Saturday, February 21, 2015

The Best Films of 2014

The filmmakers who defined the American independent film boom of the late '80s and '90s electrified audiences with their daring, idiosyncratic approach to style and narrative. But these days, with mainstream crowds clamoring for big-budget superhero larks and critics typically hyping Cannes-minted international auteurs, is there any room for the pioneers of the American indie movement to draw attention to their contemporary work?


The movie year of 2014 answers that question with a resounding, encouraging "yes." Directors who precociously asserted themselves in the indie-boom era positively fluorished. Texas-born iconoclasts Richard Linklater (Boyhood) and Wes Anderson (The Grand Budapest Hotel) became bona fide Oscar darlings. Documentarian Steve James paid affectionate tribute to a critic who was pivotal in getting his landmark '90s non-fiction chronicle Hoop Dreams to the masses with the Roger Ebert portrait Life Itself. Neo-classicist James Gray's latest, The Immigrant, played to sold-out crowds in its first weekend in Los Angeles in spite of distributor Harvey Weinstein's loathsome attempt to bury it. (Weinstein reportedly wanted Gray to cut the merely two-hour-long film, and Gray wouldn't oblige.) Either most or least audaciously, depending on one's perspective, Doug Liman and Bryan Singer succeeded within the system, making studio tentpoles defined by layered storytelling and progressive themes--Liman with Edge of Tomorrow, and Singer with the Marvel sequel X-Men: Days of Future Past. And while the indie movement's hippest founder, Jim Jarmusch, may not have found either box-office or Oscar success with his vampire romance Only Lovers Left Alive, the film still inspired the kind of passion within critics and the director's fans to ensure a longevity comparable to its protagonists' immortal existence.


As it happens, my list of the ten best films of the year is topped by a singular comedy that poignantly speaks to the lasting power of art, from a '90s-indie-scene fixture who last scored a #1 placement on my annual lists with 2001's The Royal Tenenbaums:


1. The Grand Budapest Hotel (Wes Anderson). Using an ingenious nesting-doll narrative structure, Anderson begins his simultaneously jaunty and melancholy wonder of a movie with the young fan of a noted, deceased novelist (Tom Wilkinson) visiting the novelist's gravesite to pay her respects. One of the novelist's works essentially becomes the movie we're watching, and it's to Anderson's great credit that he's crafted a story that fully earns this meta suggestion that it has the resonant power to endure beyond its creator's grave. When fussy, eccentric Gustave (played with absolute mastery by Ralph Fiennes, who can turn on a dime from the character's elegant poise to his eruptions of hissyfit rage), the concierge of a fictional European country's most posh hotel, enlists the help of dedicated lobby boy Zero (sweet and deadpan Tony Revolori) to claim an inheritance that the deceased's evil clan aim to keep from him, the farcical adventure yarn that follows zips along with giddy energy and imagination. But it's Anderson's reflection on what can and what can't be ravaged by time that gives The Grand Budapest Hotel its lasting, surprisingly emotional power. The titular resort, grandly designed by Anderson and production designer Adam Stockhausen, may decay as time passes, but the cultural-boundary-crossing friendship that blossoms between Gustave and Zero, who hails from the war-torn Third World, is a bond that neither time nor the fascist forces that flood Zubrowka can touch. Love fluorishes in the face of war--and so too does great art.


2. Nymphomaniac (Lars von Trier). Honoring the brain as the body's biggest sensory organ, von Trier's wildly ambitious--and just plain wild--magnum opus targets the intellect rather than the libido. Perhaps that's why Nymphomaniac has proven to be so divisive, but for anyone who treasures an investigation of human sexuality's connection to morality, music, philosophy, religion, and, yes, fly fishing over titillating kicks, the film is a dizzyingly rich cinematic feast. The sheer density of Nymphomaniac's stylistic and narrative digressions makes it understandable that the film's American distributor split it into two separate volumes, released independently of each other, but make no mistake--this is one movie, a giant and unforgettable one. As guilt-stricken nymphomaniac Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg, even more nuanced than she is fearless) relays her erotic history to moral relativist Seligman (Stellan Skarsgard, an ideal onscreen listener), it's tempting to read the exchange on one level as von Trier, whose career-long depictions of suffering women never fail to polarize, self-reflexively interrogating his own moral assumptions of recklessly carnal women. However, such a reading neglects the obvious, unambigous affection that von Trier has for Joe. Right down to its blunt avenging-angel coda, Nymphomaniac is a heady, exhilarating epic about a woman who triumphantly maintains her sense of self and control over her own story even while caught in the throes of addiction.


3. Boyhood (Richard Linklater). Arguably no contemporary filmmaker has experimented with time more fruitfully than Linklater, as in his nine-years-between-series-entries Before trilogy. So leave it to him to craft a 12-years-in-the-making chronicle of a boy's (Ellar Coltrane) growth from childhood to young adulthood and make it feel not just effortless, but piercingly honest and emotionally profound. We get to know Mason, the boy, and his family so well that they feel more like acquaintances than movie characters. Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke turn in career-best performances as Mason's parents--a mother whose intelligence outshines a series of cretinous suitors, and a father whose natural warmth ultimately triumphs over his rascally immaturity. Like all of Linklater's best films, Boyhood is charmingly modest and low-key, yet what it achieves feels momentous--like nothing less than life unfolding before our eyes.


4. Selma (Ava DuVernay). What makes Steven Spielberg's Lincoln and Gus Van Sant's Milk so much richer than the majority of period pieces focusing on American history is their rejection of standard biopic formula in favor of a nuts-and-bolts look at the intricate, difficult process of enacting social change in this country. Selma, which depicts the Martin Luther King Jr.-led protests that paved the way for the Voting Rights Act of 1965, is only DuVernay's third film, and yet it merits comparison to those two docudramas from seasoned masters. What's more, it has a fire in its belly all its own--a burning passion that all but turns the screen to ashes. That palpable crusading spirit suits a story that, despite the period trappings, is depressingly timely. DuVernay and writer Paul Webb's meticulous portrait of an America institutionally rigged to keep its white citizens in power and its black citizens disenfranchised speaks provocatively to the present and the future as surely as it does to the past. As King, David Oyelowo is both majestic and touchingly vulnerable--a born leader weighed down by the psychic toll of the bloody sacrifice it takes to win the war of human equality.


5. Whiplash (Damien Chazelle). So organic in its storytelling it feels plucked from the ether fully formed rather than written into existence, Whiplash turns the seemingly simple tale of a drumming student's (Miles Teller) trial-by-fire via the tutelage of a psychotically demanding music teacher (J.K. Simmons) into a complex and continually surprising study of what it takes to achieve true artistic greatness. Chazelle and editor Tom Cross make beautiful music of their own with their precise, dynamic cutting, building in intensity to a breathtaking finale that practically demands a standing ovation--and earns it, too. Teller confirms his status as one of the most refreshingly authentic young actors around, but the movie belongs to the ferocious yet controlled Simmons, whose Fletcher is as riveting a barking-mad monster as Ben Kingsley's underworld Mephistopholes in Sexy Beast and R. Lee Ermey's high-decibel drill instructor in Full Metal Jacket.


6. Only Lovers Left Alive (Jim Jarmusch). The vampire lovers at the center of the utterly hypnotic Only Lovers Left Alive, played with elegance by the perfectly paired Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston, are weary of the small-minded failings of the mortals they must exist with. What keeps them from giving up on the human race entirely is their deep appreciation of the great art and music that non-bloodsuckers occasionally turn out--they're even Jack White fans! The genius of the film they occupy the center of is that it adopts this worldview too; as dryly cynical as it often seems, it can't help but surrender to a hopeful romanticism. Jarmusch makes it such a soothing soak in pure, intoxicating style that it's clear he shares his protagonists' love of aesthetic pleasure. The flow of beautiful images and entrancing music is so continous that it's possible to have a different subjective experience with the film each time you see it. And Swinton and Hiddleston, who exude the comfortable affection of partners who've known each other for centuries, provide the perfect (in-)human core for Jarmusch to work his visual and aural magic around.


7. Gone Girl (David Fincher). Unlike Jarmusch, Fincher isn't a director prone to tempering his cynicism with detectable doses of romanticism, which makes him an ideal fit for writer Gillian Flynn's scathing, witty portrait of marital combatants who use the tabloid mediascape as their battleground. As savvy with subtext as he is with technique, Fincher critiques the human tendency to build perceptions of other people, even loved ones, around tidy, self-serving narratives--narratives that may turn out to be far from the truth. Flynn keeps the shocking twists and the icily clever banter coming. The ensemble cast is one of the year's most purely enjoyable to witness, with Carrie Coon, Tyler Perry (!), Kim Dickens, Neil Patrick Harris, and Patrick Fugit all turning in memorable supporting work. Occupying the film's central ethically soiled marital bed is a shrewdly self-parodying Ben Affleck and, most importantly, the formidable Rosamund Pike, who dons several different masks with a dazzling range and charisma that almost makes you root for her Amy in spite of yourself. Considering that Fincher has been called a modern heir to Hitchcock's studio-master-misanthrope throne, it's tempting to call Pike a sharper-fanged Grace Kelly.


8. Snowpiercer (Bong Joon-ho) Set in a dystopian future where survivors are divided by class into separate train cars hurtling over an icy wasteland, Snowpiercer mixes wildly imaginative sci-fi spectacle with pointed social commentary so forcefully and seamlessly that it recalls the instant-genre-classic impact of The Matrix. Korean visionary Bong's distinctively dark, perverse voice (check out his excellent monster movie The Host if you haven't yet) survives the translation to an English-language project thrillingly intact, and he brings the self-contained worlds of each individual train car to eye-popping life. Tilda Swinton, making her third appearance on this list (!), is brilliantly daft as the evil enforcer of the train's rigid social order. Watching the film's heroes, led by Chris Evans' Curtis, fight to overthrow that unjust social order makes the film a rousing experience--a movie set on a moving vehicle that can genuinely be called a wild ride.


9. How to Train Your Dragon 2 (Dean DeBlois). The How to Train Your Dragon series has been like a beautiful rose growing in the creatively sludgy swamp of DreamWorks Animation, and what's strikingly impressive about How to Train Your Dragon 2 is the way in which it feels at once both more epic and more intimate than its great predecessor. DeBlois takes gangly young hero Hiccup (voiced by Jay Baruchel) and his loyal, ridiculously adorable dragon Toothless beyond their home of Berk, to magnificently imagined new realms, including a wild-dragon sanctuary where the beasts fly around in a gorgeous riot of primary colors. But just as much work has gone into the emotional shading of the unique family reunion at the movie's core--Hiccup; his alpha-macho father (Gerard Butler); and his long-lost mother (Cate Blanchett, as flawless in her vocal work as she is at in-the-flesh roles), who abandoned her husband years ago to become a sort of Jane Goodall of the dragon world. The movie's suggestion that the "feminine"-coded sensitivity that Hiccup inherited from his mom grants him the potential to be a better leader of Berk than his masculine warmonger dad is thoughtful, subversive stuff for animated fare, but it's also not surprising coming from a series that has covertly become one of the contemporary studio system's most impassioned pleas for pacifism and universal compassion.


10. The Immigrant (James Gray). Gray's milieu has always been the tight-knit Jewish neighborhoods of New York City, so his sublimely moving 1920s-set melodrama The Immigrant feels in a way like an origin story. It depicts the generation that arrived at Ellis Island from far-away countries and struggled to find footing in the teeming city, paving the way for the later generations that populate the films Gray made before this one. Gray and supremely gifted director of photography Darius Khondji give the film a dark, burnished glow influenced by the similarly immigrant-experience-centered De Niro section of The Godfather Part II, and they certainly know the value of what Marion Cotillard can bring to an exquisitely framed close-up. Cotillard's Ewa arrives to New York from Poland determined to make a better life for her and her sister, and the actress' expressive eyes convey the strength that pushes Ewa through the indignities she suffers in the alleged land of promise she's arrived at. (Cotillard had quite a year, offering another stunning portrait of resilience in the Dardennes' Two Days, One Night.) As Bruno, who becomes both pimp and protector to Ewa, Joaquin Phoenix reveals the raw, naked humanity of a man forced into brutishness by the wheels of capitalism. Bruno's true feelings for Ewa come pouring out in a devastating final scene guaranteed to haunt the viewer long after the credits roll.


And here are the next 10 runners-up, with abbreviated capsules:


11. Mr. Turner (Mike Leigh). Leigh's work is an acquired taste I've only started acquiring in recent years, and the beautifully detailed J.M.W. Turner biopic Mr. Turner makes me glad I've come around. Leigh's method of cooking up scripts via improv sessions with his actors grants a funky, lived-in humanity to this riff on the artistic personality and the artist's role in society. Humor and emotion arrive in small, authentic bursts, like brush strokes. As Turner, the glorious Timothy Spall provides an acting master class.


12. Life Itself (Steve James). Anyone can make a documentary that builds a case for Roger Ebert as a great film critic. James went the extra mile and illustrated through the immensely cathartic Life Itself what made Ebert a great man, dedicated to his family and fans, committed to his calling till the very end, and ever-eager to do whatever he could to give rising filmmakers (such as Selma's DuVernay, interviewed here) the spotlight they need to move their careers forward. Ebert's death was a major emotional blow for me, and this film provides the best kind of closure: an inspiring celebration.


13. The Raid 2 (Gareth Evans). For the sequel to the thrilling single-setting action pressure-cooker The Raid, Evans takes to a bigger, more epic canvas with the infectious enthusiasm of a child at play. A hybrid of The Departed's undercover intrigue and Sergio Leone's grand-scale Westerns focused on warring good, bad, and ugly factions, The Raid 2 is a genre-movie geek's dream, culminating in a ferocious, beautifully choreographed mano-a-mano kitchen brawl that's truly a thing of brutal beauty.


14. The Case Against 8 (Ben Cotner & Ryan White). When Proposition 8, which defines marriage as being only a heterosexual union between a man and a woman, was passed in California, it was truly a depressing, shameful time for the state. That makes The Case Against 8, which details two same-sex couples' triumphant attempt to overturn Prop 8 as unconstitutional, a light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel source of joyous inspiration. This documentary refuses to lazily preach to the choir, and is especially complex and rewarding in depicting right-wing Bush supporter Ted Olson as an unlikely hero--a lawyer who came to the couples' defense and who defines himself as a staunchly anti-homophobia Republican. Any film that proves that phrase not to be an oxymoron is one possessed of a very special humanity.


15. Get On Up (Tate Taylor). Taking its artistic cues more from Todd Haynes' masterfully abstract Bob Dylan portrait I'm Not There than from mainstream-friendly biopics like Ray and Walk the Line, Get On Up conveys James Brown's rise from a childhood of abuse and prejudice to his reign as the strutting Godfather of Soul in impressionistic, non-chronological fragments that flow with gorgeous fluidity and stream-of-consciousness psychological clarity. As Brown, Chadwick Boseman gives the year's most sadly under-recognized performance--an effortless embodiment of the musical icon that shines with charisma and reveals the vulnerability underneath the peacocking exterior.


16. Edge of Tomorrow (Doug Liman). Warner Bros. didn't market this simultaneously brainy and spectacular sci-fi yarn particularly well, eventually resulting in a disastrous attempt to re-title the film Live. Die. Repeat. for DVD release. But the upside is that viewers discovering Edge of Tomorrow can be surprised by the many inventive variations on the Groundhog Day-esque premise of a reluctant warrior (Tom Cruise) re-living the same day repeatedly in order to win a war against sentient machines that writers Christopher McQuarrie and Jez & John-Henry Butterworth have cooked up; at least the ho-hum trailer didn't give them all away. Making the female lead (Emily Blunt) a fierce fighter while Cruise's military flack is essentially a cowardly wuss is a fun subversion that Cruise and Blunt, both in full-wattage star mode, really go to town with.


17. The Lego Movie (Phil Lord & Chris Miller). It's rare that a studio entertainment bites the hand that feeds while maintaining an essentially sweet-natured disposition, but the layered playfulness of the giddy, gag-every-second The Lego Movie achieves just that. Lord & Miller are undeniably talented postmodern jokesters who can be hit-and-miss for me, but this is the best distillation yet of their alternately silly and satiric absurdity. They've made a vividly colorful lark anarchic enough to question the conformist mentality of the corporation that provide's the movie's title and building blocks, yet sincere enough to act as a hymn to how creativity can pass from one generation to the next.


18. John Wick (Chad Stahelski & David Leitch). Keanu Reeves, in full command of his brooding charisma, dispatches with the goons who killed his heartbreakingly cute puppy in a series of long takes that render the action as vicious dances. So of fucking course this makes my top 20.


19. Listen Up Philip (Alex Ross Perry). Fans of erudite New York wits Woody Allen and Noah Baumbach will love the delicious verbal sharpness of Listen Up Philip, though be warned: this character study of an arrogant novelist (Jason Schwartzman, hilariously tart) drips with even more bile than, say, Husbands and Wives or Margot at the Wedding. But like those films, this contains the highest-grade acid, spewed from the expert tongues of Schwartzman, Jonathan Pryce, and the cast's true standout, a marvelously seething Elisabeth Moss.


20. Wild Tales (Damian Szifron). In the wrong hands, the subject of class warfare in Argentina could become fodder for a Crash-like sermon. But in the hands of Szifron, who announces himself as a directorial talent to be reckoned with, the topic forms the basis for an audacious, darkly comic anthology film made up of sketches that pack a savage bite. Wild Tales throbs with an energy and unpredictability that reawaken one's appetite for cinema that feels truly alive in its kicking-and-screaming unruliness.


And here are the year's remaining standouts, ranked in loose preferential order:
21. Captain America: The Winter Soldier (Anthony & Joe Russo).
22. Stranger By The Lake (Alan Guiraudie).
23. The Guest (Adam Wingard).
24. Bird People (Pascale Ferran).
25. Le Week-End (Roger Michell).
26. X-Men: Days of Future Past (Bryan Singer).
27. A Most Violent Year (J.C. Chandor).
28. Foxcatcher (Bennett Miller).
29. Obvious Child (Gillian Robespierre).
30. The Babadook (Jennifer Kent).
31. A Most Wanted Man (Anton Corbijn).
32. The Homesman (Tommy Lee Jones).
33. Like Father, Like Son (Hirokazu Kore-eda).

No comments:

Post a Comment