Friday, February 21, 2014

The Best Films of 2013

On the surface, 2013 as a year in movies appears to offer nothing to quarrel about. The sheer abundance of great films released throughout the year has inspired many critics and list-makers to hail 2013 as the most exceptional year for movies since at least 2007, and arguably since 1999. Those fond of criticizing the Academy Awards for favoring populist "message movies" will find no The Blind Side equivalent among the Academy's nine nominees for Best Picture this year, and they'll even find on that list a few idiosyncratic critical darlings that didn't catch on with the wider public (Her, Nebraska). And a high number of the movies that did click with ticket-buying masses, including Gravity, Frozen, and The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, delivered gratifyingly strong female protagonists and convention-skewering narrative choices.


But in this seeming void of cinematic matters to rationally complain about, cinephile skirmishes still dominated social-media sites. The so-problematic-it's-comical motivations for these online quarrels only served to strengthen the notion that the movie year offered little to really fight over. Certain fans of director Martin Scorsese's satirically vicious The Wolf of Wall Street attacked partisans of David O. Russell's somewhat-Scorsese-influenced humanist caper American Hustle, and vice versa; lost in the nonsensical debate was the acknowledgment that history is filled with both cold-blooded and warm-hearted great movies. Similarly, those who pitted the backstory-heavy Gravity against the audaciously spare All Is Lost failed to realize the simple value of having two impeccably made survival stories that take such wildly divergent storytelling approaches in theatres at the same time.


So if 2013 is to be remembered as a year of bickering, let it be for those squabbles that transpired onscreen rather than those that took place between Twitter pals offscreen. After all, it was an unusually strong year for portrayals of the kind of arguments so wounding they can only happen between people who love each other. American Hustle, Before Midnight, Blue Jasmine, Laurence Anyways, The Wolf of Wall Street, Blue Is The Warmest Color, and the ineligible-if-still-plenty-cinematic HBO film Behind the Candelabra all featured stinging domestic disputes that recall the work of director Mike Nichols, the master of heated romantic conflicts. One can only hope that Nichols, who hasn't worked in six years, will take this proliferation of lovers' battles as a thrown-down gauntlet.


Speaking of thrown-down gauntlets, here is my list of the ten best films of 2013:


1. Inside Llewyn Davis (Joel and Ethan Coen). The greatest living American filmmaker is not a lone individual but a pair of brothers whose rich, comic, multi-faceted glimpses into the country's psyche demand repeat viewings to excavate their tricky layers of meaning. At first glance, Inside Llewyn Davis, the Coen Brothers' ballad of a prickly folk musician (Oscar Isaac, in a flawless, low-key bit of character inhabitation that effectively erases his frankly awful Sucker Punch scenery-chewing from memory) chasing a success in early-'60s New York that constantly eludes him, is already formidable--a funny and melancholy life-as-a-cosmic-joke character study in the Barton Fink and A Serious Man mold, yet more relatively naturalistic than one would expect from the normally artifice-embracing Coens. A second viewing reveals the reasoning--and the genius--behind the removal of distancting effects: to plug the viewer into the aching pain of a man whose response to a recent tragedy (the specific nature of which isn't revealed until late in the game, in sly Coen fashion) is to shut out all meaningful human (and feline) connections in his life and reveal his feelings only to the scattered strangers who see him musically pour his heart out on coffee-shop stages. Inside Llewyn Davis belongs to a great tradition of contemporary musicals--Once and Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd are two other examples--that allow their songs to play out at full length and that aren't so much interested in making you feel "good" as they are in making you feel their characters' tangled emotions. In its cryptic way, this resonant masterwork refuses to provide hard answers to the questions of art and commerce that lie at its core, but its existence is proof enough that a dark, sad, and strange work of art has the power to connect.


2. The Wolf of Wall Street (Martin Scorsese). Fairly late into The Wolf of Wall Street, the savage, wildly energetic chronicle of real-life stockbroker Jordan Belfort's (Leonardo DiCaprio) efforts to swindle others in order to feed his ever-expanding appetites for drugs, booze, and hookers, the film mischievously switches form into a consumer-grade-camera-shot infomercial for Belfort's "Straight Line" get-rich-quick seminars. The style, along with Belfort's practiced patter, is designed for maximum consumer pacification, until Scorsese masterfully disrupts the infomercial's slick appeal by having a squad of FBI agents run into frame and apprehend Belfort, knocking the cheap camera down in the process. This sequence so clearly and cleverly lays bare Scorsese and writer Terence Winter's view of Belfort as a charismatic bullshit artist trying his best to bury the illegality and toxicity of his practices with savvy manipulation of his marks as to render anyone who accuses the film of valorizing Belfort as not just foolish, but possibly cine-illiterate. The Wolf of Wall Street is entertaining to a pointedly "addictive" degree, its three hours of profane hilarity, bling-y style, and timeline-shuffling editing wizardry (courtesy of the peerless, mystifyingly Oscar-snubbed Thelma Schoonmaker) leaving one begging for even more. Its drive to entertain is therefore inextricable from its satiric rage--it's a long, exhilarating scream of an epic. Throwing himself into the high-decibel fray with magnetic abandon, DiCaprio delivers a limber, unforgettable star turn that gives both Belfort's essential scumminess and his messianic ability to rally his debauched troops a high-voltage excitement and a warts-and-all honesty.


3. Gravity (Alfonso Cuaron). With his boundless imagination and gift for graceful, fluidly immersive long takes, Cuaron is the ideal visionary to create an outer-space-set adventure that you don't see so much as experience in a transporting, sensory-engulfing way. That's exactly what he's pulled off with the spectacular Gravity, aided immeasurably by director of photography Emmanuel Lubezki and army of specialists in visual and sonic effects. It's a movie you all but float around in, especially when viewed in IMAX 3D. At the same time, though, Cuaron is a touchingly sincere poet whose interest in characters struggling to cling to hope in seemingly hopeless circumstances has united films as superficially diverse as Y Tu Mama Tambien and Children of Men. So while Gravity is a hell of a suspenseful and awe-inspiring ride, it's also a moving portrait of a grief-stricken woman who's given up on life forced into a situation where the choice to survive is neither an idle nor an easy one to make. That woman, Dr. Ryan Stone, is played by Sandra Bullock in a career-best performance defined by haunted eyes, frayed nerves, and eventually a primal resilience. Gravity is the kind of movie that feels like a full-on journey, and watching Bullock bring Dr. Stone's arc to emotional life makes it a very rousing one.


4. American Hustle (David O. Russell). The GoodFellas-esque camera swirls and '70s rock favorites on the soundtrack are obviously what have led some champions and many detractors of American Hustle to pinpoint Martin Scorsese as the key influence on Russell's film. But I'd argue that Russell is really offering his own neurotic-screwball take on the kind of romantic-yet-cynical, character-driven studio entertainments that the great Billy Wilder used to specialize in--love stories where the sheer amount of characters lying or prostituting themselves injects a harsh bitterness that balances out the underlying sweetness of the narrative arc. Also like Wilder, Russell delights in the simple pleasure of getting people in a room and giving them plenty of spiky, witty dialogue to hurl at each other. The staggering quality of the cast--Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence, and Jeremy Renner, all at the top of their game--ensures that every possible permutation of that people-in-a-room arrangement yields equally dazzling interpersonal fireworks. An affectionately candid acknowledgement of the messy romantic and sexual entanglements that can sometimes invisibly cause the wheels of law enforcement and politics to turn, American Hustle is the reliable Russell's richest and most ambitious achievement since his 1999 Gulf War comedy Three Kings.


5. 12 Years A Slave (Steve McQueen). The story of Solomon Northup, an African-American concert violinist living as a free man in the North until he's kidnapped and sold into slavery in the American South of 1841, could've easily fallen into the trap that so many well-intentioned but dramatically flaccid prestige pictures plummet into of defining its protagonist as a noble but essentially passive victim. Instead, as written by John Ridley and as played with searing urgency and power by Chiwetel Ejiofor, Solomon is active, resourceful, and impassioned--a man desperate to assert his identity in a monstrous system that insists he sacrifice it. McQueen and Ridley use Solomon's forced entry into the plantation economy of the South to provide a newcomer's point-of-view of an unjust society that bears an uncomfortable resemblance to our own: one plantation owner (Benedict Cumberbatch) is a compassionate liberal too spineless to enact positive change, while another (Michael Fassbender, chilling yet recognizably human) is an abusive Bible-thumper whose manipulative wife (the perpetually underrated Sarah Paulson, summoning an icy bitterness) uses the slaves as pawns in the game-playing of her fading marriage. McQueen never loses sight of this contemporary resonance even as he brings the period setting to life with evocative specificity, and he organically weds the Kubrickian rigor of his earlier films Hunger and Shame to a more robust, conventional narrative. 12 Years A Slave builds to a conclusion that is emotionally pulverizing in its catharsis; the phrase "there wasn't a dry eye in the house" feels fully earned.


6. Before Midnight (Richard Linklater). The hopefulness of Before Sunrise and its more regret-soaked follow-up Before Sunset thrived on the tension of the audience knowing that lovers Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy) should spend their lives together without the characters themselves having figured that out yet. Before Midnight, the third film in Linklater's luminous, observant trilogy, audaciously begins with the revelation that Jesse and Celine have been living together as a couple for nine years. In realistic fashion, the unconsummated hunger these two felt in the earlier films has been replaced by a cozy familiarity and, more bracingly, the accumulation of simmering resentments. The resentments--authentically centered on kids, conflicting career goals, an ex-wife--come to a full boil in a climactic hotel-room argument rendered with a more lethal version of the dazzling verbal density that writers Linklater, Hawke, and Delpy have established as a defining trait of the trilogy. But the lovely trick of Before Midnight is that for all its painful honesty, it still manages to be as blissfully romantic as its predecessors. The relaxed beauty with which Linklater captures Greece, Hawke and Delpy's undimmed chemistry, a final romantic plea made at a seaside cafe--it's all swoon-worthy, even in a film complex enough that real love isn't entirely about the swooning.


7. Rush (Ron Howard). Sports movies too often fail to convey the passion and commitment of athletic competition to the unconverted--a camp I must honestly admit I belong in. However, that's certainly not the case with the dynamic, surprisingly affecting Rush, a seamless merging of spectacle and character psychology that centers on the Formula One racing rivalry between James Hunt (Chris Hemsworth) and Niki Lauda (Daniel Bruhl). Hunt thrives on the adrenaline of a profession that brings him close to death, like the protagonist of a Kathryn Bigelow or Michael Mann film, while the anti-social Lauda approaches racing with the unyielding perfectionism of a never-satisfied artist. Both racers' devotion is portrayed with an accessible universality, and the hostile, shit-talking competitiveness of their relationship is built on a foundation of mutual admiration, making this a platonic love story played in a macho key. Hemsworth shores up his swaggering charisma with real depth, but it's Bruhl, in one of the year's most enjoyably detailed performances, who steals the movie. Howard's direction exhibits a restless, feisty energy, especially in the thrilling racing sequences, that has too seldom been tapped in his career, while writer Peter Morgan, who previously collaborated with Howard on the similarly excellent Frost/Nixon, demonstrates a flair for salty, off-the-track taunting. Like the heroes of their movie, these filmmaking collaborators bring out the best in each other.


8. The Wind Rises (Hayao Miyazaki). There's no denying Miyazaki's gift for animated images that glow with a pristine, painterly beauty, and the surreal dream-logic of his narratives springs from a playful imagination. But with a couple exceptions, his earlier films (Princess Mononoke, Ponyo) prioritized down-the-rabbit-hole strangeness at the expense of emotional engagement. That tendency is nowhere to be found in the rapturous, moving The Wind Rises, which finds Miyazaki trying his hand at the animated equivalent of the kind of sweeping historical epic commonly associated with David Lean and Steven Spielberg. Miraculously, he manages to reach the creative heights scaled by those masterful forebears. Miyazaki wisely doesn't abandon his pet theme of dreams; his protagonist, Jiro, loses himself in fantasy visions of flying. But as Jiro abandons hope of becoming a pilot due to his near-sightedness and instead pursues his revised dream of being an aeronautical engineer, Miyazaki grounds this dreamer's journey with a wealth of rich ideas and narrative strands--a touchingly delicate romance; an artistic-procedural-style immersion in the details of Jiro's plane designs; a portrait of Japan caught in the sea change of tradition transitioning to modernity; a consideration of the sad irony of Jiro's creations being used for the destruction of World War II. If Miyazaki follows through on his announced plans to retire, he's at least gone out with the most mature, elegant, deeply felt work of his career.


9. The World's End (Edgar Wright). Wright is another director who turned in career-best work in 2013, though "mature" is hardly le mot juste for the boisterous, beer-soaked, sensationally entertaining The World's End. Wright's past collaborations with co-writer and star Simon Pegg, Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, had their moments, but were too derivative and uneven for me to join the cult audience that adores them. That The World's End has converted me to the Cult of Wright is deliciously ironic, since it's a film that's sneakily profound about the fear of conformity--the concern that buying into a corporatized, 9-to-5, brand-name-dominated existence like most people is not quite what the human animal really desires. Pegg's Gary King has avoided that kind of manufactured life, and the movie is complex enough to admire his never-give-in integrity while at the same time recognizing his desperate efforts to replicate his high-school glory days as pathetic. It's this fetishization of the past that leads Gary (played by Pegg with hilarious elasticity and rumpled bravado) to round up his old mates (Nick Frost, Martin Freeman, Eddie Marsan, and Paddy Considine) to finish an epic pub crawl they were unable to complete as teenagers. The ensemble camaraderie is so enjoyable that The World's End would succeed even if it stopped at being a sozzled buddy comedy. Instead, it turns on a dime and morphs into Wright's most inventive and insightful movie-nerd genre riff yet. This is the kind of endlessly funny and exciting entertainment that becomes irresistibly rewatchable--especially after you've had a pint or 12.


10. Captain Phillips (Paul Greengrass). Familiar suspense-movie tactics are no match for a premise that pits two ordinary men who need to put food on the table against each other, which is vividly illustrated in the electrifying Captain Phillips. Greengrass and writer Billy Ray take the real-life story of a band of Somali pirates who hijack an American cargo ship and refuse to render it in broad, hero-vs.-villain strokes. They take the richer, more rewarding path of treating the ship's captain, Richard Phillips (Tom Hanks, in a subtle, thoughtful, and ultimately devastating performance), and the pirates' captain, Muse (Barkhad Abdi, able to shift imperceptibly from fearsom to fearful), as co-protagonists, men whose actions are guided by a need to adapt to a Darwinian global economy. That makes this the rare thriller that's as compassionate as it is intense. Greengrass fuses the jittery momentum of his Bourne movies with the matter-of-fact verisimilitude of his docudramas. Captain Phillips is so breathless that by the time its climax comes to an end, there's superficial catharsis--a chance to exhale, anyway--but also the sad realization that this isn't a story that could've ever led to a happy outcome. It's legitimate tragedy of a uniquely nail-biting sort.


And here are ten runners-up, with minimized capsules:


11. Dallas Buyers Club (Jean-Marc Vallee). Vallee, whose kaleidoscopic coming-out epic C.R.A.Z.Y. is one of the major underseen gems of the last couple decades, tells the '80s-set story of a homophobic, HIV-positive electrician (Matthew McConaughey) and a saucy transgender woman (Jared Leto, sensitive and nuanced) who go around the FDA to get unapproved drugs to the HIV and AIDS patients who need them with a loose-limbed naturalism and anti-authoritarian passion that merits comparison to the work of Milos Forman and Hal Ashby. While throwing around '70s-movie-comparison superlatives, it's worth noting that McConaughey, on a hell of a roll, exhibits a live-wire spontaneity and unpredictability reminiscent of the young Jack Nicholson.


12. Blue Jasmine (Woody Allen). There have been even more great performances in Woody Allen movies than there have been reductive "think"-pieces written about the writer-director's personal life, but there's something uniquely special about how palpably collaborative his work with Cate Blanchett in Blue Jasmine is. His camera lingers on Blanchett's Jasmine, a once-pampered woman who loses her money and much of her sanity after her husband's (Alec Baldwin) white-collar-crime arrest, as if waiting to see what feverish combination of rage, regret, and vulnerability the actress will offer up next. The anticipation extends to the audience. Blue Jasmine is guided by Allen's effortless touch with human tragicomedy, and the entire ensemble shines (even Andrew Dice Clay!). But the film is unthinkable with anyone other than Blanchett in the title role.


13. Stories We Tell (Sarah Polley). In just her third directorial effort, Polley shakes up the form of the autobiographical documentary in audacious and profound ways. As she uncovers secrets about her parents that challenge everything she believed she knew about her background, the film itself reflects her uncertainty in the way it plays with what "truth" in a documentary really is. Even the by-now-tiresome documentary trope of "talking head" interviews is revitalized by Polley's compassionate insistence on giving each one of her relatives who steps in front of the camera equal weight, even when their memories conflict with her own. Stories We Tell is a moving testament to the notion of "family history" as a shared collection of subjective, personal impressions.


14. The Conjuring (James Wan). The crafty, creepy Insidious already earned Wan forgiveness for unleashing the loathsome Saw on the moviegoing populace. But with The Conjuring, Wan manages to take everything that worked with Insidious and elevate those qualities to a higher level, in the process creating something that was in danger of becoming an oxymoron: a great horror movie. The Conjuring has an even stronger emotional core than Insidious in its focus on one mother (the ever-impressive Vera Farmiga) risking her life to save another mother (Lili Taylor, also very good) whose family has been threatened by some very pissed-off spirits. Wan's compositional sense has never been sharper, and he uses every filmmaking trick in the book to scare the bejesus out of the audience. Mission accomplished.


15. Laurence Anyways (Xavier Dolan). After Frederique (Suzanne Clement) receives the news from her longtime boyfriend Laurence (Melvil Poupaud) that he's a woman who plans to undergo the physical transition into his real, female self, can she stay with the person she loves even as she, as a heterosexual woman, loses her attraction to that person? That's the thorny question that drives the emotionally raw Laurence Anyways, which charts the course of Fred and Laurence's relationship over a decade-long span and within just under three hours of screen time. As can be expected of any hugely ambitious undertaking shepherded by a filmmaker who isn't yet 25 years old, Laurence is not without a few whippersnapper-ish indulgences. Doesn't matter. Dolan is so devoted to the interior lives of his two central characters that you become bonded to Fred and Laurence as if they were close friends, and Clement's jagged wonder of a performance would be racking up Best Actress nominations if this was an American film rather than a French-Canadian one. Laurence Anyways is a bona fide intimate epic that leaves one happily heartbroken.


16. Nebraska (Alexander Payne). I wasn't particularly a fan of Payne's last film, the calculated grief-porn wallow The Descendants, but Nebraska marks a welcome return to form for the filmmaker. He's lost none of his About Schmidt-honed gift for finely detailed Midwestern portraiture, and the story of an aging, stubborn man, Woody (Bruce Dern) who drags his son (Will Forte) along on a quixotic quest for sweepstakes money that he hasn't officially won allows Payne to organically tap into veins of humor and melancholy. There's the haunting sense that Woody, with his myopic pursuit of a non-existent fortune, is a stand-in for any senior-age American looking back with regret on a life that appears more mundane than momentous in hindsight, but Payne makes a gently humanist case for Woody's existence as one of achievement. Dern portrays Woody's encroaching senility with bold, meticulous commitment, while June Squibb is indelibly flinty and funny as Woody's firecracker of a wife, Kate.


17. This Is The End (Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg). It would be fair to classify This Is The End as a "dumb" comedy--no one will mistake it for a Woody Allen movie, and its side-splitting highlight is a graphic, amusingly overextended argument between James Franco and Danny McBride (playing themselves, as are the other cast members) over the latter's masturbation habits. But the satiric fun it has with audience assumptions about how well spoiled, hedonistic celebrities will fare when the Apocalypse hits and the sweetness of the Rogen and Jay Baruchel friendship that becomes its emotional center distinguishes it as dumb comedy done very smartly. Behind-the-camera neophytes Rogen and Goldberg merge the humor and the apocalyptic horror elements with Ghostbusters-esque verve, and as writers, they keep the laugh-out-loud moments coming with impressive consistency.


18. Her (Spike Jonze). In portraying the romance between lonely, freshly divorced Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix) and his artificial-intelligence operating system, Samantha (voiced by Scarlett Johansson), as both a credible, two-entity relationship and as a chance for Theodore to satisfy his emotional needs while (in theory) avoiding the thornier aspects of intimacy, Jonze taps into thought-provoking questions of human connection in the technology-heavy modern world. Heady stuff, to be sure, which makes it odd that on first viewing, Her struck me as slight compared to Jonze's bigger-in-scope collaborations with Charlie Kaufman, Being John Malkovich and Adaptation. However, a second viewing revealed that Her's "small" qualities are bold in their delicacy; much of the movie is just Theodore talking with Samantha, and the refreshing patience with which Jonze directs these conversations speaks to a confident belief that a movie with a huge heart doesn't need any additional bells and whistles. Her may be timely in its examination of a post-Siri technological age, but its exquisite tenderness makes it equally timeless.


19. Prince Avalanche (David Gordon Green). Prince Avalanche is a movie of boundless generosity, which is most evident in the way it turns the story of two road workers (Paul Rudd and Emile Hirsch) repairing a wildfire-damaged Texas highway while at a low point in their respective personal lives into a buoyant celebration of the human capacity for renewal and rebirth. It's also generous to Rudd and Hirsch, two fine actors who have too often labored in projects undeserving of them and who respond to the rich leading roles offered to them here with their best work in years. But perhaps the most welcome form of Prince Avalanche's generosity is its indiscriminate embrace of both highbrow and lowbrow entertainment. Green has made both Malick-influenced art films (George Washington) and crude stoner comedies (Pineapple Express), and this film is a synthesis of those two strains of his work. For anyone whose taste encompasses both Waiting for Godot and Dumb & Dumber--as readers of this list have already figured out, that definitely describes me--that's a very welcome combination indeed.


20. Stoker (Park Chan-wook). Korean cult favorite Park has always possessed a flair for delirious set pieces that recall Brian DePalma in their ostentatious camerawork and frenzied-yet-precise editing. His English-language debut, Stoker, confirms what my favorite of his Vengeance trilogy, Lady Vengeance, already suggested--that his cinema-of-excess gifts are best applied to female-centered melodramas instead of the (still fun) macho bloodbaths that he seems to favor. After all, the form of melodrama is one inherently dependent on exaggeration, and writer Wentworth Miller's script for Stoker--a Gothic coming-of-ager centered on a young girl (the quietly forceful Mia Wasikowska) who finds herself gravitating towards her charming yet sinister uncle (Matthew Goode)--might as well have been punctuated entirely by exclamation points. So pouring Park's extravagance on top of dramatically overheated material is like topping a sundae with an avalanche of cherries. The sheer indulgence of it is bliss.


Here are 10 more 2013 runners-up:
21. Byzantium (Neil Jordan).
22. The Great Beauty (Paolo Sorrentino).
23. 20 Feet From Stardom (Morgan Neville).
24. The Hunt (Thomas Vinterberg).
25. Simon Killer (Antonio Campos).
26. Frozen (Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee).
27. All Is Lost (J.C. Chandor).
28. Something In The Air (Oliver Assayas).
29. Frances Ha (Noah Baumbach).
30. Fast & Furious 6 (Justin Lin).


Special Recognition for Ineligible TV Work from Film Auteurs: Behind the Candelabra (Steven Soderbergh) and Top of the Lake (Jane Campion). Both are masterful.

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