I really was planning on doing the list earlier this
year. Most, if not all critics
make their lists of the best films of the year in December before the year even
ends. Those of us without access
to screenings weeks before release dates often have to wait until January to
see some of the films that critics consider to be the very best. But it just so happened that none of
the films that I saw after deadline (so to speak) ended up on my Top Ten list,
so really, I could have posted this during December, too. But here I am again, just like last
year, posting my list of the best films of 2012 on the same weekend as the
Oscars. Like I wrote last year,
the timing actually makes sense.
As the Academy celebrates the year in film, we’re going to do our own
celebration here at Esoteric. The following is a list of what I think
is worth celebrating in the cinema of 2012.
The best picture that I saw this year was Rian Johnson’s Looper:
an exhilarating and emotionally powerful science-fiction film about time travel.
A scene midway through the picture
provides its central image: two men are sitting at a diner, a young man (Joseph
Gordon-Levitt) and an older man (Bruce Willis). They are, in fact, the same man. Willis is from 30 years in the future and has been sent back
in time to be killed by his younger self: Gordon-Levitt. Here we have those questions that we
think about all the time: what would you say to the person you were years ago
or the person you will become? Are
you a completely different person?
What has happened in 30 years to turn that young man into that old man?
Of course, Looper
is not only about existential questions.
It’s an exciting sci-fi crime thriller. In the future, when the mob wants to murder someone, they
send that person back in time to be killed and disposed of by an assassin like
Gordon-Levitt. Eventually, these
assassins have to kill their own future selves, guaranteeing that there will be
no loose ends. When Gordon-Levitt
fails to kill his future self, he becomes the target of his fellow
assassins. The first half of the movie
is a pulse-pounding action picture with strong characterization, visual
ingenuity, and such memorable sci-fi images as a man from the future watching
parts of his body disappear as his past self is being tortured.
But the heart of the film comes in the second half when
Gordon-Levitt hides out from the mob on a farm where a woman (Emily Blunt)
lives with her son. And while the
excitement never drops, Looper becomes
a more intimate character piece in its second half as the assassin discovers
the true reason why his future self traveled back in time and the disturbing
secret of the farmer’s son.
Writer-director Johnson displays remarkable storytelling dexterity as he
shifts audience sympathy between the two versions of the same man: between
Gordon-Levitt, who begins the story as a not entirely sympathetic murderer, and
Willis, who is revealed to have heartbreaking and dark motivations for his
journey through time.
The issue that always lurks at the heart of Looper is the question of how a person
becomes the person he or she will be in ten, thirty or fifty years. Will that be the same person? Has that future been predetermined? In its second half, Looper hones in on the most significant
symbol of this question: raising a child.
The picture is filled with parental figures: a crime boss who guides a
boy into a life of crime; a woman who heals a broken, middle-aged killer; and a
mother who believes that with her love she can make her troubled son into a
good man despite all evidence to the contrary. It all leads up to a shattering, genius conclusion that
solidifies Looper’s place as a
masterpiece of science-fiction.
The first sound heard in Moonrise Kingdom is a thunderclap,
and indeed a cloud of melancholy hangs over Wes Anderson’s tale of young love
in an island town during the 1960s.
When two twelve-year-olds run away from their homes, the entire island
becomes involved in the search for them, and all the while, a storm is
preparing to strike. As hilarious
as the picture is, the characters are all so deeply sad and melancholy. Even the children have a certain
sadness just like the adults. The
young lovers are seizing their chance for a romantic adventure out of the young
adult books that the girl reads constantly. But the end of childhood is approaching in the form of a
storm that threatens to wipe out the carefree kingdom that they have created
for themselves. Anderson brings to
the picture his inimitable visual style, his witty dialogue, and his love for
the beauty in things that are destined to fade.
Near the beginning of the dreamlike Turkish police
procedural Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, a police officer tells a doctor
that he could tell the story of their long night together as if it was a fairy
tale, and that perfectly describes the style of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s film: the
story of the hunt for a dead body in the Anatolian steppes. Two men have already confessed to a
murder, but they cannot remember where they have buried the body. So begins a long night as the
prisoners, several police officers, a prosecutor, and a doctor drive through
the landscape searching for the corpse.
They appear to be journeying through a dream or a fairy tale with
ghostly images of headlights floating through hills of waving grass, statues of
monsters hidden beside the road, an anecdote about a woman predicting the exact
day of her death, and a girl who walks through a village carrying a light in
the dark like an angel. But the
fairy tale ends when the sun rises and the body is found. And the story shifts from the dreamlike
landscape to a cold, hard city.
There are no angels here, just the wife and son of a murdered man. Now, the mysterious story of the woman
who predicted her death has an explanation. And a doctor discovers that some truths are too terrible to
be told. The dream is over. The only thing left is an autopsy.
Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln is far from just being a
history lesson: it is a dynamic, thoroughly engrossing picture about the
exciting, messy process of democracy.
Daniel Day-Lewis commands the screen as the 16th President
trying to get the 13th Amendment passed through the House of
Representatives. His portrayal is
incredibly human, bringing us the image of an often quiet, very eccentric man
who could still use the power of his voice to sway others. Tony Kushner’s script is fascinating
and accomplishes the seemingly impossible task of turning the legislative
process into an exciting entertainment.
Spielberg and his gifted cinematographer Janusz Kaminski make the
picture a wonderful visual experience with depths of light and shadow filling
the film’s many interiors. And
Day-Lewis’ performance is not the only great one in the film: Sally Field
brings powerful resonance to her portrayal of Mary Todd Lincoln, and Tommy Lee
Jones has fury and thunder as abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens. Lincoln
is not a rosy-hued look at the passage of the 13th Amendment. It acknowledges that this came about
through shady backroom deals and compromises. But in Stevens, the film finds a powerful moral center:
after Stevens compromises his values on the floor of the House, one of his
fellow abolitionists asks him with disgust if he would be willing to say
anything. Stevens responds that
yes, in fact, he would be willing to do and say anything to end the evil of
slavery. This picture is Hollywood
entertainment at its finest.
The Dark Knight Rises, the towering conclusion to Christopher
Nolan’s Batman trilogy, is one of the great screen epics. The film centers on a former superhero
who is old, broken and past his prime.
It confronts him with a villain who is physically stronger and possesses
a strong sense of his own moral righteousness. The battle between these two characters takes place in a
nightmare extension of our own reality in which the wealthy aristocracy is cold
and oblivious to the people below them and the mob that replaces them is
actually no better, in which the proliferation of nuclear technology comes back
to threaten the American Empire, and in which the practice of invaders claiming
to be liberators, so familiar after the Iraq War, is instead used against an
American city. In that vein, it is
fitting that the picture would be about people whose sins come back to haunt
them: about the child of a former enemy who returns to fulfill her father’s
goals, and about two people who thought they had buried a city’s evil only to
find that it has literally been building up underground. While it doesn’t challenge the conventions
of the superhero film like its predecessor, The
Dark Knight Rises does create an incredible emotional power. Part of this is due to the
performances. Christian Bale
continues his portrayal of Bruce Wayne, not only as a superhero but as a man trying
to bury his past; Michael Caine brings extraordinary emotion as he tries to
talk Bruce out of his self-destructive behavior. And Anne Hathaway steals the show as the Cat to Christian
Bale’s Bat. Nolan mounts an
impressive spectacle that manages to give weight to both the grand and the
intimate. Nowhere is this more
apparent than the sequence when a child sings the National Anthem at a football
game as a masked villain lays out the final pieces of his plan and walks down a
hallway to his destiny.
Martin McDonagh’s Seven Psychopaths is a wonderful,
explosive mix of violence, pitch-black humor and surprisingly thoughtfulness,
the story of two dog-nappers who must flee a mobster when they kidnap his dog,
while their friend (Colin Farrell) struggles with a screenplay idea. Sam Rockwell gives a wild, outlandish
performance as a man obsessed with the excitement of movie violence, a
performance only matched by the quiet soulfulness of Christopher Walken’s work as
Rockwell’s partner, a man with his own history of violence. The picture is funny, sickening and
exhilarating, not at all surprising from the writer/director of In Bruges. What is surprising is the thoughtful way McDonagh weaves
America’s history of violence into the proceedings, particularly the violence
of racism in the 20th Century and the atrocities of the Vietnam
War. Farrell’s screenplay idea
includes an unfinished scene involving a Vietnamese man preparing to commit an
act of revenge for the atrocities at My Lai, a scene that Farrell can only see
ending in violence. So he doesn’t
want to finish it. The solution
that Walken provides for this scene is one of the most thought-provoking and
moving moments in any film this year.
Michael Haneke’s Amour is a love story about
death. More specifically, it is
about inevitable death, death that you can see coming for a long time but have
no power to stop. It is a love
story about an old man whose wife has a stroke. Director Haneke simply watches the husband care for his wife
as she slowly slips toward death. He
must feed her, wash her, even help her to use the toilet. Eventually there comes the moment when
her words stop making sense, and he realizes that he will never actually have
another conversation with his wife.
They used to talk about music, poetry and art, but even though she is
still alive, they will never do that again. The next step is inevitable. There is no hope, no last minute cure. The picture is almost unbearably
painful at times, but what keeps it together is the simple fact that this is a
film about true love. The kind of
love that is simply flowers and candy would not last this long. The love onscreen in Amour is true love. It’s not pretty, and no one writes
poetry about it. No one, that is,
except Michael Haneke.
The Cabin in the Woods is a picture charged with excitement and
originality. It appears to be a
horror film about a group of college students being chased by monsters through
the woods. At least, it appears so
from the trailer. In fact, the
first scene of the film is straight out of an office comedy. But the office is no ordinary
office. It is the control center
for a real-life horror film. The
script from Joss Whedon and director Drew Goddard dances back and forth between
comedy and horror as the office workers in the control center monitor the
actions of the college co-eds who have stumbled into their trap and take bets
on how they will be killed. But
the picture doesn’t just stop at that twist. As the film progresses, more secrets are revealed, and more
and more hell breaks loose. The
film works as a fascinating deconstruction of the horror genre, but it works
even better as a wildly original entertainment.
One of the reasons why I go to the movies is to see pictures
like Safety
Not Guaranteed: a film so completely unexpected, so funny, and so full
of humanity that I forget that I’m sitting in a movie theater while I’m
watching it. The picture finds a
young magazine intern (Aubrey Plaza) assigned to investigate an incredibly
eccentric man (Mark Duplass) who claims to have invented time travel. She convinces the man that she wants to
time travel with him, and as he tells her his paranoid stories, involves her in
crimes, and gives her his training lessons for the journey she’s sure is
impossible, she falls in love with him.
The movie enfolds so naturally and effortlessly that we hold our breath,
hoping that this experience isn’t too good to be real. Even though it loses a bit of its magic
in the third act, the picture still ends up being an absolutely wonderful
experience.
As the first part of a trilogy, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
is not a complete narrative, but it is a complete emotional experience, a grand
and glorious adventure. Martin
Freeman gives a wonderful performance as Bilbo Baggins, the home-loving hobbit
who is convinced to join in an adventure with a wizard and thirteen dwarves, an
adventure that will have important consequences leading to the story we know as
The Lord of the Rings. Director Peter Jackson does not
disappoint in delivering spectacular action sequences: standouts include an
encounter with three trolls, a rollercoaster battle with goblins, and a
cliff-hanging climax in a mountain forest. But the most memorable moments are quiet dialogue
scenes. The lengthy opening party
scene at Bilbo’s home in the Shire is reminiscent of the wedding scenes in The Godfather and The Deer Hunter in how it establishes the many characters we will
follow on the journey: it features two particularly wonderful dialogue
sequences in which Gandalf the wizard tries to coax Bilbo to go on the
adventure and a cautious dwarf attempts to talk his leader out of the quest. One of my favorite moments comes later
in the picture as one of Bilbo’s companions realizes that he has never known
what it is like to have a home.
But the most memorable scene in the entire film is the confrontation
between Bilbo and Gollum beneath the Misty Mountains. Here is where Bilbo finds a very special gold ring and makes
a crucial decision to spare a life.
In returning to Middle-Earth, Peter Jackson has created another stunning
adventure.
A list of ten films is certainly not enough for a
celebration of film, so here is a list of the other pictures that I enjoyed in
2012 (in alphabetical order):
Argo: Ben Affleck’s 1970’s-style thriller about the attempt to
rescue six Americans from Iran after the 1979 revolution using a cover story
from Hollywood. The opening
sequence depicting the storming of the American Embassy in Tehran is masterful
cinema. A summer entertainment for
adults.
The Avengers: Joss Whedon’s exhilarating comic book epic was
one of the finest mainstream entertainments in years.
Beasts of the Southern Wild: A dreamlike examination of nature
and destruction from a child’s point of view. Young Quvenzhané Wallis has a commanding screen presence.
Bernie: Richard Linklater’s biting dark comedy starring Jack
Black as a beloved man in a Texas town who almost gets away with the murder of
a widely-hated old woman.
Brave: Pixar’s visually wonderful film about an
independent-minded Scottish princess and her mother.
Django Unchained: Quentin Tarantino’s violent, funny and
disturbing slavery-western-exploitation picture. Jamie Foxx creates a classic Western hero and Christoph
Waltz brings great emotional resonance to the film.
Flight: Denzel Washington is fantastic in the role of an
alcoholic pilot who comes under scrutiny after he pulls off a miraculous
landing of a broken airliner.
Director Robert Zemeckis returns to live action with an intimate
character study that also happens to contain an airplane crash that is one of
the most terrifying sequences in recent film history.
The Grey: A harrowing film about survival in a land of ice and
wolves with a fantastic lead performance by Liam Neeson and surprisingly
thoughtful dialogue about life and death.
The Hunger Games: The exhilarating adaptation of Suzanne Collins’
novel about a futuristic dystopia where teenagers fight to the death on
national television.
Killing Them Softly: A fascinating crime picture about a
stickup that sends shockwaves through a community of New Orleans
criminals. Brad Pitt, James
Gandolfini and Richard Jenkins give great performances as people who have spent
far too many years in their lives of crime, and the robbery scene is a
masterpiece of suspense.
The Master: Paul Thomas Anderson’s ambitious and elusive film
about a cult leader and the disturbed war veteran who encounters him. I must admit that I still don’t
understand this picture, but I also have to admit that I have never seen
anything quite like it.
Prometheus: A thought-provoking and visually astonishing
science-fiction/horror film from Ridley Scott about a group of scientists
searching a distant planet for the creators of humanity.
Red Hook Summer: Spike Lee’s messy, exhilarating return to
Brooklyn with an astonishing performance by Clarke Peters as a preacher with a
secret.
Silver Linings Playbook: David O. Russell’s romantic comedy
about a man just released from a mental institute and a woman with her own
emotional problems. Jennifer
Lawrence gives an exciting, high-wire performance.
Zero Dark Thirty: A thrilling and horrifying account of the
hunt for Osama bin Laden. Jessica
Chastain is terrific as the woman who doggedly pursued him, representing an
entire country that destroyed its soul in a decade-long pursuit of vengeance.
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Since I did not have a chance to see everything I would have
liked to see this year, here is a list of all the films that I wanted to see
but missed: Anna Karenina, Cloud Atlas, The Deep Blue Sea, Haywire, Holy Motors, The
Impossible, The Imposter, The Kid With a Bike, Rust
and Bone, Side by Side, This is Not a Film, The
Turin Horse.
And here we are again, at the end of a year in cinema and
the start of a brand new one…
