Top 10 List, 2007

 

Zodiac

While we’re thinking about long dark nights of the American

soul, it pays to take another look at David Fincher’s psychological thriller,

which kicked the year off right. It’s almost perverse, in this day and age, for

a major filmmaker to make a big Hollywood

movie about a serial killer who’s never caught. Scratch that. (The Coen

Brothers did that by the end of the year, anyway.) Zodiac was never “about” the

famous psychopath who terrorized San

Francisco in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It was

about a schlubby newspaper cartoonist and a police inspector who never

recovered from the epic mindfuck of trying to crack the case. And it’s about

Fincher himself — a notorious perfectionist who was a child during the Zodiac’s

reign of terror and who in adulthood marshaled considerable visual-effects

resources to make this digitally photographed procedural a preternaturally

authentic period piece, boasting the kind of overhead photography and tracking

shots that heretofore would have required a time machine to get in the can and

onto your local multiplex screens. Like There Will Be Blood above and Into the

Wild below it’s a distinctly creepy and impressively American movie, reflecting

one more facet of the national experience.

Into the Wild

More than anything else in recent memory, Into the Wild

reminded me of Vincent Gallo’s time-capsule road movie, The Brown Bunny. (Yes,

that’s a compliment.) Like Gallo, Sean Penn — employing his directorial chops

with smart, startling confidence — borrows stylistic tropes from 1970s cinema.

Here, they help prop up the out-of-time idealism evinced by his protagonist. As

the ill-fated (and, some would argue, ill-prepared) adventurer Christopher

McCandless, Emile Hirsch conveys exactly the right combination of gentle smarts

and naïveté. Penn portrays McCandless as a kind of folk hero, but won’t let him

completely off the hook for abandoning the family that loves him, or for

indulging in a cocky self-regard that helped lead to his death. That

undercurrent saves the film — with its whitewater-kayaking, moose-hunting,

testosterone-friendly scenarios — from playing as pure macho indulgence.

Instead, it unfolds as the tragedy of an American boy who’s wise and crazy, heroic

and pathetic: an American myth for the 21^st century.

The Bourne Ultimatum

How do you feel about waterboarding? Jason Bourne is against

it. Much ink was spilled in the latter half of the year about the commercial

failure of issue-oriented cinema directly addressing the Iraq War (think The

Kingdom, Lions For Lambs, and In the Valley of Elah). But less attention was

paid to the emotional subtext of the third movie in the Bourne trilogy, which

dealt finally with a soldier’s long-sublimated anger at being manipulated and

deceived by his commanding officers. Of course Shooter covered some of the same

territory — even making the anger felt toward U.S. lawmakers gunshot-explicit — and

it won’t be showing up on anyone’s best-of-2007

list. But Paul Greengrass smuggled the political allegory in with a boatload of

intense, nerve-jangling action scenes that emphasized the subjective camera — whether

it was gliding into a room just behind Matt Damon’s shoulders or making a

stuntman’s leap from building to building in a great, parkour-inflected rooftop

chase sequence, the strategy was to make audiences experience the same kind of

feelings as the confused but driven action hero. It worked a treat, as they

say. Jason Bourne, c’est moi.

Gone Baby Gone

Yes, I had my doubts. I’m not a big fan of Dennis Lehane’s

novels, and what critic was excited about the prospect of Ben Affleck making

his directorial debut? Turns out it’s the freshman film of the year. The

machinations behind the film’s central mystery turn out to be fairly ludicrous,

but they work brilliantly as emotional provocation. (Clint Eastwood, having

recently reinvented himself as an expert director of melodramas, might also

have had a field day with this material.) Affleck’s obvious affection for the

blue-collar Boston

milieu is a huge asset, and he gets a smart, unsentimental performance from his

little brother Casey that invests the film with an easy resonance. Also, Amy Ryan, in a big way: playing white trash with neither affection nor condescension. One day,

maybe this will make an interesting double feature with Juno — very different

films, of course, but both of them concerned in part with the popular American

pastime of criticizing other people’s fitness as parents.

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

This awkwardly (but aptly) titled film is a triumph of mood

worthy of Terrence Malick. Tracing the roots of celebrity culture all the way

back to 1883, writer/director Andrew Dominik imagines the last few months of

the life of Jesse James as a hazy battle of wits between the sharp, charismatic

bandit (Brad Pitt), the gang of thieves he no longer trusts, and the young

wannabe Robert Ford (Casey Affleck), who exhibits a neediness that borders on

creepy. Affleck has plenty of time — nearly three hours — to precisely detail

the ways Ford’s idolatry of James turned to resentment and betrayal, and Pitt

invests James with charm and humor to balance his occasional murderousness,

effectively imagining a man on the downhill side of his own legend. Cinematographer

Roger Deakins shoots some scenes with a vignette that blurs the edges of the

frame and gives the images a dreamlike feel suited to images half-remembered,

stories blurred by the cloudy-glassed lens of time. The result is a languorous

masterpiece — a revisionist western about myth, moral compromise, and the male

ego.

28 Weeks Later

I popped this one into the DVD player at year end just to

make sure I hadn’t gone completely crazy when I gave it, essentially, a rave

review. Happily, I found that this is still a terrific dystopian horror film

with just the kind of thumb-in-your-eye socio-political commentary that used to

make George Romero movies so special. (I wasn’t a big fan of Land of the Dead,

and I hold out some hope for Diary, but … ) The pre-title sequence alone is a

zombie classic, with its clever inversion of horror convention to emphasize the

safety in darkness while the eyeball-stabbing bursts of sunshine represent

chaos and terror. But things really start cooking when we visit London, which has become a sort of police state under the

protection of the U.S.

military, brought in to contain the terror threat. (Naturally, there’s an

essential declaration of mission accomplished.) Eventually, the guys with the

guns decide they have to firebomb the village in order to save it. Robert

Carlyle has a central role as a coward who left his wife to die among the

zombies, and director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo makes relentless use of windowpane

imagery to recall the last, poignant shot of the poor woman pounding on the

glass. I’ve never been a fan of fast zombies, which have lately all but

consigned the shambling, Tombs of the

Blind Dead-style undead to the dustheap of horror history, but they’re used

to good effect here — have you ever had a nightmare where you had to run flat-out

as fast as you could to keep some unmentionable thing from happening to you?

This film is about that nightmare. (I remember some griping among genre

aficionados about inconsistencies in the story — but complaining about the

finer points of zombie behavior is akin to whining that you can’t believe the talking

rat is controlling the chef by yanking on his hair.)

Manufactured Landscapes

One of my blind spots is probably documentaries — I would

almost always rather see a fiction film than a nonfiction film, and I sometimes

have a stupidly hard time separating my feelings about the aesthetics of a

documentary film from its qualities as journalism. But this film is fascinating

in every regard. It’s ostensibly a study of the work of Edward Burtynsky, whose

photography documents the effect of industry on natural landscapes, but it’s

also a film that encourages thought about the status of those photographs as

art. Further, it eventually deals with the unresolved tension between

Burtynsky’s photographs, which are largely apolitical, and the context of his

project, which is the increasingly intolerable transformation of the

environment by unchecked industry, particularly in China. The film puts the

photographs in some context, but never enters full-on didactic mode — which is

why it succeeds as art, rather than journalism. By that measure, it’s fairly

extraordinary. It deserves to be seen on a big screen, but check it out on DVD

if that’s what’s available to you.

No Country for Old Men

So who is this Anton Chigurh guy, anyway? I’ve seen

arguments that he represents death, or God, or fate. (Does he have to symbolize

anything?) OK. To me, he represents the existential position. His conversations

with his victims are the equivalent of a philosophical debate between someone

who believes in arbitrary, ultimately capricious fate, and some poor sucker who

still puts some trust in faith, love, free will and conscience. They’re tapped

phone calls from Hell to Heaven, charges reversed. But Chigurh never confronts

Llewelyn Moss. It’s unnecessary. There would be no argument, because Llewelyn

understands that point of view. Partly it’s something he learned and partly

it’s something he was born with, a knowledge that led him just so far and no

farther. It’s a fine film, but beyond the casting of Javier Bardem —

which is a stroke of genius, for sure, making this a top-10 entry and a

must-see — I’m not sure the Coens bring all that much to the table that wasn’t

already present in the source material. (I keep hearing how it’s Cormac

McCarthy’s worst book — which only makes me think I have to run out, like, right now and read everything the man

has ever written.)

 

Honorable mention (in no particular order): Margot at the Wedding, Day Night Day Night, Michael Clayton, The Lives of Others, Grindhouse, Black Snake Moan, The

Host, Black Book, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street