Carrying a Big Stick

The year's best films are characterized by restraint, rather than bombast.

by Sam Adams

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Published: Dec 29, 2009

HURT'S SO GOOD: Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker captured the surfaces of the Iraq war via a bomb squad led by Jeremy Renner's Sgt. Will James (pictured).

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As 2009 draws to a close, the big talk is of James Cameron's Avatar and its purportedly game-changing use of technology. But some of the year's best movies were distinguished by their simplicity, their focus on quiet moments and almost invisible gestures.

Hirokazu Kore-eda's Still Walking is a master class in doing more with less. A Japanese take on a familiar American genre, the movie brings an extended family together to commemorate the death of its eldest son. Buried frustrations surface over meals and lifelong disappointments are confronted, often in unbroken master shots stuffed with overlapping interactions. You could zoom in on any part of the frame and find enough drama to sustain any number of lesser movies.

Jim Jarmusch's The Limits of Control extended a minimalist aesthetic to its narrative, as well. Its core investigation, carried out by Isaach De Bankolé's tight-lipped loner, boils down to a series of identically structured encounters, a hypnotic repetition that turns his outward journey into an inward one. The extent to which reviewers held Jarmusch responsible for their own truncated attention spans (not to mention their failure to appreciate the film's visual richness) stands as one of the year's most egregious critical misdeeds.

The Headless Woman (playing Sat., Jan. 9, at International House; see Repertory Film for more info) was even more abstract, a hazy parable in which a middle-class woman who runs over a dog becomes convinced that she has hit a small boy. She wanders through the rest of the movie in a daze, transfixed by guilt that may have as much to do with the crimes of her class as any canine homicide. Like Lars von Trier's Antichrist, Lucrecia Martel's movie defies easy explanation, and it's possible that its parts will never add up no matter how many times you watch it. But great art isn't always answerable to the demands of lower mathematics, and its unfinished sums linger in a way complete equations do not.

In A Serious Man, Joel and Ethan Coen turned life's failure to add up into a cosmic joke, one which their hapless hero never quite gets. Drawing equally on their Jewish and Midwestern roots, the Coens created a Talmudic shaggy-dog story about a fundamentally moral man whose attempt to live a righteous, if not necessarily Godly, life never brings its expected reward. Never ones to show their hands unduly, the Coens buried their spiritual anguish under a layer of farce, but their fear of taking themselves too seriously should not be misread as a lack of seriousness.

Russia's Alexander Sokurov brought a strange kind of humor to The Sun, his chronicle of the last hours before Emperor Hirohito's surrender to the U.S. Centered on a twitchy, disjunct performance by Issey Ogata, the film treats the end of the war as the end to the emperor's divinity, and thus to the onset of his humanity. Incidental details and textures become signposts to his corporeal reality as he settles into his body in much the way Jake Sully adjusts to his avatar (only with a lot less whooping). Using digital cameras to shoot in extreme low light and conjuring a CGI nightmare of flying sea creatures dive-bombing Hiroshima, Sokurov turned technology toward innovative ends without hoopla or megabudgets.

Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker was the first fiction feature to capture the surfaces of the war in Iraq, although it's strange that the near-universal acclaim for her avowedly apolitical film was countered by the derision showered on Avatar's Iraq allusions. Bigelow focuses, effectively, on imminent sensation, particularly the stifling heat and strained nerves inside the titular bomb-disposal suit. For sheer sensation, though, you could hardly beat Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor's Crank: High Voltage, a blissfully dumb adrenaline OD complete with left field monster-movie parodies. The duo's Gamer, while less fulfilling, offered blunt but powerful satire of video-game culture as well as a gleefully malign performance by Michael C. Hall.

James Gray's Two Lovers offered old-fashioned pleasures, particularly a career-best performance from Joaquin Phoenix that was unfortunately overshadowed by his erratic behavior on the promotional trail. Luckily, the actors in Coraline and Fantastic Mr. Fox had no chance to misbehave. Stop-motion visionary Henry Selick and animation tyro Wes Anderson brought fresh eyes to an archaic art form, reveling in the weight and presence of tangible figures. Selick was the first director to use 3-D as an expressive tool rather than to merely photocopy reality, and Anderson's control fetish served him supremely well in crafting his handmade world. He should work with puppets all the time.

(s_adams@citypaper.net)

The year may be over, but the conversation goes on. Honorable mentions, best of the decade and other comments at Sam Adams' new blog, breakingtheline.typepad.com.

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