by Nathaniel R January 2nd, 2008

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Generally the making of a top ten list is cause for Sophie's Choice style agony but drafting 2008's list was unusually pleasant. Which is to say that the best films this year weren't as aggressively audacious or as eager to thrown down artistic and technical gauntlets as There Will Be Blood and No Country were last year (with the possible exception of Steve McQueen's prison drama Hunger which opted not to open in New York, thus making it ineligible for my list). Perhaps filmmakers were ahead of the curve and foresaw the wave of cautious optimism that was about to start rolling around the world. Consider the turn about from the following filmmakers who are no strangers to dour moods: Mike Leigh opted for cheer and generosity of spirit, Woody Allen made his sunniest film (quite literally) in years, and Gus Van Sant understood that "you gotta give them hope".

Honorable Mentions / Runners Up

Moodily stalking this year's top ten films, is a lonely Swedish girl who goes by the name of "Eli". She's 12 years old. She's been 12 years old for a very very long time. She's both the love interest and the monster in the haunting horror flick Let the Right One In. Director Tomas Alfredson obviously has filmmaking in his blood (his dad, brother and girlfriend are also in the business) and his breakout hit pulses with memorable creepy imagery and smart directorial choices, especially in its first half. If it errs on the side of conventional plot dovetailing and easy comeuppances in the final act, you'll forgive. I can't wait to see what Alfredson conjured for a follow-up.

The characters in Burn After Reading, don't drink blood like Eli (they're more likely to swill booze or slurp greedily from big gulps) but here's the fine point, they would if they thought it would get them what they want. This sneaky Coen Bros comedy of American idiocy and self-absorption is pitch black in temperament -- this isn't the first or last time the Coens have embraced misanthropy -- but it's so funny and broadly performed by a glorious cast completely in on the joke, that you almost don't need to be. The first time that is. Like all of the Coen Bros best comedies it's even funnier in retrospect and on multiple viewings. The satire deepens the more you think on it.

The Top Ten List

#10 Vicky Cristina Barcelona
Written and Directed by Woody Allen
Starring Javier Bardem, Penélope Cruz, Rebecca Hall, Scarlett Johansson and Patricia Clarkson
Released August 15th, The Weinstein Company

One of the reasons the auteur theory has had such staying power (as theories go) is that its totally fun. Who can resist the call to amateur armchair psychology whenever a world famous director releases a new work? Many trees have died throughout the years for film critics to psycho-analyze Woody Allen and, in particular, his views of women. Unlike many of my fellow cinephiles, I'm usually tempted to cut Woody slack in this department. Whatever he may think of women he does think of them, often and obsessively and for public consumption. For this, as an actressexual, I thank him sincerely even as I wish he loved them a little more like Almodovar and a little less like Hitchcock.

When I saw Vicky Cristina Barcelona this summer it struck me as a successfully simple lark. Two college girls Vicky (a terrific Rebecca Hall) and Cristina (Scarlett Johansson) and best friends summer in Barcelona where they become entangled with painters Juan Antonio (Javier Bardem) and Maria Elena (Oscar bound Penélope Cruz). They return home, mostly unchanged ~The End. Strictly on the surface the movie dazzles: the stars are ravishing and warmly shot by cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe (Talk to Her) and the movie is funny and erudite. It's also a neatly self-contained thing, shushing its harsher critics with its own built in auto-critiques: yes, Spain and its people are exoticized stereotypes but Vicky and Cristina, bohemian in bark and tourist in bite, are the protagonists and this is their (shallow) world view. But something fascinating happens after you leave the movie behind. It sticks around. The summery glow dissipates and though the movie still entices, its charms cool. Maybe Vicky and Cristina's summer wasn't so dreamy and passionate at all.

#09 A Christmas Tale
Directed by Arnaud Desplechin
Written by Arnaud Desplechin and Emmanuel Bourdieu
Starring Catherine Deneuve, Mathieu Amalric, Chiara Mastroianni, Jean-Paul Roussillon, Anne Consigny, Hippolyte Girardot, Melvil Poupaud and Emmanuel Devos
Released November 14th IFC Films

Any attempt at retelling the plot of this (or any) Desplechin movie exhausts me. Suffice it to say that Junon (Catherine Deneuve) the matriarch of the Vuillards a "family of weirdos" --their words, not mine -- has been diagnosed with degenerative cancer and her children (and their spouses and children) come home. Abundant family baggage comes with them. Every rarely discussed shared tragedy, past grudge and secret comes home to roost. I found Desplechin's dizzying tapestry difficult to follow (he never met a tangent or a cinematic flourish he could resist) and the plot points are already a distant memory. A Christmas Tale is so stuffed with information that some might call it novelesque but I think it's closer to the experience of looking at a scrapbook. The whole story of any family is difficult to grasp but the experience is in the details, the stray moments and idiosyncracies of relationships that you just can't shake. These Desplechin captures with such crystalline precision, visual flair and complexity of emotion that the movie feels positively alive. I left the theater exhilirated and sad to leave the Vuillards behind. Movies with 150 minute running times don't generally have me pulling an Oliver and asking for more.

Related piece: Brief Thoughts on the New York Film Festival

#08 Happy-Go-Lucky
Written and Directed by Mike Leigh
Starring Sally Hawkins, Alexis Zegerman, Eddie Marsan and Samuel Roukin
Released October 10th, Miramax Films

The opening line of dialogue in Happy-Go-Lucky is spoken by the film's heroine Poppy (Sally Hawkins), an indefatigably cheerful schoolteacher, to no one in particular. She's perusing books in a shop and one title captures her eye, making her chuckle.

"The Road to Reality. Don't wanna be going there."

Mike Leigh's screenplays, which are created through a laborious collaborative process involving months of rehearsals with his actors, often contain deceptively simple rosetta stones like this. The line feels tossed off, as if it were an inconsequential actorly improvisation meant only to add that lived-in character texture (Poppy talks to herself and/or to anyone around) but it actually deciphers the whole film's central thesis about the way our perceptions, good and bad, color our realities. Happy-Go-Lucky sustains its tricky act for two hours, stacking up abundant slices of life until a finely constructed but never forced comedy about positive thinking (embodied by Poppy) and its opposite (embodied by her driving instructor Scott) emerges from the seemingly random scene-work. If that sounds stiff or like an academic exercize, I assure you it doesn't play that way. The movie bounces along joyously with Poppy as guide. She's that rare movie character that's both a fully rounded creation and a positive role model. Outside of perhaps WALL•E this was the most joy-inducing film experience of the year.

Related piece: Sally Hawkins interview with The Film Experience

 

#07 In Bruges
Written and Directed by Martin McDonagh
Starring Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson, Ralph Fiennes, Jordan Prentice, Zeljko Ivanek and Jérémie Renier
Released February 8th, Focus Features

You know that old showbiz axiom

Dying is easy. Comedy is hard

What about dying comedically? Isn't the tragicomedy as difficult a genre to pull off as the musical or the screwball to name two other notoriously challenging genres? Like many moviegoers I was skeptical of Martin McDonagh's hitman comedy at first. 'Please', I thought. 'Please no more films about assassins. They're as ubiquitous on the silver screen as doctors are on the small screen. If the silver screen represented reality we'd all be dead by now!'

I should've known better. You see, I'd actually seen Martin McDonagh's Oscar-winning short film Six Shooter (a stunner) which suggested that his acclaimed playwrighting talents were imminently transferable to the screen. I'd also seen his brilliant TONY nominee Pillow Man. That richly imagined nightmare lost to Doubt at Broadway's big awards show if you're keeping score and In Bruges has already lost to Doubt in Hollywood's counterpart, Oscar buzz. In both cases the loser is the superior property. It shouldn't have been a surprise to me that In Bruges wrings more genuine pathos from its Catholic guilt than Doubt's Catholic school did-he-do-it mystery. In Bruges, like Doubt, also wrings hearty dark laughs from material that's no laughing matter. I can't wait to see Martin McDonaugh's encore.

Related piece: Colin Farrell's best performance

#06 Milk
Directed by Gus Van Sant
Written by Dustin Lance Black
Starring Sean Penn, Josh Brolin, James Franco, Emile Hirsch, Victor Garber, Denis O'Hare, Diego Luna, Joseph Cross, Stephen Spinella and Alison Pill
Released November 26th, Focus Features

Despite my pleas for Hollywood to let up on ubiquitous hero-worshipping biopics if only for a year or two, this one is welcome in my world. Bless screenwriter Dustin Lance Black and director Gus Van Sant for the foresight to have it prepped for a depressingly relevant contemporary moment. Most civil rights biopics pat us on the back for our imagined allegiances to battles long since won (funny how the human race is so prone to taking the side of the historical winners but isn't half as progressive when it comes to similar contemporary battles) but Milk is a more challenging and relevant case study because we're still fighting this one. Milk's central conflict, the fight over California's Proposition 6 which aimed to legislate discrimination against gay citizens and failed (thanks to Milk and other valiant activists) has a new ugly mirror in California's Proposition 8 which aimed to legislate discrimination against gay citizens and succeeded. Clearly we need another Harvey Milk here and now.

We also need more auteurs like Gus Van Sant, who can harness their artistic sensibilities and humanity in the service of quality mainstream fare when the opportunity arises. Milk isn't groundbreaking in form but it's an exemplary member of an overpopulated genre. Van Sant never gets in the way of the story but he also doesn't let that event+event+event+event narrative, so boring in many biopics, stand in the way of larger feeling. Milk also sidesteps another typical biopic problem (showboating lead performances with little care or room for the supporting cast) by featuring a whole slew of game interesting turns (Let's see Penn, Brolin and Franco all Oscar nominated, please). It offers up not just hero worship but a sweet portrait of a larger and resilient community, too.

 

The Top Five ~ My Best Picture Ballot
the 9th Annual FiLM BiTCH Awards begin

 

#05 Reprise
Directed by Joachim Trier
Written by Joachim Trier and Eskil Voigt
Starring Anderson Danielsen Lie, Espen Klouman-Høiner, Vikotria Winge, Henrik Elvestad and Christian Rubeck
Released May 16th, Miramax Films

Two young wannabe novelists in Oslo, Norway drop their manuscripts into the post and we flash forward with cinematic brio into their imagined success. That flashy opening of Reprise will thrill some moviegoers but others will require more sublime delicate kicks before acknowledging that writer/director Joachim Trier is a major new talent. Many young filmmakers can offer flash but Reprise, which obviously excels at just that, has deeper things on its mind once its won attention. Troubled unstable Phillip (Anders Danielsen Lie) and quiet, watchful Erik (Espen Klouman-Høiner) both find the success they dreamed of but not in the shared way they expected. The film ably charts the after shocks of success and failure that ripple through Phillip and Erik's friendship and their larger social circle.

The fascinating and perhaps most surprising thing about Reprise is that though it trades on 20something spontaneity, vigor and dreaming for its initial punch, it feels august in its understanding of the ways we mature both personally and collectively with our closest friends. Trier works exceedingly well with mostly green actors to illuminate the specific moment in life when the future and the past hold equal pull, this moment when we're still processing imagined collective futures (that naively look just like the past, only with success) but beginning to come to grips with the meaning, pain and depth of the shared past as we shape our new selves. Few movies this year resonated so strongly.

Related piece: Joachim Trier's interview with the Film Experience

 

#04 The Wrestler
Directed by Darren Aronofsky
Written by Robert D. Siegel
Starring Mickey Rourke, Maria Tomei and Evan Rachel Wood
Released December 17th, Fox Searchlight Films

While I don't remotely share the belief that The Fountain, Darren Aronofsky's last picture was a waste of time or a folly of ego, I do readily agree with his harsher critics who think that The Wrestler was the ideal way to come back from its "failure". Let's ignore for the moment the short-sighted and ahistorical notion that initial critical dismissals and box office bombing signifies artistic failure. Many beloved classics beg to differ. In fact, I suggest this switch-hitting to all filmmakers who like to work big (Peter Jackson, it's time for another Heavenly Creatures! In fact, it's past time). The Wrestler is visibly low budget: the cast is small, the locations are limited, the protagonist is a "broken down piece of meat" rather than a contenduh. But this very smallness is a huge key to its success, reflecting as it does the human drama of its co-stars. Randy the Ram (Mickey Rourke... and you should believe the hype) plays big in the wrestling ring but he's barely surviving in a trailer park, his love interest Cassidy (Marisa Tomei) also puts on a great show at the local strip club but she's no big deal either offstage. She's as likely to hear jibes about her age from randy patrons as she is to pocket a tip.

The ultra specific miniature film, if perfectly played, can feel universal in scope (Once, just last year, performed this trick). Aronofsky's finely crafted character study doesn't, in the end, limit itself to only character study. It's not a "one trick pony" as its pitch perfect theme song (courtesy of Bruce Springsteen) deceptively suggests. It's also a gripping sports drama, a loser love story and maybe even a trenchant political parable, too. Randy the Ram can't fight his way out of his crumbling body and his pitiably limited vision of himself but The Wrestler isn't as self-sabotaging. It's a total winner.

#3 WALL•E write up eventually
#2 The Class write up eventually
#1 Rachel Getting Married write up eventually

MY AWARDS -- 41 CATEGORIES IN ALL