December 30, 2004-January 5, 2005
movies
Fall Guys
 deep blue: Kate Winslet and Jim Carrey share a moment in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.  |
|
With American authority on the ropes, 2004's movies were full of damaged men.
Sam Adams' Best of 2004:
THE WAR IN IRAQ
WHAT THE BLEEP DO WE KNOW?
--Ritz East marquee, October 2004
So: What the bleep do we know? The American people trust a confident liar over an honest prevaricator, "moral values" means preferring graphic flagellation to a stray nipple, and red and blue make bruise violet. The Bill of Rights would be worth more with an invisible treasure map on the back, and Jesus died because Michael Moore hates America. Everyone clear so far?
The empire was born and died in the six months between Troy and Alexander, which started to feel like the movie of the year (in the Time sense) the instant Colin Farrell took an arrow in the gut. Messy, grotesque, bloated and overtly misogynist — all by way of obviating the "directed by Oliver Stone" credit — the unofficial sequel to JFK forecast an empire killed by its own success, devastated by the folly of an Eastern campaign to unify the Christian and Muslim worlds. Any similarity between persons living and brain-dead is purely ontological.
Even if Bush emerged from the hail of attack documentaries 51 percent unscathed, others weren't so lucky, from underprotected American soldiers to the people whose torture his administration promoted. With American authority at a low ebb, the movies were full of damaged men struggling to define themselves in a world that seemed to have no use for them. Whether you're an unpublished novelist or an out-of-work superhero, you're nobody 'til somebody loves you.
The metaphysical counterparts to election-year muckraking, What the Bleep Do We Know? and I Huckabees wrestled with the mysteries of existence (not to mention the rules of typography); both ended up on their backs, but only one had Mark Wahlberg to cushion the blow. An old soldier (at least via Three Kings), Wahlberg's Tommy Corn was driven close to madness by the attempt to reconcile the curse of consciousness with a middle-class lifestyle. If you can't buy sneakers without condemning some dark-skinned child to a life of indenture, how can you get out of bed in the morning? Based on his haircut, the answer is reluctantly.
I've complained in the past that critics didn't take Pixar's movies seriously enough, but after reading one too many dissections of Brad Bird's The Incredibles as red-state tract, maybe it's time to go back to treating them like cartoons. Perhaps Mr. I does represent America's noblest vision of itself (and its most self-pitying): the unappreciated superhero/power who's made the world too safe to require his services. But is his desire to live up to his own image such a bad one? Couldn't the U.S. stand to lose a few pounds, get out the old suit and regain its sense of purpose? A Very Long Engagement might have been more explicitly antiwar, but its digitally massaged images were almost as unsightly as The Phantom of the Opera. Engagement took the life out of live action, while Incredibles put the anima in animation; its cartoons were more human than any of Jean-Pierre Jeunet's marionettes. (Don't get me started on The Polar Express's creepy simulacra. That moustache must have given kids nightmares.)
The worst movie of John Sayles' career, Silver City mixed liberal contempt with populist hand-holding, as if portraying George W. Bush — sorry, Dickie Pilager — as a bumbling boob came close to calculating the depth of his evil. Jonathan Demme's The Manchurian Candidate was an honorable failure rather than an outright one, but its anticorporate conspiracy theories paled beside the real thing. The most cutting fictional critique came by way of M. Night Shyamalan's The Village, though its parable of "war on terror" mendacity -- moralistic villagers bound together by an expedient lie, a fraudulent enemy standing in for a real one — was either overlooked or downplayed by critics busy complaining they guessed the ending early. Still, no horror movie was as chilling as the documentary The Corporation, with its expansive demonstration of just how far corporate "values" have redefined global society.
M. Night notwithstanding, only David Mamet's underrated Spartan pushed the limits of paranoia. A self-described "worker bee," Val Kilmer's black ops specialist was Mr. Incredible's bizarro twin, a cold soldier in a world where even the president is a pawn in a larger game. Defying easy red/blue analysis, the movie was too paranoid to take sides, which might have been why audiences preferred the loathsome Man on Fire, where Denzel Washington's righteous angel gives the bad guys a dynamite enema. In a perfect précis of Bush's ever-shifting Iraq rationale, Denzel's toxic avenger ends up vindicated despite the fact that the murder he's retaliating for never took place. He's right, even if he's wrong. Who needs evidence when you've got God on your side?
Tripped up by bad intelligence, both Washington's Creasy (rhymes with "sleazy") and Kilmer's nameless, homeless warrior are dogged by the shadow of mistakes past. But neither is as haunted, or as haunting, as the Khmer Rouge jailer in Rithy Panh's S21, who flawlessly re-enacts his old routine decades after the fact, issuing orders to invisible prisoners as if his conscience won't allow him to move on. Unlike Hotel Rwanda's slick abjection — genocide staged while-u-wait — S21 offers only testimony and documents as proof of infamy: The past lives on in the living, or else it dies.
Bright Leaves brought Ross McElwee to his own, or at least his latest, confrontation with the past, as he chased the flickers of family history in a Hollywood feature. A masterpiece of allusive montage and deconstructive autobiography,the film was notably overshadowed by Jonathan Caouette's inferior Tarnation, whose easy biographical hook and low price point made it irresistible feature-bait. Critics fixated on the minuscule budget and crummy aesthetics, not to mention the genuinely awful circumstances of Caouette's life, as the badge of the movie's authenticity. Warped by Capturing the Friedmans and reality TV, one writer went so far as to cite the fact that Caouette left a festival early to care for his sick mother as proof of how "real" the movie was. (Good thing she didn't get better.) A dazzling cinema verite essay, Amie Siegel's Empathy mixed documentary with psychoanalysis (not to mention architectural criticism) more effectively, but without Tarnation's gonzo montage and without a story to sell, Siegel was effectively ignored.
Harrowing as Tarnation might have been, the year's most naked autobiography was at least nominally fictional. Pilloried by Roger Ebert, who honorably flip-flopped when he saw the recut version, Vincent Gallo's The Brown Bunny was a stunning act of self-obsession. Narcissistic in the root sense, the film is irresistibly drawn to its star/director/writer/cinematographer/editor's countenance. But Gallo persistently cuts into his face with the edge of the frame, an act of artistic self-mutilation startling in its aesthetic violence, and one that destroys any notion of the film as a vanity project. (Anti-vanity is more like it.)
Crippled as surely as Gallo by a poisonous brew of vanity and self-doubt, Will Ferrell's helmet-haired newsreader was a comic but cutting parody of 1970s masculinity. Like Brown Bunny, Anchorman is flooded with nostalgia for the polyester decade, investing it with a mythic resonance as the last time when a man knew where he stood. Under Anchorman's goofy burlesque is some of Brown Bunny's sadness, perfectly captured in Ferrell's deceptively complex performance. His ability to reduce an audience to tears of laughter is impossible to ignore, but people who don't realize you have to be smart to play dumb continue to underestimate the richness of his gifts: He's not just one of the best comedians in American movies, but one of the best actors, period.
Coddled well into adulthood, Ferrell's big babies are still learning to walk, while the hapless duo in Alexander Payne's Sideways can't stop tripping over their own feet. Of all the year's baffling phenomena — have I really not mentioned The Passion of the Christ? --the anti-Sideways backlash was among the most preposterous. Apparently the fact that there's nothing to dislike is enough to make some people dislike it. For a modest four-hander, Sideways had amazing staying power. I'd been thinking for months that the fear of mediocrity which governs the characters' lives was universal, until, just after the election, it hit me: Fifty-one percent of the electorate just announced they prefer mediocre to egghead. Is that why Bush and Ashcroft peek in on that twisted post-adulterous fuck?
The parade of damaged men wound on: Crimson Gold's Hossain Emadeddin, Collateral's Jamie Foxx, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind's Jim Carrey. Foxx deserves singling out, especially since his inferior performance in Ray got all the hype. No disrespect to Ray Charles, but it's a lot more common to see a black actor play an unfaithful drug addict than an aspiring workingman. Collateral got noticed for its DV photography and Tom Cruise's hair, but the truly extraordinary moment came early on, as Foxx and Jada Pinkett Smith reached across class lines to treat each other as human beings.
But for all the bruising and battering others took, no one was as literally damaged as Carrey's Joel Barrish, trying to patch together his own mind as it disintegrates around him. Joel's struggle was purely personal, but his realization that future happiness can only be built on the charred ruins of past mistakes ought to have been an object lesson to a nation busily writing its own book of laughter and forgetting. Even at their happiest moment, Joel and Clementine (Kate Winslet) were menaced by a break in the ice, a harbinger of crack ups to come. Hollywood "romance" is most often an insult to the real thing, but Charlie Kaufman and Michel Gondry made the year's most profoundly romantic movie by acknowledging that love is as much an act of will as of fate. Maybe it isn't happily ever after, but there's something beautiful about the notion that life offers as many second chances as it does opportunities to fuck up.
You had to take idealism where you found it this year: In Bernardo Bertolucci's maligned The Dreamers, which dared to suggest that movies might matter; in Greendale, whose swoony Super 8 conjured an eco-friendly fantasy whose characters don't like strangers, with or without cameras, on their land. Without a vision of a better world, what's left? Just the cold, diffuse white light that flooded dozens of movies this year, from Birth to The Assassination of Richard Nixon, Vera Drake to Notre Musique. Post-autumnal, the beautifully gloomy radiance set the stage for the winter of our disintegration. Maybe the pundits are right, and we are a nation divided, like Cate Blanchett arguing with herself in Coffee and Cigarettes. But while documentarians were diagnosing our ailments, a few fiction filmmakers had the courage and the vision to point the way forward. Michael Moore hinted at it, but Neil Young followed through, as did Bird, Bertolucci and Payne — hell, even Anchorman suggested that we can pull together when the monkeys attack. Instead of a frigid netherworld, give me Brown Bunny's endless road or Greendale's grainy paradise, even the dreamlike ochres of Alexander Sokurov's Father and Son. It's not enough to outline the future; we have to color it in.
Sam Adams' Best of 2004:
- Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
- The Brown Bunny
- Bright Leaves
- Greendale
- The Dreamers
- Crimson Gold
- Sideways
- S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine
- Spartan
- The Incredibles
- Anchorman
- Empathy
- The Corporation
— Respond to this article in our Forums — click to jump there
