The Back Row Manifesto’s Incredibly Personal, Completely Subjective List of the Best Films of The Decade (2000-2009) will be unveiled over the course of the month of December. Think of it as a sort of misguided advent calendar without the little chocolate surprises. Either way, thanks for reading and please check back every day over the next few weeks for the full list. The introduction to the list can be found here.
Few artists working today have the power to move my heart and my brain like Claire Denis. The breathless invention of her cinema seems to know no bounds, and she spent the decade leaping from one genre to another, re-defining each as she made her indelible mark on them; the spontaneous romance of a one night stand in Friday Night, the blood soaked vampire narrative of Trouble Every Day , the examination of class, power and paternal identity in L’Intrus, and the post-colonial condition in White Material her most recent film, set for release next year (and thus in the next decade) and bringing Denis full circle, back to a new Africa, one that seems light years away from the sun drenched expectations of Chocolat which launched her onto the international stage some twenty one years ago.
Bookending all of these tremendous movies, and there is truly not a film among them that I don’t love, Denis made two films in the 2000’s that believe are masterpieces, neither of which seems on the surface to have much in common with the other but both of which are transcendent examples of Denis’ genius; 2000*’s Beau Travail, her “adaptation” of Herman Melville’s Billy Budd and 2009’s 35 Shots Of Rum, a subtle and gorgeous story of a father and daughter facing personal transitions in their life together. Separated by the span of the decade, it is fascinating to think that the harsh and haunting Beau Travail came first and that, in the wake of such a difficult and politically challenging era in global politics, that 35 Shots Of Rum would be, in many ways, a summation of Denis’ commitment to humanism, but it is without question that this director lived through the same times we all did and still was able to come in like a lion and go out like a lamb.
For every line that has been written dissecting the decoding of masculine tropes and the homoeroticism of Beau Travail (and yes, it’s all there), the film refuses to play by the rules, forcing the audience to spend its time trying to relate to a character we revile, only to show us in the end that our revulsion is nothing compared with his need to break free from the constraints of his own desire. It is Denis Lavant’s performance as the despicable Galoup that defines the film, and his performance, coiled up like an angry snake against the backdrop of Djibouti’s white landscape, is both infuriating and oddly compelling. While Gregoire Colin’s perfectly formed body provides distraction for both the audience and Galoup, his portrayal of Gilles Sentain is compliant to Lavant’s will; Galoup dominates the screen and the narrative, providing the framework through which we see everything. When, in the film’s unforgettable final scene, he stands alone in a discotheque and begins to finally let go of the controls that lead him down the path of ruin, he literally spins himself out of control, his physical mastery as a broken man a haunting echo of every sun-soaked torso that has come before. Every shot in the film, every close-up and every scene, lends meaning to the dance floor, and only Denis and Lavant could pull off such a brilliant coup, putting an entire film together seemingly out of thin air, the pulse of the music dragging us deeper into Galoup’s personal hell.
Claire Denis’ Beau Travail
For every thump of Beau Travail’s bass drenched finale, 35 Shots Of Rum counterpunches with its own exquisite and polar opposite musical moment; a group of lovers stuck in the rain heads into a café to avoid being soaked and, as the strains of Nightshift fill the room, we watch a community flowering right before our eyes. While 35 Shots Of Rum is ostensibly the story of a retiring train operator who is preparing to give his daughter away for marriage, it is much, much more than that: It is the story of a new kind of French nation, a new community of working class people coming together to create a simple, happy life for themselves. Denis avoids all of the sloganeering and “-isms” (sexism, racism, classism) that could be used to underline her film’s principled approach to the lives of working class characters, but instead she does what she has always done best, which is to explore their common humanity through brilliantly phrased drama. In 35 Shots Of Rum, the creation of a family meal is the source of dignified communion, a gathering of co-workers a celebration of pride that echoes the kind of camaraderie that long ago seemed to vanish from the American work place. Denis’ film feels almost exotic; a single father and his daughter without an ounce of dysfunction between them, each looking to do right in the world, each wanting to find love and happiness, and both of them successful because of their principles and love for one another.
Claire Denis’ 35 Shots Of Rum
One final note; It goes without saying for me that if I were to compile a list of the greatest cinematographers of the past twenty years, Agnes Godard would be the first, last and only name on my list. The way she shoots movies sends me into fits of ecstasy, and her relationship with Denis’ style and material, the elliptical storytelling and the prowling way she accesses the faces of her actors for information about each and every moment, well, none of it would be the same without Godard’s sensibility in shooting the films. The magic between these two women will go down as one of the great collaborations in the history of cinema, and it seems impossible for me to imagine Denis’ work without looking at her stories through Godard’s lenses. I don’t know enough about how Denis’ films are made to know which portion of the credit lies where (although White Material, shot by frequent Bruno Dumont collaborator Yves Cape due to Godard’s pregnancy, retains much of the “feel” of Denis’ work with Godard), but I can say that the push and pull of story and image, the natural synthesis of their sensibilities, all of it combines to create one of the most important bodies of work in the current cinema. Claire Denis makes incredible movies; she remains one of the few people working today who articulates a truly cinematic language, reinventing herself with each and every film. A decade is just a line drawn in sand. Where to next?
*Although Beau Travail was made in 1999, it opened theatrically in the USA in the spring of 2000, which is when I saw it and which qualifies it for my list. We’re playing loose with time anyway, no?
The Back Row Manifesto’s Incredibly Personal, Completely Subjective List of the Best Films of The Decade (2000-2009) will be unveiled over the course of the month of December. Think of it as a sort of misguided advent calendar without the little chocolate surprises. Either way, thanks for reading and please check back every day over the next few weeks for the full list. The introduction to the list can be found here.
Two lovers sit inside their car near the Blue Rock Springs Golf Course on the 4th of July, 1969. As they sit and talk, a car drives past them on the isolated road and, after a few minutes, returns, parking behind them, headlights glaring in the rearview mirror. Without warning, time slows down; a man arrives at the passenger window and opens fire on the couple, killing the young woman and horribly wounding the man. Donovan’s Hurdy Gurdy Man wobbles on the soundtrack and, in a flash of light and blood, it is over quickly. No motive, no suspect, not a trace.
This scene, a re-creation of the second confirmed attack of the Zodiac Killer, provides the opening sequence of David Fincher’s Zodiac, a film that stands as a monument to obsession and frustration and one of the most important crime movies ever made. While the shadow of The Silence of The Lambs has towered over the genre for the past eighteen years (just look at the slate of Ashley Judd crime films of the 1990’s or even the ironically named Copycat from the same period for proof of the formula’s legs), David Fincher turns the usual crime-movie-by-numbers on its head by dealing not only with an unsolved crime, but by obsessively laying out in brilliant detail the wide array of dead ends, false leads, rumors, guesses and unsolvable puzzles that are the foundation of the Zodiac case.
David Fincher’s Zodiac
Fincher breaks the case into its constituent pieces, focusing not on the cinematic tropes of “an investigator on a personal mission” or a “the life and methods of a serial killer”, but the day-by-day, year-by-year accumulation of details that ultimately lead us nowhere. Fincher also wisely refuses the temptation to assign psychological motivation to his main characters, Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo) the San Francisco policeman assigned to crack the case, and Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal), a newspaper cartoonist whose proximity to the details of the case and love of puzzles drives him to obsess over the facts of the investigation (it is the real-life Graysmith’s book that provides much of the film’s point of view). Instead of making the story about the relationships between the characters, their reasons and desires, the film focuses its time on watching them slide into the unknowable, all of us down the rabbit hole together.
But, as anyone who follows such grim news must know before walking in to see the film, the Zodiac Killer remains at large, his crimes now over forty years old and unlikely to ever be resolved. And yet, their strange and spectacular nature, and the way in which they dominated the news cycles of their time, makes them one of the most fascinating cases in the “true crime” universe. Fincher not only doesn’t fail the material, he gets to the heart of their attraction with deep and purposeful storytelling that is supported by some of the best “period” filmmaking in modern cinema.
More than anything else, it is the way in which Zodiac is told that makes it such an important film and a contender from film of the decade; unlike, say, Hitchcock, who would give the audience all manner of information about the killer before providing a spectacular, thrilling finale punctuated by moral purpose, Zodiac breaks down information and the process of investigation into its natural stages, allowing information to arrive as it really came, in fits and spurts, over long periods of time, all of it cryptic, much of it still unknown. Behind every door could be a killer, every face on the street might be that of the Zodiac, and not to ruin the fun, but we’ll probably never know anyway.
So, why make a crime film about an unsolved crime full of unsolved clues, inauthentic suspects, red herrings, approached by introverted investigators and obsessed amateurs that we hardly get to know? For me, this is what makes Zodiac such an important movie, a move about process, about failure, about uncertainty, about important questions that never get answered, that is, a movie about the reality of human experience wrapped in a shiny, movie star bow. That it is also gorgeously photographed only wonderfully performed lends to the tension between the “facts” of the real life case and the glossy power of cinema to describe the world. There may have been other films this decade that provided more satisfaction and good feeling, but none of them turned the way we experience life and the movies on its head like Zodiac.
The Back Row Manifesto’s Incredibly Personal, Completely Subjective List of the Best Films of The Decade (2000-2009) will be unveiled over the course of the month of December. Think of it as a sort of misguided advent calendar without the little chocolate surprises. Either way, thanks for reading and please check back every day over the next few weeks for the full list. The introduction to the list can be found here.
Looking back across the decade, no American film sticks out more like a sore thumb than Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood. Every time I see it, and that number grows larger and larger on an almost bi-monthly basis, I find new facets at which to marvel; an undiscovered, twisted facial expression, the purr and hiss of a word or sentence, the gnarl of a hand, the texture and meaning of the light in a shot. Unlike so many of his predecessors who have bowed in homage to the style and rhythms of the filmmaking of the 1970’s, Anderson not only gets it right, he betters many of his masters by understanding that the unruliness and freedom of the early twentieth century was the axis upon which the modern condition continues to turn. And so, trading in the loose and shaggy acting, the use of contemporary folk music and the misty-eyed sexual politics of the 1970’s in favor of a deeply rigorous use of the camera, a brilliant, flawlessly taut performance by Daniel-Day Lewis (the best of the decade by a man, I think), an absolutely stunning score by Johnny Greenwood (the best of the decade by anyone, I think) and a script that drills deep into the heart of American pathology, There Will Be Blood is a monument to the power of cinema to transform history into something far more moving, meaningful and relevant than any other medium could allow.
No movie captures the roots of the existential madness, greed, religious charlatanism and obsessive plundering of American resources quite like There Will Be Blood and, as such, no movie captures the terror of living under the Bush Administration quite like it, either. Here is the American soul laid bare for all to see; a greedy swindler feigning faith in order to be granted just enough trust to fuck an entire community over for all time. And the worst part of all? You feel as though they have it coming to them all along. Watching the prowling, growling Daniel Plainview devour suckers and rubes as if they were nothing more than an appetizer for the big meal ahead, well, I couldn’t help but shake my head with instant recognition of Anderson’s note perfect indictment of our times. Buried under the hard work and “entrepreneurial” spirit of Plainview’s oil prospecting racket is the timely notion that business, unregulated, speculative, life-destroying business, is the natural condition of the American experience, and woe unto he who gets in the way of a man trying to get as rich as he can. The film lays Plainview’s cards on the table when he meets with representatives of the Standard Oil company who are looking to get him out of the picture for a million dollars; all of that huckstering and preying upon good manners and naivete is useless, and a battle of pure will and power rips Plainview from the comfort of his bag of tricks and into an irrational rage. When they suggest he simply sell and enjoy his time with his son, Plainview pauses. “Did you just tell me how to run my family?,” he hisses. “One night, I’m going to come to your house, wherever you’re sleeping and I’m going to cut your throat.” And if you thought Plainview didn’t take his family seriously, just wait for the moment when he learns the truth about his brother, Henry.
There are so many opposing forces at work in this film, so much conflict between façades of dignity, honor, family and the grim realities of business, exploitation, ego and greed, that it seems impossible that the story could resolve itself. Well, look around you; it hasn’t. Of course, each of these dynamics clash not only between the characters but within them, and it is the complexity of these relationships between men and their true selves that sets Anderson apart as, in my opinion, a true genius. Nothing captures that genius more concisely than the two unforgettable scenes that send the move hurtling to its conclusion; Plainview’s humbling at the altar of the small town preacher Eli Sunday and its rhyming moment of pure revenge and one of the best finales in the recent cinema; Plainview’s exposure of Sunday’s own hypocrisy and greed in the infamous “I Drink Your MILKSHAKE!” sequence that finally unleashes the insanity buried inside of Plainview…
Anyone who believes that the title of this film is referring simply to the blood spilled from Eli Sunday’s head is perhaps being a little too literal; The 2000’s were soaked in the blood of Daniel’s worldview. The Cult of Family. False Prophets. Drainage. This, ladies and gentlemen, is my American decade. What a movie.
The Back Row Manifesto’s Incredibly Personal, Completely Subjective List of the Best Films of The Decade (2000-2009) will be unveiled over the course of the month of December. Think of it as a sort of misguided advent calendar without the little chocolate surprises. Either way, thanks for reading and please check back every day over the next few weeks for the full list. The introduction to the list can be found here.
While assembling this list of my favorite films of the decade, the issue of how to handle documentaries presented an immediate challenge. My list so far only features three; Jonathan Caouette’s life-altering Tarnation, Yung Chang’s amazing Up The Yangtze and here now, Philip Gröning’s unfathomably great Into Great Silence. So, I guess I should be clear; I could create an entire list of the best films of the decade populated solely by non-fiction, easily and with pleasure. But I also have to be honest with myself; because of the way so many documentaries are made, I often feel a diminishing passion for them the further I get away from viewing them. There are vast numbers of exceptions to this generalization, but in the same way one might look back upon an old science fiction film and smile at the way in which the special effects seem out of date, so too many documentaries feel so alive in their moment only suffer upon reflection. They are victims of the passing of time, of problem solving and innovation in real life, of great social victories and progressive human endeavor; yesterday’s outrage is today’s history lesson. In figuring out for myself which films continue to cast a spell on me, I found myself returning again and again to a select few documentaries, and the one that kept suggesting itself as a true masterpiece of the form was Into Great Silence.
Cinematic time is one of the great dilemmas of film love, both in the way that movies utilize time to tell their stories, but more problematically in the way that time in the movies intersects with the real time experience of watching them. I have ranted often, both here and among friends, that the minute someone mentions the run time of a film, I know we have a problem; I’m just the type of person to take offense when someone mentions a films real time length as some sort of obvious pejorative against its quality. For me, someone who thinks about these types of things, it is clear that it is the presence of dissonance in the relationship between real time and cinematic time that creates an issue; millions of people have stayed in their seats, comfortably engaged throughout movies of various length without raising an eyebrow. Why? Because they were engrossed in a good story; cinematic time and real time were synchronized for the viewer and, generally speaking, it is only when they diverge, when the movie allows you to be pulled back into an awareness of real time, that the feeling of a movie being “too long” begins to arise.
But what if the subject of your film was the relationship between real time, real life, and eternity? How could anyone possibly undertake the idea of a film that encapsulates years, decades, centuries of contemplation? How could an audience endure the slow passing of days, the rituals and routines? In the case of Into Great Silence the answer is found in the grand documentary tradition of observation. Here is a film with no traditional “narrative”, no characters, no arc, no score, no voiceovers, no interviews, just a catalogue of days spent among the monks of the Grande Chartreuse monastery, pressed into the form of a feature length film. As Andrei Tarkovsky wrote in his seminal Sculpting In Time:
“Time printed in its factual forms and manifestations: such is the supreme idea of cinema as an art… If time appears in form and fact, the fact is given in the form of simple, direct observation. The basic element of cinema, running through it from its tiniest cells, is observation.”
If Tarkovsky was building sculptures in time, Gröning has undertaken the construction of an entire monastery.
One of the great stories that accompanied the film upon its release was that of Gröning sharing his interest in filming at the Grande Chartreuse back in 1984, only to be met with a reply informing him that the monks “would get back to him”, which they did, sixteen years later. This is exactly the perfect metaphor for the film itself, a pure and moving attempt to use cinema to reproduce the temporal experience of monastic living. Gröning uses the rhythms of the monk’s lives to pull you in and out of contemplation, to sync the viewer with the rhythms of the monastery, to draw us into the experience of feeling the irrelevance of time as a ritual concern. The effect was staggering for me, and not only did the film draw an old atheist like me completely into the cycles of monastic living, but it made me confront the absence of real time in the most pleasurable ways imaginable. Watching the monks pray, think, eat, walk and sing, I completely lost track of myself and, while the film makes the brilliant choice of not trying to ascribe meaning to the meditations—it isn’t a spiritual film as much as it is a physical, earthbound document of human endeavor—Gröning instead creates space for the mind to absorb the experience of life stripped of time itself.
Into Great Silence remains criminally underappreciated as a document of human experience but even more so as a masterpiece of cinematic art that delivers an integrated, coherent vision of the power of temporal observation. Gröning has transformed the cinema into a cathedral, and Into Great Silence deserves a place at the altar of this or any decade.
The Back Row Manifesto’s Incredibly Personal, Completely Subjective List of the Best Films of The Decade (2000-2009) will be unveiled over the course of the month of December. Think of it as a sort of misguided advent calendar without the little chocolate surprises. Either way, thanks for reading and please check back every day over the next few weeks for the full list. The introduction to the list can be found here.
So far, my list of best films of the decade has been relatively easy for me to assemble; even if I were to face recrimination for any of my choices, I feel as though the movies to this point have been great films that continue to speak to me in interesting ways. But now, with the selection of Alexander Payne’s Sideways, I feel as though it starts getting really personal. Any look at the critical reaction to this movie, which I consider to be the best American film of 2004, tracks like a stock market chart; Up and down, from high to low, people buying in and selling off their interest at various points in the film’s lifecycle. But, like any good investment, Sideways continues to pay great, consistent dividends, year after year, viewing after viewing. How can it be?
I think, now five years removed from the initial release, the answer lies in my personal and deep connection to both Paul Giamatti as one of the most underrated comedic actors of this decade and to his portrayal of the character of Miles in this film. There is no greater thrill to be found in a film than watching an actor inhabit a character that is perfectly drawn for him, and Giamatti’s brilliant turn in this film seems to me one of those perfect marriages of actor and role. Here is a man who has a deep passion for wine; he is recognized among his superficial and less dedicated associates as an expert oenophile, vocal about his opinions and seemingly secure in his self-belief and his understanding of who he is and what he loves. And yet, just beneath the surface of things, self-loathing, inaction, doubt and, most recognizable, the fear of being discovered as a fraud. Why? Because for everything Miles loves, for all of the special moments he creates, beneath it all he is unable to create meaningful real life connections of his own.
If there is a better metaphor for the modern state of cinephilia, well, I’m all ears. I know that A.O. Scott famously drew the comparison in his initial review of the film all those years ago, but I don’t think it’s quite right to equate Miles with a professional writer like Scott; it is the directionless love of the amateur, of a rarified passion without any meaningful venue within which to express it, of the emptiness of the expert outsider who will never be a tastemaker, that Giamatti captures so brilliantly. To paraphrase Armond White at a recent panel on internet film writers, Miles “doesn’t rate”, and that makes me love him all the more. All of the anger and self-sabotage, the way he regrets each word just as it comes out of his mouth, carries the responsibility of being “the guy that loves wine” like a cross on his back, always there, all the time, well, let’s just say as an amateur writer myself and as a film programmer whose own life often feels external to his own work, I deeply connect with this movie and especially with Giamatti’s brilliant physicality; the way his eyes flash with anger, like a tsunami of feeling has suddenly washed through him, or the submission found in his shaggy tenderness and sad eyes as he recognizes the futility of a passion he can never truly share with others. I just love him in this film.
”Instead of creating another Alexander, perhaps the studios should spend their time trying to create the next Billy Wilder or George Cukor and fulfill the true promise of the Hollywood film, a promise I so desperately miss; Warm, humanist movies that tell great stories and speak to the current generation of adults who are looking to find their own lives represented on the big screen. Sideways is, in every way, the fulfillment of this promise.”
In the years since Alexander Payne completed Sideways, he’s made one short film (the brilliant 14th arrondissement segment in Paris, J’taime) and, while he has worked in various capacities on other people’s projects, hasn’t even begun making his next film, a comedy called The Descendents that recently was rumored to have attached George Clooney and that, thankfully, should begin shooting in 2010. While the movie was green lit in 2007 by Fox Searchlight, still, it’s been five years now.
Five years. Five years between films is far too long and, while Hollywood has gone and turned itself into a children’s literature tentpole business (from the Harry Potter films to the Twlight series through innumerable comic book blockbusters), what film for adults has given us anything close to the wonderful touch of Payne’s Sideways? The film, reportedly made for $16 million, is said to have cleared over $85 million in international box office and even spawned a Japanese remake. And yet, five years, and nothing. But the movie still lives for me; nothing captures my heart like Giamatti as Miles, or those sun soaked California vineyards, or that lonely moment on the porch of a mega-winery when Miles’ cell phone rings and the latest and final rejection of his book arrives like a sucker punch, or the way that pain is transformed as Miles is pushed into pouring an entire spit jar of Merlot on his face, or even the great scene where Miles goes to retrieve his comrade’s wallet from the bedroom of a sexually generous waitress. Looking back, it’s hard not to miss a film like this; has the American comedy for adults gone and disappeared? Looking back now, was Sideways the end of something?
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