Year's best films were full of unlikely heroes
On screen over the past 12 months the most exciting leading man was a robot, presidential politics offered a yawn and a whimper, and entertainment was serious business
In a year of darkness and hope, the movies struggled to keep up. Things fell apart, the economic center didn't hold, the man least expected to win the presidency at the start of the year created a narrative of historical inevitability that just grew and grew and grew. The most engrossing drama I witnessed in 2008 may have been at the website fivethirtyeight.com, where daily poll analyses by Nate Silver and comments from his (mostly) articulate band of followers gave shape to a groundswell the mainstream media at times seemed invested in ignoring.
Yet there were movies released in 2008 - 548, according to Exhibitor Relations - and many of them mattered. For a lot of moviegoers, "The Dark Knight" was the only one that mattered, so deeply and darkly did it mourn a fallen world and the incandescent actor playing the film's villain. Would "Knight" have been the pop supernova it became if Heath Ledger hadn't died last January? Probably - it's an excellent, if flawed, affair and one with its thumb squarely on the era's discontents - but public grief gave an extra boost to the phenomenon. No other film seemed so urgently and indecisively of the moment.
That may be because we're between moments right now. The Bush years have already been formalized in Oliver Stone's "W." - a film either well before its time or well after it - and the Obama drama has yet to begin. Due to the curious time-lag involved in making mainstream movies, many of 2008's releases were weighed down with a somberness that seems oddly beside the point. The year-end Oscar releases - all those white elephants of studio-approved art - seem inert and self-important, obsessed with Nazis and emotional repression at a time when it finally seems possible, even necessary, to burst forward and ahead.
So "The Reader" and "Revolutionary Road" and "Doubt" and "Frost/Nixon" feel like yesterday's Oscar winners, while "Milk" succeeded by reminding us of the fragile but vibrant human passion that can invest politics. The lumbering heaviosity of Serious American Cinema was mocked not just by the success of idiot delights like "Mamma Mia!" and "Beverly Hills Chihuahua" ($142 and $92 million in grosses, respectively) but by "Slumdog Millionaire," a swooning fairy tale that audiences leapt on like desert wanderers coming to an oasis. By contrast, ecological disaster, made safe for the multiplex by "An Inconvenient Truth" in 2006, is now an official studio meme, one that only
A chapter is ending in American life and American movies, and who knows what the future will bring? With the shutting down of a number of studio boutique wings - New Line Cinema, Picturehouse, and Warner Independent, and that's just at Warner Brothers - a valuable conduit for ambitious movies with low- to mid-range budgets has been shut off. With the disappearance of medium-sized films, the extreme ends will most likely flourish: tiny art house offerings scrambling to be seen, and bloated 3-D apocu-tainments that gobble up all the media oxygen.
Yet YouTube and a thousand other digital endpoints will continue to grow, and that may be where we'll find the moving images that matter, as opposed to the ones we'll be told should matter. With the fraying of an old order, new ways of seeing, of being entertained and provoked, will still be chosen by the market oligarchies but also by a burgeoning democracy of viewers. Who knows what they - which is to say, we - will choose? It's enough to give one hope.
2. Slumdog Millionaire Let the backlash begin: It's not the most original plotline. The characters are stick-figures (archetypes if you're feeling academic). It is corny. Deal with it. Danny Boyle's allegory of modern India - buried within the tale of a street urchin (Dev Patel) poised to win a fortune on a TV game show - is just plain, old-fashioned great storytelling, moving with the speed of a bullet train but built on the bones of classic quest sagas. Welding images to music to color to motion, Boyle (working with codirector Loveleen Tandan, editor Chris Dickens, and cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle) tells this boy's life with an energy rooted in the rushing kaleidoscope of modern Mumbai itself. "Slumdog" is at heart a simple story, and that seems to bother some people inordinately. But this is one reason the movies exist in the first place: to restate and rejuvenate our primal narratives. You don't have to believe in fairy tales to fall for them - not when they're this well told.
3. Man on Wire On Aug. 7, 1974, French aerialist Philippe Petit stepped out onto a wire stretched illegally between the twin towers of New York's brand-new World Trade Center. In documenting this singular feat of derring-do, filmmaker James Marsh creates a heist movie in which that being stolen is human disbelief. "Man on Wire" re-enacts Petit's break-in to the top floors of the towers with his team and the agonizing wait through the night; it marshals interviews with older, sadder, wiser men while showing us grainy footage of their delirious youth - and then, when the time comes for Petit to take his walk, lifts off into still photography and a Satie "Gymnop??die" on the soundtrack. Among other things, the film's an elegy to the Twin Towers that never once mentions 9/11. Mostly, though, it's a reminder of grace on earth - and above it - at a time when so much seems to have fallen.
4. Milk Those of us expecting another Sean Penn medicine movie - rich in high moral fiber and tasting vaguely of cardboard - were shocked at how unpretentiously alive the Harvey Milk biopic turned out to be. Energized from his adventures in the art-house (see also this year's glowingly spooky "Paranoid Park"), director Gus Van Sant not only re-creates a time and place - San Francisco's Castro district in the 1970s - but a vibe of growing community and the cultural astonishment that a gay man can not only be out but electable. In Van Sant's hands, assassin Dan White (Josh Brolin) becomes not a monster homophobe but a man riven by private demons of insecurity, while Penn creates a Harvey Milk of human kindness, both for the lost boys he welds into a political force and the city that allows him to live as he wants.
5. Let the Right One In Catherine Hardwicke's "Twilight" is a worthy translation of a mass-culture doorstop, but this is the teen-vampire movie you want to see. The girl's the undead bloodsucker in Tomas Alfredson's chilly, pitch-black Swedish love story, and it's amazing how that one small change makes everything seem so much more dangerous. She's played by Lina Leandersson as a tweener having a really bad afterlife, and K??re Hedebrant is the bullied boy next door who becomes her confidant and soulmate. Because the movie is very sly about the price that entails - keep your eye on the man (Per Ragnar) who appears to be little Eli's father - the final scenes are heartwarming and bone-chilling in equal measure. All this plus the best mass cat attack in movie history.
6. The Wrestler "Rocky" with the gloves off. Darren Aronofsky's fourth feature film is his most disarmingly straightforward, a rough-hewn tale of an '80s superstar choking on the exhaust fumes of real life. The movie would seem far too cruel without the star it resurrects from the dead: Mickey Rourke, unrecognizable here as the lean, mean actor he once was but giving a performance of surpassing tenderness. Rourke's achievement is inseparable from the movie's; this is the rare comeback that's freighted with all the awful lessons - about what fame can and can't buy you - needed to make it stick. Marisa Tomei is quite wonderful as a stripper with fewer illusions than the title character, but when you look in Rourke's eyes, you know he has been to the void and called it home.
7. Rachel Getting Married An unexpected return to form for filmmaker Jonathan Demme, whose belated hop onto the Dogma bandwagon - handheld camera, on-location sound and music - only serves as a way to recover his love of people in all their messy luminosity. Anne Hathaway gives a showy, solid performance as the kind of sister you pray never gives a toast at your wedding, but the film's real grace notes are elsewhere: Debra Winger's chilly mother superior, Bill Irwin's dad - a human golden retriever addled by sadness - and Rosemary DeWitt, who makes us understand the heartache of all those siblings cursed to be normal. With a fond acid eye, Demme sets up his dynamic family tension only to dissolve it in music and ritual and the wonder of time passing.
8. Son of Rambow I beat my brains out trying to get people to see this charmer of a comedy, only to have them say, over and over, "Isn't it a 'Rambo' sequel?" No, sillies, it's about a sheltered, fatherless lad (Bill Milner) in 1982 England who sees the first "Rambo" movie ("First Blood") and sets out to videotape his own version with the school's bad boy (Will Poulter, hilariously stroppy). Eventually, the entire student body joins in, including the French exchange kid (Jules Sitruk) in his to-die-for "Thriller" jacket. Slapstick sight gags, flying dogs, religious sects, flipbook animation - it's all here, given a cheeky spin by Garth Jennings and Nick Goldsmith of music video fame. This may be the most unadulterated fun I had at the movies all year.
9. Flight of the Red Balloon We go to movies, usually, to escape reality or to see it twisted into pleasurable party-balloon shape. Hou Hsiao-Hsien's masterful film gives us life with all the dull bits left in and wonders how we humans ever give it meaning, let alone art. The answer, as stressed-out Parisian single mom Juliette Binoche dithers through her days, isn't in the camera-lens of her new au pair (Fang Song), trying to make sense of the world through laptop editing software. Rather, it's through the unblinking eyes of Binoche's son (Simon Iteanu), alive to the marvels the rest of us filter out. He alone sees the red balloon of Albert Lamorisse's classic short hovering everywhere he looks. A quiet, unhurried ode to the simple act of stopping and looking.
10. The second hour of "Synecdoche, New York" The first half of Charlie Kaufman's directorial debut still feels dreadfully forced to me, as though the writer of "Being John Malkovich" were cramming every idea into the frame for fear he'll never get another chance. (A house forever on fire? Neat idea; doesn't work onscreen.) Yet as the scenes unfold, and the lunatic idea of Caden Cotard (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) takes hold - to eternally stage his own life as a way to make sense of it - "Synecdoche" grows in majesty. The movie is most moving as a poem to women, their beauty and elusiveness, with a gallery of great actresses led by the heartbreaking Dianne Wiest, whose character begins as a cleaning lady and ends up as Kaufman's personification of a serene, unknowable God. Are they one and the same? The film, thankfully, preserves the mystery.
Honorable Mentions: "Ballast," "The Band's Visit," "Be Kind Rewind," "Chop Shop," "A Christmas Tale," "The Class," "The Counterfeiters," "The Dark Knight," "Encounters at the End of the World," "Frozen River," "The Girl Who Leapt Through Time," "Happy-Go-Lucky," "Momma's Man," "Operation Filmmaker," "Paranoid Park," "Reprise," "Up the Yangtze," "The Visitor," "Waltz With Bashir," "Young@Heart."
The performances that made my year bearable (in no particular order): Heath Ledger in "The Dark Knight," Mickey Rourke and Marisa Tomei in "The Wrestler," Sean Penn, Josh Brolin, and Emile Hirsch in "Milk," Robert Downey Jr. in "Tropic Thunder" and "Iron Man," Karl Marcovics in "The Counterfeiters," Mos Def in "Be Kind Rewind," Richard Jenkins and Hiam Abbass in "The Visitor," Ben Kingsley in "Elegy" and "The Wackness," Eamonn Walker in "Cadillac Records," Sally Hawkins and Eddie Marsan in "Happy-Go-Lucky," Melissa Leo in "Frozen River," Dianne Wiest in "Synecdoche, New York," Brad Pitt in "Burn After Reading," Renee Zellweger in "Appaloosa," Bill Nighy in "Valkyrie," Javier Bardem, Penelope Cruz, and Rebecca Hall in "Vicky Cristina Barcelona," Ralph Fiennes in "In Bruges," Will Poulter in "Son of Rambow," and the confused penguin in "Encounters at the End of the World."
The Other Boleyn Girl - "Desperate Housewives," Tudor edition
Seven Pounds - I'd watch Rosario Dawson read tax law. Also: The more sense it made, the less sense it made.
Cloverfield - This is the way the world ends: With screaming yuppies clutching their digital video-cameras.
10,000 B.C. - Maybe the Creationists are right.
The Fall - A narrative train wreck, but, ooh, such pretty pictures!
The Happening - An ill wind bloweth moviegoers and M. Night Shyamalan's career no good.
Baby Mama - Memo to Hollywood: Tina Fey should not be allowed to star in movies she does not write.
Speed Racer - One freakishly bad acid trip disguised as corporate nostalgia.
The Hottie and the Nottie - A movie that asked us to consider Paris Hilton hot? Not. 