|
Critics keep saying 2006 was a weak year for cinema, but, with so much lying on the screens, why should I believe them? Really, this was the Year of Living Deceitfully: from the parallel undercover agents of The Departed and the institutionalized snitching of The Good Shepherd to The Illusionist's fancy-schmancy obfuscation and The Prestige's duel of conjurers, film in 2006 was an extended game of poker, played with back to the wall and cards close to the vest (a fitting climate, incidentally, for the belated theatrical release of Jean-Pierre Melville's 1969 masterpiece of existential bluffing, Army of Shadows). It is not hard to feel duped when the new Pirates of the Caribbean calamity makes off with box-office booty, but why this proliferation of liars? Reflections of a period when government frauds became more transparent than ever, perhaps, but then again, this was the year that Oliver Stone turned good soldier with World Trade Center while 9/11 was exploited without being illuminated in United 93. Documentaries soldiered to bring the war home, though The War Tapes and Iraq in Fragments, among others, first of all showed the fallacies of the genre's professed neutrality -- the camera lies 24 frames per second, said Brian De Palma, whose own search for truth in The Black Dahlia left middlebrow reviewers predictably befuddled. Speaking of poker, a master gambler has left us -- "The death of an old man is not a tragedy," it is said in Altman's A Prairie Home Companion, a line disproved then by the director's passing. In the year when America played Margaret Dumont to Borat's scatological Groucho (Freedonia, indeed), it is scarcely surprising that sensitive viewers must have left theaters feeling punk'd: sequels and remakes and videogame adaptations make up the glut of mainstream releases, Little Miss Sunshine is the smiling button-face for Sundance "edginess," ridiculous offal like Babel, Blood Diamond, and Dreamgirls is touted as quality work. The moviegoing experience itself to me remains a privileged one, to be luxuriated in whether it's Old Joy or Grandma's Boy, though I must plead guilty to slightly fewer hours in the dark this year in favor of watching TV (where Deadwood episodes, Takashi Miike's Masters of Horror segment and Spike Lee's superb When the Leeves Broke regularly shamed studio releases), old DVDs, and a shameful new obsession, YouTube esoterica. Yet I refuse to join the annual rattle for the Death of Cinema -- when I see digital-video made spooky-transcendent throughout Inland Empire or how the camera bridges emotions from character to audience in L'Enfant or the way Colin Farrell and Gong Li look into each other's skin in Miami Vice, I realize how radiantly alive film is, and how the year's true liars are the ones bemoaning the fall of a medium they never really cared for. Any end-of-year list is a work in-progress, not just because there are dozens of works kept out of reach by the media steamroller, but also because art refuses to stagnate. Film still breathes, turns, expands; all we need is to follow it into 2007, with open minds and open eyes. So. What to keep, what to toss out? Ten instances of ecstasy: 1. Inland Empire: To watch it is to be contaminated, and David Lynch wouldn't have it any other way. Seen (twice, in a row) on the very last day of the year; I didn't watch Laura Dern in the labyrinth, I was Laura Dern in the labyrinth. A shared reverie, a shuddering encounter -- the biggest shock was when the lights came back on, and I remembered I was in a theater. 2. Flags of Our Fathers/Letters from Iwo Jima: Two halves of a great work, melded together in scrutinizing, somber, terse poetry. A WWII battlefield seen from contrasting angles by Clint Eastwood, whose moral gaze becomes more lapidated with each new excoriating study of masculinity and heroism. 3. L'Enfant: A young scrapper is jolted into awareness by an unforgivable act, a motorcycle chase culminates on a grueling baptism, arrested adolescence is shattered and, possibly, transcended. The spiritual made physical, courtesy of the Brothers Dardenne. 4. Miami Vice: Uncut cinematic ether: one wants to swim in Michael Mann's pristine style. His lush surfaces are no templates for TV ads, but the very air navigating the characters -- dreamers posing as zombies -- through the shadowy halls of undercover sleuthing, love, and life itself. 5. The Death of Mr. Lazarescu: An old man is shuffled back and forth between Romanian hospitals, meeting infuriating, bleakly funny neglect as he feels life leaking out of him; it sounds like one of Sokurov's tragic, unearthly visions of disintegration, but the inferno here is mercilessly physical, the horrid clarity of human life expiring in an uncaring world. 6. Three Times: Hou Hsiao-hsien's time-machine film, with a young Taiwanese couple romancing through the years while funneling emotion into moments that, in their delicacy, become enlarged into whole epochs. A ravishing elegy to the cycles of life and, in an era of pervasive amnesia, to the essential role of history. 7. The Black Dahlia: The tragic heroine's body is found in one of countless extraordinary camera movements, but she lives in the minds the conflicted noir hero, tearfully addressing Brian De Palma's lenses. The dark sides of art and history evoked in indelible slashes, opening our eyes to the moral abyss beneath our feet. 8. Gabrielle: A costume drama with a burning emotional center, Patrice Chéreau's adaptation of Conrad's The Return rips the facade off a moribund bourgeois marriage, but how can the mask of tidy appearances be forced back on when underneath it the flesh quivers and aches? An enlivening apocalypse follows. 9. A Prairie Home Companion: A testament film, whether or not Robert Altman intended it to be, yet feeling for mortality is balanced by the continuous flow of positive creativity that allows the characters to reveal the furtive truths of their being. Death advances toward our table, but art endures as a reminder of life. 10. Neil Young: Heart of Gold: A vision of musicality and morality, like A Prairie Home Companion, and, like it, an astounding sense of community. Young's performances are transformed by Jonathan Demme into a series of luminous epiphanies, culminating in the awe-inspiring serenity of being able to play to an empty, darkened theater. Honorable mentions: Gillian's feverish film-maudit Tideland, Linklater's rotoscoped lament for fizzled Gen-X potential in A Scanner Darkly, Herzog finding aliens in our own backyard in The Wild Blue Yonder, Scorsese's fierce and funny The Departed, the plangent cultural-political connections of Téchiné's Changing Times, Wenders back out West in Don't Come Knocking, Chabrol's elegant turbulence in The Bridesmaid, the misunderstood frivolity of Coppola's Marie Antoinette, and Zhang rekindling family in Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles only to destroy it in Curse of the Golden Flower. Also: the cutting reinvention of Bond in Casino Royale, Cantet's subtle analysis of sexual tourism in Heading South, Pan's Labyrinth's rich creatures, the ongoing drama of life in 49 Up, the splenetic integrity of Art School Confidential, two bravura unbroken takes in Children of Men, Aja's Hills Have Eyes remake as the most brutal through-Gallic-eyes view of arid America since Twentynine Palms, Guy Maddin's short My Dad Is 100 Years Old, Amy Sedaris's whirlwind mugging in Strangers With Candy, the cynicism-free romance of The Lake House, and, for making me want to watch animated features again, Miller's Happy Feet. Still to catch: Carlos Reygadas's Battle in Heaven, Michael Bujalski's Mutual Appreciation, Ilya Khrjanovsky's 4, João Pedro Rodrigues's Two Drifters, and François Ozon's Time to Leave.
Worst: Babel, Notes on a Scandal, United 93, Little Children, Blood Diamond, All the King's Men, The Last King of Scotland... the whole Oscar roster, basically. Choose your poison.
|