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.

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.