Modern Family

The best films of 2009 explore themes of kinship and adaptation.

by Shaun Brady

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As 2009 began, change was in the air. The buzzword of last fall's election had transformed into an electrifying anticipatory thrill. But as campaigning gave way to legislating, the Obamanation was confronted with the stubborn reality of a divided country suffering economic meltdown and a world embroiled in messy conflicts — miasma enough to knock the stars from more than a few eyes. The times, they may be a-changing, but they're sure dragging their feet about it.

The year's standout films recognized the downside of change, or at least the trepidation that accompanies a history still in the process of being written. Claire Denis' quietly luminescent 35 Shots of Rum takes place entirely at that crossroads, with a group of characters held in a delicate equilibrium, the thought of moving on a melancholy threat hanging overhead.

Denis maintains a constant low-level tension, but the worst that might happen in her story is heartbreak. A more palpable suspense runs like a raging current through Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker, which stunningly twists an action film into a revelatory picture of lives in turmoil. Götz Spielmann plays a similar trick with the crime thriller in Revanche, which begins mired in the Viennese underworld but finds darker dealings still in the countryside after a robbery gone wrong. Bigelow's film runs in existential circles, never uncoiling even when an explosion should spell relief; Spielmann's, on the other hand, proceeds like a Möbius strip, a seemingly straight downward slide that somehow emerges, if not trending upward, then at least at its starting point.

Another crime gone inevitably wrong is at the center of Lorna's Silence, the Dardenne brothers' latest. The title sums up the mood, as the film's double-dealings aren't as important (so unimportant, at times, that major offscreen developments must be inferred) as the havoc they wreak in its protagonist's head. In Hunger, Brit video artist Steve McQueen is more concerned with biology than psychology, enforcing a strict distance from his characters' withering bodies, divorcing context from the sheer physiological impact of men dedicated to affecting change where none is forthcoming.

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Of course there is no greater impediment to change — not even the intertwined forces of government and religion that motivate McQueen's hunger strikers — as family. Film after film, this year found families immediate and extended clinging to the past, whether to deny painful truths or to simply forestall the passage of time. Ozu's domestic portraits were called to mind in many cases, albeit in an unsettled, cracked-mirror reflection.

A mother's death starts her three children arguing over her estate in Olivier Assayas' Summer Hours. The film is largely a rumination on legacy, on the context of art and on how much each generation should honor the ties that bind them — the latter writ large by the globalized culture in which the siblings exist. That new reality impacts the father in Kiyoshi Kurosawa's disquieting melodrama Tokyo Sonata, as the outsourcing of his job fractures his home life in unexpected ways.

But the most solemn depiction of a family's squelched hopes came in the opening minutes of Pixar's Up — the economical history of a marriage, and of the compromises that tint its memory, was the year's most shattering tearjerker, unexpected in an ostensible comedy that went on to feature talking dogs and goofy giant birds.

Familial struggles played out most disturbingly in Hirokazu Kore-eda's Still Walking, in which a family reunion becomes an exercise in reopening old wounds; and most savagely — surprisingly enough — in Wes Anderson's brilliantly animated Fantastic Mr. Fox, which argues that nature, red in tooth and claw, lurks beneath even the most domesticated scenes.

(s_brady@citypaper.net)