Film: Year in Review

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

The most recent DVD release of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind audaciously includes a booklet featuring mini-essays from people across the country, each proclaiming the manner in which the film has forever changed their lives.

Yet Focus Features can be forgiven, for if any of 2004’s films deserves such a shameless ploy for Oscar consideration, it is this film, Charlie Kaufman and Michel Gondry’s latest collaboration.

Despite a brilliant trailer and a screenplay penned by today’s most acclaimed writer, Eternal Sunshine was the victim of meager expectations. Gondry’s debut feature, the universally unappreciated Human Nature (another Kaufman script), caused the critical community to ignore Gondry’s other credentials. Critics thought the auteur’s history with music videos would hinder the film, ignoring that his work for Bjork, Radiohead, and the White Stripes rank among the most ingenious and visually compelling short films ever made.

As a result, many reviews were quick to dismiss Eternal Sunshine’s aesthetic panache as superfluous indulgence rather than the perfect complement to the plot’s mind-bending structure. That Gondry had elicited Jim Carrey’s finest and most emotionally attuned performance was overlooked, as was the director’s seamless juggling of unwieldy subplots. In fact, Gondry’s visual mastery pales in comparison to his more organic directorial duties. By the film’s end, his intuitive understanding of Kaufman’s blunt take on love and the tragic fallibility of contemporary relationships is on par with the most proven of filmmakers.

 

The Motorcycle Diaries

One of the year’s most heralded films was the portrait of a young Ernesto “Che” Guevara (Gael García Bernal). The Motorcycle Diaries, directed by Walter Salles (Central Station) and based on travelogues kept by both Guevara and his traveling partner Alberto Granado (Rodrigo de la Serna), is not only the story of the budding revolutionary, but also a story of love, friendship, and exploration.

It is hard to believe that Guevara, whose visage now graces t-shirts the world over, was once the idealistic (and asthmatic) medical student depicted in the film. Through his trip across South America with Granado, we witness Guevara in a different light, before he becomes “Che” the revolutionary.

Salles had many opportunities to either glorify or condemn Guevara, but he did neither. In the film, Guevara is not the iconoclast or communist figure he later became, but rather a normal man, who exposes the purely human aspects of his soul. However, Salles subtly alludes to the man that Che is to become, as the young Guevara learns how capitalism has devastated the South American landscape and its people.

The film’s poetic visuals and graceful narrative earned it accolades from some of the world’s most prestigious film festivals. The Motorcycle Diaries has been nominated for a Golden Globe and for Independent Spirit Awards in the categories of cinematography (Eric Gautier), debut performance (for de la Serna), and director. Salles also received two honors from the Cannes Film Festival, including the François Chalais Award, awarded to the feature that best captures real life.

Despite the film’s love affair with the man Guevara was, it does not come off as unbearably sentimental. Bernal’s convincing portrayal of Guevara ashow that the film is more than just a bio-pic: it is a universal story about will, compassion and the power of friendship.

 

Goodbye Dragon Inn

Goodbye Dragon Inn, the latest film from Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang says goodbye to an aging, rundown movie theater in Tsai’s own district of Taipei. Giving the film its English title, the scratchy, old print the theatre projects is Dragon Inn (1966), one of King Hu’s great swordplay sagas. Against the action tale’s open skies and whiplash pacing, the entrancing and beautifully spare activities of a half dozen or so patrons and employees unfold. By the time the theater closes, Tsai’s melancholy and comic work has choreographed a hushed dance of lonely phantoms that serves as a tribute to a piece of Hong Kong’s film legacy and to the act of moviegoing itself.

 

Before Sunset

Before Sunset, Richard Linklater’s tense, wistful romance masterfully builds upon his Before Sunrise from 1995. In that film, two young travelers (Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy) meet, spend a night together in Vienna falling in love, then part, promising to meet again. This sequel leaves that sense of exhilaration and discovery behind and picks up with their reunion in Paris nine years later.

The focus is on the much knottier problem of missed chances and now guarded emotions. The wonderfully effortless result has a depth, artistry, and beauty few, if any, movies from this past year can match.

 

The Passion of the Christ

A striking face in the now-massive crowd of polarizing issues, Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ vied only with Fahrenheit 9-11 for the title of the year’s most inflammatory film. Lauded as a spiritual masterpiece and condemned as anti-Semitic, it’s sure to be avoided like the plague at most of the year’s mainstream awards ceremonies. Yet, ideologies aside, Mel Gibson crafted an excellent film, a primarily visceral experience that blends seamless cinematography with a stylized setting that—in any other context—could be called macabre. A marriage between technical precision and the daring to tackle the taboo, The Passion is Gibson’s magnum opus. Before you pan it or praise it, see it.

 

Bright Leaves

This essayistic documentary marked a return in two senses for its maker Ross McElwee, who made his reputation with Sherman’s March (1986). It is not only a return to the North Carolina of his youth, to the south that still shapes his sensibility, but also an invigorating return to form.

And it may be his best film yet. McElwee probes his family’s past, the southern legacy of tobacco production, and a re-discovered Gary Cooper melodrama that curiously unites the two. The threads that emerge and converge—smoking, living, dying, remembering, and filming—are woven into a subtle, moving work that avoids anti-tobacco boilerplate for patient, perceptive reflection on matters of a much greater magnitude.

 

Mean Girls

I saw Mean Girls sober and on purpose. This was an inexcusable decision. Knowing full well that the movie starred Lindsey Lohan and sported SNL writing “talent,” I agreed to be ripped off. I don’t think that anyone thought a movie about high school cliques delivered by the head writer of a show that can barely suspend hilarity over seven-minute sketches could be anything other than terrible.

But Tina Fey produced a surprisingly good comedy—one with enough consistency and wit to generate consistent laughter. Though short of brilliance, Mean Girls opens the door for more Tina Fey on the big screen, which, as it turns out, should be a good thing.

 

Crimson Gold

A potent look at class antagonism, Iranian director Jafar Panahi’s most recent film unjustly slipped under the radar of many when it opened last January.

But from its stark opening tableau of violent robbery to its final scenes of languid exploration in a mansion, Crimson Gold commands attention. Working from a script by his more famous colleague Abbas Kiarostami, Panahi creates a story rich in social detail that centers on a frustrated pizza deliveryman’s (Hossain Emadeddin) encounters with Tehran’s wealthier residents.

The movie benefits, above all, from Emadeddin’s uncanny presence—a hulking, lethargic mien, sympathetic and opaque all at once.

 

Notre Musique

Jean-Luc Godard’s most recent multifarious, ruminative foray finds the director extending the continuous search that defines his career, restlessly seeking ways to think about the state of cinema and the condition of the world. It is a divine comedy in three “kingdoms” (Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise) even though Godard doesn’t embrace any path to salvation. Sarajevo in the aftermath of war and the Palestinian—Israeli conflict anchor Godard’s thoughts on histories of pain and the unpromising possibility of reconciliation. Deeply affecting, densely allusive, highly cerebral, and also sensuously lush in sound-and-image orchestration; Notre Musique is just one more brilliant film from a brilliant artist, now 73-years-old and still immensely prolific.

 

Kill Bill Vol. 2

The embarrassingly sluggish progression of American cinema can be attributed to the fact that most domestic filmmakers would rather seek inspiration from hacks like the Wachowskis rather than masters such as Wyler or Welles. Quentin Tarantino opts to ride on the shoulders of giants, and with Kill Bill: Volume 2 becomes a giant himself. After aping Kurosawa and Fukasaku in the saga’s first installment, Tarantino drags his muse through a brutal homage to Leone and King Hu in the second. However, when Uma Thurman’s Beatrix Kiddo finally finds the titular character she so despises, the film transcends a mere mélange of cinema’s past and becomes a shockingly poignant and utterly unique experience that hints, hopefully, at American cinema’s future.