January 1- 7, 2004

movies

Repetition and Revenge

Vengeance is mine: Kuriyaki Chiara goes in for the kill in Kill Bill: Vol. 1.

Different movies, same themes: the films of 2003.

by Cindy Fuchs

The year’s cinematic output had everything to do with the complex cultural climate. The fear of mortality, the yearning for connection and the lust for vengeance appeared again and again in comedies, action flicks or serious year-end sagas. Such trauma is framed variously, in Pixar’s too-comforting Finding Nemo and Olivier Assayas’ truly unsettling demonlover, the unsurprising Return of the King and the unoriginal Bad Boys II. Even movies so overtly un-fraught as Something’s Gotta Give or American Splendor are haunted by death, in the form of "humorous" heart attacks or Our Cancer Year.

For all the dire thematics, girls, especially, came of age, repeatedly and with good grace: Whale Rider honored one's aspirations as her legacy, and Thirteen reframed another's fears to uncover her strength, with the redoubtable help of Holly Hunter's great performance. Parminder Nagra and Keira Knightley lit up Bend It Like Beckham, and the latter held her own with Johnny Depp, who gave the year's most delightful performance in the unexpectedly inoffensive Pirates of the Caribbean.

Documentaries also seemed more visible than usual: Jennifer Dworkin's Love and Diane, Lauren Lazin's Tupac: Resurrection, Kim Bartley and Donnacha O'Briain's The Revolution Will Not Be Televised and José Padilha's Bus 174 each offers a stunning, very different portrait of people surviving extraordinary circumstances (or not, in the cases of Tupac and young Brazilian bus hijacker Sandro do Nascimento). And Errol Morris' The Fog of War may be 2003's most important political assessment. Though Philip Glass' score and the director's visual stylization are (again) repetitive, self-involved and occasionally overwhelming, Robert Strange McNamara's recollections, phone calls and interview slivers make for mesmerizing, if alarming, subject matter. Drawing insidious connections between academic excellence, marketing cars and economizing military operations, the movie leaves no doubt how aggression and arrogance come together to make war.

21 Grams, Alejandro Gonzlez Iñrritu's first American feature, is laced with daunting metaphors and philosophical meanderings, fragments so precisely chaotic that they resemble mathematics. At first look, the contrivance is overbearing, but the film merits re-viewing, and not only for the exceptional performances (see Naomi Watts, Benicio Del Toro and Melissa Leo especially). Trying to make sense of faith, violence, addiction and desire, the characters connect only in naive efforts to control their fates, by self-destruction and revenge. Loss is perpetual -- we're all in "death's waiting room," after all -- but they hope against odds, making the film perversely optimistic for all its already notorious pains.

28 days later offers a timely notion: The end of civilization is sparked by rage, weaponized. Grim and giddy at the same time, Danny Boyle's zombie-ish movie takes aim at popular apathy and military righteousness as much as scientific ambition. Surely not a new idea, but speeded up and updated, this reiteration of Night of the Living Dead is so light on its scuttling feet that it makes the fear seem immediate, again.

City of God, by Fernando Meirelles and Ktia Lund, brings kinetic zip to both gangster and coming-of-age conventions. Its narrator a homeless kid turned photographer, the film frames startling violence with equal parts mourning, terror and familiarity. Li'l Zé (Leandro Firmino da Hora) is the resident monster, dark and "ugly" in a way that reproduces and underlines the racism of the "city" that produces him.

The Dancer Upstairs, the first film directed by John Malkovich, focuses on the painstakingly self-reflective Rejas (Javier Bardem, whose performances here and in Mondays in the Sun are heartbreakingly restrained, refreshingly unlike the powerhousey acting that American actors tend to offer). His detective refuses to claim victory even as the film will not articulate a resolution. Instead, he remains haunted by his past and present, aware that he can't save the world but unwilling to stop trying. Watching his young daughter's ballet performance at film's end, his sad eyes reveal all and not enough. He's still preparing, endlessly patient.

The title of Stephen Frears' Dirty Pretty Things refers to many "things," simultaneously dirty and pretty. Among these are the bodies always at stake. Selling and buying, using and abusing bodies -- in parts, in sex acts, in wretched and depressing labor -- is the basis of capitalism. Most effectively, of course, bodies here are full of secrets and significance. Like the cabdriver/hotel clerk played by Chiwetel Ejiofor (in the year's most subtle performance), the "invisible people," who enable daily urban existence -- restaurant meals, hotel stays, rides across town -- float to the seeming surface of Frears' oddly elegant, low-key, politically charged melodrama.

Gus Van Sant redeems himself, with Elephant and Gerry (stunningly shimmery until its boggy end). Elephant's hovering camera and repeated scenes linger on cryptic, luscious details of high school kids' lives, as if these offer clues to their doubts, feelings of abandonment or necessary compromises. Van Sant is, as always, attentive to the kids' pretty bodies and faces, but even those who are less than luminous in a conventional sense have time here to reveal their briefly lived depths.

The most effective film that I don't want to see again, Gaspar Noé's Irréversible is, on one hand, a gimmick movie, not only in its reverse structure, but also in the pregnancy that's supposed to make everything that much worse. But it can't be worse. The movie makes you pay for even thinking that pleasures might be had from watching violence on screen. On a kind of flip side, Kill Bill: Vol. 1 is convulsive, frenetic and generic, wholly watchable, again and again. A film fanatic's wet-dreamy spasm, QT's fourth film is also an exquisite paean to Uma Thurman's exquisite face and vulnerable body (and crooked feet), and, more generally and less interestingly, the wondrous and resolute resilience of girls.

Sofia Coppola's Lost In Translation begins with its most perfect, inscrutable image: Scarlett Johansson's pink panties. But the film's real mystery is the site of loss, metaphorical but also literal. Japan, Japanese culture and people recede from Charlotte and Bob (Bill Murray) in ways they can't begin to comprehend. By the end, the white folks form their own sorts of still lives. If read as a love story, the film seems solipsistic, insensitive to Japanese specifics; if understood as an exploration of willful, conditioned and even unintentional poor reading (translating) by its American characters and their self-involved culture, it's both less and more disturbing.

And at last, though hardly least, most emphatic praise for a few first films: Catherine Hardwicke's moving Thirteen, Justin Lin's vibrant Better Luck Tomorrow, Eric Byler's complexly poetic Charlotte Sometimes and Peter Sollett's insightful Raising Victor Vargas. To underline the sheer poise of just the last listed: In a memorably simple sequence, 16-year-old Victor (Victor Rasuk), eager to impress, buys Judy (Judy Marte) a "Homies" action figure (the one that pops out of the machine happens to be in a wheelchair). Leaving him in the street outside the convenience store ("You call me, right?" he asks repeatedly), she takes the toy home and places it thoughtfully on her dresser. This brief moment says as much about her self-understanding as any multiple-minutes of standard teenflick chat. And it leaves open a possibility: Movies can make meaning without car crashes and explosions. They need not repeat ideas or celebrate vengeance to be expressive and evocative.

Cindy Fuchs' best movies of 2003

City of God

Dirty Pretty Things

The Fog of War

Elephant

21 Grams

Lost In Translation

28 Days Later …

The Dancer Upstairs

Kill Bill: Vol. 1

Irréversible