundance of image tow which we now have access, when the meaning of a
“True Image” is so very urgent.
4. INHERENT VICE (Paul Thomas Anderson) / INTERSTELLAR (Christopher
Nolan) My one cheat for this year’s Top Ten, featuring two widely known
(like-almost-but-not-quite household names) celluloid-committed
filmmakers of the same age who appeal to wildly different cinephile
contingents. Their imperfect but hugely rewarding latest films mirror
each other: two primal adventures bridging the cosmic to the prosaic. At
the heart of both is a yearning to make sense and meaning out of the
abundance of narratives given us, which in their chaotic clatter leave
the haunt of pitch black loneliness.
Inherent Vice, based on Thomas Pynchon’s 2009 stoner noir,
where the the freewheeling ’60s have given way to post-Charlie Manson
paranoia and world’s end eschatology, has Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye and the Coen brothers’ The Big Lebowski
in its DNA, sure, but its overlapping plot points, handed to us with
the speed and care of a coke-fueled card dealer, struck me like the Monty Python and the Holy Grail soundtrack
joke of “The Story of the Film So Far,” where getting lost in the
density of the Narrative Factory’s labyrinth (Pynchon’s California story
does, after all, include a heckuvalot of pop culture references) is
part of the design. Private eye Doc Sportello (Joaquim Phoenix) is yet
another Quixote, busy spinning solutions out of political intrigue,
struggling to manage the cruel and ceaseless barrage of narratives
memory hands down, in this case relating to an old flame. Languid,
beautiful (lensed by Anderson’s longtime collaborator Robert Elswit),
perfectly acted, and often brutally funny, Inherent Vice, like The Master before
it, demands we take time to wade through its wondrous waters, less
certain about the painful answers than our commitment to the (even more
trying) questions.
Anderson’s film had its detractors, but not so many more relative to Nolan’s Interstellar,
where the king of anti-blockbuster blockbusters (it feels like a
defiant middle finger to the Marvel mindset) at last broke the camel’s
back with expositional dialogue and plot holes, his many critics
pointing out how he would have flunked a basic screenwriting course, or
something. But since Memento and Insomnia Nolan has
studied our need for narratives at their most nonsensical, his
formidable abundance of it reversing the Paul Schrader noir formula by
making Content part of the Form instead of vice versa (akin to what I
felt in Inherent Vice’s density). Interstellar touched
a nerve for me unlike any other 2014 film, from its first image of a
dusty bookshelf and through Hans Zimmer’s pounding organs to its
Empyrean conclusion. The resolution of Interstellar seems
atheistic, with its plot holes tied up with fifth dimensional jargon
tying up the story’s leaps with shaky cement, but I can’t shake the ache
of Matthew McConaughey struggling to reach out through time behind the
Babel Library (trying to spell out “S.T.A.Y” next to a copy of James
Ellroy’s The Big Nowhere, of all books–the plea, the prayer, so much like the conclusion of E.T.).
The impossible scream, reaching to recover lost time, makes this
intergalactic quest a lustrous one of religious sentiment. To survive,
to communicate, to love plays out like Hoyte van Hoytema’s beautiful
photochemical cinematography searching for orange human flesh in the
dark night. It’s also, if I may say so, the first big budget special
effects movie in a while where my eyes could be awed because they
believed what they were seeing.
5. UNDER THE SKIN (Jonathan Glazer) Under the Skin
is so very difficult to approach because one of its ambitions is to
present a perspective alien from a human one. Its cold and mysterious
austerity resulted in a lot of comparisons to Stanley Kubrick, which may
have only made us realize how we underestimated Kubrick’s humanism.
Like with The Babadook, we can try to map out a metaphor to
make sense of what’s happening, as we follow some extra terrestrial
invader/mole/researcher wearing Scarlett Johansson’s desirous flesh lure
Scottish men into its dark den, where they’re somewhat literally
deconstructed–but it’s the film’s powerful wrangling of an uncanny
nightmare that makes it memorable. It’s not a surrender to abstraction;
rather, we’re meant to explore and try to make sense out of what this
Alien is doing, why one of the men responds differently to
its seduction, who her collaborators are, and what changes it’s/she’s
undergoing in its relationships to the people it examines. Though Glazer
may begin from a springboard of Kubrick and Bunuel, Under the Skin’s
conclusion of fire and ice is one of painful emotional nakedness. It
took me to the close of another film about an otherworldly and
inscrutable heroine caught in the foibles of human cruelty, Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc.
6. BOYHOOD (Richard Linklater) Yes, the miracle of a
13-year production is worth writing about and invites allegations of
gimmickry. Then there are accusations that it’s a depiction of
privileged bourgeois normalcy, or that its golden child isn’t wild
enough. That leads me to wonder, “What’s normal then?” If ‘normal’ is
having an abusive stepparent, constantly moving from town to town with a
struggling single mom, and graduating with a single reluctant friend
showing up at your party, I might have taken a lot for granted. What’s
funnier is that these allegations come from a lot of the same people who
love director Linklater’s
Dazed and Confused, which similarly has those “Maaaan, that was myyyy childhood!” adulations. But
Boyhood is, by design I think, antipodal to
Dazed and Confused‘s
depiction of clearly defined, gendered, privileged social in-groups,
where even the outcasts (are there any?) have somebody. Whereas
Dazed and Confused spells out the rites of masculinity,
Boyhood‘s
title is ironic as Mason Jr. (Ellar Coltrane) cannot help but grow up
weary of what masculinity dictates. Consequently, he is–as his sister
(Lorelei Linklater) puts it–a stick in the mud. Looking for magic while
exiled in the real world, Mason reads time, attentively listening to a
sermon about faith connecting to his private transcendental yearnings,
and searching out his own sense of relating with photography. We should
know that a film’s quality isn’t determined by “relatability,” but
Boyhood has an almost
Yi Yi-caliber sense of
how we
relate to time, passively falling into mores and rituals or detaching
ourselves as observers. Though revolving around a young male, at its
center (as much as with Dante’s
Comedy,
to which I compare it here)
is a woman: Patricia Arquette’s Olivia, the abused, neglected,
headstrong single mother, affected me more than any other character last
year. Playing strong women who were as desirous as they were maternal
wish-fulfillment fantasies from
True Romance to
Ed Wood to
Lost Highway to
Bringing Out the Dead, Olivia is the dazzling culmination of a great actor’s progression, and Arquette here is a masterpiece of presence.
7. THE IMMIGRANT (James Gray) That the suspiciously long-delayed follow-up to Two Lovers (even The Interview was given a wider release) should have found light so close to the passing of the great cinematographer Gordon Willis (The Godfather trilogy)
makes Gray’s rumination of forgotten generations and throwback to
Coppola-styled melodrama all the more affecting. Marion Cotillard is
flawless as Ewa, the titular Polish Catholic newly arrived to Ellis
Island, who makes excruciating compromises to find a place in the messy
new world of 1920s Manhattan. Gripping the delicate thread of legitimacy
as bureaucracy is bent on sending her and her sickly sister back home,
she finds a savior in a pretentiously suave though simmering-to-a-boil
louse (Joaquin Phoenix) who prostitutes her, but who then finds himself
jealously in love. Gray is a rarity, making original meat-and-potatoes
stories on classic broad canvasses, channeling the American experience
in a way Coppola and Kazan did years ago. His various plot points–the
anti-romance between exploitative and tragic Phoenix and long-suffering
Cotillard, which comes to involve a debonair illusionist played by
Jeremy Renner–don’t distract us from the reverberating impact of these
characters. There’s a Days of Heaven quality to what Gray
achieves. We wonder who these people were and the lost world where they
once tread. Darius Khondji’s cinematography of diffuse and soft amber
brings us back to the Little Italy of Coppola and Willis’ The Godfather Part II,
but the homage serves a bittersweet nostalgia, peaking in the intimate
reflections and foggy uncertainties in the final shot’s longview.
8. THE BABADOOK (Jennifer Kent) Speaking of “Life as
Literature,” there’s Jennifer Kent’s efficacious gooseflesh inducer.
Essie Davis is terrific as a widow raising the troubled son (Noah
Wiseman) who was born moments after a car crash killed his father. The
“Babadook” is a monster found in a mysterious pop-up book portending its
ineluctable arrival, a classic shadow-in-the-closet who we attempt to
explain away through analysis: he’s the departed husband and father,
prompting the aggrieved survivors to follow him in death; he’s the
unknown dark, the unavoidable past; he’s the most wicked manifestation
of sleep paralysis ever portrayed, etc. As Davis and Wiseman are so on
the mark as horror-afflicted characters, intellectual explanations don’t
halt Kent’s achievement from being spellbinding and terrifying stuff.
She pulls it off with nary a “Startle!” and courts the uncanny, getting
under the skin and eating us from the inside out. And in addition to
being a great depression allegory and scary movie, The Babadook is a terribly effective way to dissuade you from ever having children. Bring your sweetheart!
9. NATIONAL GALLERY (Frederick Wiseman) “So I’m to become a non-entity,” J.M.W. Turner (Timothy Spall) says as death approaches in Mike Leigh’s
Mr. Turner,
a biopic about the curmudgeonly great painter. There’s plenty of
Turner’s work on display in Frederick Wiseman’s remarkable documentary
about London’s National Gallery, a film that immerses us in the business
of keeping the creations of several well-regarded “non-entities” alive.
In addition to contexts detailed to us by lecturing tour guides, taking
us beyond the mere spectating of art, there’s the bureaucracy, the
cleaning and restorations, the lighting, the framing, the architecture
of the exhibitive space, and the reflective quality of the floors.
Wiseman’s film captures something that bounces back and perhaps
irradiates ourselves, as gallery onlookers and moviegoers. Velasquez’s
Baroque mirrors, pointing to the impact of reflection, are another
supporting player in
National Gallery, and Wiseman compels us
to consider how this is all more than textual documentation or
archeology. We’re taken in studios with live nude models, which may be
initially awkward, though it rips away the thin diaphanous fabric
separating the viewer from projected representation. Wiseman climaxes
with a ballet, an ecstatic exultation of the body before Titian’s
adaptation of the Metamorphoses, where Ovid connected ageless and
familiar myths to the toil and trouble of human experience, of basic
love and longing. A remarkable accomplishment. (Much of this was taken
from my review of
National Gallery, which you can read in full
here).
10. THE TRIP TO ITALY (Michael Winterbottom) There’s
no shortage of movie franchises running amok nowadays. Your job and
romantic relationships are pretty much uncertain, but a slew of Marvel
movies featuring characters you may have never heard of is locked and
loaded, up to whenever
Twelve Monkeys was supposed to take place (2026?) It’s too bad that the three key players of
The Trip–Winterbottom, Steve Coogan, and Rob Brydon–aren’t as proactive, because their franchise is,
in not only my opinion, the best thing happening. In 2011’s
The Trip,
Coogan and Brydon played themselves as a pair of friendly yet
competitively antagonistic entertainers, traveling through northern
England on
The Guardian‘s pence to write a series of restaurant
reviews. Brydon was the relieving jester to big time Coogan, pursuing
roles in movies by “auteurs” and sleeping around while jealously
thinking about his stateside girlfriend. This time around, the pair
follow Byron and Shelley while ingesting loads of yummy carbs through
Italy. Coogan is now the relaxed one while Brydon’s provoking celebrity
impressions and quips safeguard him from some bad things happening in
his own bedroom back home. And meanwhile, his main goal–while
auditioning for a juicy supporting role in the new Michael Mann film–is
to get to Sicily, following in the footsteps of his idol, Al Pacino.
Another perfect serving of raucously funny improvisations with a chaser
of melancholia,
The Trip to Italy is as modest as its
predecessor and maybe on first glance little more than a pleasant
diversion. But again like the original, it’s so goddamn rewatchable,
even addictive, that its rewards are limitless. I find it hard not to
love these characters, caught between true life pressures and their
creative outlets. The series is a great portrait of the barriers–even
tacit antagonism–in a long friendship. It’s the bromance to beat.
Order your copy of Off the Map: Freedom, Control, and the Future in Michael Mann's Public Enemies, published by Cascade Books, here.
