GREAT MOVIES/UNQUALIFIED RECOMMENDATIONS

15. Margin Call (J.C. Chandor)- I don’t know anything about finance, so I don’t know if the perils of Margin Call’s investment bank are complete hogwash. But the suspense mined from the bank’s day-from-hell is palpably real. The performances, especially Kevin Spacey’s, demand use of the word “gravitas,” with each actor showing up the titan who came before him.  Besides all of the economic “movie of the moment” mumbo-jumbo, it’s just a perfectly-structured piece of old school adult drama.

14. Weekend (Andrew Haigh)- Weekend was produced on such a micro- scale, in budget, cast, and scope, that the viewer is inevitably blindsided by how profound its emotions and central relationship end up being. The dialogue is so realistic and the actors so natural that the whole thing feels improvised, but that’s usually just a sign of how finely-tuned a film actually is.

13. Beginners (Mike Mills)- For me, Mike Mills’ second feature deftly combined heartfelt autobiography with stylized drama. Every scene has stakes and an essential tension, and every scene is delivered with a whimsical, exhilarating style that never wears out its welcome or becomes too cute for its own good. As if that wasn’t enough, it’s anchored by an unforgettable Christopher Plummer performance.

12. A Separation (Asghar Farhadi)- When people point out that this is an Iranian film, they aren’t just showing off that they watch Iranian films. (Iranian cinema is so ten years ago anyway.) What they mean is that you can’t divorce what happens in this film from the culture and identity of 21st century Iran, and that’s what makes it so compelling. For example, an elderly man with Alzheimer’s is being watched by a female caretaker when he soils himself, and the minder has to call someone at her mosque to ask if she, as a woman, can change him. And within that byzantine gray area, we get a glimpse into an issue that would be a moral dilemma anywhere. A Separation resists any easy answers, and it refuses to make caricatures of people who seem undeniably real.

11. Like Crazy (Drake Doremus)- This is a pure and gut-wrenching love story, featuring two committed, subtle lead performances, but it’s actually just as much about being in your twenties and not knowing where you belong. These characters would get married—if they were the right age to get married—and they would sacrifice for each other—if they hadn’t just started their careers—and they would know where to live—if it didn’t seem as if they had one foot in their parents’ house and one foot in their own. It’s a romance about how unromantic real life can be.

10. The Trip (Michael Winterbottom)- Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon trying to comedically outdo each other is going to be funny. That’s a given. But all of what makes this film poignant (and a lot of what makes it funny) is beneath the surface. The way the relationship on-screen comments on their friendship in real life. The way it contextualizes modern masculinity and depicts middle-aged competition. It’s chopped up from six episodes of a British TV series that I still haven’t seen. I can’t imagine it being any better than what’s here.

9. Shame (Steve McQueen)- The plot summary of Shame is usually one sentence long. The film doesn’t pretend to be about twists and turns. Its strength instead lies in its ability to both minutely document the interior life of a sex addict and, at the same time, never tidily explain itself. Every time it feels as if it’s on the verge of a confession or revelation, it inches backwards and gropes back at mystery. We get details about why Michael Fassbender’s Brandon is who he is, but we’re left to fear the worst and fill in our own details. McQueen’s long takes—one shot is about ten minutes without a cut—force us to face this character in as unflinching a way as the film presents him.

8. Take Shelter (Jeff Nichols)- What impressed me about Take Shelter was how full of consequences it was. Our protagonist is going mad. But if he goes mad, he loses his job. And if he loses his job, he doesn’t have health insurance. And if he doesn’t have health insurance, he can’t get a coclear implant for his hearing-impaired daughter. All of these consequences are connected, but they never have to be spelled out. They just slowly overwhelm us in the same way they overwhelm Michael Shannon’s character in the film, with a realism that slowly explodes into a harried nightmare. Nichols depicts small-town America with a warm dignity, but also with a claustrophobia that informs this year’s best paranoid thriller not named Martha Marcy May Marlene. 

7. I Saw the Devil (Kim Ji-Woon)- For a film that is shockingly violent, I Saw the Devil is pretty graceful. Without much dialogue, Kim establishes the story we expect, then vaults past it, with unexpected depth and breathtaking composition, into a savage exploration of vengeance. It’s not always clear if the film is a legitimate representative of the Korean revenge genre, or if it is a satire of those films. What’s amazing is that it works as both, inviting us to take pleasure in its retribution, then chastising us for the same thing.

6. The Interrupters (Steve James)- Among the small circle of people who care, a lot has been made about the Academy’s damning failure to consider The Interrupters for their Best Documentary category. It seems as if they (and many others in the field) have an idea of who deserves to have a film made about them. Horse whisperers? Sure. Political refugees? Of course. Marginally-appreciated artists? Always. But people who are genuinely making a difference when no one makes them, in a world where they’re desperately needed? That’s apparently not what wins awards. But it is what creates moments of such devastating, heartbreaking truth that I’ll never forget them.

5. Bridesmaids (Paul Feig)- In many ways, Bridesmaids is the culmination of the Judd Apatow repertory’s improvisational, anything-goes, neverending rough draft system. It feels finely-tuned to be harder, better, faster, stronger than the gross-out comedies that it eclipsed in popularity and relevance. No matter how broad it gets, however, it never forgets to supply intimate character moments, and it always stays true to the human relationships that are the foundations of all the laughs.

4. Martha Marcy May Marlene (Sean Durkin)- No 2011 film has stuck with me after its final reel like Martha Marcy May Marlene. Long after I finished watching it, its images and ideas kept resurfacing and challenging me. In a performance that is haunting (and disturbingly fetishized by the camera), Elizabeth Olsen embodies a character so confused and stunted that she is almost frustrating to the viewer at times. The film alternates between sequences from her past at a cult-like commune and sequences from her recovery in the present, and it elegantly slides back and forth, just out-of-focus, putting the viewer in her mistrusting shoes. Then it concludes on a moment perfect in its ambiguity.

3. Poetry (Lee Chang-Dong)- Poetry is never really the film you expect, and—in a refreshing, satisfying way—it’s not even the film you want. It rejects the immediate thrills of its rape subplot in favor of the slow burn of an elderly woman who is taking a poetry class to firm up her slipping memory. In that choice, it underlines the importance of searching for beauty in a world full of ugliness. This woman never really belongs, either in the class or in charge of a rape bribery, but she insists upon a desperate dignity.

INSTANT CLASSICS


2. Certified Copy (Abbas Kiarostami)- Is costume jewelry, say, fake pearls, better than real jewelry? Some would say that it is—it’s cheaper, looks the same, and requires less worry over it. Some would say that the wearer would always know the difference and could never equal the cachet of the real thing. But does that mean that costume jewelry is the same as real jewelry? That’s the more complex question posed by Certified Copy, and the film has an elegant, graceful way of posing it. It follows a meeting between a woman and the author of a book on the value of duplicates. As their day-long interview unspools, we begin to wonder if they really are meeting each other for the first time, if they are a married couple copying barely knowing each other as a game, or if they’re something in between. This verbal dance the pair goes on is so meticulously planned, and the ambiguous language creates a space that is both realistic and dream-like at the same time. No matter which interpretation you believe, the film’s alluring tone and exhaustive character development will satisfy you and leave you wanting more. 

1. The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick)- When I saw Malick’s gorgeous meditation on memory and family in the theater, I was inspired and moved by it. Before writing this list, I watched it again, eagerly but with suspicion. I feared that it had overwhelmed me when it should have seduced me. I wondered if I responded more with my heart than with my head.

I watched it yesterday, and I was right all along. This is an achievement that won’t be met for years. At the same time, I completely understand if you didn’t like it because the Brad Pitt character was not your father or grandfather, or because you don’t view God with the sideways deist mindset that Malick and I apparently do. I’ve tried to write about The Tree of Life more concretely—and even then I used words like “spiritual” and “Heidegerrian”—but it’s just one of those movies. It’s a deeply personal film by a veritable artist, and I hope it hits you in as personal a way as it hit me.

That’s it for 2011 stuff. Thanks for indulging me.