Memorable Films of the Decade

I didn’t see enough films in the last ten years to make a convincing determination of which were “the best” but it’s been fun to see a few of the lists generated by the critics, which have brought back fond memories and also reminded me of a few movies that continue to be (in my opinion) vastly overrated. What follows is a brief list of films from the last ten years that I enjoyed and wouldn’t mind seeing again.

 Hell or High Water is a film about two brothers, their love for one another, and their differing approaches to raising money when the bank tries to foreclose on the family ranch. It’s the kind of film in which every throwaway line sounds perfectly natural, but also adds to our understanding of where people come from and what they’re thinking. This quality extends from the brothers (Chris Pine and Ben Foster) to the Texas Rangers (Jeff Bridges and Gil Birmingham) who are sent to track them down. Even the bank president and the waitress in the diner have some good lines. There’s a fair amount of bloodshed in the film, but, like the dialog, it’s subtly modulated and consistently kept in check by the pathos of the unfolding story.

The End of the Tour. I have never read the novel Infinite Jest, and I’m pretty sure I never will, though I have read a few tennis articles by its author, David Foster Wallace. This film chronicles the last seven days of a book tour in which Wallace is accompanied by a reporter from Rolling Stone (played by Jesse Isenberg) who also happens to be a budding novelist. The two discuss life, literature, work, fame, celebrity, junk food, and other things as they travel together from one book event to another, slowly generating a camaraderie that’s laced with suspicion and envy, professionalism and need, vanity and self-disgust. The interactions are complex and often edgy, as Wallace pursues the renown that will accompany the feature story while remaining wary of Eisenberg’s power to “spin” the article any way he chooses. Whether these conversations offer an accurate portrait of Wallace I have no idea, but they make for an absorbing film experience.

Museum Hours. Much of this film takes place in the Kunstehistorishes Museum in Vienna, where a tall, middle-aged guard named Johann sits on a bench thinking his private thoughts (in voice-over) as the patrons pass by. Just when we’re beginning to think we’re watching a genuine slice-of-life documentary on the order of Frederick Wiseman’s National Gallery, Johann makes an effort to help a stranger, Anne, who has arrived in town from Montreal to visit a relative she hardly knows who’s in the hospital. She has little money, doesn’t know the city, and returns to the museum repeatedly as a way to fill her idle hours. Anne and Johann are both gentle souls, lonely but also widely curious, and they slowly begin to open up to one another as the empty days go by. This plot line—it would be a misleading to call it a romance—serves as an effective counterpoint to the seemingly random but mildly engaging images the camera draws our attention to both within the museum and also on the city streets, which include bored children and cawing crows, streetcars in the snow, and closeups of Grand Master paintings. At one point we listen for several minutes to a lecture being given by one of the docents about the work of Breugel, and the parallels between his peasant-oriented work and the film we’re watching become clear. One remark that she makes could stand as the theme of Museum Hours: a painting’s ostensible focus and its actual point of interest are not necessarily the same thing.

Theeb (United Arab Emirates). Theeb is a tale of a man, the son of a sheik, who agrees to lead a British soldier across the wastes of Saudi Arabia along an old pilgrim trail, now mostly used by bandits, in search of a well. The Arab doesn’t know what the soldier is up to, and perhaps doesn’t like him much, but he’s obliged by the unspoken rules of hospitality to take on the assignment. Matters are made considerably more difficult for him when his baby brother, Theeb, decides the follow the little caravan out into the desert. Theeb bears some similarity to American westerns where the countryside is magnificent, danger is always near at hand, the law is nonexistent, and it’s sometimes hard to tell friend from foe.

Ida chronicles a few weeks in the life of Anna, a young Polish novitiate who is about to take her vows. Before before doing so, her superiors demand that she pay a visit to Wanda, her single surviving family member—an aunt whom she’s never met. Wanda turns out to be a sullen, hard-drinking woman who informs Anna almost immediately on arrival that her real name is Ida Lebenstein. She’s Jewish, and her parents were murdered during World War II. Ida has been in the convent since infancy and knows very little about the world. She seems astonished simply to be traveling on a bus, and it takes a while for her to digest this new information about herself and the evils of the wider world. Wanda agrees to help her niece find her parents’ burial site—a mission that eventually takes them to the bedraggled farmhouse Ida’s parents once owned. It’s now inhabited by God-fearing Poles who claim that “Jews never lived here.” Wanda knows they’re lying, and they know she knows.

The film’s black-and-white cinematography is extraordinary, and the pace is slow enough to allow us to savor it scene by scene. Forests, crumbling buildings, Wanda’s stylish apartment, city streets, a well-lit dance hall. The luminosity of the footage acts as a welcome counterweight to the sometimes grim drift of the plot. We see the world afresh through Ida’s limpid but strangely unfathomable eyes, both the good and the bad. 

Papusza (Poland) Did the Polish film industry run out of color film, or what? First Ida, and now Papusza. Not that I’m complaining. Papusza tells the story of the gypsy poetess of that name and the gadja (i.e. non-gypsy) who comes to live with the band, recognizes Papusza’s talent, and later shares her poetry with the wider world. The film is rich in long-shots of campfires by the river in the moonlight, caravans slowly crossing fields of stubble, and riotous parties at which the gypsy musicians have been invited to play. But if the cinematography romanticizes Roma lifeways to a degree, the plot-line exposes their patriarchic cruelty and xenophobia. Things do not end well for Papusza. Her big mistake was to learn how to read and write.

Tangerine takes place in a wooden valley in Abkhazia, a sub-region of the former Soviet Republic of Georgia. Georgia is now an independent state, but some of the residents of lower Abkhazia consider themselves more Russian that Georgian, and they’re fighting for their independence. The film’s central character, Ivo,  is Estonian, and now that Estonia is no longer part of the USSR, many Estonians are inclined to go home, but Ivo and his friend Margus have decided to stay on until they’ve harvested the tangerines. They’ve arranged for a local militia to escort the produce to the market, and even, perhaps, help them pick the fruit. Their tranquil agricultural pursuits are shattered when a firefight takes place on the country road outside their farms, and Ivo finds himself taking care of two wounded soldiers, one Georgian, the other a Chechnian mercenary fighting on the side of Abkasia and Russia.

 In Mr. Turner, Mike Leigh adds new shades of meaning to the phrase “warts-and-all” biography. His portrait of the famous English painter during the final decades of his life (Turner died in 1851) is spectacularly robust—the streets, the wharves, the salon galleries, the artist’s studio have all been vividly recreated, like a Dickens film without a plot. It’s no wonder the film garnered Oscar nominations for both costume and production design. The acting is first-rate. Timothy Spall, in the title role, mumbles and grunts his way across the screen like a cretinous lout (good enough for Best Actor kudos at Cannes), and various relatives, servants, and artist-friends also fix themselves in our imagination immediately. Marion Bailey is worth singling out for her portrayal of a jolly boarding-house matron, twice-widowed, who possesses an unaffected intelligence and sensitivity that Turner finds appealing. Yet unlike most “period” English dramas, Mr. Turner is devoid of romantic sentiment, and could hardly be said to have a plot. In one scene Turner sits in a music hall while actors on stage lampoon both his canvases and the way he paints them. A few scenes later, someone is offering him a hundred thousand pounds for a few of them.

A Royal Affair. In France they had a revolution. In Denmark, a few years earlier, a physician of enlightened convictions (Mads Mikkelsen) got the ear of the slightly-mad king and launched a series of progressive reforms. The film’s title suggests a back-stairs romance at a decadent court, with harpsichords, wigs, candles, and carriages, and there’s some of that, too, as Mikkelsen and the young queen (played by the Swedish beauty Alicia Vikander) pursue a private agenda. Wrap these elements together and you’ve got a film with more grip and pull than Ridicule, The Madness of King George, Marie Antoinette, Start the Revolution Without Me, La Nuit de Vanennes, or any costume drama you could name.
And did I mention the story is true?

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia. Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan once remarked, “The problem with Hollywood is the audience expects to get the answers like a pill. They expect to know not just whodunnit, but the motives of the characters, the how and why. Real life is not like that. Even our closest friend—we don’t know what he really thinks.” It would be difficult, I suspect, to make a good film about what we don’t know about people, but in Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, Ceylan gives it a shot. He has made a film in which we get to know people almost in spite of themselves, as twelve men, including a murderer and his brother, a doctor, a prosecutor, an urban and a provincial policeman, and a couple of laborers with shovels, traverse the barren hills of rural Turkey in the middle of the night trying to locate a body based on a few hazily-remembered landmarks. Though parts of the film have a ludicrous humor reminiscent of Almadóvar or the Coens, its overall tone might better be described as Chekhovian.

A Separation is an unsavory gruel of overheated conversations, long-standing resentments, deep familial affections, hopes for a better life, unshakeable religious faith, and economic desperation. The plot thunders on like an express train and though the violence involved, in the end, amounts to little more than a few slaps and shoves, every frame carries an uneasy current. As the film opens, eighteen months have passed since the Iranian couple at the center of the action applied for a visa to leave the country. The visa has now, finally, come through, but Nader is unwilling to leave without his father, who’s suffering from dementia. His wife, Simin, considers it imperative to leave Iran for the sake of their daughter, Termeh, a bright and seemingly docile adolescent who’s obviously taking in every angry work exchanged in the apartment. The two-hour film, shot with natural light in apartments and on the streets of Tehran, goes by in a flash, and as we leave the theater we’re likely to have Aristotle’s theory of poetic catharsis running through our heads: a sense of purification after the release of pent-up or horrific emotions.

The Tree of Life is a rendering of childhood in the 1950s, in Waco, Texas. It’s also a visual history of the universe. Through much of the film three brother shout, torture frogs, wrestle in the weeds, hang out with their deviant friends, play the guitar, obey their domineering father (Brad Pitt), fall in love with their charming mother (Jessica Chastain), go to church, go down to the creek, challenge and test one another, and climb trees. Most of the time their conversation consists of murmurs and mumbles. Much of the time it seems we’re hearing what they’re thinking, rather than what they’re actually saying.

Malick frames this central focus on childhood experience between two specific events, one small, the other large. No point in mentioned the small event here. The “large” event is the creation of the universe and the development of life on planet Earth. There is extended footage of cosmic events—nebulae expanding, volcanoes erupting, micro-organisms developing—with ethereal religious music sounding in the background. It all seems a bit like a cross between that BBC series Planet Earth, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Richard Linklater’s Boyhood. Only better.

The Social Network. I guess I have a soft spot for films set on college campuses. Young women and men are in the midst of what, for many, is the first flush of quasi-independence; they’re being challenged to show their stuff intellectually in the classroom while engaging in animated conversations at local watering holes after hours. The Social Network, is similarly well-endowed with late-night drinking, over-bright students, odd-ball personalities, and winsome coeds. It tells the story of Mark Zuckerman, the inventor of Facebook, and the plot-line would fall squarely into the category of implausible wish-fulfillment fantasies if it didn’t happen to be largely true. Though Zuckerman comes across as unbearably snarky, and treats his intellectual inferiors with bored distain, the path by which he hones the features of his networking website is fascinating to follow.

I Am Love is a lavish Italian production that has been compared to the best works of Lucino Visconti. Director Luca Guadagnino adopts a “fly-on-the-wall” point of perspective on the comings and goings of a wealthy multi-generational Italian family. Tilda Swindon attends to the concerns of her three children, her square-jawed and lackluster husband, and her mother-in-law (Merisa Berenson). The scenes flow one into the next; we’re not sure which threads are the important ones, and that’s what makes the film so interesting. It’s as if the director wants us to see the paintings on the wall, the tile on the floor, the glaze on the shrimp, and the insects buzzing amid the clover. He’s equally interested in the shape of the distant hills, the health of the family’s clothing factory, and the aroma rising from the fish soup.

The Secret in Their Eyes is a police procedural, in so far as it deals with an investigation of a brutal rape-murder on the part of a middling investigator and his brilliant but alcoholic sidekick. Yet the story is made richer by the response of the victim’s husband to the loss of his beautiful young wife, and also by a romantic subplot concerning the investigator’s boss, an equally beautiful but conservative and seemingly unapproachable young woman from the upper classes. It’s difficult to discuss a film of such quiet richness without giving away too much, but suffice it to say that in an era of fascist ascendancy, justice is not entirely served by due process, and at a certain point, life becomes dangerous for the investigator himself.

Particle Fever (2014) follows scientists making use of the newly launched Large Hadron Collider to  recreate conditions that existed just moments after the Big Bang hoping to detect the presence of the legendary Higgs Bosen. Or not. It’s a red-hot scientific documentary more fascinating than any sci-fi film you’ll see this year, edited by master Walter Murch (Apocalypse Now, The English Patient, The Godfather trilogy).

How I Ended This Summer (Russia, 2010). Two bored and antagonistic men stationed at a lonely military outpost above the Arctic Circle, counting the days until their tour of duty is over. Check it out—if you dare.

Postprandial Thanksgiving Reflections

I was sitting in the waiting room at a clinic the other day thumbing through The Seventeenth Century Background by Basil Willey when I came upon this appraisal of Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682):

Perhaps no writer is more truly representative of the double-faced age in which he lived, an age half scientific and half magical, half sceptical and half credulous, looking back in one direction to Maundeville, and forward to Newton. At one moment a Baconian experimentalist and herald of the new world, at another Browne is discoursing of cockatrices and uni­corns and mermaids in a tone which implies that though part of him is incredulous, the world is still incalculable enough to contain such marvels.

We still live in that world of marvels, I said to myself. We don't know half as much as we think we know.

Willey adds:

At one moment [Browne] pro­fesses himself a follower of Hermes Trismegistus, and feels, pantheistically, “the warm gale and gentle ventilation” of the world-soul; at another, he accounts the world “not an Inn, but an Hospital; a place not to live, but to Dye in”. He exhorts us now to “live by old Ethicks, and the classical rules of Honesty”, and now to “Look beyond Antoninus, and terminate not thy morals in Seneca or Epictetus. Be a moralist of the Mount, and Christianize thy Notions.” He had, in fact, what Mr. T. S. Eliot has called the “unified sensibility” of the “metaphysicals”, which was the offspring —perhaps unreproducible in different circumstances—of a scholastic training blended with the expansive curiosity of the Renaissance. It meant the capacity to live in divided and distinguished worlds, and to pass freely to and fro between one and another, to be capable of many and varied responses to experience, instead of being confined to a few stereotyped ones.

For a modern reader like me, the big problem with Sir Thomas Browne is that he couldn't spell!

But leaving that issue aside, I think it's worth considering how, if we care to, we can still live in an intellectual world as rich as the one Browne inhabited, and why we should make an effort to do so.

Anyone with an ounce or two of curiosity is likely to be fascinating by the picture of the universe given to us by biologists, physicists, chemists, and other researchers of that ilk. On the other hand, the philosophical community had failed us big time by neglecting to emphasize how many questions lie beyond the range of scientific research, and how much our understanding of life and of ourselves depends on other disciplines—not only philosophy itself but also poetry, history, and religion.

Our lack of clarity regarding the power and appeal of these disparate but related spheres of thought—and the differing types of experience that feed them—makes it difficult to properly emphasize the value and the limitations of any of them.

A case in point: just this morning, after a first-of-the-season ski around Theodore Wirth Park, I was reading a review by Nicholas Kristov of Karen Armstrong's new book, The Lost Art of Scripture. Though I haven't read the book, a few days ago I listened to Kerry Miller interviewing Armstrong of the radio, so I already had some idea of what it's about, and Kristov's review underscored the same points. 

In brief, Armstrong is arguing that scripture—Christian, Hindu, Confucian, or whatever—presents a vision of life in a different way than does the scientific community, and that "we" have lost the ability to receive its message. She goes on to suggest that an important part of that message lies beyond its factual or didactic content; it can be found in its sound, presentation, and embodiment.

The first of these points—the widespread loss of sensitivity to the value of scripture—is certainly true; the second strikes me as a bit silly.

Armstrong reminds us of how easy it can be to ridicule the nonsensical and contradictory aspects of  scripture, and also to make use of it to defend bigoted attitudes and and violent acts. But she also holds that looking for an accurate and all-encompassing representation of life from scripture misunderstands how those writings are designed to work. True once again, though she seems to be edging toward a "performative" interpretation of scripture rather than a cognitive or metaphysical one. Kristov paraphrases :

It’s like complaining about Shakespeare bending history, or protesting that a great song isn’t factual ... Anyone who has been to a Catholic Mass or a Pentecostal service, or experienced the recitation of the Quran or a Tibetan Buddhist chant, knows that they couldn’t fully be captured by a transcript any more than a song can be by its lyrics. I still don’t understand Don McLean’s classic song “American Pie,” but it moves me every time I hear it. Music doesn’t need to be factually accurate to be true.

To which the rejoiner might be, "Yes, a piece of music or a theatrical production often moves us when it's beautiful, but that doesn't make it true, strictly speaking. The categories of experience are getting confused here, and need to be straightened out."

The other day I requested a copy of Durufle's Requiem from the library, and yesterday Hilary and I sat by the fire and listened to it. She was knitting; I was doing nothing. We enjoyed it so much we listened to it again, though it's in Latin and we had no idea what was being said beyond a few Kyries and Agnus Deis.

We were moved. Does that make us Christians? Probably not.

It's easy enough to hive off and discard those elements of scripture that expound an antiquated view of the physical cosmos, and it's also easy to cultivate an appreciation of the beauty of a given liturgy, without pondering the ethical and eschatological pronouncements that lie at the core of the faith in any great detail. Music and liturgy can bolster and strengthen a "faith," but it seems to me that faith must still be rooted in some form of understanding. If not, then it would be difficult to distinguish a religious faith from a social club or a choir group.

Then again, would it be too far off the mark to suggest that a religion is a social club of a special kind, created to facilitate and minister to its members' most important passages: birth, christening, communion, repentance, marriage, and death?

My parents dragged me and my brother to church for many years. They both sat up front in the chancel because they sang in the choir, and they had no idea what we were doing during the service. Nor did they care. They were shrewd enough to anticipate that some aspects of this beautiful world, full of reverence and holiness, might rub off on us no matter where we sat. We often played scissors-paper-rock up in the balcony, though sometimes we ran around in the basement. Occasionally we actually attended to the service—the readings, the psalms, the intercessions, and all the rest.

And some of it did rub off.

I actually found some of the sermons interesting. The minister, an East Coast transplant named Greenley, looked like a white-haired Efrim Zimbalist, Jr., the spitting image of an Old Testament patriarch. From the pulpit he analyzed Greek words and explained what the "fear" of God actually consisted of. His black Studebaker Lark convertible was always parked in front of the side door through which we usually entered the church on our way to the choir room.

St. John in the Wilderness. 

Greenley's assistant was a tall, lanky recovering alcoholic named Andy. He typically wore a long black robe and had a disheveled Whitmanesque beard which gave him the look of a maladroit prophet who'd just returned from a few weeks in the desert. My mom found Greenley to be a little stuffy, I think, but she and Andy hit it off from the first. They were both interested in antique furniture. I think the desk sitting against the wall here in my office once belonged to him.

I don't remember much about the Sunday morning liturgy, beyond its inordinate length. But all lapsed Episcopalians probably remember these lines from the General Confession by heart.

"We have done those things which we ought not to have done,

and we have not done those thing which we ought to have done,

and there is no health in us ... "

At that age, my recurrent misdeeds were on the order of putting tin cans in the trash bag rather than the garbage bag.  I was also adept at forgetting to take the trash bag down to the basement to burn it in the incinerator, even after having been entreated to do so several times.

Yet even at an early age, the statement "there is no health in us" struck me as a bit extreme. Give me a break! No health whatsoever? Isn't that laying it on a little thick?

I also found the repeated reference during the readings to Israelites, Canaanites, Philistines and Maccabees incomprehensible and tedious.

But I digress. The point I'm trying to make is that the sensations associated with a particular faith experience, repeated again and again, continue to resonate subliminally and eventually become a source of comfort (or nightmares, I suppose) long after we've rejected most of the theological particulars involved. I'm grateful to have been raised in a rich Anglican tradition in which the concept of sin tended to get slighted or ignored, and this gratitude extends beyond the aesthetics of choral harmonies and stained glass windows to the kind of ingrained and unthinking reverence that lends so much power to church events. 

Perhaps one value Armstrong finds in orally transmitted scripture—a value she fears we're in danger of losing—is precisely this ritualistic liturgical repetition, which played a much larger role in daily life during ancient and medieval times, when many people couldn't read, than it does today.

 

But I think another aspect of scripture is also due for a revival: the poetry itself. And while we're at it, why not extend that interest more widely to encompass  poetic works that do not claim for themselves the imprimatur of divine revelation. I'm not talking simply about verse here, but about all types of imaginative literature. Such creations summon experiences and types of understanding that can be had by no other means.

In his description of Sir Thomas Browne mental tool kit, cited above, Willey hits upon precisely the frame of mind needed to draw sustenance from that zone of experience and expression: 

It meant the capacity to live in divided and distinguished worlds, and to pass freely to and fro between one and another, to be capable of many and varied responses to experience, instead of being confined to a few stereotyped ones.

Here, in a typical passage, filled with Browne's halting yet elegant delivery and terrible orthography, he draws upon his medical background to consider where in the body the soul resides—he can't seem to find the relevant organ.

... In our study of Anatomy there is a masse of mysterious Phi­losophy, and such as reduced the very Heathens to Divinitie; yet amongst all those rare discoveries, and curious pieces I finde in the fabricke of man, I doe not so much content my selfe as in that I finde not, that is, no Organ or instrument for the rationall soule; for in the braine, which we tearme the seate of reason, there is not any thing of moment more than I can discover in the cranie of a beast: and this is a sensible and no inconsiderable argument of the inorganity of the soule, at least in that sense we usually so receive it. Thus are we men, and we know not how; there is something in us, that can be without us, and will be after us, though it is strange that it hath no history, what it was before us, nor can tell how it entered in us.

Browne goes on to consider what the human body is actually made of:

Now for the walls of flesh, wherein the soule doth seeme to be immured before the Resurrection, it is nothing but an elementall composition, and a fabricke that must fall to ashes; All flesh is grasse, is not onely metaphorically, but literally true, for all those creatures which we behold, are but the hearbs of the field, digested into flesh in them, or more remotely carnified in our selves. Nay further, we are what we all abhorre, Antropophagi and Cannibals, devourers not onely of men, but of our selves; and that not in an allegory, but a positive truth; for all this masse of flesh which wee behold, came in at our mouths: this frame wee looke upon, hath beene upon our trenchers; In briefe, we have devoured our selves and yet do live and remaine our selves.

Now there's some food for post-Thanksgiving thought.