The Beat Goes On

A few pulse-quickeners from a moribund year.

by Sam Adams

Digital tyros have been proclaiming the death of film for many years, but in 2006, the old guard joined the chorus. "Film is dead," I heard octogenarian documentary pioneer Richard Leacock proclaim in April, and in October, David Lynch echoed him, adding that after using a mid-range consumer camera to shoot his three-hour opus Inland Empire, shooting on film seems "like swimmin' through molasses." The syrupy slog through Empire's disconnected dystopia inadvertently points up the benefits of the discipline imposed by the high cost of celluloid, but regardless, it wasn't much of a year for the medium or its message. In a decade of year-ending, I've never had a harder time compiling a list of films I was genuinely enthusiastic about.

Black as my mood is, it's not surprising that my favorite movie is a two-and-a-half-hour journey to the end of the line. In a year where many movies barely skimmed the surface, The Death of Mr. Lazarescu literally got under my skin. The movie's extraordinary long takes forge a practically physical connection between audience and subject; I'll never forget the moment when I felt my own body jerk in response to Lazarescu's spasmodic cough. Watched over by Luminita Gheorghiu's battle-scarred paramedic, Dante Remus Lazarescu, played with majestic dishevelment by Ion Fiscuteanu, slips closer and closer to death, rendered mute and finally inert, relieved of his combative personality and reduced to his elemental physicality. There were plenty of bodies chopped up, mangled, dissected and split open this year, but only one that we were encouraged to take as our own.

Just for the record, I'm fully aware that Lazarescu sounds like a critics-only affair; it placed at or near the top of indieWIRE and Film Comment's polls (both of which I voted in), but made pennies at the box office. But if you could sit people down without telling them they're about to watch a two-and-a-half-hour movie with "death" in the title, I'm convinced audiences would find much to respond to. In other words: Just rent it, will ya?

At the other end of the spectrum is Tristram Shandy, which lives and (almost) dies by its words. Adapted from Laurence Sterne's putatively unadapatable novel, Michael Winterbottom's delirium-inducing farce spins in ever-decreasing circles, tying itself in pre-postmodern knots until you almost choke on the cleverness. And then, just when we've had enough, the movie breaks in two, pulling out of the fictional world and into the real one — or rather, a fiction masquerading as reality. The chaos of the novel's crisscrossing plots is replaced by the hubbub of a film set, but the theme that life is lived in the interstices between events remains remarkably consistent.

The Death of Mr. Lazarescu

The year's most enjoyable movie, and one of its most troubling, Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan became an unexpected hit and then an improbable whipping boy. Before we get to the Borat-bashers, a few words in favor of Kazakhstan's finest. Surely, no one except a humorless clod needs to be convinced of how balls-out funny Borat is. But watch it again, and it not only gets funnier, but weirder too: Did that car salesman really just suggest the optimum speed for running down a gypsy? Once you know where the encounters are going, you can watch in awe as Sacha Baron Cohen manipulates his willing victims, seizing on the merest impropriety and leveraging it to pry open a deep well of intolerance. Maybe it's not all fair, and it's definitely not nice, but God forbid we live in a world where only fair, nice people make movies.

What the Borat-bashers don't get is that there's no percentage in attacking Cohen. Like the humorless first-wave feminists who take issue with Borat's piggish slurs, the movie's critics can't help but come off as uptight squares, grousing about ethics and exploitation as if Cohen's targets were unlettered savages. (Scratch that: Somehow I don't see George Saunders and Joe Queenan getting their Irish up over a bunch of unlettered savages.) The movie's moral, if it has one, is that when someone sticks a camera in your face, you'd better act as if people might see what you do, a lesson that applies to drunken women-haters as much as to ousted senators. By quarrelling with the movie's purity, Borat's critics miss its bastard brilliance. Its cinema vérité miscegenation of fact and fiction is a challenge, not a shortcut, a head-warping conundrum that would make Herzog proud.

If mediocrity ruled in 2006, then Little Miss Sunshine was the film of the year. Rewriting the 1960s road trip as a road to nowhere, the movie rides a sputtering VW bus into the heart of darkness, a beauty pageant populated by bronzed, shellacked creatures more alien than the bloodthirsty Mayans of Apocalypto. Like Borat, Steve Carell's suicidal Proust scholar is a stranger in a strange heartland, his shell-shocked deadpan cueing the movie's raised-eyebrow tone. Some mistook its diffidence for contempt, but Sunshine's attack on the American obsession with success clearly comes from the inside. Featuring the most in-sync ensemble this side of United 93, the movie draws a convincing line from Frederich Nietzsche to Ron Popeil (and maybe to MC Hammer as well).

With the war in Iraq running low on gas, Americans averted their eyes in droves. Although documentary makers shined a light on both sides of the conflict, their works went undistributed and unseen. Despite strong reviews, James Longley's poetic Iraq in Fragments has yet to land a Philly play date, and I couldn't find a copy of Patricia Foulkrod's vital The Ground Truth: After the Killing Ends at any of my usual video stores. That's more of a scandal than a shame, since, with due apologies to An Inconvenient Truth, if there's one documentary you should see this year, The Ground Truth is it. Foulkrod's harrowing, no-fuss doc tells the story of the Iraq war entirely in the voices of the American servicemen and women who have put their lives, and their souls, on the line. A Winter Soldier for the Xbox generation, The Ground Truth details how recruits systematically have their resistance to taking life stripped away, training on video simulators that encourage them to literally view war as a video game. So much for hearts and minds: One Marine details how soldiers keep U.S. casualties low by designating "area targets" — the bloodcurdlingly bloodless term for mowing down everything that moves. Why take fire identifying a sniper when you can let God sort 'em out? Unlike the Hollywood cream puffs of Home of the Brave, these vets don't tear up as they describe killing women and children, but their distant, unblinking eyes tell the story of moral corrosion so deep and lasting that they, and their country, may never recover from it. Led by a commander in chief addicted to his own private reality, the country voted to make the war in Iraq go away, but these wounds will be festering for decades to come.

United 93

Of course, you can't entirely blame the American people for not facing facts. Critics and commentators stoked a spurious "too soon?" debate around United 93, pawning off their own misgivings on nonexistent third parties. Like World Trade Center, United 93 pulls a partial victory from the WTC wreckage, but its jingoist finale (mercifully tempered by the excision of a closing title proclaiming the flight's crash as the first victory in "America's war on terror") is largely overshadowed by its devastating portrait of a country in the grip of leaderless chaos. Every unanswered phone call brings up the memory of Bush reading "The Pet Goat" and Cheney scurrying off to his undisclosed location; the movie's subtext is that the flight's passengers took action because no one else would. Its cast stocked with unknowns and nonprofessionals, United 93 doesn't even name most of its players, whose collective suffering makes a poignant contrast to glory-hogging draft dodgers who reap the benefits of others' risk. Perhaps a special award ought to go to FAA Director of Operations Ben Sliney, who in restaging the confusion of that awful morning, implicitly accepts his own role in the disaster — far more than one can say for his so-called superiors.

While United 93 envisions Americans as nobler than their leaders, Lars von Trier's Manderlay implies that they're just bad enough to deserve one another. Bryce Dallas Howard's officious liberal occupies a Southern plantation with the help of her gangster father's goons and sets about distributing freedom as she sees it. Are the former slaves grateful? Not when the paternal protections that hid them from harm come tumbling down. Courting genuine offense rather than his typical knee-jerk provocation, Trier indulges the latent racism that runs through much of his work (see his script for the odious Dear Wendy), but the movie strikes home anyway, dynamiting the myth that freedom can be given rather than taken, and that merely unlocking the door is the same as giving people a new life. Now that they're done with Battle of Algiers, maybe the military brass should be Netflixing Manderlay instead.

Marie Antoinette and The Fountain aren't perfect movies, but their virtues, and vision, outshine their flaws. Sofia Coppola's Marie took a pounding for its supposed self-indulgence, but the puritans who attacked the movie's fashion fetish missed its conceptual rigor; if it weren't for the pink high-tops, the movie could have been directed by Straub-Huillet. Just as Coppola's Marie becomes the scapegoat for her husband's profligacy, so Coppola herself bore the brunt of dismissive attacks that invariably shaded into sexism. (Anthony Lane's high-handed New Yorker pan, which likened Coppola to a text-messaging Paris Hilton, was the worst of a bad lot.) That's not to say you're a sexist if you don't get it — just a humorless dink who doesn't understand the power of pop art. I mean, really: Is Marie an inch more quote-unquote self-indulgent than The Departed?

A doomed flower even before it was released, Darren Aronofsky's Fountain was transformed into a cult classic by polarized opening-week reviews and a kamikaze opening date. Hey honey, should we take the kids to Happy Feet, or a time-traveling triptych about the acceptance of mortality? Maybe it is goofy as shit, but I'm left awed by the breadth of Aronofsky's vision. How can you not love a movie where a guy whispers sweet nothings to a tree? If he'd made this 30 years ago and in Spanish, Aronofsky would be hailed as a psychedelic visionary rather than a wunderkind who got too big for his britches. Without slighting the fine-grain pleasures of a Mutual Appreciation or an Old Joy, they lack that sense of exhilaration you feel when an artist really swings for the fences. Say what you like about The Fountain or Marie Antoinette, but there's nothing timid about them.

The Devil and Daniel Johnston

Finally, with the possible exception of Borat, no movie delivered as much pure enjoyment as Dave Chappelle's Block Party, a vibrant concert film that pays tribute to music's ability to create and sustain community. And The Devil and Daniel Johnston chronicled the triumphs and trials of an outsider musician with fannish devotion and mature perspective. In a different year, these might be minor achievements, but with the medium-sucking wind, they were a breath of fresh air.

(sam@citypaper.net)