Another Year: All in good time

Seasons pass, the garden’s tended, visitors come and go. “Nothing changes,” sighs one of our ensemble of mostly middle-aged, middle-class Londoners, though that’s not always bad news where certain cinematic yields are concerned. Honestly, I’m not sure that any new ground is broken in writer/director Mike Leigh’s latest multi-character study, yet it somehow feels fresh anyway. Another Year is chatty and rambling, busy yet plot-free, tender yet merciless about how life can just keep getting more unruly and incomprehensible, and, despite a number of chronically anxious, substance-abusing or otherwise depressed supporting characters—not to mention a harp-heavy score from Gary Yershon that creeps into New Ageyness—it’s also very, very funny.

Tom and Gerri (those sturdiest of Leigh vets, Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen), a chipper geologist and warmly maternal psychologist respectively, are the film’s collective rock. Lucky to have each other, they’re not flawless people, yet each possesses that rare gift for contentment, so much so that you might find yourself wondering if, like Leigh’s recent Happy-Go-Lucky, their story mightn’t become another cautionary tale about the tyranny of the well-adjusted. The film is built around the couple’s hosting at least four festive gatherings and a funeral. At nearly every one of these occasions Mary (Lesley Manville, mannered yet so precise) turns up, merrily envies her patient friends, gets plastered, and only gradually learns not to put the moves on their son (Oliver Maltman). Perhaps she needs someone to help, and she might just find it in an ashen widower (David Bradley) who looks like Motörhead’s Lemmy if Lemmy were a vampire. Good old Ken (Peter Wright) meanwhile may not ever learn to moderate his food intake, nor to stop two-fisting the lager, nor recover his unobstructed view of his own lap, but there’s always hope. Such things take time. Fortunately, Another Year is so pleasurable and sometimes touching that you won’t be in a hurry.

2008: the year in movies

When you’re freelancing for publications with filmgoing cultures as distinctive as New York City and Edmonton, not to mention when you’re attending festivals where movies screen sometimes years in advance of their release proper, trying to sort out what counts as a 2008 release can be mind-boggling. In the end I decided to simply go with this rule: I live in Canada, so if it had a legitimate theatrical release somewhere in Canada during the calendar year, it could be considered. And the considering was surprisingly tough. There are indeed more than ten films listed in my below best of, but I did manage at least to contain them all in ten groupings. Thus it is with some fondness that I bid adieu to the most mesmerizing movies of 2008, all of which I hope to see again sometime soon.

There Will Be Blood
P.T. Anderson’s portrait of Daniel Day-Lewis’ oil baron, a lonely man of some ferocious, near-Satanic ambition, was so intensely focused as to feel like a one-man show. But think about what ingredients truly bring this strange masterwork to life, and Day-Lewis, however ingeniously outsized, becomes only the frontman for numerous superlative craftsmen: production designer Jack Fisk, cinematographer Robert Elswit, composer Johnny Greenwood. The crazy finale, the commentary on our Faustian contract with the earth’s resources, the emphasis on savagery and, indeed, bloodletting—it all adds up to something bizarre and haunting that should keep us arguing, reconsidering and celebrating for years.

Silent Light
Carlos Reygadas’ third feature, which concerns a love triangle in a Chihuahua Mennonite community, is at once a study in the most primal moral struggles and a gentle acceptance of the miraculous, whether it be found in love’s defiance of mortal boundaries or in something as quotidian as the sun’s ascent and departure. A touchingly non-judgmental film teeming with natural wonder and arresting human connections. And the question is begged: what will this guy do next?

My Winnipeg, Synecdoche, New York
The world as reflected through he self, and vice versa. In his first “docu-phantasia,” Guy Maddin profiles his hometown in audaciously hyperbolic flights of imagination and winds up contemplating the impossibility of truly breaking with his own past, embodied most potently in the late, indomitable Ann Savage, who plays Maddin’s mom. In his first time out as director, screenwriter Charlie Kaufman creates a surrogate version of himself, played with gravity and great humour by Philip Seymour Hoffman, who attempts to make a piece of theatre that contains the world, though the world it contains is of course only his, a vast simulacrum of unfulfilled desire and tenuous human connections. Both films are funny, moving, and at times sublimely surreal.

Encounters at the End of the World
While Maddin evoked cursed psychic traps mystically a-flowing beneath Winnipeg’s snowy crust, Werner Herzog whisked us to very the bottom of the world, the place where so many of its misfits gradually slip down toward as they try to find a place in the world. The title’s more than a pun—everyone working in Antarctica, watching ice caps melt up close and personal, seems acutely aware of the looming devastation of global warming—yet somehow we simultaneously get one of the warmest portraits of human nature Herzog’s ever made, a group portrait of a very oddly assembled family.

Paranoid Park
Gus Van Sant’s beguiling portrait of bewildered youth and accidental death moves in mesmerizing circles as its teen hero starts and stops his written testament. The skateboard sequences quietly dazzle and the teen performances catch you utterly off guard in this, yet another fresh variation on the director’s death trip.

Happy-Go-Lucky, Rachel Getting Married
These are sensitive, vital and enormously entertaining stories about the more elusive aspects of personal responsibility. Sally Hawkins’ unshakably perky Poppy is forced to consider the limitations of hoisting cheerfulness upon the world—or, at least, upon grumpy Londoners—while Anne Hathaway’s Kym, freshly released from rehab to attend her sister’s wedding, becomes the catalyst, or sin-eater, once again for her family’s collective neuroses. If these aren’t two of the finest female leads of 2008 then I don’t know anything about movies. And it’s equally thrilling to see both directors Mike Leigh and Jonathan Demme especially at the very top of the game.

Flight of the Red Balloon
Juliette Binoche is vivaciously batty as a single mother and voice actor living comfortably in perpetual chaos, while her son introduces his Chinese babysitter/filmmaker to Paris and to the mischievous drifting globe of the title. Hou Hsiao-hsien’s first movie in French is a sublime homage to Lamorisse’s 1956 classic La Ballon Rogue and makes sweeping cinema from the most simple ingredients.

4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days
A procedural, of sorts, in which writer/director Christian Mungiu traces the steps required by a young woman to procure an abortion in Ceausescu’s Romania. It’s gruesome, suspenseful, fascinating, and more stimulating for not actually being overtly polemical. Among other things, it’s a story of friendship’s end, with the truly remarkable Anamaria Marinca enduring some grueling trials for the sake of her drearily too-pregnant roommate.  

Man on Wire
James Marsh’s reconstruction of Philippe Petit’s 1974 tightrope walk between the twin towers is ultimately an emotionally overwhelming experience. There’s something nearly ineffable in Petit’s feat, though the attempts made by his colleagues to recall the wonder of that day and its never-to-be-repeated crime of spectacle are deeply compelling. And Petit himself is such a marvelous storyteller that, even if there weren’t such terrific archival materials to pull from, a movie of just him talking probably would’ve been nearly as good.

La France, The Band’s Visit, Still Life
Why did I automatically think of these films as kindred spirits? Serge Bozon’s wonderful cross-dressing musical about French soldiers wandering far from their proscribed path in war-torn Europe exists in a world all its own. Meanwhile, Eran Kolirin’s tale of an Egyptian classical music group stuck in some Israeli backwater seems a million miles away from Jia Zhang-ke’s chronicle of people trying to tie up loose ends with estranged family members in villages becoming slowly submerged by China’s colossal Three Gorges Dam project. Yet there’s something about the landscapes and the desolation, the at times uneasy interaction between strangers and acquaintances alike, and the sense of, well, stillness, that binds such stories in their subtle comedy, admiration for small gestures of dignity and bone-deep dislocation. And there is finally a nomadic spirit at work in all of these that speaks to the communal spirit that can bring together wanderers astray on life’s unruly roads.

If only I could also fit: Before I Forget, Standard Operating Procedure, The Last Mistress.

Ode to Joy: Mike Leigh zeroes in on Sally Hawkins' irrepressible smile in Happy-Go-Lucky

Though his reputation is built largely on a number of celebrated ensemble films, the addition of Happy-Go-Lucky to British writer/director Mike Leigh’s filmography draws attention to an element in his work that I’ve long regarded as an untapped source of mastery: individual portraiture. As with John Sayles, the use of ensemble casts in Leigh’s films, from High Hopes (1988) to Secrets & Lies (96), Topsy-Turvy (99) to All or Nothing (01), ostensibly speak to the filmmaker’s socialist ideals, a belief in the collective that rises to the fore even within the gloomiest of stories where the odds are heavily stacked against communion, consensus or any sort of redemption. And perhaps the exception only proves the rule: Leigh’s Naked (93), which, while still featuring a great deal of multiple character development, is finally focused on the whirlwind of brooding, nihilistic, machine gun wit that is Johnny (the never more remarkable David Thewlis), ends as it begins, with its protagonist fleeing the scene of a crime, alone, limping, unable to bear the kindness of others, an embodiment of despair like no other in Leigh’s cinema.

But, regardless of whether it represents the filmmaker’s more generous view of humanity, Naked, complicated, darkly charismatic, engagingly messy, no doubt hated by some, endures like few Leigh films, looming over the bulk of them with its gruesome integrity intact. This makes it that much more satisfying to report that, 15 years after Johnny terrorized the psyches of lonely Londoners, Poppy (Sally Hawkins), the heroine of Happy-Go-Lucky, arrives to dominate the foreground of Leigh’s latest as Johnny’s cheerful nemesis. An apparently gifted teacher of small kids on the cusp of her 30th birthday, Poppy is afflicted with an overwhelming impulse to look on the bright side, and has a similarly divisive effect on all those she encounters: they adore her, abhor her, try to ignore her, or find themselves in a desperate struggle to correct her optimism. Like Johnny, she can natter on like nobody’s business—and Happy-Go-Lucky truly has some of the most brilliant banter of any Leigh movie—and like Johnny her insistence causes considerable problems. This is a comedy about the dangers of thrusting your happiness upon the world.

A friend who wasn’t as taken with Happy-Go-Lucky suggested to me that the film was basically a character study, and for any character study to work you’ve got to fall in love with the character—which he didn’t. I can’t quite agree with this assessment. I think there are plenty of engaging character studies with quite unlikable characters—Citizen Kane (41), anyone?—but if there’s any truth to my friend’s notion then I’d have to claim myself guilty. From Hawkins first appearance, riding her bike through London traffic, ribbons undulating from her basket, hoop earrings dangling, that enormous smile on her face, I was ready to follow her anywhere. When she enters a bookstore and relentlessly annoys the poor clerk who just wants to be silent, I liked her all the more. When she exits the store to discover her bike’s been ripped off and can’t help but just shrug at the silliness of the world, I was pretty much in love with her beguiling audacity.

Over the course of Happy-Go-Lucky we see a fair amount of Poppy both at work and at home, a flat she shares with her best friend Zoë (Alexis Zegerman), their friendship being one I’d place as among the most richly textured in recent movies. We see her take classes in Flamenco dancing from a Spanish fireplug named Rosita (Karina Fernandez, whose over-the-top performance here is absolute gold) and classes in driving from a very tense, troubled, angry young man named Scott (Eddie Marsan, brave, brandishing bad teeth that spring like fangs when overcome by a child-like rant). Between these two polarizing experiences in social interaction the limits of Poppy’s demeanor become increasingly apparent. The Flamenco’s discipline requires her to be in touch with her inner suffering; the driving sessions with Scott require her to accept that her particular energy, however innocently intended, can be construed as something manipulative and damaging when trapped in close quarters with someone whose negativity is just as powerful as her sunniness. The scenes between Poppy and Scott are what unite the decidedly loose narrative threads of Happy-Go-Lucky, merging them into something cathartic, a turning point in Poppy’s maturity, and these scenes are handled so beautifully by Hawkins and Marsan as to be utterly arresting. They are among the finest pieces of acting you’ll see this year.

TIFF '08: Reeling in the afterglow, with reflections on Che, Mickey Rourke, Hoffman-Kaufman, JCVD and the wiry physique of Ben Kingsley

Lingering in film festival-land during the final days is much like being the last guest at a party after the beautiful people have left, your host has passed out in the backyard, and you’re sifting through the ashtrays from smokeable butts, bleary-eyed, waiting for dawn. The press office closes down, the hotel lobbies are being shampooed, the limo drivers start vacation. I swear I saw a tumbleweed tumble down Bay Street. It seems so desolate now, who’d have guessed only days before I was sharing an elevator with Ben Kingsley—who really is built like a ninja as it turns out.

Yet it was on the very last day of the 33rd Toronto International Film Festival—at which I saw exactly 33 movies—that I finally caught Darren Aranofsky’s The Wrestler, a very hot ticket and the only press and industry screening I couldn't get into for the crowds, the film which a week before enjoyed the coup of winning the Golden Lion at Venice, the very same festival where Aranofsky’s The Fountain was famously booed two years previous. The Wrestler was something of a disappointment though: the narrative, about spandex-clad lord of the ring reaching a very lonesome middle age, was formulaic, the dialogue flat, the visual style shockingly anonymous considering Aranofsky's history of hyper-cuts and histrionics. But Mickey Rourke, with his leathery flesh and damaged beauty, was indeed wonderful, the physical punishment wrought upon him impressively gruesome, and the real reason to see the movie anyway is the milieu under investigation, which yields tremendous riches of human strangeness. And yes, wrestling, it seems, is indeed fixed.

What wasn’t fixed was any pre-set notions of what would be the highlights of TIFF ’08. There weren’t as many new films from high-profile filmmakers, and of those that did arrive, some were less than startling, like the Coen brothers’ Burn After Reading or Richard Linklater’s Me & Orson Welles, which was pleasantly corny, while others, like Steven Soderbergh’s four-hour Che, proved difficult for many. I saw Che in two parts, and was at once dazzled and mesmerized, entranced by the obsessive attention to detail. But I noted a quieter, wearier, and smaller audience for the second screening, perhaps because while ‘Part One,’ covering the Cuban revolution, functions as an instruction manual for fighting a successful armed uprising, ‘Part Two,’ covering Che Guevara (Benicio Del Toro, superb) in Bolivia, does it all over again but ends in failure and death. But this is visionary filmmaking. Exhausting? Absolutely—but exhilarating, too, in its intensity of focus. Soderbergh’s a rare artist who makes you truly believe in the continued possibilities of movies.

The turbulence and atrocities of Latin America informed several other TIFF selections, notably Pablo Larrian’s Tony Manero, which follows a 52-year-old Chilean guy weathering the terror of the Pinochet regime by endeavouring to becoming the titular protagonist from Saturday Night Fever. That he wants to be a fictional character is revealing: like something out of a Roberto Bolaño novel, Larrian’s antihero seems to have taken the violence around him as tacit consent to release his own repressed aberrant tendencies, all moral logic eroding under the weight of his absurd fantasy life. It might synopsize like a movie about dreams trumping dictatorship, but this is not the case: Tony Manero is deeply sinister stuff, concerning a very dark passage of recent history.

Gerardo Naranjo’s Voy a explotar is an altogether wilder tale of familial disintegration, class rot and teen rebellion, a very fun homage to Godard about a girl who meets a guy she says is both “invented and real,” a son of a Guanajuato congressman who harbours homicidal fantasies toward al authority figures. Unlike Che or Tony Manero, the film is set in the present and is not especially politicized, though the undercurrent of class difference and the streak of political corruption especially is impressive. The lovers on the run run away from home, only to camp out on the congressman's leaky roof, a delicious testament to the Mexican elite's willful ignorance regarding what goes on right under their own noses. And the public service video the parents watch about how to cope with a runaway child was surely the most entertaining movie within a movie in a festival with a hell of a lot of movies within movies.  

But enough with the Americas—on to Europe! I don’t think I saw anything more elegantly realized than Claire Denis’ 35 Rhums, which follows the delicate negotiations between a father (dashing Denis regular Alex Descas) and his adult daughter, cohabitants in a Paris apartment block. There are two sequences—one set in a trainyard, the other in a bar—built mainly around music and movement, that are sensuous, poetic, pleasingly aligned to the rhythms of everyday life and among the loveliest things I saw this TIFF. Yet much of the film is relatively straightforward, examining the trails of the working underclass and the knotty entanglements of urban life, something evident in both the film’s web of acquaintances and its metaphoric use of the public transit system. There’s also a scene involving a horse that, while so very brief, speaks volumes about the image-power of Denis’ singular cinema.

Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Three Monkeys, like last year’s The Man From London, offers something pretty unusual: a modern noir delivered in a highly meditative style. It kind of reminded me of The Reckless Moment, but more overtly bleak and, you know, brooding. Spanish director Albert Serra’s Birdsong follows the three wisemen on their way to greet Jesus, a film comprised mostly of landscapes being traversed which won’t do it for many but does possess a certain velvety, chiaroscuro beauty and bone-dry humour. Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky is a nearly sublime character study, with the relentlessly cheerful Poppy (Sally Hawkins, terrific) encountering numerous fellow Londoners who challenge her to consider the hidden consequences of her flamboyant optimism. Mabrouk El Mechri’s majorly meta JCVD blurs the real and fictional Jean-Claude Van Damme as he’s held hostage in a Belgian bank heist, suffers tax problems and a child custody suit. He delivers this fucking crazy, half-coherent monologue that recalls Brando’s in Last Tango in Paris. I don’t think Mechri can cash all of the cheques he writes in this thing—It’s a comedy! It’s an action movie! It’s a Charlie Kaufman movie!—but it’s pretty fun.

Speaking of Charlie Kaufman, I assume I'm not alone among Kaufman sympathizers in feeling I should probably see Synecdoche, NY again before I pursue any elaborate commentary. It's overwhelming,truly bizarre, and defies a glib summation. The film is certainly something you have to admire even when it's grinding you down. In fact, it's actually quite an amazing piece of work, singular in its aggrandizement of self pity, sprawling in its way, with Philip Seymour Hoffman's Kaufman stand-in suffering, often terribly amusingly so, through a life of misery, illness, disappointment and isolation, with only his never-ending play-in-progress, a colossal work of theatre that simulates Hoffman-Kaufman's sad life, as some sort of soul balm. I was perplexed; I was touched; I was entertained; I was bored; I was bummed; I was drained; but I want to see it all again.