Some time late July, deep in the heart of the summer blockbuster
movie season, I had what you might call a film critic’s existential
crisis.
It was the summer, you recall, of Grown Ups 2 and Iron Man 3 and Fast and Furious 6 (not to mention, The Lone Ranger and White House Down)—and I thought: I literally don’t care about any
of these movies. If I had to slap on one more pair of 3D glasses or see
one more action film with a number after its title, I was going to lose
it.
I articulated this crisis of conscience while sitting with two
friends—both film critics of far greater stature than myself—and they
talked me off the ledge, so to speak.
“Wait until December,” they told me, in soothing voices. “There are
many more good films to come.” It was the film critic’s version of the
“It Gets Better” talk.
Well, I took their advice and damned if they weren’t completely
right. It did get better. Much better. In the end, 2013 turned out to be
a great year for film. The kind of year where I struggled to limit
myself to a mere Top 10 list (the 10 runners-up were all seriously
considered for the main list).
And because Year-in-Review lists compel us (sometimes artificially)
to make connections among the year’s releases, it was hard for me not to
notice that this was a year that celebrated rugged individualism and
the indomitability of the human spirit.
While Gravity, All is Lost, and Lone Survivor all explicitly featured one human fighting alone for survival, films like Captain Phillips and Dallas Buyer’s Club also featured heroes who bravely spat in death’s eye. It’s a stretch, I admit, but even Inside Llewyn Davis was about going it alone (as an artist in this case), consequences be damned, and Nebraska was about one man’s need for a personal crusade.
So is there a reason why 2013 was the Year of the Individual? Umm, I could give you some New York Times-style
think piece about these films being a reaction to our social media,
crowd-sourced age or how we’re trying to find ways to praise the human
spirit at a time when snark and cynicism are the prevailing attitudes,
but that would just sound like so much twaddle. So instead I’ll say:
Weird coincidence, dude.
Anyway, here are the films that made me glad I stayed in the film critics’ game this year.*
1. Enough Said There were more important films this
year, more serious ones, but that none lit up my particular pleasure
sensors quite like Nicole Holofcener’s Enough Said. It was
funny, tender, and smart as it explored finding love in middle age and
the whole “who am I now?” crisis that arises when kids leave the nest
(especially for single parents). It had one of the great rom-com
premises in recent memory—a woman finds out that her new best friend
used to be married to her new boyfriend and does the absolute worst
thing possible (tells neither of them and mines her friend for damning
intel on her ex). It had a brilliant, arguably career-best performance
from Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who proved that she has dramatic chops that
rival her comedic ones (and that’s saying an awful lot). And it was a
nearly flawless step into the mainstream for Holofcener, long one of my
favorite indie auteurs. My only regret, of course, is that this was
Gandolfini’s last film, as his sweet, tender, sexy performance could’ve
opened so many new doors for him. He was perfect. In my eyes, the whole
film was. (My review)
2. Stories We Tell Six months after I’ve seen it,
and my mind is still slightly blown by this genre-busting documentary
that manages to be an affectionate character study of director Sarah
Polley’s quixotic late mother, a riveting who’s-your-daddy mystery, a
tender portrait of a relationship between a daughter and her emotionally
reticent father, and a juicy family exposé. It’s also about
perspective, and how the same story can morph and shift when told from
different angles and about the importance of self-mythologizing. (Also,
for you cinephiles out there, it’s about the very process of making a
documentary film). It is one of the most honest and humane personal
excavations I’ve ever seen at the movies. But what exactly is it? Well, that’s up to you to watch and decide for yourself. (My review)
3. Inside Llewyn Davis This wonderful film—one that
somehow manages to simultaneously deflate and uplift— can be seen as a
companion piece to the Coen Brother’s Barton Fink. That was
about the nightmarish hell of writer’s block. This one is about the
nightmare of trying to be an authentic artist in a commercial world. The
setting is Greenwich Village in the early 1960s and Llewyn Davis
(dazzling newcomer Oscar Isaac) is a folk singer who just lost his
longtime singing partner to suicide. He’s a true talent—a singer of
mournful, slightly cracked folk ballads—but he’s having a rough go of it
as a solo artist. It doesn’t help that he has an abrasive personality
(he heckles fellow musicians at the Gas Light Café) and that, at this
particular point in time, it seems that everybody and their Great Aunt
Irma has a folk album (this is one of the film’s recurring nightmarish
jokes). He goes couch surfing, pissing people off along the way
(including an amusingly ticked-off Carey Mulligan as a former flame),
trying to make money and live life as an authentic artist. All the music
in the film is wonderful, even the treacly ditties that Llewyn
disdains. And then there’s this tabby cat. Any film can have a folk
singer and a scruffy dog. But it takes the Coen brothers—with their
slightly off-kilter perspective—to give us a folk singer with a squirmy,
unreliable cat (or two, to be precise). Llewyn riding the subway,
cradling the cat in his arms, is just one of the many indelible images
of this film.
4. Blue is the Warmest Color Take away the
controversy—the disgruntled lead actresses, the seven-minute sex scene
that some saw as voyeuristic—and you’re left with Abdellatif Kechiche’s
remarkable achievement: A three-hour film about a subject no less
well-trodden than a young girl’s first love that is absolutely
mesmerizing from beginning to end. As the girl, Adèle Exarchopolous is
extraordinary. She takes us through the entire emotional repertoire of
female adolescence. Of course, defending a film against accusations of
the “male gaze” can be tricky. (And the fact that the central love
affair is between two young women only adds to the sense that Kechiche
is projecting his own desires). But aren’t all films essentially the
“gaze” of the director? Yes, Kechiche’s film is abundantly
sensual—fleshy, you might even say. But he doesn’t only apply this gaze
to the sex scenes. He eroticizes a bowl of spaghetti Bolognese as much
as a naked breast. The whole film is an orgy of human desire. (My review)
5. Nebraska Does any living director capture the
rhythms of the open road better than Alexander Payne? His latest is
about a father/son road trip that defies all expectations. The trip
itself hardly a grand quest, but in fact, meaningless: Old Woody (Bruce
Dern) is convinced he has won a million dollars in one of those
Publisher’s Clearinghouse-type sweepstakes and is determined to claim
his prize. The bonding, between Woody and his sweet, sad-sack grown son
(Will Forte) is neither sentimental nor obvious. There are no “I love
you, man”s, no great epiphanies. Instead, there is a grim but tender
understanding that grows between them. The film suggests that Woody
knows his mission is futile: He wants to live for something, he wants a
quest, a mission—it’s his way of reasserting some control over his own
life. As he did so wonderfully in About Schmidt, Payne gets to
the heart of a certain kind of taciturn, Midwestern persona. He shoots
the film in an affectless black and white, mirroring the stoicism of its
characters and the flat Midwestern landscape. In more than one scene,
Woody and his brothers —reunited at an aunt’s house—sit in front of a
TV, gaping wordlessly at the screen. This is the torpor that Woody wants
to break free from. The film is often quite funny, but the overall tone
is elegiac. As usual, Payne is clear-eyed and unsentimental, until the
very last frames, at which point he allows himself (and us) a few
explicitly touching moments. Heck, we’ve all earned it. (My review)
6. Short Term 12 There are two scenes in this film,
about a melancholy young woman name Grace (Brie Larson), who works in a
home for troubled teens, that stayed with me long after the credits were
over. In the first, a disillusioned teenager named Marcus (Keith
Stanford) sits on the edge of the bed with Grace’s boyfriend Mason (John
Gallagher Jr.), also a counselor at the home, and raps about his life.
“So put me in your books so you know what it’s like,” Marcus raps, as
Mason thumps along on a bongo, “to live a life not knowing what a normal
life is like.” That scene destroyed me. Later, Grace sits with a young
girl who reads a children’s book she has created. It’s clear through the
metaphors in story—about a rapacious octopus—that the girl has been
sexually abused. As stirring and powerful as these scenes are—they trust
the audience to just sit and listen to the power of self-expression
through art—the film also has a fair amount of levity, a loose and
frisky sense of daily life in the home. Ultimately, the film shows how
damaged people can find solace and self-healing by advocating for
others. It ends on a note of profound optimism.
7. American Hustle The story of a couple of con
artists helping the FBI ensnare some corrupt politicians with the help
of a fake sheik is so ridiculous it has to be (at least partly) true.
And director David O. Russell mines the full comic potential of this
absurd scenario, giving us a 1970s straight out of a Tony Manero fever
dream and broad, hilarious performances from the leads. Everyone here is
great: Christian Bale as the vain but shrewd Irving Rosenfeld, a con
artist and, more importantly, a survivor; Amy Adams as Sydney, his wily
mistress, a born hustler, and the love of his life; Jennifer Lawrence as
his sultry, bored, manipulative wife; Jeremy Renner as his good-hearted
mark, a populist New Jersey mayor whose desire to please his
constituency makes him vulnerable to bribes; and Bradley Cooper as
Richie DiMaso, the twitchy, crazed-with-ambition FBI agent who sets the
whole thing in motion. (Also, kudos to Louis C.K., as the only sane man
at the FBI and Alessandro Nivola as Richie’s enabling boss). Still, all
of this broad hilarity would be meaningless if we didn’t somehow believe
in and root for these characters, and we do. In fact, despite all the
double-crossing, deals, decadence, and partying—American Hustle is ultimately a romance, about the lengths a couple of grifters in love will go to stay together.
8. 12 Years a Slave When I was a young girl, I saw the mini series Roots
and it had a profound effect on me, as it did for many of my
generation. But in a way, by focusing on the plight of a single
man—Solomon Northrop (Chewetel Ejiofor), a free man captured into
slavery—12 Years a Slave packs even more of a visceral wallop.
Director Steve McQueen gets in close—at times impossibly, unflinchingly
close—so that we feel every threat, every humiliation along with
Solomon. And Ejiofor is just remarkable as a man whose survival instinct
is strong enough to see that he must suppress his pride and his anger
and simply . . . wait. Equally vivid: Michael Fassbender as Epps, the
sociopathic plantation owner who makes Solomon’s life a living hell, and
wondrous Lupita Nyong’o, as the slave Epps is sexually obsessed with.
There are a few scenes of almost unbearable brutality, but one that will
haunt me forever: As punishment for presumed insubordination, Solomon
is strung up to be lynched, but given a last minute reprieve. Instead of
being cut loose, he’s left dangling, still too high to plant his feet.
Two tip-toes dancing on the ground are Solomon’s only means to stay
alive, for hour after hour, as life on the plantation continues around
him apace. It is truly one of the most chilling images I’ve ever seen on
film. (My review)
9. Her In the not so distant future, a lonely man
(Joaquin Phoenix) falls in love with an intuitive operating system (the
voice of Scarlett Johansson). Meanwhile, his friendship with a recently
divorced female friend (Amy Adams) flourishes. You think you
know where this story is going—except that you don’t. Because
writer/director Spike Jonze is simply too interesting, too weird (in the
best possible sense) to tell us to embrace humanity over technology.
Instead, he suggests that happiness, even artificial happiness, is not
something to be trifled with. Jones’s future, where people walk down the
street so plugged into their interactive devices they barely notice
each other, is not that far off from our present. But he doesn’t judge,
he simply observes, with humor and humanity. This is science fiction,
through the eyes of a poet.
10. Blue Jasmine Woody Allen’s understanding of
class and, in particular, the near panicky snobbism of the upwardly
mobile, is at the forefront of Blue Jasmine, featuring a
brilliant, fearless performance by Cate Blanchett in the titular role.
As the film starts, Jasmine’s ideal life has been shattered—her investor
husband Hal has been caught red-handed (both as a marital cheater and a
financial one) and she is broke and ostracized by society. So she goes
crawling back to her kid sister Ginger (Sally Hawkins, in a marvelously
unpretentious performance), a good-natured, unfussy girl living in San
Francisco, who nonetheless adores and even idolizes Jasmine. Blanchett
plays Jasmine’s class consciousness as a physical thing—she literally
recoils from things that she finds distasteful, and that includes
virtually everything and everyone in Ginger’s life. Jasmine knows that
she has no coping skills—her only hope is to latch herself onto a
successful worldly man. When she does, briefly, to a wealthy aspiring
politician (Peter Sarsgaard), her palpable relief has more than a whiff
of desperation. This is the genius of Cate Blachett’s
performance—Jasmine is a horrible person, but she secretly knows it. She
sees herself as ridiculous, albeit in a tragic, glamorous sort of way.
Her life was perfect, but it was also a carefully constructed illusion.
Allen watches, not exactly kindly, as it all crashes down. (My review)
Runners Up (in alphabetical order): All is Lost, Dallas Buyer’s Club,
Don Jon, Fruitvale Station, Gravity, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire,
It Felt Like Love, Much Ado About Nothing, The Spectacular Now, The
World’s End.
*In some cases, I have lifted direct passages from my previous reviews. Links included.
**I’m seeing The Wolf of Wall Street this Thursday, so it was ineligible for this list.