The best new narrative I experienced in 2009 was, no fooling, about sixty hours long. To be fair, it was really only new to me—this particular epic, fragmented into perfectly measured hour-long chunks, ran its damning course about three years ago. I watched it unfold in episodic arcs, over the course of several short weeks, its multi-character Greek tragedy splashed not across the contours of the silver screen, but packed into the more intimate confines of the small one. For all the pleasures this bygone year of cinema offered, I’ll likely remember 2009 mainly as the year I finally caught up with what may be television’s supreme artistic achievement: HBO’s “The Wire”. If you think I’m hyperbolizing, chances are you’ve yet to get lost in the moral thicket of David Simon’s grand urban mosaic, a portrait of a dying city as microcosm of a corrupt world. How could the tidy dramas of the multiplex, in and out in two breezy hours, hope to compete with the paid-off promise of Simon’s immaculately constructed uber-narrative? Pity those works, especially, that trafficked in similar themes—the only bad thing you could really say about The Class or Gommorah, for pertinent example, was that they weren’t “The Wire.”
I’m being hard on 2009. Maybe it was just easier to get lost in Simon’s bustling Baltimore—no matter how symbolic its downfall was of universal social maladies—than to grapple with the horrors of our here and now, as told by the prophets and poets of our darkened auditoriums. Truth be told, it was an excellent year for film. Lazy critics, unwilling to snoop out pastures greener than those of shameless blockbusters and transparent Oscar bait, did the same old gloom-and-doom song and dance they always do. “This has been an incredibly crummy year for movies,” wrote J.R. Jones, mere sentences before confessing that he hadn’t seen nearly enough of the year’s offerings. (I bet he made time for Transformers 2, but did he see 24 City?) With a few notable exceptions—a melancholy monster movie, an immigrant story in the guise of a sports fable, the triumphant rebirth of a 70s iconoclast—American cinema disappointed more than it dazzled. Thankfully, a master class of international auteurs, from Assayas to Zonca, picked up the slack. In this final year of the millennium’s first decade, we were filthy with riches.
Well, riches of the screen anyway. I’m consistently amazed by cinema’s ability not only to reflect the fears, hang-ups and obsessions of our culture at large, but to anticipate them. Just as 2008’s big crowd-pleasers seemed to neatly align with the run-amok idealism of the Obama phenomenon, this year’s morning-after dramas compounded our national hangover. Money problems were on the mind, and everything from silky smooth award contenders (Up in the Air) to formulaic rom-coms (The Proposal) to icky-sticky horror movies (Drag Me To Hell) found ways both big and small to riff on the global financial crisis. The other big thematic concern was, perhaps by some kind of relation, the shifting structure of the modern family. Following closely on the heals of 2008’s Rachel Getting Married and A Christmas Tale, many of this year’s art-house triumphs—channeling Ozu through their own kaleidoscopic prisms—explored the growing divide between fathers and daughters, mothers and sons, brothers and sisters, husbands and wives.
These two disparate interests—stocks and blood bonds, job security and knotty kinship—found synthesis in the best movie of the year. The nine that follow it on the list below offer their own brave visions of a weary present and uncertain future. One of them perched precariously on the line separating ’08 and ’09. Two never found their way into theaters. None made more in their entire run than Avatar did in its first weekend. And all betrayed the notion, floated by Jones and those like him, that this was anything less than another great year to be a movie lover in America.
THE BEST MOVIES OF THE YEAR
1. TOKYO SONATA [Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Japan]
There are no supernatural forces at play in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Tokyo Sonata—no bone-white beasties staring out from glowing computer monitors, no ghoulish apparitions scuttling down darkened corridors. Still, make no mistake: this is a ghost story. And this Tokyo, quiet and windswept and withdrawn, is a ghost town. Here, it’s the ethereal spirit of Old Japan—the integrity of its social structures, the security of its traditions—that goes bump (and crash and burn) in the night. Kurosawa, that erstwhile Master of Horror, hasn’t abandoned the apocalyptic dread of his exemplary genre offerings. He’s merely redirected it, letting it operate as the grate through which he feeds his polemical outrage. If J-Horror gem Pulse cast its paranormal phantoms as symbolic specters of a doomed generation, Tokyo Sonata flips the equation: flesh-and-blood men, downsized into occupational obsolescence, roam the empty streets like lost souls, trapped in a jobless purgatory. We hone in on one of these laid-off stiffs, living an aimless lie by day, playing the proud, dominant patriarch by night. His downward spiral of rage and shame and impotence, a raw-nerve reprisal of Laurent Cantet’s Time Out, pulls the whole family into its careening orbit. While a mother withers quietly, lost in her own foggy nightmare of domesticity, a young son rebels in secret, seeking private refuge in an untapped gift. The compositions close in slowly and tightly around this clan in crisis. And then, as in all of the auteur’s doomsday narratives, a fiery catharsis arrives, here in the form of parallel trials of darkness. Several of 2009’s superlative pictures, including a few on this very list, channeled the spirit of Ozu and his seminal family dramas. Yet none offered the cracked-mirror reconfiguration that Tokyo Sonata did—this is family, the writer-director screams in a hushed whisper, in our mad new millennium. It’s an ugly truth, charitably leavened by a blinding glimmer of hope, a transcendent coda with a redemptive hook: the meek will inherit the earth, finding escape through artistic expression, one day breathing new life into our ailing ghost world. Maybe Kurosawa should have called this one Bright Future.
2. WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE [Spike Jonze, U.S.A.]
The Warner Bros logo has sprouted horns and fangs, the company credits colonized by the scribbled signature of an enfant terrible. These doodles speak volumes—from the first frame onward, this is Max’s movie. But it’s also Spike Jonze’s, a taming of the studio dollar by a true blue American Eccentric. It takes some serious gall to tackle a property as universally beloved as Maurice Sendak’s kiddie-lit classic. But to then wrestle that iconic work into something so thorny and difficult and gut-punch melancholy? The stones on this guy. Much to the chagrin of hipsters everywhere, the anarchic spirit of that teaser trailer was a red herring—we swooned over the majestic music, ignored the telltale truth bombs embedded in the lyric sheet: “Our bodies get bigger, our hearts get torn up.” Whereas most childhood fantasias trumpet imagination as the refuge of the pure, this damaged-youth daydream dares to posit that even flights of fancy are vulnerable to the creeping anxieties of troubled adolescence. (Spielberg’s extraterrestrial divorce fable seems, by comparison, rather glib.) That mighty island, with its vast deserts and tangled foliage, is really a battlefield, one where Max grapples with the demons of his broken home. And Sendak’s woolly beasts, brought to vibrant life via scrappy FX wizardry and a game cast of voice-over actors, register as neurotic projections of his interior and exterior spaces—the voices in his head and his heart, in his classroom and his living room. All the while, our fearless director commiserates from close and afar, pitching the perspective somewhere between that of an adult sorting out his childhood and a child racing into his adulthood. Jonze’s picture, the most achingly personal American film of the year, is not a joyous rumpus through backyards and dreamscapes. It’s a wilder thing than that—and a truer one.3. 24 CITY [Jia Zhang Ke, China]
Werner Herzog once wrote of an “Ecstatic Truth,” one that was inherent to the cinema, and that could be discovered only by blurring the nebulous line between fact and fiction. This was a truth so complicated, so thorny and multi-faceted, that it required more than what “real” or fabricated stories could reveal--it demanded a merging of these pursuits. With 24 City, a nervy fusion of documentary and narrative conventions, Jia Zhang Ke comes close to realizing this mythical ideal. The title refers to a new high-rise apartment complex being built in Chengdu, the site of which was once a government-run factory. In prototypical Jia fashion, this destruction/construction plan, beautifully captured by the filmmaker's panoramic compositions, symbolizes China's rapid thrust into the post-modern world--out with the old, in with the new, damned be the lives that disappear into the chasm between. What's excitingly fresh about this latest globalization screed is the manner in which it's delivered: nine testimonials, five authentic and four scripted, painting a personal/anecdotal picture of a nation in the throes of change. Whereas Jia once kept an allegorical distance from his subjects, casting their frail human frames against scarred landscapes and enormous manmade structures, here he pulls them closer than ever before to his crystalline digital lens. Still Life, his previous high water mark, suggested that this gap might be closing, but it scarcely prepared us for such a full-on embrace of the power of spoken-word storytelling. It's not just a voice Jia affords the people of Chengdu, but a countenance--there's more history, more ecstatic truth, etched into these individual faces than there is in the architectural structures rising and falling around them. 24 City, a moving mix of narratives remembered and concieved, boasts nothing less than the reclamation of the Empathetic Close-Up.
4. 35 SHOTS OF RUM [Claire Denis, France]
Claire Denis’ greatest gift as a filmmaker may be her ability to wordlessly convey key information, to define her characters and conflicts through purely visual means. A furtive glance here, a penetrating gaze there. A look, a touch, a loaded gesture. Blink and you miss these silent transmissions, codes and clues passed between lovers and kin, those for whom words can no longer contain the wealth of feeling coursing through their shared histories. You had to fixate hard on this language of the body to make any sense of The Intruder, Denis’ near-impenetrable last feature. 35 Shots of Rum, her terrific follow-up number, marks a return to relatively linear storytelling, but in some respects is just as demanding. Get lulled too long by the sensuous rhythms of Claire’s rainy Paris—a lonely tango of commuter trains, Ozu dancing to the Tindersticks in the evening glow—and you might forget that there’s an honest-to-God narrative unfolding within it. Denis’ characters, they’ve been lulled too, gently resigned to a purgatory of complacence. Home is sanctuary and prison, the city of lights a waiting station, with expired romances still lingering on the margins, neither re-sparked nor completely extinguished. Sexual, platonic or familial, our relationships are our opiates. Anyone who’s ever stalled out their life for the people in it, who have chosen the comfort of connection over the necessity for personal growth, will hear the conversations these wounded souls talk around. Or rather, you’ll see them—written in the skin, in a stare, in a shrug or a sigh. Never spoken but plain as day. Just don’t blink.
5. SUMMER HOURS [Olivier Assayas, France]
The Musée d'Orsay presents… a sly condemnation of museums everywhere! To have been a fly on the wall when Olivier Assayas unveiled his Summer Hours to the folks who financed it. They pulled their support, naturally, but one has to wonder, really: little digs aside, who wouldn’t want their name attached to such a golden-hued gem of 21st century craftsmanship? This is a film so intimate in scope, so scaled to the real concerns of real human beings, that I initially mistook it for slight. Summer Hours is indeed small, pocket-sized even, but its insights into the way we live, in these go-go aughts, are silver screen big. The passing of a matriarch brings together her three adult children, who debate about what to do with her estate and the works of art within it. If sleek, globe-trotting thrillers like demonlover and Boarding Gate suggested a world where everything is for sale (including human lives) Summer Hours purports that our souls themselves may be embedded in the things we buy and sell—in our homes, in our trinkets and keepsakes, in the bric-a-brac we accumulate over the years. And it’s our lives that invest meaning in artwork, not the other way around. From Assayas, a slick poet laureate of our nightmare age, that’s one hell of a sentiment: an opening of the skylight, warm sunshine obliterating, however briefly, the silvery-blue cynicism of his worldview.
6. FACE [Tsai Ming-liang, Taiwan]
The misunderstood masterwork of this past year’s festival circuit, Face was met with what might best be described as a resounding, collective head-scratch. It’s a bug-fuck crazy film, no doubt about it, but what exactly were jet-setting critics expecting? With each passing year, the compact charms of What Time Is It There? and Goodbye Dragon Inn fade faster in the rearview mirror. Tsai Ming- liang, one our weirdest and wildest living masters, has been burrowing deeper, deeper, deeper into the void with each successive picture. How much deeper could he go then an examination of his own wily creative process? A film shoot is disrupted by a death in the family, grief mingles with artistic ambition, and you get the distinct impression that this is the closest Tsai has ever come to getting the mad movie in his head up there on screen. Face unfolds in endless vignette, one baffling, beguiling, beautifully filmed set-piece after another. Sublime slapstick involving a broken water valve. Dazzling musical interludes. A candlelight seduction. A forest of mirrors. New Wave cameos. A wandering elk. The whole thing is like a fever-dream Day For Night, all impulses and inspirations. Fire up those search engines and scour the region 2 DVD sites, because this glorious pileup is not coming to a theater near you.
7. THE CLASS [Laurent Cantet, France]
Of all the fairytales floated by Hollywood this past year, were there any more irksome than the blind endorsement of academia as some sort of great social equalizer? Films like Precious, The Blind Side and An Education all offered comfort food variations on this dubious theme—Horatio Alger by way of Dead Poets Society. Laurent Cantet’s The Class, released at the onset of 2009, was the retrospective corrective. Here was a film daring enough to posit that not only do western schools often fail those most in need of their services, they also operate as a kind of filter, separating the Haves from the Have Nots, academic success rates divided cleanly down lines of class and race. Based on the nonfiction memoirs of François Bégaudeau, who wrote the screenplay and stars as (pretty much) himself, this gripping docudrama locks its lens on a Parisian classroom, chronicling, through quasi-improvisational means, the day-to-day power struggle between a teacher and his unruly, multi-cultural pupils. It’s a lose-lose conflict, and what The Class cannily understands is that, within this broken system, the institutional assumption is that some students will have to slip through the cracks for the rest to move forward. Faced with that kind of harsh reality check, it’s no small wonder audiences prefer to see Precious Jones or Michael Oher as the rule, and not the exception to it.
8. THE HEADLESS WOMAN [Lucrecia Martel, Argentina]
In another lifetime, Lucrecia Martel made horror films. She had to have. The woman’s got Val Lewton in her bloodstream. Here and now, in the world we know, she makes dramas—claustrophobic ones about insular environments, where frazzled outsiders float through undetected, their sins and desires and secret shames lost in the overlap of banal conversation. There is a spindly dread to these pictures. They quiver with an underlying tension, something squirming and pulsing just below the surface of every scene. Remember the queasy end stretch of The Holy Girl? Imagine those white-knuckle beats stretched out into a full-length feature. The Headless Woman is 87 minutes of sweaty, inescapable guilt. A bottle blonde on the run, like Janet Leigh in Psycho, except she’s got nowhere to run to and hasn’t a single blessed moment to herself. There are no paranoid tells scrawled across her impenetrable poker face. Not that we need them. We’re hardwired to her headspace, and every bump and scrape on the soundtrack, every jittery focus pull, speaks to the storm raging behind her eyes. As Martel sneakily suggests, crime is only crime when you get caught, and you never get caught when the victim is invisible. She can see him, though. He’s lurking in the peripheral of every frame, out of sight but not of mind. A scream up the road, a greasy hand print on her brain. This is a horror movie, isn’t it?
9. CANARY [Alejandro Adams, U.S.A.]
If Avatar does change moviemaking forever, as so many have claimed it will, we cinephiles are gonna need to chart a different course through unwritten history. The video revolution was not televised because it never arrived, but we are not without our promising prodigies and potential figureheads. Case in point: while James Cameron was still tinkering with his perfect future, a certain little corner of the blogosphere was grappling with a jaggedly imperfect one. Canary, a high-concept, low-budget, little-seen transmission of dsytopian dread, wasn’t just the best American indie of the year. It was also the most naggingly discussable. Was Alejandro Adams, scrappy visionary at the helm, a polemicist or just a talented fuck-around? Should one make sense of the elliptical narrative—a screaming nightmare in white collar digs, the mundane mixing it up with the malevolent—or simply fall under the insidious influence of the film’s (distinctively, hypnotically) digital textures? Was the whole thing a metaphor for the filmmaking process? Or was it just a scary, scary-good art thriller? And what the holy hell was that ghostly woman really doing with that blue gel? Canary makes you want to lean in close, to study its corners and crannies, its mysteries and nuances. We need Adams and his ilk, we need them badly. Because, like it or not, there are more Avatars where that first one came from.
10. IN THE LOOP [Armando Iannucci, U.K.]
“War is… unforeseeable,” blurts out dim-witted British statesman Simon Foster, inadvertently setting off a chain of events that will end with a brand spanking new conflict in the Middle East. But war isn’t unforeseeable. Not according to the manic minds behind this lightning-quick, midnight-black political farce. War is not made by grand forces beyond our understanding or control, or by the forward march of history, or any of that rubbish. It’s made by men and women, by individuals with too much hubris in their heads and too many buttons under their fingers. War is made by petty, cruel, stupid, self-serving, horny, crazy, power-hungry people. It is only unforeseeable because there’s no putting it past the folks we elect to make these decisions. Spun off from the hit BBC series “The Thick of It,” In the Loop has the look and sound and rat-a-tat pacing of small screen comedy, but also the heady charge of first-rate satire. It’s got more million-dollar punchlines than a season of “30 Rock,” but there’s more horror at its heart than there is in The Hurt Locker. Forget gallows humor, this is a mushroom-cloud comedy. Keep laughing, but keep your eyes on the horizon too.
HONORABLE MENTIONS
Here are sixteen more reasons why J.R. Jones is full of shit.
Werner Herzog and Nicolas Cage, firing on all madman cylinders, brew some delirious black magic in sequel/remake/parody/genre deconstruction The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call-New Orleans. Agnes Varda waxes beautifully, nostalgically on her own life and career in The Beaches of Agnes, the year’s best documentary. Attuned to the quickened pulses of its burgeoning romantics, Jane Campion’s Bright Star whispers the sweet nothings and real somethings of first love. Why wasn’t Rian Johnson’s frequently hilarious, sneakily poignant The Brothers Bloom a bigger hit? After a decade in the Hollywood trenches, Sam Raimi rediscovered his macabre mojo with blackly comic funhouse ride Drag Me To Hell. Though I still say the perspective shift is a major misstep, there’s no escaping the rough-and-tumble gravity of Kathryn Bigelow’s action vérité The Hurt Locker. Hey guys, the New Wave affectations are part of the joke—Gerardo Naranjo‘s I’m Gonna Explode is a play-pretend Badlands, and an affectionate goof on melodramatic youth. Quentin Tarantino’s best movie since Jackie Brown was Inglorious Basterds, mostly on the strength of that incredible saloon scene with Michael Fassbender. Speaking of Michael Fassbender: Hunger, about imprisoned IRA leader Bobby Sands, was a flawed but striking feature debut for video artist Steve McQueen. Don’t tell Sandra Bullock or Meryl Streep, but Tilda Swinton gave the boozy, bellicose, flat-out best performance of the year in Erick Zonca’s electrifying Julia. We’re up to our ears in neo-noirs, but are any as slow-burn, wood-chopping intense as Götz Spielmann’s Revanche? Up, Coraline, and Fantastic Mr. Fox all had their charms, but it was Nina Paley’s mixed-mode jubilee Sita Sings the Blues that should have ruled the animation roost in ‘09. Of all the Ozu-inspired family dramas released last year, Hirokazu Koreeda’s Still Walking may have cut the deepest. With Sugar, Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck tore down the lie of the American Dream, only to erect a moving counter-mythology in its place. He’s back, baby: after the bat-shit tedium of Youth Without Youth, Francis Ford Coppola made another one for the pantheon, his operatic Tetro. And like Where the Wild Things Are, So Yong Kim’s Treeless Mountain was an expressive vision of childhood grief.
