Tried and True

Movies that seek to separate fact from fiction.

by Cindy Fuchs

MY LITTLE PHONY: Did 4-year-old Marla create the artworks featured in My Kid Could Paint That? (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

This year's best films are structured as quests. While they rarely achieve their stated aims — truth, justice, a sense of moral order — they find in their seeming failures more remarkable ends. If the films reveal worlds rife with corruption, they also provoke profound questions. How is truth or nobility defined? And how different might these worlds be if only such quests might start from somewhere else?

Imagine, for example, that Charles Burnett's first feature, Killer of Sheep, had actually been released to theaters in 1977, when he made it. Just this year released to theaters and DVD, the movie follows the struggle of Stan (Henry Gayle Sanders) to find meaning amid soul-crushing poverty and loneliness. Facing death each day on his job at a slaughterhouse, Stan yearns for stability. His labors and frustrations are captured in stark, beautiful black and white, his emotional depths rendered in images so stirring that the film seems to rewrite what's possible in film.

Such possibilities are approached, at least, in today's more adventurous movies. Consider the lyrical brilliance of Golden Door, directed by Emanuele Crialese. It narrates another sort of search, as immigrants from Sicily make their way by ship to Ellis Island at the turn of the 20th century. Seeking economic salvation, Salvatore (Vincenzo Amato) and his family endure a dark and raucous passage. On board, he meets the woman who may or may not embody his dream, the alluringly red-gloved Lucy Reed (Charlotte Gainsbourg). Their relationship, charted in delicate passings on deck and eventual agreements on land, subtly evokes the early promise of the United States.

Both Andrew Dominik's The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood offer something like next steps in the dissection of a seeming national potential. In the first, which begins in 1881, the fantasy of infinite prosperity is complicated not by criminality but by celebrity. While Jesse (Brad Pitt) and his brother Frank (Sam Shepard) seek to leave their notoriety behind, the ultimate fanboy Robert Ford (Casey Affleck) pursues a grisly conclusion to his desire not only to admire his idol, but to be him. The movie explores the dangers of consumer culture, especially in its final third, when the assassin not only becomes famous for his deed, but re-enacts it nightly onstage, shooting Jesse James again and again.

Anderson's film, based on Upton Sinclair's 1927 novel Oil!, lays out an ostensibly basic structure: The opposition of commerce and religion as these forces shaped the U.S. in 1898, the self-proclaimed oilman Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) finds his first well, then parlays his talent-cum-expertise into an empire of exploitation and profits. Embodying the most visible challenges to his self-delusions are his son, H.W. (played as a boy by the extraordinary Dillon Freasier) and the preacher Eli Sunday (Paul Dano). The film's schematic framework shape is complicated at every step by stunning oil-field visuals and Day-Lewis' mesmerizing performance.

Another sort of pursuit is represented in Zodiac, directed by David Fincher and starring Jake Gyllenhaal as the newspaper cartoonist Robert Graysmith, whose pursuit of the Zodiac killer consumed him. Abetted at first by inspector David Toschi (Mark Ruffalo) and reporter Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr.), Graysmith persists in his search for the killer's identity. The film reflects not only the discontents of the investigation, but also the ways that celebrity and violence intertwine in myth and truth.

The impossibility of truth is crucial in three excellent documentaries. My Kid Could Paint That, by Amir Bar-Lev, begins as one story and becomes another. At first investigating definitions of art — in the gallery world, in the minds of critics, even in the ways artists imagine themselves — the film eventually becomes an investigation of documentary as a genre and the limits of documentation. The more the film grants parents Laura and Mark Olmstead opportunities to show the truth of their 4-year-old daughter Marla's brilliance, the less convincing their story becomes.

Two films focused on the war in Iraq also explore the permeable boundaries between fiction and truth. Usama Alshaibi's smart first feature, Nice Bombs, charts his 2004 return to Baghdad with wife Kristie. Endeavoring to make sense of the devastation he finds, Alshaibi manages a consistently acute observation of tensions between troops and citizens, expectations and realities.

Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker's extraordinary The Prisoner or: How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair begins with a decision to follow up on an Iraqi prisoner spotted first in their film about U.S. troops, 2004's Gunner Palace. Journalist Yunis Khatayer Abbas, relegated with his brothers to Abu Ghraib for some three years, here recounts his ordeal with wit and profound cultural insight.

Other visions of oppression are more systemic but no less personal. Cristian Mungiu's astonishing 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days charts the ordeal of two students as they procure an illegal abortion during Ceausescu's reign in 1980s Romania. Jafar Panahi's Offside follows a group of female soccer fans as they are arrested attempting to attend a World Cup qualifying match at Tehran's Azadi Stadium. Even as they are stymied and contained, the girls find strength in one another.

And at last, the movie quests of 2007 were not always doomed. Joon-ho Bong's The Host is at once a clever paean to old-school atomic-monster movies, a satire of nationalist dreams and an enchanting coming-of-age tale. The creature embodies a grace that is, in the end, overshadowed by its young victim, Hyun-seo (Ko A-sung). Resourceful as she resists her fate, she's not so much vengeful as she is courageous, aware of her limits and the truth she faces. She's an ideal hero for our moment.

(c_fuchs@citypaper.net)