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2006 Year in Review
"Our Leaders. Ourselves"
by Nathaniel R January 6th, 2007

Pg 1 Our Leaders. Ourselves. / Pg 2 Special Citations & Honorable Mentions / Pg 3 Top Ten



"Heavy is the head that wears a crown"

Two of the past year's most talked about films, Stephen Frears The Queen and Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, kick off in virtually the same way: A direct acknowledgement of the movie going audience from her royal majesty. In the first film after a brief Princess Diana news clip we watch as Elizabeth II (Helen Mirren) sits still for a portrait. In close up, she turns her head to smile at the audience as the title card arrives: The Queen. The second film offers us a luxuriously decadent long shot of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France reclined in splendor, a towering cake behind her. She turns lazily to the camera with a self-possessed smile. In both cases one immediately wants to know what this royal will reveal about her character as the film progresses.

It goes without saying that these films diverged considerably from there. Despite their shared ‘meet the royals’ opening and their preoccupation with queens in their bubbles, they diverge considerably in style, tone, dramatic purposes and effect. But it struck me as I watched them both again recently that the Shakespeare quote used in The Queen “heavy is the head that wears the crown” could be placed at the start of a number of the year’s films and make a peculiar sense.

Helen Mirren’s stubborn royal and Kirsten Dunst’s frivolous dauphine weren’t the only leaders capturing cinematic attention. The year also brought us the paranoid Idi Amin (Forest Whitaker, The Last King of Scotland), a bullying mob boss (Jack Nicholson, The Departed), a merciless captain (Sergi Lopez, Pan’s Labyrinth), the icy dominating Miranda (Meryl Streep, The Devil Wears Prada), an immoveable emperor (Chow Yun Fat, Curse of the Golden Flower) and the doomed General Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe, Letters From Iwo Jima) to name a few. One can’t be sure if this year’s parade of charismatic but often dangerous leaders is a direct and intentional comment on where we are now in a world or if they just resonate more strongly given the cirumstances. Nevertheless, the presence of so many troubled authority figures bungling their jobs, leading people astray or trying to win the souls of their literal or figurative subjects suggests a collective nervous searching about our authority figures: where exactly are they taking us?

‘What does it mean to be a leader?,’ these filmmakers are asking. And, by extension, 'what does it means to be led?' Though some of the year’s strongest films walk in fear of their imagined rulers, the alternative is also presented in a less than hopeful light. Consider the corresponding vacuum of leadership in three of the year’s most harrowing films. Alfonso Cuaron’s dystopian think piece Children of Men, the global warming Al Gore documentary An Inconvenient Truth, and Paul Greengrass real time recreation of United 93. These films don’t paint portraits of specific people in charge so much as they draw scary pictures of collective failure. An Inconvenient Truth's Melissa Etheridge theme song "I Need to Wake Up" could be the musical accompaniment for all of these films, which suggest we'd be better off without our complacency or apathy. The same advice could certainly have helped Elizabeth II and Marie Antoinette. It's easy to go astray when you're too stubborn to change or too easily distracted to look where you're going.

The Queen’s tagline is an incisive and even generous gem. It serves its own film well but it’s also a succinct three word summary of the year in film. “Our Leaders. Ourselves” indeed.

 

Continue to...
Underappreciated Films & Special Citations
and
My Top Ten of 2006