Lion

LION   ***1/2

Garth Davis

2016

IDEA:  In 1986 in India, a young boy is inadvertantly carried thousands of miles away from his home on a train. Adopted and raised by an Australian couple, he uses Google Earth some 20 years later to locate his home and reunite with his mother.

BLURB:  The pleasures and exceptional catharsis of Lion derive from the simple, not-to-be-underestimated satisfaction of closure. This isn’t so much the satisfaction of narrative closure as it is of a deeper, much harder to realize psychical closure; an against-all-odds fantasy closure whose biographical truth paradoxically makes it all the more fantastical, and gratifying. What Lion taps into, via its astonishing real-life tale of a man’s reunion with his mother and sister 25 years after he went missing as a child, is the desire for a primal resolution that entails a return to one’s origins – to the familiar geography of home, to the warm embrace of a mother who is still there to receive you. Its emphasis is on an inviolable bond that time and distance constantly fail to sever. The first half of the film, led by the remarkably self-possessed Sunny Pawar, is all about the spatial disorientation and terrifying dislocation of a boy taken far from home. Long, wordless passages of the little Pawar alternately wandering, napping, and running amidst the dense urban activity of Kolkata have a straightforwardly affective force, even as Davis perhaps struggles (who wouldn’t?) to represent the full terror of the events he depicts. The film’s second half, taking place 20 years later, is his and screenwriter Luke Davies’ best accomplishment: avoiding the pitfalls that often hamper bifurcated or time-jumping stories, they deepen and complicate Saroo’s journey by poignantly folding in the accumulated weight of memory and guilt. Any worry that the abrupt shift to an adult Saroo will rupture our identification or engagement is handily allayed by Dev Patel, whose full-hearted, emotionally transparent performance – and rapport with the radiant, generously nuanced Kidman and Mara – imbues what could have so easily been a facilely uplifting final act with rich, variegated, unfiltered human feeling. Watching him as his suppressed memories slowly resurface, galvanizing him to complete his journey, is a uniquely cinematic pleasure. His closure feels like ours.

Arrival

ARRIVAL   ***

Denis Villeneuve

2016

IDEA:  A linguistics professor is enlisted by the military to decipher the language of aliens who have landed around the globe.

BLURB:  Arrival confounds audience expectations in minor but satisfying ways. First: despite its extraterrestrial subject matter, the film offers an exceedingly human-scaled story about one woman’s journey in confronting the ripples of grief and connection. Physically it is just as pared-down, rarely leaving the gravity-defying corridor of the alien spacecraft or the adjacent military compound. These locations, shot through with a murky gray haze, become the unassuming sites of this woman’s internal drama. Second and most importantly: its structure gently plays with the spectator’s perception of narrative chronology. In thrilling accord with Louise’s evolving mastery of an alien language, our own increasing grasp of the film’s unique syntax is commensurate with how we understand its construction of time. This blossoming semiotic comprehension is not particularly complex, but by mirroring it to Louise’s mental transformation through an alternative language, Villeneuve renders visible his own cinematic language, and thus by extension the ways in which it structures and reconfigures our reading of his film. Also confounding, although more to its detriment, is how Arrival falls short of truly investing in a nonlinear temporal perspective. Outside of its best, most dramatically rich moments – the first entry into the alien passageway, especially – it is never as perceptually disorienting as it perhaps should be, adhering to a deterministic logic that often seems to contradict its imagining of an “other” time. Still, even with its frustrating aporias, Arrival is thought-provoking and lean and unusual in ways that sometimes redefine those very kinds of attributes.

Certain Women

CERTAIN WOMEN   ***

Kelly Reichardt

2016

IDEA:  Three women in Montana - a lawyer with a volatile client, a family woman looking to build new property, and an independent ranch hand - experience adversities small and large.

BLURB:  The women of Certain Women are steady, determined, and courageous in ways they never have to call attention to. Kelly Reichardt, whose filmmaking is shorn of any shred of didacticism or bombast, gets this, and presents them plainly: never are they dramatically elevated to symbols of a particular gendered condition, but shown as humans negotiating the particulars of their socio-cultural environment. In this case, that’s an American West that Reichardt has remarkably demystified and empowered at once. Written and hegemonically upheld by Man, she doesn’t so much reimagine the landscape from a contemporary female perspective as demonstrate how its ideals are experienced and reworked through various female subjectivities. Law, property, and freedom, those sacrosanct male-scripted institutions, are undertaken by the women of Reichardt’s film, who operate within their patriarchal constraints while asserting their own agencies. Certain Women is not after a polemical call-to-arms but an inductive observation of social roles prescribed by gender and, in the superior final chapter of its triptych, by class, race, and sexuality. Reichardt offers neither a fantasy to redress systemic inequality nor a jeremiad; in the fashion befitting her unsentimental, understated style, she simply shows women living their lives, compelling us to realize that when it comes to the art of the West, that’s a quietly revolutionary thing indeed.

Cameraperson

CAMERAPERSON   ***1/2

Kirsten Johnson

2016

IDEA:  A film composed of unused footage cinematographer Kirsten Johnson shot for several documentaries. 

BLURB:  Without being precious or overly academic about it, Cameraperson demonstrates the transcendent body- and mind-expanding functions of the cinematographic camera apparatus. It’s right there in the title: for Johnson as it is for the spectator, the camera conflates with the individual, becoming an annex organ that has the capacity to enact and fulfill innate human needs. The humanist core that blossoms through the film’s measured formality attests to this central truth. Johnson gets us to reify how the apparatus gratifies our passion for perceiving; the ways in which it orients us in the world through mediation and identification; how it sparks our consciousnesses and consciences to make us agents of social awareness and change; most poignantly, through her deeply personal meditation on memory, deterioration, and death, its ability to overcome the constraints of time by memorializing that which is most transient. Indeed, Johnson formulates her film as a memoir, and yet we only ever see her once, briefly. In truth, there’s no need to see her at all: her footage becomes a gestalt, its content and precise formal choices enough to evince the character of the person who produced it, its collage emerging as a veritable archive of her memory and emanation of her very being. At all times asserting the presence of the camera and the influence of the person behind it, Cameraperson posits the apparatus not as a mechanical observer, but as a fundamentally human project, activated only in its interaction with the body and mind, and endowed with all the moral responsibility and fragility that inevitably entails.

The Birth of a Nation

THE BIRTH OF A NATION   ***

Nate Parker

2016

IDEA:  The story of Nat Turner, a preacher who led fellow slaves in an insurgency against their owners in 1831 Virginia.

BLURB:  Bristling with urgency and palpable moral outrage, The Birth of a Nation decocts American racial tensions in service of a cathartic cri de coeur for our uneasy times. More than a retelling of a historical event, the film is energized by the politics of the contemporary moment that inform its righteous anger. Nate Parker potently builds the cultural resonances into the picture, locating biblical and modern parallels in a story he fashions as both myth and future social promise. The portrayal of profoundly recusant slave Nat Turner could rightly be dinged for hagiography if not for the way he becomes filtered through his own homiletic teachings: while the Christ imagery is heavy-handed and often excessive, especially considering Parker has cast himself in the sanctified role, it is drawn from a place deeply connected to the guiding principles of his character and the culture he emboldens. Like the film’s title, it is also an emphatic reclamation of text that has and continues to be used to persecute and subjugate. Parker bluntly foregrounds this safeguard of religion to underscore its centrality and assert its primary purpose as one of enlightenment. He also calls upon other hallmarks of what would become the civil rights movement, giving particularly persuasive space to the rallying power of oration. The Birth of a Nation is not an especially refined film, and it shouldn’t have to be. Parker’s rough-edged, two-fisted approach bespeaks a visceral, untrammeled expression that in many ways disarms legitimate reservations about his film’s design. An emotional and political deflagration, it bursts forth as a splanchnic howl from the depths of an embattled African American psyche.

Pete's Dragon

PETE'S DRAGON   *1/2

David Lowery

2016

IDEA:  Stranded after his parents are killed in a car accident, Pete finds protection and companionship in Elliot, a friendly dragon who lives in the woods. Their peaceful existence, however, is threatened by the arrival of a park ranger and a fleet of rapacious loggers.

BLURB:  In its most lyrical moments, Pete’s Dragon aspires to the kind of earthy, poignant poetry of canonical boy-and-his-pet movies. For the rest of the time, which is a dispiriting majority, David Lowery’s loose remake lazily employs all the kids’ film clichés that Disney has made its bread and butter. The simplistic nature of the story is not by itself the issue: for a little while, Lowery seems to have tapped into the appropriate fable-like tone, which operates on straightforwardly primal storytelling and easy-to-read archetypes invested with the resonance of tradition. His prologue, largely nonverbal, promises economical image-making in an understated emotional register. Then it falls apart. The obligatory run-and-play scene between boy and dragon, placed right at the beginning, is a rousing sequence that nevertheless serves as a premature crescendo to a narrative that hasn’t even occurred. It is followed by an increasingly slapdash string of unimaginative dramatic confrontations and pursuits, each one culminating in a similar climax en route to the predetermined – and saccharine – resolution. Daniel Hart’s majestic score, at least, suggests the awe the film consistently fumbles to produce, but even its sweeping strings begin to sound as mawkish as the scenes they accompany. When Pete’s Dragon finally amounts to little more than a rote reiteration of the sanctity of the traditional family unit, that initial artistry supplied by Lowery feels like either the vestiges of a squandered opportunity or a hint at another film that would better serve his talents.

The Strange Little Cat

THE STRANGE LITTLE CAT   ***1/2

Ramon Zürcher

2014

IDEA:  An extended family in a middle-class German apartment prepares for dinner as tensions and curiosities emerge from their interactions.


BLURB:  The characters in The Strange Little Cat might be stuck in a time loop. Although the perfunctory efficiency of their domestic routine has bred a certain complacency in their lives, thus eliminating the chance that they would pick up on this, an unusual number of incidents and objects reoccur within a very brief span of time. We notice it far more than they ever could: in a formal strategy that comments as much on their blinkered vantages as on the way cinema organizes vision, Zürcher employs fixed takes, often from oblique angles that crop out significant spaces and actions, that restrict our focus to only what he wishes us to see. So, we notice the pesky moth that has invaded the kitchen even when the family does not. Oranges, frequently invoked in dialogue and in image, keep repeating in front of the camera, signifying connections, and meaning, that may not exist. Glasses of milk, bottles, bloody fingers, and shopping lists take on talismanic value. Behavior is both disjunctive and familiar; conversations, by turns digressive and direct, stress the banal mysteries of private experience. Zürcher does not prescribe some explanation for the mild yet acute strangeness of his otherwise mundane scenario. He is interested in locating cosmic questions in the interstices of ordinary moments, in mapping the eternal over the quotidian, and with removing us just enough from recognizable reality that we can look at ourselves askew, keeping the little enigmas of human life idiosyncratic and ineffable. The Strange Little Cat is as teasingly gnomic as they come, filled with playful elisions and dead-ends that make it an exemplary cinematic koan.

Captain Fantastic

CAPTAIN FANTASTIC   **

Matt Ross

2016

IDEA:  A man raises his six children in the mountains of the Pacific Northwest, instituting a robust curriculum of physical and intellectual pursuit. Following the death of his wife, he and the family travel back to civilization to honor her burial wishes.

BLURB:  The first red flag is the impromptu family jam session. The tone doesn’t feel quite right; the interaction is forced, the gradually flowering sense of bonhomie less an organic result of an authentic dynamic than an engineered moment of whimsy. That dissonant, naggingly phony tenor runs through most of Captain Fantastic, a film that presents a morally and ideologically provocative scenario only so it can smooth over its actual implications in the name of quirky setups and crowd-pleasing resolutions. The approach is especially hypocritical coming from a film that wants to both endorse and critically assess its family’s counter-culture lifestyle. Instead of offering trenchant observation on either side, the film limply addresses the hazards of their ways while ultimately celebrating even their most troubling qualities as cute, easily reconcilable foibles. Ross takes up their nontraditional, anti-establishment philosophy, and yet he ends up falling back on convention as much as they flout it, his script requiring his actors to become purveyors of eccentricities calculated for optimal audience approval. If any of it registers as more than an excuse for another twee indie fairytale, it’s mostly due to Viggo Mortensen, who textures his casually radical patriarch with shades of righteousness, pomposity, and enviable, if inimical, conviction. He is the grit and complexity in a complicated social portrait that more often than not resorts to facile feel-good sentiments.

Swiss Army Man

SWISS ARMY MAN   ***

Daniels

2016

IDEA:   A man about to hang himself on a deserted island is rescued by a flatulent corpse, whose sundry abilities allow the two to survive.

BLURB:  A sophomoric jape hijacked by dramatists with a sincere interest in exploring human behavior, social conventions, and the warped face of millennial angst, Swiss Army Man is a disarming blend of the vulgar and the humane that insists such qualities are inextricably enmeshed. Kwan and Scheinert present what is a fairly straightforward allegory of the return of the repressed – a timid, despondent man is visited by the moribund embodiment of man’s primal, suppressed urges, and finds his will to live again by reanimating in him what has died – and deliver it with berserk yet unwaveringly earnest commitment via their outlandish buddy-movie conceit. Defying belief, what sounds puerile and thin on paper is robustly moving on screen, as Paul Dano and Daniel Radcliffe work in perfect sync with the Daniels’ vision, throwing themselves (literally) headlong into this fantasia of lurid corporeal activity while fleshing out an intimate, borderline romantic pas des deux. Central to being alive, the film asserts, is to be a body in space, and to have a mind that can operate that body in all its weird, improbable glory. Kwan and Scheinert offer up bodies, and a tactilely handcrafted world around them, in contradistinction to a culture growing increasingly dematerialized and disconnected, placing ecstatic emphasis on bodily functions and the simple affinities they afford. One wishes their film was even stranger and more transgressive than it is – for all of its colorful inventiveness, it still succumbs to aesthetic and narrative triteness, with too many montages and what amounts to a depressingly familiar ennobling of male solipsism. Still, their main character isn’t let off the hook here, and if he looks kind of psychotic by the denouement, the film mordantly argues that we would too if we all acted our real selves.

Love & Friendship

LOVE & FRIENDSHIP   ***

Whit Stillman

2016

IDEA:  Following the death of her wealthy husband, Lady Susan, "the biggest flirt in all England," arrives at her sister-in-law's manor and concocts a devious plan.

BLURB:  Love & Friendship is a union of two artists magnifying and bolstering the qualities of one another, Whit Stillman revealing the bitter bite of Jane Austen and Austen sharpening the hyper-verbal, mercilessly unsentimental snap of Stillman. The match is scarily right: Austen’s novella becomes for Stillman a dryly scathing comedy of manners with hardly a room for breath, each astringent, scrupulously tailored line of dialogue at once cutting through the folly of aristocratic social ritual and compounding its exhausting gamesmanship. Nobody plays the game better than Lady Susan, a role Kate Beckinsale relishes as she rattles off reams of primly disparaging incriminations without batting an eyelash. It’s all subterfuge all the time, and Beckinsale’s handling of her deceitful verbosity is as likely to give audiences whiplash as the characters she unashamedly deploys it against. Even at a little over 90 minutes this can grow wearying, but Stillman’s propensity for playfully curt cadences typically keeps things from becoming too overbearing. And while anything resembling compassion seems entirely absent from Lady Susan’s actions, Stillman nevertheless honors the audacity of a woman who wins with baldly mendacious words, whose scheming and haughtiness are symptoms of a rigged world of privilege she’s found a way to use against itself. It’s a character invented by Austen and realized by Stillman as another of his blithely self-deluded heroines.

Midnight Special

MIDNIGHT SPECIAL   *1/2

Jeff Nichols

2016

IDEA:  A young boy with supernatural abilities is pursued by the religious cult that considers him a savior and the government that considers him a threat. With the help of a childhood friend, the boy's father takes him on the run.

BLURB:  Midnight Special is a vexing film that has ideas it never seems interested in realizing and intentions it actively bungles. This is a movie about faith in the unknown that gives us little reason to believe; a glimpse of future transcendence that forgets to generate awe or excitement; an imagining of a reality beyond our perception that feels crushingly earthbound; most upsetting of all, an intimate domestic story of parental love, responsibility, courage, and sacrifice that has no heart. The actors in Midnight Special have apparently been instructed to deliver their lines in a tone of monotonous solemnity, awkwardly signaling emotional cues without ever investing feeling in the thin characterizations they’ve been given. Nichols’ filmmaking follows suit as the narrative plods along stolidly, failing to pick up momentum or break free from the rigid parameters which it has imposed upon itself. One could perhaps argue that Nichols is using this listlessness to illustrate the oppressiveness of his American milieu, where cultish religion and government surveillance seek to control life, threatening to tear apart the home. But if the world has gotten this bad, shouldn’t we have a sense of what is being lost in the process? Shouldn’t we sense the humanity, the suppressed beauty, the potential for grace? Nichols arrives there eventually, but the journey is ponderous, its stodgy images and lifeless performances fatally incongruous with its ethereal aims.

The Witch

THE WITCH   ***

Robert Eggers

2016

IDEA:  In 1630s New England, a Puritan family is tormented by strange phenomena after being exiled from their village to a farmstead just outside the woods.

BLURB:  The Witch is not, strictly speaking, nerve-jangling supernatural horror. Nor is it a period drama about Puritans where the occult stands as a purely metaphorical representation of ideological evil. Instead, it craftily synthesizes the two approaches to tell a story where supernatural evil arises as the logical, inevitable result of dogmatic ideology. In Eggers’ film, under perpetually sepulchral skies in a scarily nascent America, it is the religious zealotry, persecution, and unbridled paranoia of the Puritans that literally breed the witches whose existence they only suspected, fulfilling their fear by inadvertently manifesting it. The Witch is brutally effective in this depiction of self-perpetuating and self-consuming fear, running real witchcraft parallel to the inner turmoil and eventual implosion of its Puritan family unit to underscore just how insidious the latter is, its tyrannical repressiveness a horror equal to or more than that of the spirits lurking in the woods. Less successful is Eggers’ handling of tone and rhythm: he makes an audacious narrative gamble early on that pays off conceptually, but it also somewhat hobbles the film’s suspense, and he has difficulty keeping the rope tightly wound to generate the kind of steady, inexorably building dread the film calls for. Thankfully he makes up for the slack with his ghostly visuals, and certainly in the smart nuances that texture this parable of religious hysteria, one that slyly posits the life of sin so much hostility had gone into averting as both a tragic outcome and ecstatic liberation from a paralyzing culture.

Hail, Caesar!

HAIL, CAESAR!   ***1/2

Joel and Ethan Coen

2016

IDEA:  Pious Hollywood "fixer" Eddie Mannix deals with a variety of snafus - including the kidnapping of one of Capitol Studio's biggest stars - while he faces a crisis of conscience.

BLURB:  Leave it to the Coen brothers to craft a farcical satire on the Hollywood studio system that functions as a meditation on faith. In their wry and ingenious tale, it only makes sense: after all, what are the movies but grand illusions that require us to believe in them if they are to work? And what is Hollywood but a capitalist industry we’d also like to think is capable of real virtue? Indeed, the “dream factory” is the oxymoron that centers the directors’ exploration of cinema’s and life’s great contradictions. Within the back lots and stages of 1950s Hollywood they find a sprawling institutional space where pleasure is manufactured while business rules, truth exists only to be trumped by fabrications, and the rigmarole of routine and mechanical process clouds all certainty that its results will have any cultural value whatsoever. Hail, Caesar! thus maintains a characteristic Coen-level cynicism, and it mines deliciously sardonic humor from the foofaraw generated by celebrity personalities and PR politics. Somewhat surprisingly, however, is the optimism that offsets it. Though they may view Hollywood from one perspective as a crass, exploitative instrument of capitalism that controls bodies, what they ultimately find is a magical instrument of creation that provides, as our protagonist notes, entertainment and enlightenment. Or maybe they just want to believe that. Why shouldn’t they? As with any higher power, whether institutional or spiritual, a certain stubborn faith is required. Hail, Caesar! sees the Coens not only honoring the power of make believe, but validating the right to believe in it at all – maybe even, or especially when, it seems most foolish.

Top 10 - 2015

This is the latest I have made a Top 10 list since I began this blog in 2010. As I outlined in a past post, the reason is that I’ve been waiting to see significant 2015 titles that I either missed or that never came to my area, and I didn’t want to compose my list without being able to consider such notable (and obnoxiously late) releases such as Anomalisa and Son of Saul, or streamables available on Netflix and elsewhere. My plan, it turns out, proved to be only partially useful: as of this writing, the second film was only released here last week, and the first is still absent from any theater near me. I suppose it’s my fault for missing them when they were at CIFF back in October…

But something else has delayed my list, something I also made note of in my prior post. It’s that 2015 felt like kind of a bizarre movie year, the rare one in which no single film stood out as a head-and-shoulders-above-the-rest favorite. In other words, you can essentially consider all ten excellent films on my list as equal top-rankers.

One theme emerged, however: cinema. Many of the 2015 films that most spoke to me were the ones that took cinema history and theory as their driving creative forces, building experiences that exploited the material and psychological faculties of the medium. These films were conceptually audacious, aestheticaly indelible, and wonderfully exciting in their understanding, and practicing of, film's boundless formal and narrative potentials.

2015 films of note I still, regrettably, have not seen: In Jackson Heights, Queen of Earth, Anomalisa, Mustang, Joy, Chi-Raq, Arabian Nights, Victoria

TOP 10 AFTER THE JUMP!

The Revenant

THE REVENANT   **1/2

Alejandro González Iñárritu

2015

IDEA:  19th century fur-trapper Hugh Glass seeks revenge against the aggrieved expedition mate who left him for dead.

BLURB:  The Revenant is quite something as you’re watching it. Visually imposing, immersive, brimming with tactile details and visceral drama, it plunges you headfirst into a vivid 19th century American frontier. Emmanuel Lubezki’s camera keeps us unnervingly tied to every step and breath of the protagonists as they weather the merciless elements and contend with their own brutal human natures. Employing long, continuous mobile takes and low angles to place us at a ground level, practically first person perspective, Lubezki continues his run of virtuoso choreography and establishes himself as a legitimate auteur with his own completely identifiable visual language. The filmmaking craft on display is so formidable across the table, from the enveloping sound design to meticulously recreated and lived-in sets, and so engaging as a full-bodied transportation system to another time and place, one may shrug off the most suspect features of the film’s narrative and politics while soaking up the atmosphere. It becomes increasingly difficult, however, to swallow Iñárritu’s ham-fisted metaphors and frequently overblown gestures, his insistence on his film’s Importance as a reckoning with America’s violent legacy. One is apt to question why a film that acknowledges and condemns such a legacy still concerns itself with the heroic journey of a white man, who is literally guided and emboldened by the ghost of his beatific Native American girlfriend. By emphasizing his superhuman resilience, strength, and courage, Iñárritu exalts him above all else. Come the frankly groan-worthy ending, The Revenant has been a thrilling, often awe-inspiring sensory experience and a dubiously inflated tribute to its protagonist’s – and its makers’ – prowess.