Dunkirk

DUNKIRK   **1/2

Christopher Nolan

2017

IDEA:  By land, sea, and sky, the British army at Dunkirk tries to stave off German forces and get safely back home.

BLURB:  With Dunkirk, the gifted but chronically ponderous Christopher Nolan has attempted to make his fleetest, most pared-down film, and has half-succeeded. Running a relatively brisk 107 minutes, the film has no time to get bogged down in extraneous expository dialogue or convoluted narrative mechanics, the troubling features that have to varying degrees marred the director’s previous work. Instead, it plays out with a directness and efficiency satisfyingly in line with the underlying credo of the stranded soldiers: just stay alive. This conceit frees up Nolan to invest in a more streamlined, sinewy kind of filmmaking than he is accustomed to, the result being a big-budget war movie tempered by a kind of formal modesty and narrative economy rare in comparable projects. The problem, alas, is that he is unable to fully rein in his most tiresome proclivities, his ambitions frequently overburdening the simplicity of his story. The braided structure, for instance, in which three “timelines” interweave to highlight different aspects of the Dunkirk evacuation, feels arbitrary and ineffective, a temporal muddling of the event that doesn’t so much convey disorientation as it hobbles each strand’s dramatic momentum. Despite his inimitable technical prowess, Nolan’s inability (or unwillingness) to modulate tone and rhythm yields a monotony that further blunts the film’s visceral impact, a numbed state compounded by Hans Zimmer’s distracting, pile-driving score, which works overtime to generate suspense but has the adverse effect of seeming annoyingly redundant. Dunkirk works best when Hoyte van Hoytema’s sumptuous 65mm lensing does the heavy-lifting. The vivid teals and azures of sea and sky, set against the viscous browns and blacks of soldiers huddled in the sand or shuttling through the air, have more potency than any of the film’s rather humdrum action sequences.

Arabian Nights

ARABIAN NIGHTS   ***

Pier Paolo Pasolini

1974

IDEA:  The ingenuous Nuredin travels the desert in search of his missing slave girl, Zumurrud, while various others along the way expound on their own romantic travails.

BLURB:  Even more than the first two films in his Trilogy of Life, The Decameron andThe Canterbury Tales, Arabian Nights feels like Pasolini’s id splashed across the screen, the director’s most unwieldy, quixotic, indulgent, and uninhibited vision of insatiable erotic desire. His loose rendition of a handful of stories from One Thousand and One Nights is less a loyal historical account than an unapologetic idealization of a pre-modern past figured as a phantasmagoria of bountiful carnal pleasures. There is little denying that Pasolini, in exalting a relatively uncorrupted (by capitalism at least) era and people, tips emphatically over into Orientalism and sensual extravagance. His mise-en-scène contains majestic Middle Eastern vistas and supple, young nude bodies in equally abundant measure; unashamed nakedness bespeaks an innocent and liberating comfort with sex he mobilizes in protest of contemporary Western prudishness. The perspective is obviously highly dubious, but also gratifying – Pasolini makes no claims to either realism or good taste in his fantasy of fleshly abandon. Yet to posit Arabian Nights or the other films of the trilogy as purely idyllic retreats into the past would be a mistake. The films are as vivified by the idea of humans stripped of civilizing cultural constraints as they are haunted by the absurdities, cruelties, and hypocrisies of religious dogma and reigning structures of power. Still, in Arabian Nights as in the other films, mankind’s follies are always bound up with its irrepressible primal urges. Pasolini’s fervidly messy tales allow those urges to run (mostly satisfyingly) amok.

A Ghost Story

A GHOST STORY   ***1/2

David Lowery

2017

IDEA:  After being killed in a car accident, a man returns to his home as a ghost to check in on his bereft wife.

BLURB:  Ethereal, evocative, and pregnant with a voluptuous sense of mystery, A Ghost Story is a rumination on human consciousness that feels as fragile and wondrous as the fabric of existence it captures just a sliver of. From its first frames, Lowery lets us know that his universe is one where the eternal is enfolded in the everyday, juxtaposing shots of the cosmos with scenes of intimate domestic contentment. As in life, places are never just places, and attachments are never merely physical connections; they are imbued with and informed by history, memory, and existential knowledge, inscribed with the psychical imprints of human subjects. Lowery’s ghost is an allegory of this and more. It is a spectral emanation of an individual’s habits and anxieties, preoccupations and residencies, a manifestation of his attempt to cling to a world of which he is a mere transient fragment. A Ghost Story is, on this level, an achingly poignant meditation on impermanence that uses the figure of the ghost as a prism through which to view the imponderable flux of existence. But it is perhaps even more remarkable as a demonstration of cinema’s senses-expanding faculties. By anchoring his ghost, our point-of-view, in one location as time contracts and speeds by in front of him, Lowery offers a compelling metaphor for film spectatorship, making thematic the medium’s ability to reorganize space-time and present us with a world we are absent from. While the director’s narrative logic begins to unravel by the end – the line between allegory and serious metaphysical inquiry becomes too muddily negotiated, and his exceptional laconicity turns convoluted – his formal rigor never wavers. A Ghost Story is a slippery, diaphanous object, sometimes to its detriment, but it is also an exemplary showcase of meticulously controlled film form that invites us to bear witness to our own ghosts, including the ones conjured by the cinema.

A Quiet Passion

A QUIET PASSION   ***1/2

Terence Davies

2017

IDEA:  A portrait of Emily Dickinson, from her iconoclastic teenage years to her later increasing reclusiveness.

BLURB:  One of the most notable features of Terence Davies’s supremely witty and ineluctably sad A Quiet Passion is its use of language. Everyone in it, from Emily Dickinson to her family and friends, speaks in an exaggeratedly eloquent, hyper-literary English whose crisply theatrical delivery attunes us to each and every word. The effect is a foregrounding of prosody as much as meaning, underscoring the dense materiality of spoken language and its attendant pleasures and frustrations. This is clearly an appropriate and clever strategy to employ in a film about a poet, especially one, as Davies shows us, whose sharp linguistic sense contributed to both her artistic triumphs and her personal torments. The dialogue shrewdly embodies this duality: it is at once dazzlingly acrobatic and piquant, optimally mobilized for expression, and thick and entrapping, the structure of an intractable discursive realm that Dickinson in particular struggles to find peace within. Emotionally brittle and abrasively forthright, equally empowered and debilitated by her stubborn convictions and rhetorical proficiency, Cynthia Nixon’s astonishing performance illuminates a woman bound up, for better and worse, in the vagaries of such discourse. For Davies, she is a fiercely smart, sensitive individual whose tragedy was just that, an artist for whom words were her greatest ally and the material of her self-seclusion from the unjust world she refused to yield to.

Top 10 - 2016

When I reflect on the best films of 2016, I return to moods, sensations, and melodies that, taken as gestalt, seem to evoke the entire spectrum of human feeling. I remember the almost unbearably overwhelming catharsis of a son seeing his mother for the first time in 25 years after he went missing as a boy; the indignation of a free-thinking student forced to defend himself from the patronizing harangue of a despotic dean; the excruciating awkwardness but even greater ecstasy of a birthday celebration literally stripped naked, a nightmare scenario transformed into a gesture of anything-goes abandon; the pervasive air of dread, disorientation, and grief experienced by a woman and a country following a national tragedy; the boundless exhilaration of a ragtag group of kids on the road pumped up by communal sing-a-long; the mournfulness, inquisitiveness, and compassion of a woman who sees the world through a camera. Certainly any movie year produces a plethora of these indelible moments, but in a year that saw as much callousness toward our basic humanity as 2016 did, the feelings somehow resonated just a bit stronger. 

It was noticeable, also, just how many of the year's greatest films were inextricably tied to music, whether they were actual musicals or dramatic films emboldened by unique, unpredictable, and exuberant incorporations of song. Many scenes are now emblazoned into the memory thanks to, among others, Rihanna's "We Found Love," Richard Harris's "Camelot," the SOS Band's "Take Your Time, Do it Right," and the most hysterical rendition of Whitney Houston's "Greatest Love of All" ever recorded. 2016 was a rollercoaster of a year, mostly not in the good way. Its best films, however, are reminders of the full register of humanity we cannot stand to ignore.

One note up top: as always, tricky release dates have complicated my determinations of what I deem a 2016 film. To keep with consistency, I will continue to go by the year in which the film in question had its major premiere. Therefore, despite it showing up on several critics' lists this year (and receiving an Oscar nomination!), I am considering Yorgos Lanthimos's brilliant The Lobster as a 2015 release. If this were not the case, it would be on my list - very high on it, in fact.

On to the Top 10 after the jump!

Silence

SILENCE   ***

Martin Scorsese

2016

IDEA:  In the 17th century, two Jesuit priests travel to Japan to find their mentor, who is said to have assimilated and renounced Christianity.

BLURB:  Few, if any, films in Martin Scorsese’s oeuvre have felt as austere or intimate as Silence. Its 160 minutes are devoted not to operatic formal flourish or the generation of historical sweep, but to soul-sick rumination; rather than build outward in grand strokes across that runtime, it burrows deeper and more ceaselessly inward to a psyche beleaguered by a profound crisis of faith. Starkly, without superfluous adornment, Scorsese cuts right to the essence of his protagonist’s belief-shaking quandary, initiating a dialectic that constantly and in increasingly lacerating ways pits stubborn religious conviction against uncompromising national ideology. That both could be referring to either side in this loggerheads is what makes Silence such a compellingly ambivalent work. Our point of entry and identification, however, is Father Rodrigues and by extension Christianity. As played by Andrew Garfield, whose lithe features and soft-spoken demeanor make him an agreeable figure from the start, Rodrigues embodies passionate piety and intrepidness, as well as a naïveté masking imperialist fervor. We understand, even admire, his tenacity, and it is testament to Scorsese, co-writer Cocks, and Garfield that our relationship to him grows more agonized, not resistant, as the consequences of his actions grow more visibly destructive. He emerges as the latest in a long line of Scorsese antiheroes, inviting our simultaneous sympathy and disapproval. Both feelings are elicited by the Japanese characters, as well, and in the simmering morass of anger, righteousness, and repudiation they all share, Silence viscerally captures the internecine struggle of imperialism and the angst-ridden trials of inveterate religiosity. This may not be the most immaculate of Scorsese’s films, but in its bluntness and relative minimalism, it feels like his most personally sobering.

Paterson

PATERSON   ***1/2

Jim Jarmusch

2016

IDEA:  A week in the life of Paterson, who drives a bus in Paterson, New Jersey and writes poetry about his experiences.

BLURB:  Paterson brings the viewer into a serene, meditative state of mind hard to come by in contemporary American cinema. It sharpens our focus to make us cognizant of the mundane beauty immanent in our surroundings, appreciative of those strange synchronicities that can often feel like meaningful cosmic winks in the fabric of an indifferent time-space. Like few other filmmakers, Jarmusch drolly surfaces the sublimity in quotidian environments and actions, suggesting at once the richness of the world we inhabit and the ability of the arts – film in particular – to reconfigure our conceptions of it in order to tease out its most peculiar treasures. Paterson does this more literally than most of the filmmaker’s past work: subtly assuming the subjectivity of a bus driver poet whose name is identical to the city he lives in, it amusingly and poignantly articulates a perspective on work, relationships, and life informed by poetry. It illuminates how the world is in constant, reciprocal cultural exchange with its subjects, who are formed by its external spaces and rhythms as much as they form them through their expressive presences. In its recursive structure and meticulous formalism, it produces a kind of naturally unfolding feng shui that manifests itself in a bounty of visual rhymes and narrative echoes. An earlier, more cynical Jarmusch might have treated all of this repetition as some cruel cosmic mind game on the protagonist, but here the connections are fortifying whether they have meaning or not, signifying an attentiveness and receptivity to life’s vagaries that indicate the virtues of simply being present. While it contains the familiar hallmarks of Jarmusch’s other films, Paterson replaces his typical confusion and irresolution with a profound sense of equanimity, demonstrating with Zen contentment how, foibles and all, we still maintain our balance, day in and day out.