John Dies at the End: CASTLE FREAK

(Note from Steve: This is Kent Beeson's piece for this year's White Elephant Blogathon. At his request, I'm posting it here.)



1. There is no monster in CASTLE FREAK.



2. No, that's not true.

In the first few minutes of Stuart Gordon's CASTLE FREAK, an old, wrinkled woman prepares a meal of bread and salami. She then serves it to a naked man-creature locked in a dungeon cell, but not before beating the living shit out of him with some kind of spiky whip. Later that night, she dies in her sleep.

That old woman was the monster. The rest of the film is just aftermath.



3. John Reilly has arrived in Italy, there to check out the castle he's just inherited from an deceased aunt he didn't even knew existed -- the old woman from the first scene. He's brought his family with him: wife Susan and blind daughter Rebecca. Something's not quite right with John. Maybe it's the paternalistic, unintentionally patronizing tone he takes with his teenage daughter, describing the castle as, "like a fairy tale." Maybe it's the slightly hysterical edge in his voice that undermines the "happy family" image he tries to present to the Italians. Maybe it's simply because John is played by Jeffrey Combs, an enjoyable actor not known for subtlety, and he's tamping down so hard on his natural theatricality that it's oozing through the cracks.

When Susan asks the caretaker to set up three bedrooms, not two, we glimpse the truth that is soon confirmed: John and Susan are effectively separated. John, while drunk, was at the wheel of a car accident that took Rebecca's sight and killed their son J.J. With no forgiveness forthcoming, John is a crumpled napkin of a man, incapable of handling the guilt and scorn.

The question the film poses every step of the way is: Can John, effectively a non-man, regain his manhood? The stakes -- his whole world -- are quite high.



4. A partial synopsis. The naked man-creature is still in the dungeon when John and his family move in. John isn't paying attention when Rebecca wanders off on her own, and stumbles into the dungeon. The man-creature sees her, and it inspires him to bite his thumb off, slip out of his manacles, and escape. He skulks about the castle, always managing to stay out of sight, while stalking the daughter. John attempts to repair his marriage, but when Susan suggests that killing himself is his best option, he retreats into his alcoholism and drunkenly hires a prostitute, whom he takes back to the castle. The man-creature ends up killing the prostitute and the caretaker, and John is arrested for the crime. And while he sits in custody, Susan and Rebecca are alone in the castle with a homicidal maniac on the loose.



5. Here's the kind of horror movie I really like, and it comes in two parts. The first part: the movie introduces a protagonist and his normal life, and this material is compelling in and of itself. An island's brand-new police chief, an outsider who's afraid of the ocean, tries to fit in without stirring up trouble with either the Mayor or the citizens. A woman, an immigrant from an Eastern European country, finds herself torn between her modern American husband and the ancient, repressive culture of her homeland. A man, going through a brutal divorce, discovers that his daughter, upon returning from her mom, has bruises on her body. Perhaps I'm strange, but while all of these stories soon introduce a genre element, I'd gladly watch them even if they stayed in the realm of pure drama.

The second part is that the horror element is directly derived from the "ordinary" conflict, and becomes a metaphor for it. The shark turns the ocean into an embodiment of death. The woman's culture tells her she'll turn into a monstrous cat creature if she gives in to her sexual desires. The divorced wife is turning her rage into murderous tykes, literal "damaged children".

CASTLE FREAK meets these requirements. And so, I do like the film.

And yet.



6. The naked man-creature is Giorgio, and the old woman, Duchess D'Orsino, is his mother. Giorgio is also John's half-brother. It turns out that John's dad was married to the Duchess, but then ran off to America with the Duchess's sister, who had John. The Duchess dealt with the pain of this betrayal by locking the five-year-old Giorgio in the dungeon and torturing him for the rest of her life.

These family connections are only there for a thematic purpose: Giorgio is John's shadow.

In the Jungian sense: John is highly educated (it's suggested he's a professor), Giorgio has no education at all. Giorgio is completely naked the entire time, while John never takes off his clothes, even with the prostitute. John, haunted by the memory of his son, has no real interest in his daughter (and it's that neglect that ultimately unleashes Giorgio), while Giorgio is fascinated by her. John is a weak, weak man, repeatedly giving into his worst impulses, while Giorgio, despite every atrocity committed against his body, is strong, resilient.

But also a literal shadow: Giorgio watches John with the prostitute. After John collapses to the ground in a fit of self-pity, the woman tries to find her way out of the castle, but Giorgio kidnaps her. Then, in an incredibly uncomfortable scene that plays like Gaspar Noe's OF MICE AND MEN, Giorgio attempts to copy John. But he can't consummate the act because, as we see quite clearly, he's missing a penis.

This is the major similarity between John and Giorgio.



7. Let's talk about that missing penis for a moment. Presumably, the Duchess chopped it off, probably as Giorgio entered puberty, but perhaps earlier. Think about that for a moment. Try, if you can, to imagine the mind of a person capable of doing that. Imagine the sequence of actions that leads to that moment with a knife.

Did you think about it?

Now -- how can we hate Giorgio? We can be afraid of him, but the same way we're afraid of a rabid dog. We don't blame the dog for its infection. The dog must be put down, for our sake and its sake, but we don't take any pleasure in that, just pity. Pity is the enemy of hate, and I think we have to hate our monsters in order for horror to work. But the monster is dead in the first couple minutes, and so the whole movie is off-balance right from the first scene, right from the very premise. Pity saps the drama out, and we're left watching how one woman's pain and evil flow through time and mangle the lives of everyone after her. (End result: two women dead, four men dead, and two families shattered. Oh, and one dead cat.)



8. John dies at the end.

Held at the police station, John knocks out a cop with his own nightstick, deposing an authority figure with his own cock and taking it for himself. He then fights Giorgio on the rooftop, beating him with the nightstick as his family watches. (Well, I guess the daughter just listens.) What should happen is that John defeats Giorgio, reclaims his manhood, and the nuclear family is made whole again. And while it doesn't get much more questionably patriarchal than that, I won't lie -- it's the ending I wanted.

But the inexorable logic of the film has already demonstrated that John and Giorgio are the same person. If one goes, so does the other. Earlier, Susan all but challenges John to kill himself to atone for his sins, and he gets as far as the ledge before backing down. This time, John chains himself to Giorgio -- the metaphor made material -- and leaps from the castle, killing them both.

And this is why I like CASTLE FREAK, but can't endorse it. Because, for this movie, the myth of Campbellian transformation is just that: a myth. The only reality is suffering, the only constant is pain, and the only choice is whether to hold one's ground or succumb. To be Giorgio, or to be John. And regardless, you die at the end.

Golden Muriel for Best Film of 2011

The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick) [317 points/25 votes]

"When you watch The Tree of Life, you’re seeing a vision of a family’s life experienced with an other-wordly, unfathomable sense of perspective. Writer/director Terrence Malick’s latest film is elusive, engrossing and just all-around big. There are discernible leitmotifs that run through the film, like the intrusion of chaos into order, the gentle realization that form does not always conform to essence, and the fleeting presence of radiant, context-free hopefulness.

But the sense of spirituality that characterizes The Tree of Life is nothing if not pantheistic and all-accommodating. It’s an open container of meaning, which is partly why the film a minor cultural rift when it was first released last year. Some dismissed The Tree of Life by saying it was loaded with pretentious assumptions, specifically accusing of him of assuming the position of God in his film. Others said that the film’s vision of faith was too simplistic and that the film just regurgitates/reinforces Judeo-Christian imagery. So many of the film's most staunch defenders foolishly tried to combat this short-sighted criticism, but defending The Tree of Life against such claims is patently unnecessary: the complexities inherent in Malick’s film are defense enough.

For example, in the opening image of the diametrically-opposed ways of grace and nature, Malick sets up and then exponentially complicates the notion that lived spirituality is inseparable from idealized faith. The two states of mind are opposite sides of the same state. The film’s protagonists are thus not totally in control of their memories, nor are they totally passive participants in the film’s dream-like reverie of past events. The Tree of Life presents the past as it might have been, not as it objectively occurred. We see events through the eyes of man-made Gods, the mother and father (Jessica Chastain and Brad Pitt) of two children. One boy is dead while the other boy, now a man, wonders when it was that he first believed in God. And he seeks Him out again. And so does his mother.

So, when one of the two boys asks, “Where do you live?” he’s living the answer: in memories, in the past, in the design that unites the two and in dreams of simplicity and twilit beauty. God is fallible because he is us but He also exists outside of us. According to the film, the fact that we cannot always be united is what alternately motivates us towards and pulls us away from our faith. There is both great faith in doubt and in the presence of God in Malick’s latest masterpiece. It’s alternately a mirror of actively evolving ideas of the past and a flood of emotions that create its own order out of the inherently chaotic. Wow." - Simon Abrams

See the full results.

2011 Film of the Year Countdown: #2

Certified Copy (Abbas Kiarostami) [215 points/20 votes]

"On the one hand, it's understandable that a thriving consensus has formed around Certified Copy. It is undeniably a masterpiece, a film whose appeal is broad and deep. On the other hand, this phenomenon is somewhat odd, given the difficulty imagining a consensus of any kind forming around what is actually occurring in the film. I can thus recognize that many love the film as much as I do, but I'm not altogether sure if we all love it for the same reasons, because the film is something of a mirage, an ever-turning Möbius strip of narrative that eludes any and all attempts to pin it down. What these oblique metaphorical references indicate, then, is that Certified Copy is a film that exists wholly in the act of perception and in our relationship to it. It's the rare film that feels like it absolutely requires our participation, involvement and sensitivity in order for it to complete itself.

In Certified Copy, we watch a British writer (opera singer William Shimell) and a French antiques dealer (Juliette Binoche, in a virtuoso performance) spend a great deal of time talking with one another and wandering around Tuscany. At first, they seem like strangers, but by the end, they interact as if they were a married couple. It's not the case that the "true" nature of their relationship is progressively revealed to us, superseding previous iterations. Rather, every face their relationship presents to us feels equally "real." It's rather fitting that the plot of Certified Copy revolves around a relationship, a bond that only exists between two individuals, with one foot planted in each person's subjectivity. No one half of a couple can unilaterally claim ownership of the relationship -- relationships exist only in the space between people. The experience of Certified Copy exists only in the space between the phenomena and images of the film and our ever-fluctuating perception of and response to them.

Many films purport to tell the "story of a relationship," often using various techniques to fracture their narratives in order to convey something of the complexity we all feel to be fundamental to relationships. But these films often fail because of their need to come down, finally, and make some sort of definitive statement about the relationship, usually either naively hopeful or nihilistically cynical. These films cause us to become invested in relationships as plots and dramatic narratives, as though we were watching diplomatic negotiations between states: "Will they or won't they...?" We are denied this in Certified Copy: we cannot hope for any specific outcome to Shimell and Binoche's relationship because we cannot with any precision say what the nature of this relationship actually is.

This mystery of the central relationship in Certified Copy is the culmination of a seemingly minor but absolutely central theme in Kiarostami's work: the incessant wandering, drifting, or searching of his characters, often by foot or in a car. Foregrounding this seemingly innocuous activity to such a great extent, his films require that we interpret this aspect as a consistent, central motif. These wanderings can take on a political edge (as in the Koker trilogy) and they can even hint at a poetic, almost mystical religiosity, as in The Wind Will Carry Us. Rootlessness reaches its peak in Certified Copy, directed by an Iranian, filmed in Italy and co-starring a British non-actor and a French actress.

From this film's unique premise, a number of potential themes spiral out. Do the characters' progressive acknowledgement of their supposed relationship hint at our responsibility as human beings, the need not to disavow our connection to each other? Or is Certified Copy a statement about our own disconnect from history, our aimless drifting an expression of the desire to escape our roles as historical subjects? Might it also be that despite the film's seemingly apolitical nature, the film's oblique yet persistent rejection of our social isolation should, in fact, be the starting point to all political action?

As I said, it's difficult to tell if the film's numerous other fans see in it the same things that I do. More than most films, it's difficult to talk about Certified Copy because it seems to be speaking a language all its own, one in which none of us are exactly fluent. We can start by saying that the film is sublimely beautiful in a way that few films are, though "mere" beauty can seem inadequate for some. But it also affirms the need for beauty, and isn't the creation of a work of art so wholly beautiful as Certified Copy itself the most adequate response to a world that is often ugly?

But what I find most personally meaningful about the film is the way each twist and turn somehow engages us deeper and deeper without us ever knowing exactly why. It restores our faith in art, in particular reminding us of the power of narrative art, storytelling. For all its experimentalism, Certified Copy is a profoundly traditional work of storytelling. Even though we modify our understanding of this couple from moment to moment, each metamorphosis feels as real as what preceded it. The characters' arguments and counter-arguments become refracted through our own personal experiences. We latch onto every twist in the narrative as if it's potentially about us and something we've experienced. The characters speak in ways that hint at countless other implied meanings, the way poetry finds its significance between the words. Certified Copy shouldn't work, because it undermines our belief in the reality of what we see, but it absolutely does, revealing that we can become caught up even in what we simultaneously understand to be entirely fictive. In the end, I'm most grateful of this feeling, of being "caught up" and involved. At a time when we doubt the veracity of the stories we tell each other, whether in films or in real life, here is a film as blatantly "unreal" as can be imagined, yet it nevertheless reaffirms the value of narrative art, the way it can miraculously and alchemically transform the fictional into something undeniably real." - Trevor Link

2011 Film of the Year Countdown: #3

A Separation (Asghar Farhadi) [204 points/18 votes]

"The first domino to fall in A Separation comes in the form of the literal separation of a married couple residing in modern-day Iran who have come to an impasse over what’s best for both their young daughter and the man’s elderly father who is stricken with Alzheimer’s. Their family’s circumstance is also colored by their native land, a country at odds with its past and uncertain of its future, currently straddling the line between Arabic and Western cultures. Lastly, their relationship’s fate is masterfully entwined to the separations that exist between all people, including those of faith, class, language and political viewpoint.

Writer-director Asghar Farhadi explores these themes and his script makes each character’s action feel impassioned and real. The stellar ensemble cast embodies the daily struggle of maintaining morality in the face of dire situations, even to their breaking point. While there are many nuances unique to this story and setting, A Separation should be universally relatable to Western viewers. Its power resides in the grey areas between truths and lies —- those moments between loved ones that bind or repel us and the triumph or doom that lies in the balance." - Patrick Williamson

2011 Film of the Year Countdown: #4

Drive (Nicolas Winding Refn) [200 points/18 votes]

"Danish filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn has stated in interviews that he’s drawn to films that run roughly ninety minutes long, not merely because “it’s a great pulp length” but because it approximates the duration of our dream cycle. The appeal of Winding Refn’s latest film, Drive, is how closely it emulates the sensation of walking through a dream. Both sensual and nightmarish, often at the same time, Drive employs the slimmest of genre frameworks to depict a phantasmagoric Los Angeles comprised of gangsters, hustlers, small-time crooks and an impossibly stoic wheelman that exists entirely outside of time and space. We recognize these characters and these situations as the hoariest of crime film staples, yet in its telling Drive defies convention at every turn. It is both instantly identifiable and completely alien.

Winding Refn is following in the tradition of John Boorman and Peter Yates as a European filmmaker traveling to America to craft an unusually bold staring vehicle for a steely-eyed leading man, but he differentiates himself by evoking a history of cinema, referencing films as diverse and seemingly incongruous as Kenneth Anger’s SCORPIO RISING, Jean-Pierre Melville’s LE SAMOURAI, and William Friedkin’s TO LIVE AND DIE IN LA and marrying these images to defiantly sincere pop music. The film is set in Los Angeles, yet it's one we rarely see on screen, shot amidst the mountains and strip malls of the San Fernando Valley, the mesmerizing drainage ditch nicknamed the LA River and the neon garishness of the LA Live Center downtown (in a joke that’s lost some of its potency in the past year, the film features a set piece built around a shockingly well attended LA Clippers game). But mostly, Drive accomplishes this dream-like sensation by recognizing the single greatest special effect in film is a well-composed close-up.

For a film as propulsive titled as Drive, it’s remarkably still. Winding Refn and his editor, Mat Newman, allow shots to hold for a breath or two too long, creating tension out of pregnant pauses and swoon-worthy romance out of a simple reaction shot. Winding Refn isn’t afraid to stage baldly theatrical tableaus, either, setting a violent encounter amongst a room of unaffected strippers posed like mannequins or adjusting the lighting scheme mid-shot to highlight a climactic kiss... a kiss that’s then followed by blood, exploding onto the scream with the force of a fire hose and accompanied by some of the most stomach-churning sound effects ever recorded (effects that even the Drive-averse Academy Awards couldn’t ignore). The violence in Drive arrives suddenly and without warning, shattering the film’s idyllic trance, like being forcefully shaken from a deep sleep.

This dichotomy is best exemplified in the film’s leading man, Ryan Gosling. Gosling, an immensely talented but often overly demonstrative actor, portrays his nameless driver as an enigmatic case study in dramatic minimalism. Possessing an almost child-like innocence and only a handful of lines of dialogue, Gosling’s character is tender and sweet, caring for Carrie Mulligan’s Irene and her young son Benicio, while at all times respecting the boundaries of marriage, settling for a chaste hand-holding and happy to have it. Yet Gosling’s sweetness disguises (or perhaps simply exists alongside of it) a tightly coiled rage that bursts through the calm surface with startling savagery, surprising no one more than himself. Like Frankenstein’s monster in a white satin racing jacket, Gosling appears terrified by his own strength and ashamed of the fear he inspires in others.

There is a preposterousness to Drive which is engrained in its charm; this is a film that is both anachronistically earnest and notably aware of its own silliness. At one point Albert Brooks’ unctuous yet homicidal Bernie Rose explains of the action films in the 80’s that he used to produce, “one critic called them European... I thought they were shit”, as though the film were anticipating both how its champions and detractors would respond to it. In 2011, Drive won a prize at the Cannes Film Festival, produced a best selling soundtrack, was a modest financial success and inspired an omnipresent Halloween custom for guys of a certain age. It was also at the center of an unintentionally hilarious lawsuit and, in one especially odd instance, motivated a confused individual to publicly throw a hot dog at Tiger Woods. Appropriately, even the reaction to Drive feels like a dream. I hope I never wake up from it." - Andrew Dignan

2011 Film of the Year Countdown: #5

Melancholia (Lars Von Trier) [159 points/17 votes]

"A troubled female protagonist... a claustrophobic setting representing a microcosm of the outside, civilized world... an eclectic cast of international actors portraying an ensemble of characters who demonstrate examples of self-interested and short-sighted behaviors... an intricate story told in an misanthropic and endearingly satirical tone.

These identifiers could refer to any one of several Lars Von Trier films. There's Breaking the Waves, in which a simple, God-fearing, young woman, Bess, is shunned by the residents of a stern religious community in a small, coastal Scottish town. Then there's Dogville, in which Grace, a mysterious woman on the lam, seeks refuge in the eponymous Rocky Mountain town only to have its seemingly sympathetic residents slowly reveal their true colors and turn on her after initially offering their acceptance and friendship. Melancholia, about a disillusioned bride who sabotages her own wedding in reaction against her self-involved family and the tired rituals imposed upon her, also fits within this familiar paradigm and, under Von Trier's bold and inspired direction, still manages to be a completely original and stirring work of art.

For me, the self-assuredness and formality of Melancholia is what puts it right up there with Von Trier's other important works. The ceremonial quality of the opening prologue, set to the strains of Wagner's "Tristan and Isolde," referencing the paintings of Pieter Breugel and John Everett Millais and then finally concluding with a vision of a rogue planet colliding with Earth is both deliberate and evocative. What are we watching? Are these images the apocalyptic visions of our heroine, Justine, which might inform her erratic behavior at her own wedding reception and eventual breakdown? If nothing else, this prologue is a beautifully aesthetic rendering of hopelessness.

The imagery of one planet colliding with another reveals itself to be an extremely effective metaphor of the relationship between the impulsive, unstable Justine and her practical-minded, by-the-book sister, Claire. Justine's serene detachment contrasted with the gradual anxiety and pathos of Claire is where Melancholia is at its most chilling. And that ending! I have heard some people say that they were oddly comforted by the last few minutes, an observation I agree with. A lot of it has to do with the expression we see on Justine's face. So many emotions can be interpreted from it: acceptance mixed with apprehension, curiosity, even love. It is this mystery found in these final frames before the end credits that add to the power and force of Melancholia, a film both grand and intimate in the same breath." - Kevin Dufresne

2011 Film of the Year Countdown: #6

Meek's Cutoff (Kelly Reichardt) [151 points/16 votes]

"'Hell's fulla bears, Jimmy. But there's no bears here.' Bruce Greenwood's loquacious frontier pathfinder mutters this early on as a closer to one of his discursive flights of storytelling fancy as he regals a young boy with a tall tale involving a man wrestling, yes, a bear. He also, unwittingly, cuts straight to the essence of Meek's Cutoff -- what seems like an endless slog through a dusty, sagebrushed Hell is rather a purgatorial suffering, an agonzing march through a flat and featureless space that nonetheless ends with an idea of a destination.

Whether that destination is desirable or even concretely foreseeable at film's end is another story, but then story's in the telling and the journey's in the taking. Meek's Cutoff is a film about a journey, and director Kelly Reichardt means to immerse us in this. Every rustle of home-stitched fabric, every squeak of a wagon wheel, every parched throat and aching joint and dragged footstep is ours to share with the characters. This is one of the most material-minded films I've seen in a long while -- even the credits are displayed as cross-stitchings, labors with tactility and weight. Any failure of equipment or (in a heart-stopping sequence) breakdown of transportation can be a tragedy, and it's this relentless dedication to the tiniest sensory details of the moment, even more than the inspired choice to use only natural lighting or the terrific work of a game cast of actors, that get across the you-are-there total absorption.

Not that the cast isn't instrumental. I could just point out that Reichardt, more than any director I can think of not named Paul Thomas Anderson, makes skilled and beneficial use of Paul Dano's natural ability to be intolerably annoying, but that would give short shrift to the strong turns from the rest of the cast, including a steadfast Will Patton and Rod Rondeaux as the Indian who becomes so crucial to the narrative in the film's second half. Slim as said narrative is, though, it ultimately boils down to a contest of wills between Michelle Williams's steely Emily Tetherow and Greenwood's garrulous Stephen Meek. Reichardt and and screenwriter Jonathan Raymond establish friction early on, with the group's open disillusionment in Meek's guidance painted across Williams' face and entrenched in her few, vinegary interactions with him. With the entrance of the Indian, this friction becomes flat-out hostility until the tension and threat of revolt in the face of starvation becomes as palpable as the moccasin Emily repairs for the Indian.

Still, for all the character work and back-and-forth that occurs in the second half, Meek's Cutoff is primarily an extraordinary sensory experience and derives the force of its drama from such. It's a film about the terror of being lost, the delirium of deprivation and the difficulty of just scraping by. Even the divisive final scene, in essence, is a final shot of immersion. Stop, look through the branches and the leaves of this tree. Listen to the breeze, feel it blow against your face. See that Indian? Hell's fulla Indians." - Steve Carlson

2011 Film of the Year Countdown: #7

Take Shelter (Jeff Nichols) [141 points/13 votes]

"Jeff Nichols’ Take Shelter begins with a nightmare and, for two hours, sustains the accompanying sense of panic like no other movie I can recall. Nichols returns to similar sequences intermittently throughout the film, but they are merely crescendos in the anxiety-dominated life of their subject, Midwestern family-man Curtis Lafourche (Michael Shannon). Distraught over these apocalyptic visions, Curtis constantly contemplates whether they signal his inheritance of paranoid schizophrenia or the impending end of the world.

Nichols doesn’t offer any concrete answers to Curtis’ predicament and, as a result, the viewer is forced to try to get inside Curtis’ head to form an opinion -- to experience the frustration and fear right alongside him. More than making up one’s mind on whether Curtis is mentally ill or accurately prophesying the end of the world, the viewing experience is about understanding the man’s destructive fear of losing control -- the root of anxiety in today’s America. Thus, through this hyperbolic microcosm, one discovers an encapsulation of the zeitgeist.

For a film that is so precise in personifying an abstract theme, alternately entertaining each of the two answers to the central question in a calculated, perpetual yo-yo effect, Take Shelter is astoundingly human. In the lead, Michael Shannon’s anguish is palpable, evoking the viewer’s sympathy and, through their relation to the fear of losing control (if likely not Curtis’ specific predicament), empathy. Jessica Chastain is equally brilliant as his wife, Samantha; her strength, particularly in the final act, is the perfect vehicle for the film’s refreshing message that the American family remains a strong institution, no matter how tough times may be. Furthermore, Take Shelter never patronizes its Midwestern characters in depicting their plight -- a rarity in contemporary film.

Then there is the final scene -- haunting, assured, unforgettable. There are those who, adopting a highly literal interpretation, believe that it concretely answers the film’s central question. I couldn’t disagree more. Nichols ends the film in a manner that is designed not for scholarship, but post-viewing discussions that lead to further discourse on the entire piece. And what a special occasion this is -- a movie actually worth talking about once it’s over." - Danny Baldwin

2011 Film of the Year Countdown: #8

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (Tomas Alfredson) [128 points/13 votes]

"Tomas Alfredson's feature-film version of John LeCarre's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is fascinating not just for the intricate tale of espionage, loyalties and betrayal it tells but for the way it is visualized. The first time I saw it, I wasn't sure I could explain the plot (I rarely can), but I was mesmerized the whole time. Structurally and compositionally, it's spellbinding, drawing the viewer into a world of covert emotional and existential compartmentalization (all those shots of people watching fragments of others' lives, their views partially obscured through frames, windows, doors and, sometimes, their own reflections) and universal physical and moral decay (1974 London and Paris look just as grey-brown and decrepit as the crumbling Old World structures of Budapest and Istanbul).

How perplexing, then, that the Academy chose to honor the fussy, digitized images of Hugo (a movie with a palette limited to the colors found in a bowl of peanut M&Ms) over the astonishingly rich cinematography by Hoyte Van Hoytema. (The Oscar voters quite rightly saw fit to nominate Tinker Tailor for actor [Gary Oldman], screenplay and music, while the BAFTA balloters honored it with nominations in virtually every category.)

It's a movie that sneaks up on you -- and the camera makes a habit of sneaking up behind its characters so that we are looking over their shoulders, seeing what they're seeing, but often unable to read their reactions. The cast is extraordinary, starting with Oldman as George Smiley, an almost invisible man and consummate spy whose face rarely betrays more than a hint of what he's thinking or feeling. But watch closely. Something's always going on there.

Let co-screenwriter Peter Straughan have the last word:

Working with Tomas [Alfredson] was a little like working on a project with a mad professor. Instead of the usual studio notes on "characters arcs," "three-act structure," and "dramatic stakes," Tomas would begin a script meeting by wondering what kind of fairy story "Tinker Tailor" would be; the good Prince who is thrown out of the castle and must defeat the usurper King, we decided. Another meeting began with Tomas arriving with a chess set he had just bought. Which character was which piece, he wondered? We spent the afternoon playing with that idea -- and the chess pieces made it into the script. Other notes included his telling the cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema that the film should look like the smell of wet tweed. (He told me that world should have the color of an old man's foreskin. I haven't actually seen an old man's foreskin, but I took the point.) [...]

The adaptation process differs from book to book, but in the case of "Tinker Tailor," it involved a kind of mosaic work. The structure of the novel was broken into pieces. Some long sequences would remain intact -- Peter Guillam stealing the files from the Circus, for example -- but in other cases we would take a line or event from one place in the narrative and move it elsewhere, shifting the fragments around endlessly until it felt right. The goal was to create a new version of the narrative which would bear a close family resemblance to the source material, but have its own cinematic personality. The really difficult part was not fitting the plot into two hours but doing it without losing the tone; to give the film the same autumnal, melancholy pace, and to give the script air and silence.

As the drafts progressed it became evident where new sequences, scenes and images would have to be injected. Bridget, who was endlessly inventive, came up with many of these ideas -- from Guillam's homosexuality to the new café scene at the opening to the simple but eloquent image of Smiley swimming in the ponds at Hampstead Heath, looking at the trembling elderly bodies around him and wondering if this was his world now.

Beautifully said, and beautifully done." - Jim Emerson

2011 Film of the Year Countdown: #9

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul) [127 points/12 votes]

"I first saw Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives in October of 2010 at a local film festival in San Diego. Uncle Boonmee had won the Palme d’Or in Cannes and received rave reviews all around the globe yet was delegated to a one-time screening slot late at night during a weekday. After a downright lackluster introduction by one of the festival employees, which caused legendary filmmaker Jean Pierre Gorin (who was in the audience) to call bullshit in front of the entire crowd, it was clear the festival itself was not too keen on the film. Alas, when the lights went down, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s (nickamed “Joe”) sublime and haunting film made all the perfunctory nonsense a moot point.

So why call attention to this strange and somewhat upsetting experience? I think the circumstances surrounding my screening of Uncle Boonmee reveals the divisive power of Weerasethakul’s work, a small canon of masterpieces that creates passion in many ardent cinephiles and fear in those who choose to resist the religious and philosophical ideas his film’s contemplate. These are not easily digestible works, seemingly even for the very audience and festival programmers one would expect to embrace such ambitious filmmaking.

Of all of “Joe’s” films, Uncle Boonmee seems to be most at peace with the inevitability of death and the possibilities beyond the grave. It’s a film that respects the passage of time but also carries the realization that certain specifics of temporality cannot be trusted. When the titular character is visited by the ghosts of long-deceased relatives at his countryside home, their hypnotic conversations focus on the fluidity of emotional connection, a powerful, near-elemental force that bridges the gap between the living and the dead. So it’s not surprising Joe beautifully connects caverns of the mind, soul, and earthly locales, suggesting that life and death are forever intertwined by gaps in memory. To live a life without fear, we must admit that our life’s images and sounds are fabricated by experience, reformatted by desire and expectation.

Uncle Boonmee is second on my best list of 2011 right behind Raul Ruiz’s Mysteries of Lisbon, and the two films share an obsession with the seamless abstraction of time and space. But Uncle Boonmee contorts the classical aspects of Art Cinema to an even greater extent, finding a harmonious and intoxicating balance between what can be seen in the details of Cinema, and what can only be felt." - Glenn Heath Jr.

2011 Film of the Year Countdown: #10

Margaret (Kenneth Lonergan) [115 points/11 votes]

"Perhaps the time for a properly considered assessment of Margaret will come with its upcoming home-video release -— away from its fraught production history, away from the bitter legal issues still surrounding the film, away from Fox Searchlight’s attempts to quietly bury it with an extremely limited token release, away from the #teammargaret cause that sprouted up on Twitter to get more film critics to be able to see it and champion it. Home video may be the only way that the many outside of certain major film cites who have merely heard about Kenneth Lonergan’s sophomore film maudit will finally get to see it for themselves, and perhaps by then the hoopla will have died down enough for the film to be considered on its own terms. Who knows? Maybe, by the time it does get a home-video release, we will all be able to see it in a form closer to Lonergan’s original intentions.

Even in the unabashedly messy 150-minute theatrical version that inspired all that ink to be spilled for and against it, however, Margaret remains, to these eyes, a considerable achievement: a work of enormous thematic ambition that adds up to more than the sum of its often-impressive parts and is a deeply moving experience besides.

Here is a film that is not content to simply tell a straightforward story of a teenager, Lisa Cohen (Anna Paquin, in a majestic performance), dealing with the traumatic after-effects of witnessing a woman perish right in her arms as the result of a traffic accident she inadvertently helped cause. Lonergan, instead, blows his narrative up into a complex portrait of an adolescent not only coming to grips with this particular death but also with everything in the adult world she has yet to fully grasp. Broadly speaking, Lisa’s angst-filled journey toward some kind of personal redemption touches on matters of ethics, morality, class differences and even art; unavoidably, she comes up against moral gray areas and emotional complexities that can’t help but confound her sheltered upper-class existence and her increasingly spiraling-out-of-control sense of right and wrong. Margaret isn’t just meant to be universal in scope, however; Lonergan, for instance, includes earnest classroom-discussion scenes in which students often heatedly discuss worldly post-9/11 implications, suggesting he wants his tale to be clearly situated in a topical context.

All of that is enough to fuel two or three films’ worth of drama; that Lonergan tries to cram it all into this one means Margaret sometimes admittedly comes off messy and unwieldy. But, even at its least coherent, Lonergan has genuine insights into human nature to back up his ambitions. Margaret is, in part, about the ways we all see ourselves as the stars of our own personal dramas, to the point that good intentions sometimes can shade dangerously into self-involvement. During the film’s last hour, Lisa gets caught up in the U.S. legal system when she tries to help the accident victim’s best friend, Emily (Jeannie Berlin), sue the MTA for negligence -— but is she doing it out of pure altruism, or is this just a cover for a pained attempt to assuage her own guilty conscience? Lonergan wisely allows both possibilities to hang in the air; his film freely swims in the complexities of character, and the film is all the richer for it.

What ultimately dazzles about Margaret is an overriding sense of a film borne out of what feels like bitter experience on the part of its maker — a work that feels torn, bleeding, from Lonergan’s heart. And that, among other reasons, is why its ending is as emotionally soaring as it is. Set during a live Metropolitan Opera performance of Jacques Offenbach’s operetta The Tales of Hoffman, it depicts a catharsis for both Lisa and her mother that may not mean anything to the many opera-goers surrounding them but certainly mean the world to them both and to us as well. Even after all that Lisa has gone through in the course of this particularly exhausting period of time, she has the power to respond passionately to even something as seemingly unrelated to her current circumstances as The Tales of Hoffman —- and, considering how much we in the audience have been privy to regarding her emotional struggles, we find ourselves thoroughly understanding the experience that informs her passionate reaction. It’s unavoidable that everyone brings their own personal baggage to the way he/she responds to a work of art; more than any other film I can think of, Margaret vividly conveys the process by which one individual develops the kind of life experience that can’t help but affect one’s own perspective on art. That is not a small thing for a film to accomplish; the fact that this is merely the least of the film’s accomplishments is proof that Margaret, warts and all, is a film to value and treasure." - Kenji Fujishima

2011 Film of the Year Countdown: #11

Martha Marcy May Marlene (Sean Durkin) [106 points/12 votes]

"I didn't see a lot of movies in 2011.

As some of you know, I spent the year bouncing around the country, working on more films than I actually saw. When you spend a lot of time traveling, quite often you don't want to bother to figure out where the closest movie theater is, nor can you get screeners in the mail or any of the other methods we have of seeing movies. By the time October rolled around, I'd seen a grand total of 2 films -- Your Highness and The Lincoln Lawyer. I saw both of those on the same day.

And then, finally, I got to Austin.

I'd never been to Austin, which means I'd never been to the Alamo Drafthouse. Can you truly be a cinephile in America without having been to the Drafthouse? No. No, you cannot.

Maybe it's the beer, maybe it's the food, maybe it's the strict no-talking policy, or maybe it's it's the 2K projection, but it's probably a combination of all of the above. Watching a movie at the Drafthouse is awesome. If filmmakers think of the cinema as their church, then the Drafthouse is the Sistine Chapel. So it might be unfair to judge the film I saw there against, say, a film I watched on a plane between Chicago and Salt Lake City or a film I got out of a Redbox machine and watched on my parent's standard definition TV Christmas Eve.

It'd be nice if I could separate my top pick from the surroundings in which I saw it, but that isn't possible. Just as films aren't made in a vacuum, they aren't experienced in a vacuum. Then again, nothing is.

Which brings me (finally) to Sean Durkin's Martha Marcy May Marlene. In no way a flashy film, MMMM lives on the fine line of mistrust and unease, the calm of the camera work masking the turmoil underneath. In his debut, Durkin has created an actor's showcase and filled it with the always reliable John Hawkes and a breakthrough performance by Elizabeth Olsen.

Essentially, this is Olsen's debut as well. Her and Durkin are a powerful combination. Honestly, I'm not sure there's been a better dual debut in a long, long time. I can't say I enjoyed MMMM in the traditional sense, but it grabbed me from the first frame and never let go, all the way to a final frame that's more or less perfect (despite what the idiot sitting next to me thought).

I'd write more, but my brain isn't really working at the moment. I've had a really strange weekend so far.

Most years, when cramming for the Muriels, I go nearly to the deadline wondering if I'll even find a film worthy of the number 1 slot. This year it took all of three films. Sure, I saw that third film in late October, but still. Will it hold up to a second viewing separated from the charms of the Drafthouse? I hope so, because I really loved this film." - Lucas McNelly

2011 Film of the Year Countdown: #19

Poetry (Lee Chang-dong) [63 points/6 votes]

(The following was originally posted here; I've used it here with permission of the author.)

"Lee Chang-dong's Poetry is the kind of film I would have squirmed my way through had I been forced to watch it when I was younger. It's a slow film, filled with quotidian details that summarize the life of a 66 year old woman in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease. Its main plotline, summarized in its title, follows her changing perceptions once she starts taking a class in writing poetry at her local community center. The movie is a good deal darker than that might suggest, because in learning to see with language--particularly with language that she's losing--she begins to see some very dark things around her. I'll come back to that in a bit, though. First, I need to point out that my younger self was an idiot. She wouldn't have responded to the gentle, but implacable insistence of this movie because she was impatient. She wanted things to happen in a hurry. It would have been her loss. As with the protagonist of Poetry, spending a lifetime with movies eventually does teach one to see, if you're up to it.

That gentle insistence that kept me watching stems from its opening scene, I think, in which a body is found floating in a river. It promises ominous things, things that tends to convert Lee's quiet scenes into menacing ones. The movie isn't a thriller, though, and the emotions it seeks to elicit aren't excitement. There is no adrenalin rush here. This is mainly a character study.

As I've noted, Poetry follows Mija, a 66 year old woman who makes her living as an occasional maid and lives with her no-account grandson. Her daughter is off in the city looking for work. As the movie opens, Mija is beginning to forget words. This is, unsurprisingly, the onset of Alzheimer's, a diagnosis that the movie confirms later. Her employer is a stroke victim who makes sexual advances toward her, though these advances aren't entirely unwelcome. Mija's grandson has been identified as one of a group of kids who raped a girl who then jumped off a bridge. On her initial visit to the hospital at the beginning of the movie, Mija sees the girl's body arrive, along with her inconsolable family. The girl haunts Mija for the entire film, and as she looks for beauty around which to organize the poem she wants to write, she is stymied at every turn by the sheer ugliness of life around her. Finding poetry within this, it turns out, is the mission of the movie, and it builds to a haunting conclusion.

Through Mija's eyes and (especially) through her words, we see a life of struggle against casual misogyny that's so integral a part of the fabric of life that it's like white noise. That her employer is exploiting her seems relatively benign next to the fathers of the boys implicated as rapists, who are conspiring to buy off the victim's family, or even the blank-faced anomie of Wook (the grandson) and his friends, who seem to feel no remorse and live only to eat and play video games. There's something in the way Yun Jung-hee plays Mija that suggests a lifetime of ducking abuse. Her acquiescence to her employer, for instance, is played in such a way that it's obvious that this isn't the first "transaction" in her past. The way Yun Jung-hee's voice bleeds into the voice of the murdered girl at the end tells volumes about what the girl's story really means to her. She's that girl, only she soldiered on through an indifferent, hostile life.

This is Lee's quietest movie. All of the sound is diegetic; there is no score. His visual style is reportorial. His camera gathers information without trying to prejudice it. The points of the story are enough, though, and each piece of information is organized by the conceit of the poetry class into a quietly devastating denouement in which Mija vanishes from the screen, leaving behind only her poem and a profound sense of loss. This is very much a film about language. Words, in this film's universe, are talismans, and as Mija loses them and struggles to regain them, so too does she struggle for her own life's meaning.

It would be wrong to say that Lee's deadpan visual style is entirely reportorial, though. The film's opening image of the girl floating in the river sends a dark chill, while the film's final shot acts as a bookend. This comes after a montage of images notable by the absence of the film's star. This montage seems to me to be an evocation of the transience of life. Lee's last film, Secret Sunshine, struck me as an atheist's movie. This one does too. It's almost purely existential, in which the only meanings are those we make for ourselves. Mija's ability to make meaning is fleeting, flowing away with her words like a body floating down the river." - Christianne Benedict

2011 Film of the Year Countdown: #23

Mysteries of Lisbon (Raul Ruiz) [49 points/4 votes]

"Raúl Ruiz’s Mysteries of Lisbon, unequivocally the most important film of 2011, begins with a public rumor and ends with a personal memory. The four glorious hours in between, comprising what I can only describe as a simmering stew of intrigue, revenge and romance, intricately maps the serpentine narrative canals connecting these two reference points. Told in a fluid, almost elastic style, Mysteries of Lisbon effortlessly overlaps seemingly diverging stories and experiences to create a majestic timeline of tragedy, lust, and comeuppance, where each piece is integral to the overall puzzle.

Characters share long, subtext-heavy interludes, verbal standoffs of epic proportions that jettison them into the expanding cinematic world beyond the frame. Fittingly, Ruiz’s nimble camera glides through hallways, rooms, and corridors like a boomerang slowed to an inquisitive crawl, twirling forward then backtracking to find new information, new emotions. Each wonderfully textured image is a still photograph spun into motion by fate.

Set in 19th century Portugal among the upper echelons of the social elite, Mysteries of Lisbon opens with the story of Joao (Joao Baptista), a young orphan yearning to understand his true identity and past history. From here, the film gracefully and deceptively expands to include multiple characters, flashbacks, and tangents where every human emotion under the sun becomes a cinematic centerpiece.

Time is both a weapon and a shield in Mysteries of Lisbon, sometimes a purveyor of doom and sometimes a surveyor of hope. This natural pragmatism toward the ways contrasting ideologies, social conventions and hierarchies feed off each other is Ruiz’s main concern. The final moments of the film find a beggar telling the now grown Joao an especially pertinent bit of wisdom: “What to us are the things of life are the enormous tragedies to the nobility.” But Mysteries of Lisbon doesn’t just skewer the arrogance and entitlement of the privileged; it connects wealth and poverty as complex human experiences separated by the smallest twist of fate, the most minute detail. Both are subject to tragedy and redemption in equal measure.

Ruiz’s greatest character, an assassin named Knife Eater (Ricardo Pereira) who later evolves into a much more complicated beast, best personifies this transcendent and flexible view of human nature. In the end, Mysteries of Lisbon is not a film of finite memories, scars or relationships but remembered (and misremembered) shifts in consciousness, defining moments crystallized through the hazy lens of memory. Raul Ruiz passed away in August of 2011 with supposedly four more films in the can. Like many of his characters, Ruiz's influence transcends the grave." - Glenn Heath Jr.

2011 Film of the Year Countdown: #26

War Horse (Steven Spielberg) [44 points/4 votes]

'In the digital D.I.Y. age, filmmakers have an incredible arsenal of technique available to them. They know tricks some directors who learned their craft on Super 8 and 16mm, cutting film on Moviola decks like sausage makers, may still not have mastered. And yet, to crudely paraphrase a nugget of Christian theology, what does it profit a woman or a man if they can shoot film like a gunslinger yet they come up short in the soul department? Nowadays, knockoffs of the dolly zoomSteven Spielberg popularized in Jaws or the kind of hair-raising, relentlessly fluid, anything-goes sensibility that characterized Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and1941 or the emotional acuity of movies as disparate as E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and Empire of the Sun are a dime a dozen. Yet their true spirits are much harder to capture. Many filmmakers have dazzled audiences with mastery of technique in the wake of these movies, to the point that some audiences may have begun to have trouble even mustering the effort to differentiate between well-crafted art and sheer audio-visual noise. Amidst all the cacophony, few have swept us up the way Spielberg, working at peak form, is capable of doing. And I’d like to suggest that War Horse represents Spielberg in peak form, marshaling a marriage between the early impudence of his technical prowess, his continued, even more potent desire to connect his sensibility with the traditions of film history, and an emotional freedom that unites the director and his audience, absent the need for mutual flattery regarding the social importance of the subject matter.

By embracing the melodramatic splendor of the story of the bond between young Albert (Jeremy Irvine), his beloved horse Joey and their journey of separation and eventual reunion across the impossibly gorgeous landscapes and ravaged, scarred battlefields of World War I, and then robustly channeling that splendor into his filmmaking, Spielberg finds the emotional power he often overreaches for when he approaches “mature” subject matter head-on. Ironically, the director accesses a portrait of the human condition that bests even that of Empire of the Sun by following Joey’s journey of hardship and reflecting the experience of soldiers (British and German) not through Joey’s perspective -- as some have claimed -- but simply by the fact of the animal’s presence and how it affects those whose lives are most derailed and devastated by the war. Simply put, Joey reminds them of their own humanity. War Horse suggests a way of looking at stories about the way boys and men relate to animals that transcends anthropomorphic excess; the movie’s opening 45 minutes are a glorious fantasia on themes of loyalty and determination played out on one of the most glorious Technicolor-esque Irish countryside ever committed to film, perhaps the best movie on a classic Disney template that Disney himself never made. (We’ve encountered the likes of Albert’s downtrodden dad, his stern but loving mother, and their gruff, unyielding landlord, played wonderfully by Peter Mullan, Emily Watson and David Thewlis, respectively, in countless other movies, but rarely brought to life with the kind of commitment and passion these actors display.)

But when the story begins its episodic movement from Joey’s conscription into service with the British Army to his theft by a pair of German deserters, his brief adoption by a Belgian farmer and his granddaughter, and his navigation across the front lines of battle, Spielberg takes up a more artful, suggestive approach to depicting the horrors of war than the more plainly overwhelming barrage of death on display in Saving Private Ryan. Critic David Edelstein described a sequence in War Horse in which two German soldiers are executed, the moment of their death obscured from our sight by the slow passage of a windmill’s blade, as one of the movies’ most merciful depictions of death, “yet still unspeakable.” It’s Spielberg’s restraint, which is emphasized throughout War Horse despite the movie’s impossibly pleasurable grandeur, that makes his canvas of horror so immediate, so powerful, and which also aligns him with the epic tradition of classic cinema rather than the razzmatazz younger generation, many of whom are working so hard with their shaky-cams and violent editing schemes to outdo effects they probably first saw in Jaws or Raiders of the Lost Ark. Spielberg’s design reminds us how artists can use aestheticizing effects without buying into the pomp and circumstance and rush of excitement about war that probably lured the soldiers into the trenches in the first place. The British Army’s first charge across a wheat field and into the camp of a surprised battalion of Germans begins with this kind of rousing purpose, and ends with a horrifying sight of suddenly rider-less horses running into a forest where a deeper nightmare awaits.

Those who dislike War Horse often cite its length, or its flush of melodramatic imagery, or John Williams’ typically ornate score, or even alleged inaccuracies involving the behavior of horses as evidence that it’s somehow boring, over the top, or in one way or another shameless and false. But resistance to War Horse, including Williams’ contribution (which I find to be one of his loveliest accompaniments to a Spielberg movie), was a willful act far beyond my meager strength as a moviegoer -- I was engaged far more quickly and deeply than I could have ever guessed possible, then completely overwhelmed at the conclusion by Spielberg’s deliberate evocation of a Technicolor majesty long since abandoned by an industry more interested in “found footage” gimmicks than the zone where craft becomes art. As I choked back and then succumbed to tears while the credits rolled, the friend with whom I saw the movie (he also loved it) patted me on the back and said, “Isn’t that why we go to the movies?” In that moment, and in all the moments which have occupied my remembrance of the movie since, I could not disagree." - Dennis Cozzalio

2011 Film of the Year Countdown: #33

Film Socialisme (Jean-Luc Godard) [35 points/4 votes]

"'The film is out there. For the future. And, with Beethoven, I think sometimes it is a bit too much.' - Pedro Costa on Film Socialisme

On the surface, few films are feel as contemporary as Film Socialisme, from the utilization of every digital recording medium possible to Godard's first statement on Web 2.0 with the Twitter-like 'Navajo' subtitles to the purest function of YouTube (cat videos) and the always camera-toting observer, documenting thin slices of life. And yet, few films feel so historically threaded and grounded as this one, using no less than the origins of Western arts and politics to ground the horrors of the recently lapsed century and our current one.

Beginning on the recently sunk cruise ship, the Costa Concordia, with its unmistakably garish yellow spires, a marriage of aesthetics: 1970s Godard (a confessional, melodramatic cinema) with Vertov -- a blending of the staged, the maybe staged, and the observational and voyeuristic. The ship, a cruising Dubai of pretentious and dubious appropriations where Alain Badiou and Patti Smith, the very rich and the petit-bourgeois, coexist, touring the debris of Western culture along Mediterranean (which may be the most full-bodied environmental Godardian metaphor since he filmed the ruins of East Germany in Germany Year 90 Nine Zero). The film moves to a gas station in rural France, where familial collectivism disintegrates into a behind-the-scenes provincial-porn documentary, a diagnosis of the failings of new/trans media backdropped in a candy-colored pop art hellscape. It is here that the film finds a traditional pace, a tenderness (the mother/son relationship especially) that signals, ever so subtly, a trust in youth.

Much like Notre Musique opens, Film Socialisme concludes with dense, tangential visual and aural threads, color graded to something close to cosmic digital paint, unifying thoughts, conversations and materials. -- again, a collectiveness encompassing images from the trapeze sequence from Beaches of Agnes (an infinite conversation in Arabic and Hebrew) and the Odessa steps while reshaping the entire first sequence, cutting the past with present. While Godard avoids a didactic socialism (or utopianism), he redefines it for this very great medium through a vigorous, nearly hyper-linked dossier about all of us and where we're moving in time." - Michael Lieberman

2011 Film of the Year Countdown: #63

Bellflower (Evan Glodell) [14 points/1 vote]

"Writer-director Evan Glodell literally takes a flamethrower to the conventions of the lo-fi indie romance in his debut feature Bellflower, announcing a breakthrough talent to be reckoned with in the process. The micro-budget mumblecore movies of recent years have their merits, but few of them possess the go-for-broke passion for all things cinema on display here. Although Glodell shares with the mumblecore movement a preoccupation with the fumbling, crumbling relationships of semi-articulate young people, he doesn’t adhere to its minimalist philosophy. After all, you may only get one chance in this life to make a movie, so you might as well use the opportunity to blow up a propane tank with a shotgun.

But if all Bellflower had going for it was a flair for pyrotechnics, it would hardly qualify as the most electrifying filmmaking debut of the year. The biggest explosions in Bellflower are of the emotional variety, as Glodell taps into the volatile, alcohol-fueled interactions among underemployed twentysomethings in Los Angeles (something I know a little something about from my younger days). At that age, every breakup feels like the end of the world, a notion Glodell takes to its logical extreme by giving best friends Woodrow (played by Glodell himself) and Aiden (Tyler Dawson) an apocalyptic obsession with the Mad Max movies. (What a relief it is, for once, that the pop culture touchstone for these characters is not the Star Wars saga.)

Woodrow’s romantic apocalypse begins when he meets Milly (Jessie Wiseman), who immediately demonstrates that she’s no Manic Pixie Dreamgirl by besting him in a dive bar’s cricket-eating contest. Milly is an entirely different variety of idealized indie girlfriend: rough around the edges but up for driving all the way to Texas on a first date (in a car equipped with a whiskey dispenser, natch). She’s the kind of girl who’ll warn you it’s a bad idea to fall in love with her... which only makes you fall harder.

In its last 30 minutes or so, Bellflower roars and vibrates and nearly shakes apart like the engine under the hood of Medusa, the badass, flame-belching Road Warrior car Aiden has built in preparation for the coming apocalypse. (In the movie-saturated view of Aiden and Woodrow, the end of the world is not an occasion to dread, but rather an opportunity to rule the wasteland like the descendants of Lord Humongous.) It’s nearly impossible to distinguish reality from fever-dream as the undercurrents of violence present in the film’s first hour ignite like a string of firecrackers. The imagery grows increasingly abstract and intense, to the point where Bellflower has the blown-out, degraded look of an antique film discovered long after the apocalypse. (Glodell, who studied engineering, designed and built several of the cameras used to shoot the movie.) Given its oft-unlikeable characters and potentially maddening ambiguity, Bellflower isn’t a movie for everyone. But surrender to its singular, obsessive vision, and you may decide, like me, that it’s the movie of the year." - Scott Von Doviak

Other Stuff We Liked, Part 2: Miscellany

Best Body of Work: Ryan Gosling

"It all began, innocently enough, with him being a fresh-faced kid in the Mickey Mouse Club back in the early-to-mid-nineties. Within two decades, he'd turned into a guy in a Scorpion jacket who could conceivably stomp the mustard out of some thug in an elevator. Canadian-born Ryan Gosling has become both a heart-throb (just Google "Hey Girl") and a serious actor (I personally believe his turn as a drug-addicted teacher in 2006's Half Nelson was one of the best male performances of the aughts). It's the kind of career Robert Pattinson, for one, wished he had, if he wasn't so busy not washing his hair and not sparkling so damn much.

2011 proved to be a landmark year for Mr. Gosling, as he was able to produce three standout mainstream movies: Drive, Crazy, Stupid, Love. and The Ides of March. The three films required three separate emotional registers -- in Drive, he was taciturn and protective but capable of horrendous violence; in The Ides of March, he was demanding, idealistic but full of inner conflict over his ideals and the real world of evil political maneuvering; and in Crazy, Stupid, Love. he was an impeccably-mannered womanizer who tutored Steve Carell on how to be a whoremaster just like him before falling under the spell of kewpie-doll Emma Stone. He looks just as comfortable chatting in bed with Stone as he does storming away from a crime scene in Drive; in interviews he's careful with how he answers questions and never seems to say a bad word about anyone. In real life he's been known to bust up fights after leaving the gym. When asked if he's dating anyone, he says he's in a relationship with Disneyland. He gives just enough to let you hang there; it's in the eyes and the sheepish grin.

Exactly what will the future look like for the amorphic and ambiguous Gosling? I can honestly see him, as he gets older, turn to directing (which, coincidentally, is something James Dean probably would have done). I just get the feeling he has the insight and sensitivity into human affairs that would make him perfect for it. But before that, in 2012 he's filming two for the bros: he's re-teaming with Derek Cianfrance (of Blue Valentine notoriety) to play a motorcycle stunt rider and he's going to reunite with Emma Stone for The Gangster Squad, where he's going to play a sergeant for the LAPD. And when he's not doing that, he's going to be on Ellen giving the audience free Snuggies. Or he'll be back in Disneyland. But trust me on the director thing. You can just picture him standing by his faithful cinematographer: 'Hey girl, could you step to the right six inches because you're not in the frame? And can you give me a little more fire in the eyes? Thank you so much.'" - Matt Lotti



Best Ensemble: Margin Call

"If your idea of a great film noir is a tight, compelling story about a bunch of characters who speak their own language while gathering in the dead of night to discuss how to make a killing at the expense of a lot of other people who never did them any harm, then Margin Call is the film noir of the year. It is also, almost incidentally, the best of a number of attempts to dramatize the economic implosion of the past decade and the moral corruption that led to it, and that has a lot to do with the fact that it's the only one that dares to challenge audiences to spend some time inside these weasels' heads instead of judging them from safe moral ground. As in any good crime movie, it lures you into complicity with their way of thinking, so that some part of you feels their terror, the better to understand that it has less to do with having all those millions of dollars somehow taken away than with the fear of being seen as ridiculous. It's a great opportunity for the actors, and there are actors here who live for these opportunities: Kevin Spacey (proving again that he is a star so long as he thinks he's being a character actor), Zachary Quinto, Paul Bettany, Stanley Tucci, Simon Baker, Penn Badgely, and Jeremy Irons (parachuting in at the start of the third act, just to show that Oliver Stone cast the wrong Englishman as Nixon) are all first-rate while coming together to create a perfect working machine that digs its own hole. The one prominent woman in the cast, Demi Moore, isn't in their league, which is too bad. But that's not a crippling flaw in a movie about a toxic boys' club." - Phil Dyess-Nugent



Best Cinematography: Robert Richardson, Hugo

"One of the many wonderful things about Hugo, perhaps the thing I value most about the film, is the fact that it does not feel like the work of a 67 year old man.

Despite its themes of nostalgia, regret and loss, Hugo is a film made by someone who still is galvanized by the possibilities of his art and the act of making movies. Moreover it’s the work of someone still excited by the possibilities of the medium they have mastered. And I think some of the credit for that must go to Robert Richardson. Scorsese has delivered some of the most visually innovative films of the last half century, but there is no doubt that he is also a creature of habit. Thelma will edit, DeNiro, DiCaprio or some other member of his trusted stable will star and if the film is not set in ancient Jerusalem or 1940’s Tibet the Rolling Stones will factor in. I would argue that none of his frequent collaborators pushes him the way Richardson does.

Their collaboration began with Casino (and to see what Scorsese brings to their partnership, compare the look of that movie to Oliver Stone’s flailing, Richardson-shot, desert noir U Turn), but it’s really Bringing Out the Dead, my pick for the most underrated film of Scorsese’s career, that crystallized the tenor of their creative partnership.

Bringing Out the Dead is a film that feels fueled by Benzedrine, making even Henry Hill’s famous meltdown at the climax of Goodfellas (which is really more a feat of editing) seem staid by comparison. Robertson delivers some of the most stunning images of Scorsese’s career: Nicholas Cage’s “grief mop” pulling the souls of those he’s failed to save out of the pavement; the various trips through the hospital that feel only marginally less traumatic than the one in Jacob’s Ladder; the unforgettable shot-in-reverse attempted resurrection of Rose, the snow flying up into the sky, juxtaposed in front of the hanging carcasses of meat. It's an almost assaultive, surrealist depiction of failed grace.

And unlike, say, Robertson’s work with Stone, such aggressive amped-up imagery does not come across as empty flailing but very much of a piece, and it’s not as though aggression is his only trick. Indeed, in The Aviator it’s Robertson’s command of Classicism that seems subversive. By sticking to an early Technicolor palette where the shade of grass and the peas and the flow of light through water look utterly alien, Robertson creates a mood that is positively dreamlike, an environment as removed from ours as is the privileged world of Hughes. Yet even in this elegant film, Robertson’s brute force comes through in the spectacular plane crash in the center and the subsequent mental meltdown. Every Scorsese film is about suffering, physical, mental and spiritual, and The Aviator shows Robertson meeting him beat for beat on all three. Shutter Island dove further into the nightmare, creating a look that can be described as “Val Lewton on steroids.” The carnivorous shadows, locked-down tracking shots and details barely glimpsed in the corners of the frame helped create one of the greatest works of cinematic paranoia this side of Polanski.

The point is that Robertson is able to deliver imagery that is both quintessentially Scorsese and innovative enough never to risk becoming stale. He’s the perfect DP for a film that simultaneously manages to embrace cinema’s past and future. From the opening cross fade, overlying the image of the great clock at the film’s center delivered with the depth of field provided by 3D, the entire film walks a balance between old and new. So we get impossible CGI tracking shots next to scenes of almost Tati-like remove as Hugo observes the “parts” of his train station. The Stroheim-like “masked” montage of Chloe Moretz’s fall at the train station and the chilly expressionism of Papa George’s front walk is juxtaposed with the simple unfussed-over warmth of Hugo’s nest. The film’s aesthetic is perhaps best summed up by the climatic restaging of Safety Last!: an old thing done in a new way.

In doing so, Scorsese, a director who could never really be called fanciful, draws a direct line between himself and Melies. I have suggested elsewhere that Hugo is a kind of alternate autobiography for the filmmaker. It’s tough to remember after a decade of unbroken success that Scorsese’s career was in a very different place at the turn of the millennium. His films weren’t commercially successful before The Aviator. It’s all too easy to imagine that if Michael Mann had directed that film as was originally intended, if Scorsese’s creative partnership with Leonardo DiCaprio had not been sealed and he had instead followed up Gangs of New York with another costly underperformer, the state of his career would be much more like the late career of his contemporaries Coppola (reduced to making smaller, ever more hermetic works) or De Palma (struggling feebly at the edge of the system) or his mentor Michael Powell (marginalized).

But there is another fate that can befall the filmmaker in the late period, one that’s far more insidious. Commercial success is no insulation against simple fatigue. Not that older directors aren’t capable of great films, but we all know the list for every Ran there is a Family Plot, for every Man Who Shot Liberty Valance a Rio Lobo. Just as it is depressingly easy to imagine a marginalized Scorsese it’s easy to imagine a Scorsese no longer interested in the experimentation that has defined his career for the past two decades. Thanks to the collaboration of the likes of Richardson, this seems unlikely. I’m as excited about the prospect of Silence as I’ve ever been by a Scorsese film, and if Richardson should be the one to shoot it, so much the better." - Bryce Wilson

Best Screenplay: Abbas Kiarostami, Certified Copy

"Whereas some of 2011's finest films had elements to them that clearly — or at least noticeably — superseded others in terms of quality (the aesthetic wonder of The Tree of Life taking precedence over its screenplay being a popular example), Certified Copy's moving parts all work together in harmonious unison, one rarely overstepping or obscuring the other. The film's sterling screenplay and unassuming compositions in particular are irrevocably entwined, with one reverberating off the other in any given scene; each serves to compliment the other, and each is just a fraction of Abbas Kiarostami's heartbreaking vision of two people forging a connection.

Indeed, both script and visuals help to define one of the film's principle motifs: the nest of warring perspectives that surrounds the fragile human bond at the film's center. Kiarostami's camera cuts in and out of Juliette Binoche's car or coyly fixes its gaze on what seems to be a quarreling couple across the square but soon is revealed to be a man talking animatedly on his cell phone with his wife simply standing nearby. All the while, we're privy to the sparring, musings, and reflections on art, love and life, all of which finds our central two characters, played by Binoche and William Shimell, at fascinating verbal odds with each other. Thus, Certified Copy is largely about differing, constantly shifting perspectives, which its screenplay, also by Kiarostami, is constantly reinforcing; the way the characters converse in three or more different languages throughout the film, sometimes within a given scene, is an arresting expression of their patchwork of clashing opinions and ideologies, never coming across as some sort of self-aggrandizing cosmopolitan front. It's tragic too, evoking a kind of loss of connection or breach in understanding between Binoche and Shimell, a relationship partly lost in translation or complicated and distorted by the forces of gender, generation, change, location, and many more.

Certified Copy is, in fact, a study in temporality and change punctuated by stunning emotional turbulence. Kiarostami is fascinated with the way the emotional dynamics of a given scene can shift, swerve, or be altered altogether, triggered by a memory or instance of reflection or a single phrase or line of dialogue. A kind of tragic impermanence reigns supreme over the film, and many of the characters spend much of its duration trying to hold on to what is clearly slipping between their fingers, a devastating emotional texture conveyed ably via Kiarostami's wistfully-tinged words.

Another major, effective theme Kiarostami's screenplay pushes is that of simplicity - surprising given its somewhat cryptic, puzzle-like qualities. Certified Copy could almost be read as an advocation of the most refined, simple pleasures in one's life, a strand reflected in the screenplay, which continuously highlights Shimell's fixation with those who are able to take life and its offerings at face value and appreciate the most basic of gestures. This central rumination on simplicity comes to a devastating head in the film's final stretch, where we realize the conundrum that seems to command any discussion of the movie - namely, whether or not Binoche and Shimell are indeed a long-married couple or merely two strangers meeting for the first time as the film begins - doesn't actually matter, at least in regard to emotional payoff. No matter how you come at it, no matter what perspective you approach it from, in its final minutes, the film is distilled into its most basic, elemental and undeniably moving core." - Charles Lyons

Other Stuff We Liked, Part 1: Actors and Actresses

Just because they didn't place doesn't mean we didn't appreciate them...



"Alexander Payne’s films are like a snow globe. He takes a character leading out a peaceful existence in an idyllic setting and shakes things up. The shake-up usually takes the form of a life-altering event (death, failure, betrayal), and the ensuing snowstorm is a dramatic calamity where we watch the pieces settle back into place, culminating not in a big dramatic reveal, but with a return to the mundane routines of daily life.

The Descendants fits this mold quite nicely. George Clooney plays Matt King, a wealthy architect and landowner, who finds himself cuckolded by a wife he can’t quite confront (she is in a coma). Surrounding King’s moral dilemma are two equally troubling issues, both of which are unique to Payne’s typical brand of character study. King has two young daughters (both of whom are neglected and rapidly developing into a couple of fuck-ups) who are grieving their ailing mother, and he also has a swarm of greedy family members watching his every move as he presides over a monster of a real estate deal that concerns the sale of some ancestral land with which he was entrusted. The sale promises millions for each member of his extended family, and all are eager to find out what their piece of the pie will net them.

I refer to these final two elements – family and ancestry -- as unique amongst Payne’s filmography because both require a character to make a decision outside of his own self-interest. Unlike the straight-shooter teacher who is tired of playing by the rules in Election, the retired businessman whose lifelong partner passes on in About Schmidt or the misanthropic wine-snob whose failures in love and life come to boil on a weekend getaway in Sideways, Matt King is being crushed by the weight of issues much larger than himself. Even though he feels betrayed by his wife’s actions and wishes to drag her and her lover’s names through the mud, he has a duty to his children to stand by her side and see this thing through to the end -- for better and for worse, through sickness and through health, ‘til death do they part. King also has a duty to uphold the values of his ancestors. Would they approve of the venture capitalist urges driving this land deal? By selling off this land, would he be in a sense selling off his family history? His wife might not pull through, and if she dies, will he be able to hack it as a single parent? Was he ever a good parent to begin with? These giant issues are all kicking around in King’s head and the importance of leading a more selfless life begins to carry weight with him.

“Family seems like an archipelago. We are part of the same group, but we are still islands – separate and alone. And we’re slowly drifting apart” – Matt King

King’s internal moral dilemmas are given life through the brilliant performance of George Clooney. His struggles to honor the legacy of the deceased, set a good example for the living and uphold his commitments to the dying are communicated through a veritable master class of facial tics and well-timed glances. His gestures are so exaggerated and animated they bear comparison to classic Hollywood performers such as Cary Grant and Gary Cooper. Typically, it is the words that carry the weight in a Payne film, but in this case much of the emotion is internalized and repressed by King, and we are left to read the story on Clooney’s face. To say he pulls it off would be an understatement. He communicates pages of emotion without using a single word. Clooney’s performance makes a more mature filmmaker out of Payne, and in The Descendants, the image begins to resonate as much as the page. Take, for instance, the dozens of shots where Payne’s mise-en-scene strategically places a family relic or photo over Clooney’s shoulder, as if to give external life to the internal memories informing King’s every move. Clooney and Payne are using visual language in a way never present in either of their previous works which, for this writer, represents the highpoint of both their careers.

Eventually, the pieces may settle back into place for the final shot of the film -- as King and his children congregate on the couch as a family -- what could be more mundane than a night in front of the television? And while on the surface, this return to normality seems like a simple gesture signifying closure, there is a deeper message at play: no matter how far a family drifts apart, it can always be pulled back together. Living, dying, deceased, the family unit is ever changing, but the name, and the “group” it represents, is something larger than us all, and no amount of greed or betrayal could ever break that bond." - Adam Lemke



"It’s a cliché to say that effective child actors project a maturity beyond their years, but what Elle Fanning does in Super 8 is a layered variation on that familiar idea. It’s not so much that Fanning exhibits uncommon maturity but that she imbues Alice Dainard with the kind of weary resignation that comes from having to grow up much too quickly. Yet probably the most transcendent moments of Fanning’s performance come when Alice’s youthful enthusiasm shines through, when she can’t repress her goofy smile at the antics of the young movie-obsessed boys who’ve roped her into appearing in their homemade film.

Alice’s starring role in that movie within the movie offers Fanning a chance to give a performance within a performance, showing how all of Alice’s pent-up emotions come through as she acts in the boys’ cheesy zombie production. The early scene of the train derailment that unleashes an alien on the main characters’ sleepy small town is notable for its spectacular special effects and sheer enormity, but just as notable is Fanning’s performance immediately preceding it, as Alice imbues a tearful farewell scene with far more pathos than the budding filmmakers ever could have imagined. Fanning allows Alice’s reading of the horror-movie dialogue to reveal the hurt that she’s carrying around with her constantly.

The best example of Fanning’s multi-faceted performance comes in a small moment as main character Joe (Joel Courtney), who of course has a huge crush on Alice, advises her on how to play a zombie. Clad in impressive ghoulish makeup that Joe has created, Alice seamlessly and unsettlingly slips into mindless zombie mode, coming closer and closer to the boy who craves her attention. It’s a moment of innocence and knowingness mixed together, the perfect representation of Fanning’s work and J.J. Abrams’ film as a whole." - Josh Bell



"Prior to Meek's Cutoff, rising indie filmmaker Kelly Reichardt had never written characters with the explicit intent of providing an actor with a meaty showcase. That would go against her just-this-side-of-mumblecore dedication to patient "realism," usually translated as casual observation without heavy dramatic conflict —- lest she provoke (she'd say "manipulate") an exaggerated emotional response. At least, this is what I've always perceived to be the thought process behind her underplayed style and Meek's Cutoff, despite the fact that it's a stone masterpiece, pretty much keeps the trend going but for one exception: Bruce Greenwood.

No less lived-in than the countless other parts Reichardt's penned -— and to whose one-note limitations she's noticeably strained to adhere -— Greenwood is just too restless to reign in, his rowdy frontiersman presence invigorating every moment of Meek's Cutoff that he graces. As the eponymous Stephen Meek, guide to a wagon train crossing a vast desert expanse during the dog days of the Oregon Trail, he's bearded and wild-eyed and filled with stories about wrestling bears and scalping redskins. Whether these sordid tales are truths or elaborate fictions matters none to us even as they further spook his starving, exhausted clientele.

This is because Greenwood's monologues possess an incantatory quality, the words less important than the tempo and tone of their delivery, with the revving huskiness in his voice and his fireside (sometimes literally) immediacy suggestive of something mythic, a shared lineage with any number of larger-than-life personae born of the American Western. With squinting, inscrutable eyes set back in a shaggy, knotted gray mane and visage darkened by broad-brimmed hat, Greenwood's voice becomes his most expressive asset, and he strikes the perfect balance of comforting, old-pro wisdom and vague undercurrents of menace. He disappears so completely into the role of Stephen Meek that even those familiar with the well-regarded character actor's most recent work in the Star Trek reboot and Super 8 might not spot him.

But as camouflaged a performance as this is, it's also an unquestionably great one and a considerable asset for a film of quiet, languorous inaction. The conflict Reichardt's always allowed into her films in only the smallest doses springs from every fiber of Meek's being, antagonizing the self-sure morality of Michelle Williams' Emily and greatly testing the patience of the entire group with every dead-end his questionable guidance leads them to. Greenwood's nuanced work teeters between the jovial and the bloodthirsty, his unpredictable temperament itself amounting to all the tension Meek's Cutoff could ever need to transform its cloistered monotony into wratcheting suspense. Here's hoping Reichardt never stops casting him." - Sam C. Mac



"Simon Curtis’ My Week With Marilyn really doesn’t boast a great story – boy falls for a way-out-of-his-league girl while she struggles with fame – and in many ways it’s just another minor historical footnote (one that Colin Clark, the boy whose week it was, squeezed 2 books out of), but it becomes something special in the moments that its lead actress appears.

Glorified flirtations with celebrities are often TV movie fodder, and that’s what this film feels like for its first 10-15 minutes before Michelle Williams splashes onscreen as Marilyn Monroe in all her iconic bleached-blonde glory. Then the picture suddenly feels cinematic. Williams’ performance transcends so many standard cartoonish impressions of the sultry Monroe (think: Tina Louise as Ginger on Gilligan’s Island). The frailty, vulnerability and loneliness of Ms. Monroe bleeds through even the smallest moments of Williams’ work.

Williams has obviously meticulously studied Monroe’s canon, but I believe she’s infused some of her own life trajectory and observations of her peers into her portrayal. Sure, there’s her intense connection to the father of her one child – Heath Ledger, a star who also tragically died too young – but there’s a bit of such train wreck actresses as Lindsay Lohan in there too. Clark, portrayed by Eddie Redmayne, is way out of his depth in his lust for Monroe, at the same time that Monroe is out of her depth as an actress on a film set directed by Laurence Olivier (grandly played by Kenneth Branaugh). This is something we can feel in Williams as she nervously tries to do her job, yet still can’t quite grasp what’s expected of her.

Meryl Streep won the Best Actress Academy Award instead of Williams, and I was fine with that (even in the unremarkable The Iron Lady, Streep was pretty remarkable), but I had picked Williams when I made my Oscar predictions so I couldn’t help but be disappointed. No matter -- with such a mesmerizing turn, we are sure to be wowed again by her. Even if I can’t imagine being more wowed than by Williams channeling Monroe in the bangin’ musical dance number “Heatwave.” At least that’s one thing that Streep, no matter how many great performances she does and Oscars she gets, couldn’t ever pull off." - Daniel Johnson



"Every actor loves to play a villain, and why not? The chance to be unencumbered by restrictions of morality, subtlety or good taste is irresistible and has led to some of the most memorable of all movie characters, from Dracula to Khan Noonien Singh. The trick is to not play these characters as simple moustache-twirlers but as three-dimensional human beings who yet indulge in depravity.

In Kim Jee-Woon’s I Saw the Devil, Choi Min-Sik plays that most common modern cinematic villain -- the Cackling Serial Killer -- but with a twist. For much of the film (spoiler alert) he’s the victim of an elaborate revenge scheme by the fiancée of his most recent victim, a highly-trained security agent. Choi plays the part for all it’s worth, hitting the expected notes of gleeful sadism but also balancing his villainy with an unexpected amount of charm, intelligence, and even mundane schlubbiness. He’s the underdog in this particular game of cat-and-mouse, and Choi absorbs as much punishment as his character dishes out, limping and staggering bloodily through the film. Throughout this, he never allows the audience to settle into a comfortable relationship with him – the pain he endures is as real as the pain he inflicts, and his stubborn persistence against his victim/tormentor is simultaneously heroic and horrifying. It’s the sign of a great actor to be able to take such a flashy, larger-than-life role and imbue it with the small details of humanity while never letting go of the reptilian intelligence in his eyes." - Jeff McMahon



"When a performance or an actor gets called volcanic, generally it's a nod to the violent forcefulness of the skill on display. What Anna Paquin does in Margaret fits that definition, but she's also volcanic in a more elementary sense: Her character Lisa Cohen is prone to erupting without warning, spewing boiling-hot invective and laying waste to whomever should be in her path.

It's a hell of a high-wire act writer/director Kenneth Lonergan has set up for Paquin. The challenge: Dig down and find the truth, the intelligence, the sympathetic heart of this confused and overwhelmed teenage girl while all the while playing her as frazzled, nasty and unsympathetic as possible -- in other words, a genuine teenager. Paquin proves more than up to it. Her Lisa is a smart girl, more troubled than most (one doesn't witness a woman hit by abus and have her die in their arms and call it everyday angst) but still recognizably garden-variety in the battles she chooses to fight.

And fight she does. Her intelligence allows her an uncommon dexterity in verbal battles just as her irrationality allows her to change the terms of argument on the fly without skipping a beat. Margaret elevates snippy day-to-day discourse to the level of operatic power struggles as part of its grander aim, and why shouldn't it? Does the average teen not see the world as essentially a self-involved one-person war against all who would cause grief or harm, with every emotion pitched at a fever or not at all? It's a fragile, volatile world that's built here, a New York City of frayed nerves and the lingering stain of tragedy, and Paquin is terrific as its thrashing chaotic center, steely and exasperated when haranguing the police in one moment and breaking down over using a word incorrectly in the next. Her quixotic quest against the bus driver she wants held responsible for the accident mirrors her own internal struggle for something, anything, to make perfect sense for one brief moment. Paquin's asked to do a lot of emotional heavy lifting and never once does she falter or buckle under the pressure. She never falls off that wire." - Steve Carlson