small town cinema agonistes

Here's the thing about living in the sticks: I can list my top ten films of last year, but I haven't seen half of them yet. I'm still waiting for I'm Not There, There Will Be Blood, the Orphanage, Margot at the Wedding... Hell, I'm still waiting for Sunshine to hit the theatres but since it's out on DVD now I may have to relinquish that particular dream.

These are some I loved:

No Country for Old Men
3:10 to Yuma
Zodiac
in the Shadow of the Moon
the Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
Eastern Promises
Zidane: a 21st Century Portrait
Pan's Labyrinth
Michael Clayton
Into Great Silence

This was a great year for walking out of the theatre thinking, "I've never seen a movie quite like that one before." No Country was one of those. Much eloquence has already been spilled upon it so I'll just mention Garret Dillahunt, whose name gets lost in the brilliant shuffle of its credits. He's the deputy in this one, also giving up a wrenching and poetic turn as the doomed Ed Miller in the Assassination of Jesse James. Possibly you recognize him as the slow-witted lowlife who gunned down Wild Bill in the first season of Deadwood or the deeply introspective whorekiller from the second. He's one of those actors, like John Carrol Lynch and Gregg Henry, who make a decent film better and pull a bad one up a rung or two just by being so interesting to watch.

Jesse James wasn't the all-out Western I was looking for (never mind: I got that in Yuma) but it was a creature unlike any I've ever seen. It most resembles a Gus Van Sant film, from, say, ten years ago. Strange and slow, it digs with unyielding temerity into the methodology of psychological warfare. To work for Jesse James, first you hand him over all your power. The backwash of THAT is that he's attracting men like Ford (Casey Affleck, so good at this that he's painful to watch) who are unformed and looking to him for some magical galvanization to kickstart their Real Lives. James is an adroit psychological terrorist, masterfully tyrannizing the Ford boys into submission using time-honored tactics: random swings between affection and violence, constant surveillance, playing one off the other, and we watch as they become eaten away and etiolated like battered wives. The real stroke of success here, though, is how simply and silently Brad Pitt makes us understand and sympathize with his Jesse, who wants friendships like everyone else and must settle for sycophants because it's the bed he made himself and now he's gotta lie in it.

There was talk when Michael Clayton came out that it had the feel of a '70s film because of its strong emphasis on plot and character. That's not '70s; that's a good film. They just knew how to make 'em back then. And it IS a good film, well worth watching. There were bits I loved as much as anything I've seen this year: the thing about the horses, the credits over the cab ride at the end (nobody in the theatre moved until it was ended, even though it was just a cab ride, he was just sitting there, doing nothing, riding in the back of a cab, for God's sake. And yet it was fascinating. The silence, Clooney's face at rest after the long, impossible journey). Then I got to thinking about how this movie would've been made thirty-five years ago. First off, production values: this was NEVERMIND to the '70s' BLEACH. All slick: none of the gritty realism of Dog Day Afternoon or the French Connection. But the big difference was the lack of what I will call for want of a more perfect term Existential Angst. Think of the Conversation or the Parallax View. Back then, this story would never have jumped around from the inside of one head to another like this does... One minute we are in Tilda Swinton's head, the next we are following the assassins, then we're back with Clayton. It still makes for a good story, but some of the tension is wrung out of it, because we've seen the bad guys, been in their heads and know their flaws, so the menace does not seem overwhelming and unimaginable as it did in those old films. Of course, the ending would've been very different back then. No relaxed cab ride in those days for the existential hero, no sir. Witness the Verdict. Back then, even when you won, you really didn't. I tell you what else they'd have done: the assassins wouldn't have looked like they'd been chosen by central casting. How much scarier would it have been if they didn't look like aryan thugs, but ordinary joes making a living?

Zodiac makes me so happy I could spit. We've all known for many years that David Fincher is brilliant, but this is the first time he's let up on trying to convince us of it, making his tricks and shock techniques the real stars of his movies. They're still here, all his brilliant moves, but he's relaxed into them. Like he's finally found a story he's eager to tell for its own sake, and so he does it as effectively as he can, which is damned effectively. And it's a nigh-on impossible story to tell. It's shaped wrong, with lumps in odd places and long, arid stretches, and (here's the killer) it has NO REAL ENDING. A lesser man would have focused on a chunk in the middle of the Zodiac killer's spree, the most eventful chunk, and manufactured some kind of false climax. What Fincher has done is brave and, ultimately, well, brilliant. It's eerie, it's fascinating, it has an aura of truth about it; I've seen it twice so far and I suspect it will never get old.

As for the rest, docs about astronauts and monks and footballers are exactly my cup of tea, and there are few men I love with greater paroxysms of euphoria than Cronenberg and del Toro. (Zidane and Pan's Labyrinth are I think officially from 2006, but I didn't have access until last year, so... you know. Watch them anyway.) Meanwhile, Sweeney Todd has finally opened here, and I have high hopes for Daniel Day-Lewis showing up next Friday, so I reserve the right to change my mind as often as I want.