Joel and Ethan Coen, Spike Jonze and a host of foreign directors created some of the best in cinema this year
By Elise Nakhnikian
IN recent years, I’ve heard a lot of buzz about how movies are going down the tubes. I don’t agree, since I always find it hard to choose just 10 favorites from the films that hit U.S. theaters this year. But I do wonder about American movies. Once again, only four of the movies on my year-end top 10 list are from the U.S. The last time there were more than that was 2005.
Granted, I don’t exactly feel deprived. Thanks to Netflix, movies on demand, film festivals, and the rich array always on tap in theaters, there are always more movies I want to see than there is time to see them. (Note: I had trouble keeping this list to 10 movies. For a longer version that includes my 11th choice, visit Girls Can Play by clicking on “blogs” on the toolbar at
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.) But I worry about smart, gifted American filmmakers who have something to say. Is it getting so hard to finance anything other than a wannabe blockbuster that they’re giving up and doing something easier? If so, that’s everyone’s loss, even if the online options jostling for our attention keep us from noticing right away.
The Maid. Raquel (Catalina Saavedra) has been the live-in maid for an upper-middle-class Chilean family for her entire adult life. Despite all the talk about how they love one another, she’s really not part of their family — or of her own, after living apart for more than two decades. But her little room is the only home she knows, so when the mistress of the house announces that she’ll be hiring someone to “help” her, Raquel starts acting out in increasingly bizarre ways, until a new maid comes to the house and changes everything.
Writer-director Sebastián Silva lays out the rickety relationships between Raquel and the family she serves with sensitivity and sly humor. Saavedra is a revelation, using her thin lips and bruised-looking eyes to convey both the pain of the emotions roiling around in Raquel’s aching head and her grim attempts to quash them, and the rest of the cast is excellent too.
Bright Star. This deeply felt, exquisitely tender love story places us smack in the world of poet John Keats (a luminescent, gently charismatic Ben Whishaw) and Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish), the young woman he loved. Cinematographer Grieg Fraser captures an astonishingly gorgeous England, starkly beautiful in the winter and bursting with colors and life in the springtime and summer. Writer-director Jane Campion revives the pressures and pleasures of early 19th-century English society, but this is no stilted costume drama. It’s the story of two vivid individuals whose feelings and motivations are as compelling as our own — if not more so. Keats is a born Romantic, full of feeling and fun, and Fanny is Campion’s most self-assured heroine yet, self-confident, forthright, competent and kind.
Gomorrah. Gomorrah is a whole new kind of mafia movie. Compared to the goombahs of Gomorrah, even Tony Soprano looks tony, and the Godfather series look like a Cosa Nostra recruitment poster, with its movie-star Mafioso.
Writer Roberto Saviano, a native of Naples, based the screenplay on his own novel, which was in turn based on extensive research into the camorra, the criminal underground that maintains a chokehold on Naples and the surrounding countryside. Saviano exposes the hidden workings of the system by showing how it affects the lives of nearly everybody in its orbit, even infiltrating parts of the global economy.
Director Matteo Garrone, a painter as well as a filmmaker, artfully translates the novel’s grim intensity, creating a visceral and claustrophobic world. There’s nothing noble or melancholy about the gangsters in Gomorrah; they’re just ugly brutes who cripple the world they rule.
The White Ribbon. At first, all seems well in this creamily photographed black-and-white tale of a farming community in northern Germany shortly before World War I. But little by little, writer-director Michael Haneke reveals the authoritarian brutality so casually wielded by the sternly self-righteous men in charge. One father canes his children for imagined sins. Another has sex with his teenage daughter. A blithely entitled baron forces the sharecroppers to put up with daily humiliations and unsafe conditions and makes a virtual prisoner of his own wife.
Meanwhile, seemingly random acts of cruelty or violence are occurring. Since we never learn who is doing them, they come to seem like an inevitable reaction to rampant oppression. Where your thoughts lead you from there — to the Nazi regime that the kids in this movie will vote in as adults? To someplace closer to home? — is up to you.
Where the Wild Things Are. Though it’s co-written by Dave Eggers and based on Maurice Sendak’s classic children’s book, this is a classic Spike Jonze Joint: intelligently conceived, ingeniously crafted, and as steeped in humanity as a rum cake is in rum.
The opening and closing scenes economically convey the anger and angst that causes Max (Max Record) to run away and the love that pulls him back. And when he runs away, it’s to an exhilaratingly primal island peopled by wild things that are awesome in the old-fashioned sense of the word. Played by actors in giant puppet suits and voiced by a stellar cast, they are vulnerable, tender and occasionally terrifying.
Wild Things is refreshingly free of the pyrotechnics, paint-by-numbers peril, and preachy morals that gum up most children’s movies. The lessons learned emerge organically from a plot that feels as impulsive and focused on fun as a child at play.
The Hurt Locker and In the Loop. Of all the movies I’ve seen so far about what we’re doing in Iraq and Afghanistan and how we got there, these two may be my favorites. Director Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker is a visceral look at the pull exerted by the war on Staff Sgt. William James (Jeremy Renner), an adrenaline junkie who disarms bombs in Iraq. Bigelow knows how to maximize the suspense inherent in a violent confrontation or an armed bomb, but she’s also good at showing how men reveal themselves even when they’re trying to hide, so we get to know the taciturn James and the other men in his squad well enough to share the hurt when the war warps their lives.
In the Loop, a mordantly funny British satire based on a BBC-TV series, is a fictionalized tale of how the Bush Administration engineered the start of the occupation of Iraq, as seen through the eyes of Simon Foster (Tom Hollander), a British politician pulled into “debate” on the topic by an American State Department official (a tart Mimi Kennedy). Foster happily bumbles into a world in which nearly everyone — himself included — is motivated by self-interest, more interested in salvaging or furthering their careers than in deciding whether their country should go to war. The barbs fly by like darts as the Brits use their best remaining weapon, erudite sarcasm, to bully and manipulate. It’s all very funny, yet it feels alarmingly plausible — office politics with a capital P.
A Serious Man. A Serious Man’s Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) is a mid-century modern Job and a bit of a schnook. His life could easily be played as a tragedy, but co-directors Joel and Ethan Coen — who also co-wrote, co-produced and co-edited, as usual — are after something more entertaining, more open-ended, and ultimately deeper.
The story takes place in a Jewish suburb of Minnesota in the late 1960s or early ‘70s, which the Coens recreate with their usual attention to detail. You can almost smell the pot the kids are smoking and feel the secretaries’ chilly disinterest. But there’s always just enough comic exaggeration to nudge us into the realm of comic fable. At their best, the Coens introduce us to ourselves, satirizing human weakness while celebrating human nature, and A Serious Man is one of their best.
Anvil: The Story of Anvil. It took me a few minutes to get past the similarities to This Is Spinal Tap, but once I did I was hooked. This oddly named documentary about a balding Canadian heavy metal band trying to regain its past glory is really about drummer Robb Reiner (no kidding) and lead singer/songwriter Steve “Lips” Kudlow, and it turns out these two are very likeable guys.
Reiner and Kudrow started jamming together at age 14, made it big at the start of the heavy metal movement in the ‘80s, then quickly lapsed back into obscurity. But they never stopped playing — or hoping to go pro. Their journey, as documented by longtime Anvil fan Sacha Gervasi, raises some interesting questions for a culture that constantly tells us to follow our dreams while making most dreams almost impossible to achieve. Are these guys admirable for sticking with the music they love or self-indulgent for risking their families’ financial security? How you answer may tell you more about yourself than it does Reiner and Kudrow.
Summer Hours. The plot of Summer Hours doesn’t sound very interesting: The adult children of an haute-bourgeois French clan converge on their lovely old family home to bury their mother and settle her estate. But this elegiac work of art captures the ebb and flow of family life across generations, the decommissioning of an aging empire’s ruling class, and how globalization is weakening ancient cultures.
Some of the best naturalistic actors working today, including Juliette Binoche and Jérémie Renier, make us believe in the jokes and shared memories that keep these siblings together and the interests and obligations — including working abroad — that pull them apart. On one level, as the movie makes clear, the estate is just so much stuff. But it is also part of the roots that have nurtured the family for generations, and they will be weaker without it.