Top 10 - 2021

 

What a pleasure it was to have cinema back! Following the COVID-induced moviegoing privations of 2020, it was immensely satisfying (and more than a little overwhelming) to be inundated by the rich cinematic surplus of 2021. While theatrical exhibition as an aesthetic experience continues to feel somewhat endangered - a reality dispiritingly reflected in the box-office successes of factory-assembled IPs at the expense of all else - this past year proved that quality filmmaking is as alive as ever, and that we shouldn't take for granted the ability to sit in the dark with strangers gazing up at a silver screen. 

Many of the great movies of 2021 were big in a way that seemed to propitiously answer our frustrated thirst for the big-screen experience. Musicals made a huge comeback, from the exuberant In the Heights in the summer to the dazzling old-fashioned spectacle of Spielberg's West Side Story to close out the year. The only way to truly take in the maximalist Dune: Part One - and to feel its churning, bombinating soundscape in your bones - was to go to the theater. There were also a remarkable number of high-profile black-and-white features (Passing, The Tragedy of Macbeth, C'mon C'mon, and Belfast among them) that helped distill the pure, fundamentally photographic pleasure of images sculpted from light. Meanwhile, a sublime opus from one of contemporary cinema's most indispensable artists literally demanded to be seen on the big screen - its director and distributor have no intention of ever releasing it for home viewing. No wonder it's also the clear best film of 2021 (no credit if you can guess what it is)!

Note: there are still some major titles I've been unable to see, namely Flee, The Worst Person in the World, Mass, and Parallel Mothers.

On to my Top 10 after the jump...

The Tragedy of Macbeth

THE TRAGEDY OF MACBETH   ***1/2

Joel Coen

2021

IDEA:  Upon learning from a witch that he shall one day be declared King of Scotland, the general Macbeth sets out to fulfill the prophecy at all costs.

BLURB:  Sculpted from fog, chiaroscuro, and brutalist lines, The Tragedy of Macbeth is an austerely existentialist chamber piece as sharp-edged and pitiless as anything in the Coen brothers’ oeuvre. Although it may not boast the mordant humor, nor the colorful idiosyncrasies, that characterized the siblings’ work together, it’s no wonder why Joel was drawn to Shakespeare’s Scottish play for his first solo outing; after all, it’s ridden with all the deadly scheming, hubris, and ambiguous games of choice and fate that have long been favored pieces in his films’ eschatologically chaotic cosmos. Here, he’s marshaled a severe, transfixing audiovisual experience that decorticates Macbeth down to the angles of its sturdy skeleton, turning the already lean tragedy into a minimalist, primordial shadow play, delivered straight to the nervous system. One can object to how cavalierly Coen divests the narrative of its historical-political context, or fails to reframe it in a new one, but at the same time, his Macbeth is rather willfully atemporal, engraving into its lithograph-like images the evergreen forces of human folly that howl forth from an ancient past. It’s a resonance felt in the sonorous drumbeat and rumble of the film’s unnerving soundscape; in the stentorian paranoiac monologues of Denzel Washington’s king; and in the ubiquitous ravens and their analog in Kathryn Hunter’s witch, predicting or precipitating a destiny that becomes inescapable. Whether or not we really needed the umpteenth version of this tale of sound and fury, Coen has proved to be an apt fool to tell it.

Licorice Pizza

LICORICE PIZZA   ***1/2

Paul Thomas Anderson

2021

IDEA:  A teen actor and a disaffected 20-something woman navigate film industry eccentrics, business endeavors, and politics in the San Fernando Valley of 1973.

BLURB:  The Hollywood of Licorice Pizza is infectious; its showbiz attitudes seep into the daily lives of those within its proximity, informing the behaviors of everyone from minor child actors to zealous agents and restaurateurs. Not unlike the poison mushrooms of Anderson’s prior film, the motion picture industry here is a perverting, ego-altering toxin, equally fragrant and rancid, capable of twisting relationships and their underlying structures of desire into exceedingly strange geometries. It’s also an age-warping force that turns a 15-year-old boy into a cocksure entrepreneur and wannabe Lothario, and a young, directionless woman into, alternately, his guardian, starry-eyed friend, employee, and vampish boss. In this rich, mutating exchange of performance and power, Licorice Pizza is more allied with Anderson’s recent films than its bright, breezy, lackadaisical SoCal surface might have one believe. The writer-director threads through his would-be nostalgia piece a pas de deux of manipulation and oneupmanship as juicy as the one in The Master, and fleshes out a 1970s LA as suffused with the air of cultural danger as Inherent Vie. Yet departing from those films’ violently tortured couplings, Licorice Pizza’s greatest coup - one bolstered by the sensational performances of Alana Haim and Cooper Hoffman - is in how it transforms its putatively unnatural quasi-romance into a perfect collision of complementing personalities, a beacon of mutual personal maturation in an environment seemingly conducive to anything but that. Toggling deftly between the sunny and the antic, Anderson furnishes a quixotic yet realistically turbulent roadmap for Alana and Gary to find their ways through the maze of hoary Hollywood leches, pervasive consumerism, and sociopolitical turmoil that constitutes their surreal world; maybe in this context, he suggests, the two really can feel just right together.

West Side Story

WEST SIDE STORY   ***

Steven Spielberg

2021

IDEA:  In the midst of a rivalry between white and Puerto Rican gangs in 1957 New York City, a forbidden romance blossoms between star-crossed lovers Tony and Maria.

BLURB:  Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story introduces itself like a war film. In place of the chicly modernist aerial city views of the 1961 adaptation, the camera glides close to the rubble-strewn earth, surveying the ruins of a neighborhood that’s become a battleground in more ways than one. Of course, West Side Story has always been something of a war story, but this version underlines and expands on that idiom by grounding its drama more viscerally in the forces of systemic depredation and ethnic tribalism. Through the grimy decay of Stockhausen and DeAngelo’s sets, the overexposed gleam of Kaminski’s lensing, and the sweaty rough-and-tumble physicality of its actors, this West Side Story conjures a verisimilitude of dread within its artifice that is striking. At the same time, Spielberg and Kushner balance this new realism with grandly classical Old Hollywood spectacle and a fundamental impulse to remain loyal to the original text – its pleasures as well as many of its deficiencies. While it’s hard to watch the film without having some lingering skepticism about the point of its existence, it’s also impossible to fault the sheer brio and technical prowess of Spielberg’s production on a moment-to-moment basis. The outsize emotions of the material are ideally matched to the director’s own lushly melodramatic sensibilities, and he even manages to find some savvy ways to add new dimensions to canonical sequences. No creative decision lands more poignantly than the change made to the voice of“Somewhere,” which becomes here a punctum to the fiction, a metatextual threnody connecting past and present with sobering clarity.

C'mon C'mon

C'MON C'MON   ***1/2

Mike Mills

2021

IDEA:  When nine-year-old Jesse's mother leaves town to care for her ill estranged husband, he's left under the watch of his radio journalist uncle, who takes him around the country on a project interviewing kids.

BLURB:  Mike Mills makes films of such genuine warmth, lightness, and empathy for people that they end up inadvertently exposing just how lacking these qualities are in so many movies from major American filmmakers. On the other hand, perhaps it’s not inadvertent at all; in C’mon C’mon especially, the writer-director seems to wear his heart on his sleeve with something like defiance, unashamedly courting potential calls of sentimentalism without ever succumbing to the mawkish devices or platitudes that would validate those accusations. In other words, he demonstrates how a film can be non-naively about positive relationships, open communication, and hopefulness without sacrificing dramatic interest or complexity. He makes it cool to be kind. One of the things that feels so quietly radical is his depiction of American masculinity. Through the blissfully tender rapport between Joaquin Phoenix and Woody Norman (an uncommonly centralized uncle-nephew relationship), Miller extols a male sensitivity and emotional candidness too seldom witnessed in popular Western media. This generosity radiates all throughout C’mon C’mon, pulling in every face - from the professionals to the myriad kid non-actors - into an expansive, egalitarian dialogue on childhood, parenthood, and the spaces connecting them. Mills also incorporates a number of other texts within his own, fostering a heteroglossic tapestry where every voice matters, and echoes; his black-and-white images further flatten hierarchies between the many places he depicts. C’mon C’mon is ultimately a gentle entreaty to listen and to learn. It has an air of pedagogy, even homily, but it’s not didactic; it’s more like a heuristic for a world we have the capacity and tools to make better, if we’re willing.

tick, tick... BOOM!

TICK, TICK... BOOM!   ***1/2

Lin-Manuel Miranda

2021

IDEA:  Playwright Jonathan Larson struggles to get his new production off the ground in the months leading up to his dreaded 30th birthday.

BLURB:  Among the many things tick, tick… BOOM! gets acutely right about the foibles of the creative process is how narrowed one’s consciousness can become when devoted to a project. Art can be a laborious, crazy-making idée fixe as much as a pleasure, and for Andrew Garfield’s Jonathan Larson, it’s an obsession that often clouds out the rest of the world, right when he needs it the most. Lin-Manual Miranda’s film also potently understands, and beautifully embodies, the transformations that take place in the channeling of life into art, not just within the artist and the “original” work, but through the myriad of others who come into contact with that work, from those who give it new life, like Miranda, to audiences whose engagement advances its legacy. This tick, tick… BOOM! is a marvel of an adaptation because it recognizes all art, in some way, as fundamentally adapted, as the translation of lifeworld intentions and contingencies that continue to evolve long beyond their conceptions, fanning out infinitely from a subjective point of origin. There are numerous other things the film is perceptive and agile about, from its depiction of the eternal conflict between artistic integrity and capitalism to how it refuses to soften, demonize, or excuse the navel-gazing proclivities of its subject. Importantly, Miranda’s tick, tick… BOOM! is also just a blast, a spry, inventive, and full-hearted testament to the crucibles of time and creation, powered by the gigawatt charisma and grace of Andrew Garfield’s career-best performance.

The Power of the Dog

THE POWER OF THE DOG   ***

Jane Campion

2021

IDEA:  While waging a war of attrition against his new sister-in-law, an irascible Montana rancher is pulled into the orbit of her enigmatic teen son.

BLURB:  The Power of the Dog is a queer kind of Western, in all senses of the word. Structurally, it morphs from the appearance of a sweeping frontier drama to the cloistered, febrile textures of a Gothic romance. Standing in for 1920s Montana, the desolate, alien-looking New Zealand landscape never lets us settle into a terrain that feels particularly isomorphic with the American plains. Guns rarely appear, and outward displays of violence are scarce or elided. Campion’s violence is predominantly psychological, festering beneath the surface on a constant simmer. Most of the film’s incident transpires in pained, loaded glances and gestures, in the codes of patriarchy and cowboy masculinity being tacitly challenged, inverted, or otherwise nervously negotiated. The Power of the Dog is queer, of course, because it deals with queer characters, most intriguingly Kodi Smit-McPhee’s Peter, whose gawky string-bean frame and effete manner alone make him a full-bodied iconographic shock to the milieu of gruff machismo in which he's cultivating his identity. The Oedipal drama that unfolds between him, his mother, and the literally castrating father figure-cum-lover Phil forms the late-breaking crux of the somewhat shaky narrative, giving the film its most tantalizingly subversive thematic currents. What nags about The Power of the Dog, a curious problem considering the director, is that it often feels too reserved to truly bring its psychosexual tensions alive; one longs for some spikes of libidinal energy in the languorous mood, for a more viscous, lurid visual eroticism to convince us of the characters’ transgressive desires. It’s all guarded under those circumspect gazes, nudging the film softly rather than emphatically toward the queerness that becomes its unexpected victor.