Rebel Forces

Films that made an impact this year were those that took their subjects to the extreme.

by Sam Adams

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Published: Dec 30, 2008

With Slumdog Millionaire still packing houses, it seems fitting to look back on 2008 as a year of Dickensian extremes. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, the spring of hope and the winter of despair. America revived its own myth, so rarely fulfilled, but the rise of the country's first nonwhite leader churned the sludge of racial resentment. Voters may have been unified in their dissatisfaction, but Obama's double-digit red state losses revealed a nation as divided as ever.

It's fitting, then, that the movies that cut through the clutter were those that pushed at the extremes, sacrificing comfort and mere perfection in the pursuit of outlaw visions. An exhibition system driven by star power and weekend grosses was ill-equipped to handle many of them, but they found ways, in theaters and out, of reaching those determined to seek them.

Savage Grace put off audiences (who may be excused) and critics (who may not) with its true-crime subject matter, but Tom Kalin's portrait of a wealthy family poisoned by moral rot was pure devastation. Julianne Moore put a cap on a career full of women imprisoned by privilege as a monstrous mother whose passions and proclivities were worthy of Greek tragedy

Audiences shied away from Taxi to the Dark Side, but for once the Oscars got it right, bypassing the usual suspects in favor of Alex Gibney's masterful exploration of an innocent Afghan who was beaten to death in U.S. custody. Errol Morris' Standard Operating Procedure looked into the eyes of Abu Ghraib's abusers, but Gibney climbed the chain of command, targeting the leadership vacuum that made obscenities both inevitable and predictable. Along with Jane Mayer's essential book The Dark Side, Gibney's documentary is an invaluable corrective to a government that has sought to leave no trace behind. Peter Galison and Robb Moss and Secrecy took the long view, tracing the government's penchant for covering its tracks back half a century, revealing that the state secrets privilege has been abused since its inception

Kelly Reichardt's Wendy and Lucy (opening in Philadelphia Jan. 23) is radical in its simplicity, a protest lodged in urgent whispers. As an itinerant woman whose lost dog and busted car threaten to sever the last shreds of her safety net, Michelle Williams is breathtaking in her restraint, fear and anger among the many luxuries she cannot afford. Shooting without lights in the permanently gray northwest, Reichardt captures a world of small kindnesses and big problems, an American landscape at dusk.

Wall-E and Blindness took opposite but no less compelling routes to the end of the world. Andrew Stanton's mechanized parable began as comic melancholy and ended as wishful farce, working backward from apocalypse toward a new beginning. The movie's dialogue-free first movement turned the technological cutting edge toward cinema's earliest pleasures, prompting comparisons to Jacques Tati's melancholy slapstick. The movie's second half drew fire from cultural conservatives who took umbrage at the attack on happy-faced lardasses, but the facts speak for themselves. 

With Blindness, Fernando Meirelles walked right up the brink and stared into the abyss until his eyesight failed. The movie was dismissed as heavy-handed by critics unable to distinguish polemic from pedantry, but the portrait of a society aching for a chance to dissolve was too trenchant to be swept aside. Deprived of their sight, the residents of an unnamed city assume they cannot be seen, bursting their bonds like unchaperoned children.

Just as bleak, though rarely seen as such, the Coen brothers' Burn After Reading was No Country for Old Men recast as manic comedy, with a handful of D.C. denizens clambering over each other for possession of a worthless (of course) computer disk. Churning through the alphabet soup of intelligence (ahem) agencies, the movie's target was hard to mistake; if people weren't so used to reflexively dismissing the Coens as glib stylists, they might have harkened to a film in which black-ops mucky-mucks knock off civilians at the drop of a hat, taking care only to keep blood off their shoes.

The birth pangs of new societies preoccupied The Class and The Edge of Heaven, which dissect the painful process of trading a corrupted past for an uncertain future. In The Class (opening in Philadelphia later this year), Laurent Cantet takes a Parisian classroom as his microcosm, a roiling multicultural soup a few degrees shy of a boil. The children of Africans, Asians and native French jockey for position, trying to find their place in a constantly shifting terrain. Watching them spar with their teacher, played by François Bégaudeau, whose memoir inspired the film, you have the sense of relationships being altered before your eyes, of something yet unseen slowly coming into focus.

Fatih Akin has broached the subject of Turkish immigrants and the new Germany several times before, but never with the precision or breadth of The Edge of Heaven. Spanning two countries and multiple protagonists, Akin creates a handful of characters whose lives are entangled whether they know it or not. From a Turkish-born professor of German literature to a disapproving hausfrau masterfully played by Fassbinder regular Hanna Schygulla, they move across borders and between worlds, belonging to both and to none. Apart from a small cadre of po-faced neorealists, American filmmakers have yet to address the country's ever-diversifying culture with anything like Akin's sophistication.

Against Wall-E's vision of a garbage-choked future, Werner Herzog's Encounters at the End of the World provides cold comfort, exploring the life that flourishes under the Antarctic ice. The conquistadors and madmen of Herzog's early films have given way to obsessives of a more sociable type: the scientists who leave nearly everything behind to study the frozen terrain at the world's tip

Too many of the year's most engaging films never made it to Philadelphia at all, from Abel Ferrara's batshit Mary to Kent MacKenzie's The Exiles, a searing black-and-white depiction of life among Los Angeles' American Indian population that got its first theatrical release 47 years after its initial showing. The latter will be out on DVD courtesy of Milestone films, but others, like Hirokazu Kore-eda's shattering Still Walking and Ronald Bronstein's skin-crawling Frownland, are still swimming the frozen wastes, looking for a soft spot in the ice.

(s_adams@citypaper.net)

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