Ty Burr's Top 10
Amid societal unease, onscreen blood was abundant and tidy endings were rare
The movies didn't behave in 2007.
They were far too violent ("No Country for Old Men," "Eastern Promises," "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead," "Sweeney Todd"). They didn't stick to a coherent narrative line ("No Country for Old Men," "I'm Not There," "Zodiac"). They stunk of the sickroom ("Away From Her," "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly") and were either too concerned with abortion ("Lake of Fire") or not concerned enough ("Knocked Up," "Waitress," "Juno"). They had screwy third acts that denied audiences the tidy endings we consider our due ("No Country for Old Men," "Zodiac," "There Will Be Blood"). They were depressing.
All in all, an excellent year.
If movies reflect a culture's collective unconscious, then our dreams are troubled. Here we are in the fifth year of a war we don't like to talk about - except in the documentaries we know we should see but never find time for - and our entertainments are awash in blood, gnawed by doubt. Our comedies are unbearably crass and unusually intelligent; Jonah Hill's bug-eyed leer is the face of America's youth. "No Country for Old Men" sits atop dozens of critic's lists (it's No. 2 on mine), and I've received dozens of angry reader e-mails asking how a movie so horrifyingly amoral can be praised. Wait un til these people see "Sweeney Todd."
"No Country for Old Men" isn't amoral, though. It simply confronts the amorality of a chaotic universe, an admittedly discomfiting notion. And the non-climaxes of movies as varied as "No Country," "Zodiac," and "Once" likewise remind us of the big polka-dot ribbon that life doesn't come tied with. Such things are right there on the newscasts and in the papers; the movies have traditionally been where we flee to avoid them.
Now, though, the doubt has seeped into the multiplex. Take "300" (please), one of the year's big hits and a macho war whoop riddled with unacknowledged anxiety. Cultural repression's a game of Whack-a-Mole: Ignore something in one place, it pops up in another, usually in your face. The following list honors those 2007 films I was least able to bat away. (It's arranged in the classical manner: 10 movies, ranked in rough order of preference. Out of fashion, perhaps, but traditional handholds are useful in weird times.)
If celluloid confrontation makes you nervous (or if you sensibly object to paying for it, plus popcorn), there were just enough fairy tales this year to shut out the din. Not all of them were made for families, although the best often were: "Ratatouille," "Enchanted," "Hairspray." There were fairy tales for grown-ups as well, sensitive and tasteful displays of cinematic good manners like "The Kite Runner," "Into the Wild," "Atonement," and even "The Lives of Others."
Those last four aren't bad by any means - and "Lives" is beloved by many - but to this critic they seemed somewhat beside the point. It has been a movie year not for rational men but despairing ones: Tommy Lee Jones sitting at a kitchen table in total defeat, Cate Blanchett vomiting words and psychodrama as one of many Bob Dylans, Daniel Day-Lewis yanking "There Will Be Blood" to a close with gallows fatalism and the words "I'm finished."
In a way it feels like the early 1970s again: unpopular war, unpopular president, expensive gas, Sidney Lumet making good movies. Our films, too, have the gall once more to tell us things we'd much prefer remain unsaid. We don't have to listen, but we're running out of places to hide.
The top 10
"I'm Not There" Much, much more than a boomer nostalgia trip, Todd Haynes's fantasia on the lives and times of Bob Dylan is a great work of American mischief: a tall tale that rearranges the facts until they tell a fresh story of fame and unknowability. Building upon the myth of reinvention on which this country was founded, the movie's many Dylans - kid charlatan (Marcus Carl Franklin), folk martyr (Christian Bale), self-destructive brat genius (Blanchett), among others - crisscross like kaleidoscopic fragments, each one a simultaneous promise and betrayal to a nation of credulous believers. To appreciate what this movie's about you don't have to know anything about the man born Robert Zimmerman beyond what Wikipedia tells you - just bring a sense of humor and a raging distrust of our celebrity culture. A prodigious feat of editing, camerawork, performance, and sound, "I'm Not There" is experimental moviemaking at its most accessible, and an argument as playful as any Dylan song.
"No Country for Old Men" A masterpiece of apocalyptic pessimism. The Coen brothers' adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's novel delivers the bad news with magisterial force: Evil walks the earth, dramatic closure is for fools, human life hangs on the flip of a coin, and - the hardest pill to swallow - cowboy heroism is just a bedtime story to soothe grown men. What on paper seems a simple game of cat and mouse and cat - Sheriff Tommy Lee Jones chasing terrifying assassin Javier Bardem chasing average cluck Josh Brolin with his satchel of found drug money - becomes a nearly biblical saga, and not one of the pleasant ones. The usually ironic Coens come through with their weightiest work yet, but for all the formal rigor of the filmmaking, "No Country" is about the chaos we desperately try to pretend isn't there. Vanity, vanity, murmurs this movie in response.
"No End in Sight" In a year of multiple documentary responses to the war in Iraq, Charles Ferguson's history lesson is a magnificent scold, a point-by-point accounting of US policy that spells out what went wrong, who screwed up, when they did so, and why - all in the words of front-rank players on various points of the political spectrum. "No End" has the arc of dramatic fiction (or maybe a horror movie) as the political assumptions of Messrs. Cheney, Wolfowitz, and Rumsfeld lead into the disastrous post-invasion stewardship of Paul Bremer, who disbanded the Iraqi Army and helped light the fuse of the insurgency. This is a documentary of persuasion to make Michael Moore look like a dancing bear, and a model of primary-source outrage. Essential viewing regardless of your convictions.
"There Will Be Blood" Whatever are we to make of Paul Thomas Anderson's shaggy-dog history lesson? It's a stylistic departure for the director of "Boogie Nights" and "Magnolia," slow and discursive where the earlier films were manic and mannered. Based (very) loosely on Upton Sinclair's 1927 novel "Oil!," it follows a California wildcatter named Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis, working at peak ferment) as his fortunes grow over a 30-year period. When an ambitious young evangelist (Paul Dano) shows up, the film becomes a startling allegory of the twin engines of the New World - capital and religion - as they struggle for a nation's soul. Day-Lewis creates an all-American monster to stand with Charles Foster Kane and "Chinatown" 's Noah Cross; the actor even borrows John Huston's voice. A movie slow to cast its spell yet impossible to shake, with an ending that's both maddening and incontestable. (Opens in Boston on Friday.)
"The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" Leave it to Julian Schnabel - artist, egotist, Rabelaisian - to teach us how to see again. Adapting a slim memoir written by the paralyzed magazine editor Jean-Dominique Bauby (played by Matthew Almaric), who dictated it by blinking his left eye, letter by letter, Schnabel and his cameraman Janusz Kaminski create a man's perceptual rebirth, image by image. Yes, the story line flirts with standard inspirational uplift (albeit with a Gallic flip); yes, every last woman in the film is attractive enough to enchant us and torment Bauby. That's the cruel bargain the hero is offered: Only with his nose pressed against the prison window of his body does he finally see the world in all its beauty. An astonishingly visual experience that, in a weird way, recapitulates the history of cinema itself.
"Ratatouille" Of course it made this list - Anton Ego may be the most damningly sympathetic depiction of a critic ever put on film.
"Michael Clayton" It has been so long since Hollywood has turned out a drama for grown-ups - deeply written, patiently paced, played with the long game in mind - that some audiences mistook this for dull. Their mistake. The first film directed by Tony Gilroy (screenwriter of the Jason Bourne movies) is a story of corporate mayhem on the surface and a series of lethal character sketches beneath, much like the classic 1970s Sidney Lumet thrillers on which Gilroy has obviously charged his batteries. The thrill here is watching George Clooney, playing a burned-out law firm fixer, and Tilda Swinton, as a general counsel shark, pass each other while respectively rising and descending the ethical escalator. Satisfying in ways the movies have largely forgotten, "Clayton" deserves to be savored like a good Scotch: slow and neat.
"Before the Devil Knows You're Dead" As if Gilroy pretending to be Sidney Lumet weren't enough, 2007 saw Lumet himself rise from the creative dead and, at 83, direct one of the sharpest dramas of the year. Written by first-time scripter Kelly Masterson, "Devil" is a crime thriller to stand with the filmmaker's best work, but it's smaller and less forgiving than "Serpico" or "Dog Day Afternoon." The story plays like outer-borough Shakespeare: Two brothers (Philip Seymour Hoffman is the smart jerk, Ethan Hawke the sweet loser) decide to rob their parents' suburban jewelry store, either in revenge for unspecified sins or out of sheer greed. Marisa Tomei is a carnal tootsie roll as Hoffman's wife, but the most shocking aspect is that Lumet, going digital with a small crew, has rediscovered the brio of his live TV work in the '50s.
"Zodiac" David Fincher's drama about the hunt for California's Zodiac killer came and went without much fuss early in 2007. As with so many of the year's best movies, it's about the human need to know being constantly outfoxed by the impossibility of ever knowing. Unfolding over dozens of years, with different cops, journalists, and obsessed laymen poring over the evidence, the film's an oddity: an epic procedural in which the growing mountain of facts only serves to obscure the truth. Mark Ruffalo, Robert Downey Jr., and Jake Gyllenhaal give meaty, life-size performances, each of their characters banging their heads against the Zodiac mystery. It's an intentionally frustrating movie - like "No Country for Old Men," it says closure's a myth - but it's the work of a world-class filmmaker coming into his maturity.
"Lake of Fire" Let other documentarians deal with safe topics like the war in Iraq. Tony Kaye, that stroppy troublemaker, wandered into the nuclear minefield of the abortion wars simply because he wanted to test his own opinions. The result is the first honest movie on the subject in years - maybe ever. It's also nearly impossible to watch at times, as it should be. Challenging viewers on both the right and the left, Kaye shows us abortion procedures (the film's in black and white, thankfully), talks to the women who've had them, visits with crazed evangelicals who murder in God's name, sits down with Jane Roe herself, now a pro-life activist, and in general encourages us to toss our unexamined beliefs and start fresh. No other movie this year was this brave or this crazy.
Runners-up
"Away From Her," "Black Book," "The Bourne Ultimatum," "Day Night Day Night," "Eastern Promises," "Gone Baby Gone," "Half Moon," "The Host," "Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten," "Juno," "Lady Chatterley," "Linda Linda Linda," "The Lives of Others," "Manda Bala," "Manufactured Landscapes," "The Namesake," "Once," "Rescue Dawn," "The Savages," "Superbad," "Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street," "This Is England," "3:10 to Yuma"
The five worst
"Bratz," "Factory Girl," "Georgia Rule," "Redacted," "300."
Five reasons to be cheerful
Taraji P. Henson in "Talk to Me."
Philip Seymour Hoffman in anything.
Teen comedies got funny again.
Max von Sydow ("The Diving Bell and the Butterfly") still walks among us.
Boston's back in the movie business.
Five reasons to be depressed
Ingmar Bergman died.
The Boston Film Festival refused to die.
"300" made more money than nine of the movies on my top 10 put together.
We can't make fun of Ben Affleck anymore.
Coming in January: "Rambo." 