A Year to Remember
Was it a great year or a bad year for movies? A great year, if only because it did what every movie year should do: provide an astonishing number of films worth praising and attacking, and an even larger number of films worth appreciating, in whole or in part, because of their sheer ambition, even if they didn't hold together.
To that already lengthy list, I'd add a couple of ambitious movies that didn't quite work yet didn't look or feel quite like anything I'd seen and that boasted filmmaking choices that were inventive (Birth and The Polar Express). They're more worthy of sustained, meticulous analysis than some movies that worked better as a whole. I'd throw in Guillermo del Toro's theologically inflected action picture Hellboy, the remake of Dawn of the Dead, the mournful, Terrence Malick-inspired Australian period drama Ned Kelly and the cartoon slapstick whirlwind of Anchorman (grounded in Will Ferrell's impishly inventive performance) just to make a point: It is the duty of critics to seek out and identify good work even if it occurs in films that aren't clearly stamped "SERIOUS!" by marketers.
And I'd grudgingly acknowledge Fahrenheit 9/11, a shoddy, alarmist piece of conspiracy mongering that caricatured authentic American political anxieties, but also demonstrated editing's ability to create countermyths better than any American feature since JFK.
I watch movies not merely to analyze style and content and pass judgment (though that's the base layer), but also to appreciate the skill, energy and conviction with which ideas are expressed. I'm as entertained by the dogmatic approach to criticism as anybody-i.e., the elaborate filtering of movies into two categories, those that match up with the critics' own political, esthetic and emotional proclivities and those that do not. But in the end, I find the dogmatic approach reductive, and at its worst, adolescent, because it often short circuits substantive discussion and locks rhetorical doors that ought to be opened wide. I watch movies not to have my worldview confirmed and applauded, but to see what filmmakers and their collaborators are thinking and feeling, and to appreciate their willingness to take mad risks, whether grand or silly.
That's why I can't get too excited over Sideways (which I did enjoy) or other critics' favorites like Before Sunset (sincere and romantic but visually prosaic), Million Dollar Baby (slow, condescending and twice as long as it needed to be), Kinsey (an HBO biopic with a more expensive cast), Finding Neverland (great lead performance, but too safe and conventional) and Closer (so cutsey-cynical that it actually made me nauseous). No matter how professionally assembled, such films do the dramatic equivalent of a soft-shoe routine, sticking to the commercial filmmaking playbook.
That's why my year-end lists tend to embrace movies that inspired radically divided reactions-and often movies to which I myself had serious personal objections. That's also why I have always given bonus points for stylistic, technical or tonal daring, even when the artist fails. Some great movies are perfect-Hero comes to mind-but such verdicts are never universal, and in any event, it pays to remember the opening line of Pauline Kael's review of the still-divisive Casualties of War: "Great movies are rarely perfect movies."
For that matter, it's possible for a movie to be great and offensive. The Passion contained its share of anti-Semitic imagery and gay baiting-why did Herod have to be a mincing fop?-a fact detractors fixated on, and defenders rationalized away. That doesn't mean it's not an astonishing movie that moved people not just through its subject matter, but also its unrelentingly intense, hallucinatory style. The Birth of a Nation, The Wild Bunch and Straw Dogs are Neanderthal in some ways, but they're still great movies.
I was moved to tears more often during movie year 2004 than at any time since my childhood. In retrospect, I see that my reaction had less to do with plot twists or nakedly emotional performance moments than with the craft of filmmaking itself. I usually experience a profound emotional reaction at the movies not when a major character dies or some horrible large-scale disaster befalls a civilization, but when a filmmaker presents a situation or idea in such an unexpected way that I'm jolted out of my own consciousness and into his.
The Passion of the Christ, my second- favorite film of the year, moved me to tears during the final moments of the crucifixion sequence, when Mel Gibson cuts to an overhead shot of Christ on the cross and a giant teardrop falls from somewhere outside of camera range, exploding into the dirt with the force of a boulder dropped from a mountaintop. What moved me wasn't just the context of the scene-the unbearably sad finale of a tale I'd heard and read a thousand times as a child-but Mel Gibson's heroic determination to express the idea of God weeping in such a daringly primitive way. Here, as elsewhere in the picture, Gibson put to use modern filmmaking techniques (expressive, post-Peckinpah slow motion and CGI effects) to illustrate a poetic, mythic moment (God weeps). In that dazzlingly risky choice-a choice many cynics mocked as excessively primitive, sentimental, old fashioned and unhip-Gibson allied himself not just with Peckinpah, Scorsese, De Palma and other modern poets of violence, but with silent-era masters.
In that spirit, I appreciate the individual parts of a film as much or more than the whole. When a movie is in its own private esthetic and emotional space, as Gibson's surely was-doing its own thing with style and conviction, and not really giving a damn if you like it-I don't really care if it validates any of my prejudices or preferences, because a small miracle of transformation is taking place: I am seeing through the eyes of someone else. I watch movies not merely to go somewhere I've never been or empathize with someone I've never met (though both are surely important), or in keeping with the more reductive and pernicious definition of "escapism" (something like, "forget your troubles for a couple of hours") but for the chance to fully inhabit someone else's vision, however epic, opaque, grotesque or aggressively goofy that vision may be.