2009: the year in movies

Let me first confess that I still haven’t seen at least one movie that I predict I’m going to adore. It's been a busy winter! Fortunately, I don’t think there’s any lack of love out there for Fantastic Mr. Fox and it’ll surely be heartily celebrated elsewhere. This may not be case however with my first pick for the best of 2009, which barely screened anywhere in Canada but is now at least available on DVD. In fact so many of my favourites didn’t hit theatres or had only limited runs that I’ve decided to comprise my list from anything that debuted in theatres or on DVD in 2009. This is hardly news of course, but given the current state of exhibitors, unless we all get to attend major festivals we need to look to screens of all sizes if we’re to embrace the spectrum of what’s exciting in movies these days.


The Headless Woman
A hit and run occurs. We don’t see the victim, but neither does the driver. We see the driver work through her decision not to look—the process is oddly transfixing. We then see her do many strange yet finally instinctively logical things in response to the accident. We’re dream-deep in noir territory, but the author of this beguiling movie is Lucrecia Martel, who made The Holy Girl, so along its periphery are unforgettably peculiar, unnervingly funny details, and troubling questions of class solidarity and willful blindness. María Onetto gives an immensely absorbing performance, like Gena Rowlands on Quaaludes.


Summer Hours
A final family reunion precedes a matriarch’s death. Her adult children, now spread across the globe, must reconvene to sort out mother’s legacy. Olivier Assayas’ most emotionally rich work is about things, “bric-a-brac from another era,” the residue of a life, its memories and secrets. It offers a sobering sense of mortality, followed by the consolation of renewal: the last characters we see are the matriarch’s teenaged grandchildren, whiling away the summer hours at grandmother’s old house one last time, before it becomes the property of someone else.


The Limits of Control
“As I descended into impassable rivers, I no longer felt guided by the ferryman.” The opening Rimbaud quote says it all: surrender to the drift, the buoyancy of the texture, mystery and playfulness will carry you along. Thus unmoored, Jim Jarmusch made one of the loosest, most chimerical and, it would appear, most divisive works of his career. Smartly suited Isaach De Bankolé slips across Spain, meeting with shadowy figures, deciphering cryptic messages, drinking twin espressos and even enjoying some after-hours flamenco on his way to complete a sinister mission. Pitched somewhere between Point Blank, The Passenger and Jarmusch’s own Ghost Dog, this is a cinema of wanderlust and hypnosis, far more concerned with architecture, atmosphere, jokes, musical logic, naked ladies, sensation and sensibility, than it is about, say, espionage. My second viewing was approached very skeptically. I still loved it completely.


Inglorious Basterds
Here’s some synchronicity for you: 17 years after Reservoir Dogs Quentin Tarantino finally goes completely bananas and reaches the peak of his maniacal, pastiche-frenzied craftsmanship at the same time. Who else could have made this insanely verbose, over-the-top epic about resistance in war-torn Europe that fantasizes both a scalp-collecting Jewish revenge squad and the complete annihilation of the entire Nazi elite in one explosive screening at a Parisian movie palace? I rest my case.


35 Rhums
This was Claire Denis’ entrancing and moving tale of a closely bound father and daughter gradually finding their individual paths after years of living together. Denis’ touch is so light as to seem weightless, her exposition so minimal as to seem neglectful of plot, yet no one makes movies like this, so alive, so warm and sometimes funky and funny, so sensitive to everyday rhythms and nuance, so trusting in story to reveal itself once nurtured. I could curl up on a rug and drift away with her films for ages.


A Serious Man
Remember the story of Job? Well, this is funnier. A physics professor’s wife leaves him. His brother is arrested. He could any moment be accused of taking a bribe from an alarmingly deadpan student from Korea. He’s inexplicably hounded by the Columbia Record Club. This is the Coen Brother’s vision of the universe, set in the Minneapolis suburbs, circa 1967. A tornado might come along and kill everybody. Uncertainty is the only certainty. There’s no comfort in religion, though it’s kind of fun to look for it anyway. As the Korean student’s dad advises, “Accept the mystery.”


Two Lovers
Speaking of Jews in trouble. A Brooklyn dry cleaner’s son trying not to be suicidal, Joaquin Phoenix loves the sweet girl his family has implicitly selected for him. He also loves Gwyneth Paltrow, who’s clearly bad news but is so much more exciting. He also loves his mom, who happens to be Isabella Rossellini. James Gray is a master storyteller, and this is his best work, a vision of the abyss we traverse when we surrender fully to romantic longing, and of those harrowing moments when compromise wollops us upside the head until out ears ring.


Che
The first part of Steven Soderbergh’s portrait of Ernesto Guevara is a puzzle made of trial and error while the second arm-wrestles with The Thin Red Line for the title of Most Hypnotic War Movie. The whole thing eschews Guevara the T-shirt icon, yet it doesn’t hoist phony biopic vulnerability on him either. It’s by turns lyrical and strategic, a manual on armed revolution and a consideration of violence as a tool for social change.


Sugar
Miguel ‘Sugar’ Santos is hardly a revolutionary, but his story provides us with much insight into the uneasy alliances that span the Americas. Recruited to play ball, he leaves the DR for the US, discovers French toast and TV on the Radio, as well as the simultaneous warmth and cool conservatism of the semi-rural Midwest. So much more than a sports movie—though the baseball is rendered excitingly—Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden’s follow-up to Half Nelson is a beautiful, profoundly resonant tale of the unpredictable paths that characterize the immigrant experience.

Wendy and Lucy
One needn’t be an immigrant however to understand how riddled with obstacles American life can be. Kelly Reichardt’s neorealist story of a young woman stranded in Oregon, trying to find her dog and get to Alaska, uses the simplest of narrative elements to forge both a lament for the outsider in the ostensible land of plenty and an ode to the kindness of strangers.

Liverpool

A sailor goes ashore in Argentina. He says he wants to visit his home, a tiny village in the mountains, to see if his mother is still alive. It's winter, and the sailor drinks, swigging off a bottle he keeps in his small bag. But it may not only be the cold that he's bracing himself for. Lisandro Alonso's rigorously observational approach is employed with special elegance here, gradually gliding away from the protagonist to someone else, someone he's forgotten, until we rest on the image that explains the enigmatic title, and offers up some touchingly subtle gesture of things passed along from one generation to another.

Maybe not quite as good but still very good: Hunger, The Hurt Locker, Let the Right One In, Pontypool, The Road, Tulpan.

TIFF '08: Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden on Sugar, faith, language, ambition and collaboration

Half Nelson was among the most preternaturally assured indie debuts of the past decade, perhaps more so given that its singularity was the product of two fully engaged writer/directors, a rare phenomena without significant counterparts in contemporary American movies outside of the brothers Coen. It no doubt of some significance that Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden are a couple—and I can’t decide if that makes collaboration easier or more difficult. But Sugar, their follow-up to Half Nelson, is in some regards even more stylistically and tonally distinctive than its predecessor. It follows the titular Dominican pitcher (vividly embodied by first-timer Algenis Perez Soto) as he journeys from Boca Chica to play in the minors in an Indiana town. It eschews the customary ascent-to-triumph tactics of the sports genre for something far richer and more attuned to the vagaries of immigrant experience. I spoke with Fleck and Boden after Sugar’s premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival.

JB: Where the idea for Sugar came from?

Ryan Fleck: I’d read an article somewhere about a baseball academy in the Dominican Republic and eventually discovered that every major league baseball team has an academy there, where they sign players for a fraction of what they sign them for when graduating high school or college in the US. We became very interested in the kids who go through these programs, especially the ones you don’t hear about. We started our research up in the Bronx at that field that ends the movie where there’s this whole community of guys who’ve been through these programs and eventually, when they’re let go or decide to leave early, head to New York to start over.

Anna Boden: Then we went down the Dominican Republic, interviewing guys, tooling around, going to as many academies as possible, going into towns and finding players who’d been released or had gone to the US. The character of Sugar and his journey is a composite of all the different stories we heard and people we met during that time.

JB: Do either of you have friends or family with analogous experiences as immigrants?

RF: Not in our lifetimes. Maybe three generations ago.

AB: This didn’t come from that sort of personal place. We just saw this story as a vessel to explore themes we were interested in: what it means to have an American dream, then have that dream shift, to rediscover who you are, how you might fit within this system.

JB: The film handles its politics in a lovely, understated way. One subject that I thought was dealt with especially elegantly was heartland religion. There’s seems to be strong undercurrent in this Indiana town where Sugar finds himself of people wanting to wed every part of their lives to their sense of belonging to a religious community. I wonder if you felt at all anxious about dealing with this subject.


RF: We’re both very non-religious, so we kind of surprised ourselves with this gentle portrayal of these religious families. I guess it’s just that when you’re trying to tell an honest story you have to listen to what’s happening around you. All through our research we kept encountering religion—most players thank God numerous times when talking about their talent—so we knew we had to work it into our movie in a way that felt organic.

AB: We were as surprised as anyone at just how much of a spiritual journey we were telling.

JB: I actually found myself wondering if there wasn’t some spiritual, or rather mythic corollary to Sugar’s story. I understand Spanish, and found it interesting that you subtitle virtually all the Spanish dialogue in the movie with one notable exception, this Icarus-like story Sugar shares about how he got his scar as a baby, trying to grasp something beyond his reach. And of course he has this considerable hubris, this arrogance to match his talent, so the story naturally assumes allegorical dimensions.

RF: That scene was written later in the process, simply because we realized we cast somebody who has a scar. That’s Algenis telling the actual story of how he got it. What you’re saying is really interesting. Honestly, I never made that connection.

AB: I did.

RF: Really?

AB: I thought it was really important. And for me the decision to not translate it was about not necessarily having the audience make that connection—though I think it’s really lovely that you did—but rather letting this guy who’s been stuck in this place where he can’t communicate for so long finally be able to speak his own language, seeing how that changes who he is, how the process of coming to this place has changed him.

RF: Plus, it puts you in his shoes for a second, giving you some idea of what it’s like to have all these people talking and understanding almost nothing.

JB: I love how this story of self-actualization coincides with one of language acquisition—so much of how we identify ourselves has to do with the minutia of how self-expression. I also thought that Algenis, who I guess spoke more English than the character, did a knockout job of playing a guy who understands very little.

AB: I think Algenis shared a lot with the character. He understood this feeling of having to smile and nod your head a lot to get through uncomfortable scenarios.

JB: Your films possess such a distinctive style considering your sharing of writing and directing duties. Do you have a process in which you have to delegate certain elements of the work?

RF: We’ve used the same key crew both times, and when you’re working with the same people they contribute to the same part of that vision. But between us it’s actually pretty fluid. We pretty much do everything together.

JB: So often in movies the more voices you have competing for control the more fights that arise and the more diluted a distinctive voice can become.

AB: Yet it’s so much easier to fight those fights when you have a partner fighting alongside you. Making Sugar we actually felt pretty supported by our team and our producers, but with Half Nelson we hadn’t worked with any of these people before and they didn’t have the confidence in us they have now. So I found it incredibly helpful to have someone there who I knew trusted me and who could give unwavering support and who could help to decide which fights are worth having.

JB: Were there films you guys used as models of some sort or that you could use as a shorthand with others when trying to pitch the film or get your team on board?

AB: I remember we showed Algenis Taxi Driver and Raging Bull.

JB: Not for a sense of the style of your filmmaking, I presume.

RF: Mostly just because they’re good movies and we wanted to share some of our favourites with him.

AB: And some of the best acting ever.

RF: There wasn’t really any one film that guided us, though, really, We watched all the baseball movies ever made, just to see how they shot it, as sort of a technical exercise.

JB: You were speaking at the screening last night about how one of the things that attracted you to Sugar was that it was a story you’d never heard, so I wonder if you have plans for a next project with a similar appeal.

RF: We’re been adapting a book called Special Topics in Calamity Physics, by Marisha Pessi, which has some similar twists. But having these sorts of twists originate in someone else's material will be a good way of keeping us on our toes.