January 1- 7, 2004

movies

No End in Sight

ANSWERED WITH A QUESTION MARK: Robert McNamara in the mesmerizing, miasmic The Fog of War.

2003's best movies avoided endings, happy or otherwise.

by Sam Adams

It’s official, from Time and Newsweek on down: 2003 was "the year of the documentary." But while the spotlight on documentary filmmaking is certainly welcome (not to mention overdue), it’s worth asking why nonfiction films have suddenly become so much more satisfying than their fictional counterparts. Sure, the year’s crop of documentary films was truly extraordinary, but that’s not enough to explain the medium’s abrupt embrace by a critical establishment that typically treats documentaries as second-class citizens.

First, rewind a few months. While industry observers bemoaned Hollywood's lackluster summer, I found myself with a surfeit of movies to recommend as the season drew to a close: Swimming Pool, Dirty Pretty Things, The Secret Lives of Dentists, Mondays in the Sun, The Magdalene Sisters, American Splendor, Lost In Translation and so on. Yet when it came time to ponder which might make the year-end cut, I found, to my surprise, that none of them did. Worth seeing, all, but somehow unsatisfying in the end, parts greater than the whole. (Its place at the head of last week's Village Voice film poll confirms Lost In Translation as the most overrated movie of the year: If you're going to overlook the movie's sentimentality in favor of the complex comic performance at its center, you might extend the same courtesy to Elf.) One by one, the year's almost-best movies betrayed their own possibilities, as if the stories they told didn't want to end. It was all by way of leading up to the ultimate anticlimax, The Return of the King, which suffered less from its multiple denouements than the disappointment of being only as astonishing as its predecessor. Perhaps in a year where "Mission Accomplished" became Mission: Intractable, pat conclusions no longer seemed sufficient. The year's best movies, documentary or not, ended with a question mark, not a period: What happens next?

In documentaries, by definition, the story continues after the cameras stop. Three of the year's best fiction films embraced that open-endedness, using nonactors and documentary techniques to blur the line between real and reel. The ultimate rebuttal to cinematic certainty, Elephant infuriated some with its ambiguous re-creation of the Columbine massacre, but their anger only vindicates the movie's enterprise. Harris Savides' camera silently shadows Gus Van Sant's cast of teenage nonactors through the halls of an unnamed high school, their improvised dialogue full of banality, not foreboding. The sight of two camo-clad, duffel bag-toting teens entering the grounds is enough to tell the audience what's to come, but even when the movie rewinds to show the killers-to-be suffering abuse at their classmates' hands, you can't make the link to the impending tragedy. Much as it mounts a devastating critique of the high-school horror show, Elephant declines to manufacture comforting cause-and-effect certainties. Clues might have been missed, cries for help unheard, but in the end, there's no way anyone could have seen it coming -- which means it will almost certainly happen again.

Unsolvable problems are at the heart of Frederick Wiseman's Domestic Violence and Domestic Violence 2 (seen locally on public television), as well as Steve James' Stevie and Jennifer Dworkin's Love and Diane (a last-minute exclusion from the Big List). Pushing through the two-hour barrier (in Wiseman's case, shattering it), they showed reality exactly as Hollywood doesn't, in all its incomprehensible, ungraspable complexity. A long-form essay on liberal guilt, Stevie explores James' attempts to reconnect with the boy he mentored in college, now a grownup with legal and emotional problems. If James is ultimately powerless to affect the course of another man's life, the battered spouses of Domestic Violence (like the mother and daughter in Love and Diane) are determined to change their own. But as Wiseman's two films, with a combined running time of more than six hours, show, the women and the systems set up to help them often reach out in different directions, or at different times. Studded with 911 calls, where police struggle vainly to sort through incompatible accounts of the same event, the films, like Elephant, suggest that violence is too embedded in the human character to be addressed by anything as cumbersome as bureaucratic institutions.

Drawn from dozens of hours' worth of interviews with former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, Errol Morris' The Fog of War (due for release in January) shows just how hard it is to turn the ship of state. Already criticized by some historians for its alleged failure to pin down the elusive McNamara, Fog instead lets him contradict himself: One moment, he's quoting his onetime superior, Gen. Curtis LeMay, to the effect that if they'd lost WWII, he and McNamara would have been justly "tried as war criminals" for the firebombing of Tokyo, the next he's blithely proclaiming that "you must be prepared to do evil to do good." No doubt those who found Elephant inconclusive will find The Fog of War similarly maddening, which is as good a reason as any to look forward to its release.

Violence against the state, rather than in its name, is the focus of Sam Green and Bill Siegel's documentary, The Weather Underground, as well as Peter Watkins' semi-documentary feature, La Commune (Paris, 1871), and John Malkovich's The Dancer Upstairs. All three housed the same ugly truth: that violence may be an appealing, even rational, response to an unresponsive government. With decades of hindsight, The Weather Underground was the most remorseful, as onetime '60s radicals reflected (some unrepentantly) on how close they came to killing in the name of justice. Dancer's enigmatic revolutionaries (modeled on Peru's Shining Path) cross that line, leaving Javier Bardem's disillusioned police detective to uncover their tracks, protecting a government he barely believes in. Though damaged by an extraneous quasi-love story, Dancer kept its eyes open where The Weather Underground blinked. Its terrorists carry through on their threats, and with no public manifesto, their violence stands for itself, for the ugly, seductive power of chaos. For a moment, it let terrorism seem appealing. Watkins' revolutionaries, seizing a brief moment in French history, bury themselves in manifestoes, self-destructing before the government troops march in and mow them down. But for his cast of nonactors, the film's history isn't in the past: It's right now. Boldly reinventing the form (and taking six hours to do it), La Commune takes Faulkner's axiom that "the past is not even past" to heart. The several dozen people who braved a snowstorm to make International House's single screening were justly rewarded.

Nathaniel Kahn's My Architect, a son's attempt to reconcile his famous father's work with the man he hardly knew, was deceptively simple. But those who took it for another egocentric vanity project missed Kahn's larger investigation: To what extent is knowing an artist's work the same as knowing the artist? The tenderness with which Kahn films his father's buildings suggests a belated embrace, but they can be as cold and formal as Louis Kahn himself. When he finally finds a building he can truly love, he's brought himself to a new place of understanding, and us along with him. Robert Altman's The Company (due in January) may not have pleased some dance aficionados with its warts-and-all portrait of Chicago's Joffrey Ballet, or its beyond-the-proscenium style of filming the dances themselves. But Altman's skill at capturing performance on celluloid remains unparalleled, and the film's mixture of real and documentary elements is a perfect blend.

Finally, two products from the dream factory, in a year that was short on dreams. Finding Nemo was Hollywood filmmaking the way Hollywood doesn't make them anymore, a vast collective effort yoked to a singular sensibility, its ostensible kiddie-movie tag a trap for those who think House of Sand and Fog is "mature." Preceded by trailers that made it look like an artistic train wreck, Joel and Ethan Coen's Intolerable Cruelty was a box of poisoned chocolates, a glossy rom-com whose characters were as vapid and self-absorbed as Gigli's, except that they were supposed to be unlikable. An assault on its own genre, Cruelty was kind to its audience, trusting them to get the joke; they apparently didn't, but no matter. Its unhappy happy ending (or is it the other way around?) was the perfect capper, a masochist's just desserts.

Sam Adams' Best movies of 2003

Elephant

Finding Nemo

Intolerable Cruelty

Domestic Violence/Domestic Violence 2

Stevie

The Company

The Fog of War

La Commune (Paris, 1871)

The Dancer Upstairs

The Weather Underground

My Architect