The last year has not
been very good. The movies have been all right – the first five on this list
are unquestionably masterpieces – but life has been uneasy. For me, it’s been a long
year of broken computers, horrible cinema audiences and even worse politics.
I think I know what I
need to do this next year. Be a little less guarded, and try to open myself up
in real conversations with people. Tell people what I mean more, and, when
appropriate, what they mean to me. I’m not very good at this. As they say in My
Dinner with Andre, “We can’t be direct,
so we end up saying the weirdest things.” I feel like that. Like my whole life
is a series of regurgitated responses and I’m not really saying what I mean. I
also want to absorb the content of things more. Take a few more chances. Let’s
hope the New Year brings that.
I sometimes find
myself at a distance from a lot of movies – they’re not affecting me like they
used to. Most of that has to do with the distractions. Here are the films that
broke through the noise.
Warning: Spoilers
ahead for all of these films.
1. Silence (Martin Scorsese)
There are so few good films about religion – particularly
ones that ask questions rather than give answers. In Martin Scorsese’s Silence, a powerful question is posed: is
it right to renounce one’s faith if such an act ends the suffering of others?
In the seventeenth century, two Jesuit priests, Rodrigues
(Andrew Garfield) and Garrpe (Adam Driver), travel to Japan to find their
mentor, Father Ferreira (Liam Neeson), who has reportedly renounced
Christianity under torture by the Japanese. Upon arriving in Japan in a search
for Ferreira, the priests give hope to a village of persecuted Japanese
Christians, but it’s not long before Rodrigues is captured and held before the Inquisitor
(Issei Ogata). The Japanese demand that Rodrigues step on an image of Christ
and renounce his faith, and in return, they will release the persecuted
Christians they hold captive.
If renouncing his religion means suffering will end for so
many people, isn’t that the right thing to do? Is it selfish to cling onto
faith when the only person you’re saving is yourself? And is the Christian gospel
something truly to be shared in every nation? These are some of the many
questions Scorsese asks here.
The character of the believer plagued with doubts has been
seen before in Scorsese’s work – namely in The
Last Temptation of Christ (1988), in which Jesus Christ (Willem Dafoe) struggles
to accept his position as the savior of mankind. If Jesus is both God and man,
then he must be susceptible to man’s temptations – that is the conceit behind The Last Temptation of Christ. Here, in Silence, you have a Christ-like figure tested
again and again, and though he succumbs to a kind of defeat by the film’s end,
his faith is still there – hidden, dormant, silent.
Andrew Garfield makes every moment of doubt and uncertainty
real for us – he’s likely to get nominated for Best Actor this year for Mel
Gibson’s Hacksaw Ridge, but he should
be nominated for this film.
This is the most austere, serious picture Scorsese has ever
made. The explosive camerawork, rapid-fire editing and brilliant use of popular
music – which are among the qualities that first drew me to the filmmaker as a
young boy – are absent here. The questions the film asks are so pure, the
suffering of its lead characters so intense on its own, that any kind of
kinetic, whiplash-inducing filmmaking would betray the subject matter. Don’t
think for a second that I’m dismissing either style – after all, Scorsese’s
last film, the exhilarating The Wolf of
Wall Street (2013), is the best film of this decade – although Silence may very well give it a run for
its money.
This is the film Scorsese has wanted to direct for nearly
thirty years, and it’s understandable why it was so difficult to make. Based on
Shûsaku
Endô’s novel, the subject matter of Silence
is unlike anything else being released in Hollywood’s current climate,
particularly with this kind of budget and such a wide release. It was
awe-inspiring to hear the silence in the cinema as it played – there was a real
reverence for the passion of this filmmaker and his images onscreen (I hope
everyone is as lucky to get this cinema experience – sadly, I doubt that will
be the case, as today’s audiences are conditioned in such a way that people
won’t know what to do with a film as meditative as Silence). Scorsese recently said he hasn’t watched much in the way
of current cinema because the images don’t mean anything anymore. Here, they
mean something.
His films, as Thelma Schoonmaker once said, are all about
immersing the audience in a particular world and making you feel it. Here, you feel the inner
torment of Rodrigues at every turn, but there is also an interesting remove
here that I haven’t often seen in a Scorsese picture. Many scenes unfold with a
straightforwardness that suggests a viewpoint other than the two priests –
almost a divine presence observing these events and remaining silent throughout
the suffering.
The silence in the title ostensibly refers to the silence of
God as Rodrigues and others endure their pain. But there’s another kind of
silence near the film’s end – the silence of the priests who give up their
devotion to God. And yet, in the final haunting image of the film, we see how in
their silence, there is a kind of prayer all its own.
There is a character, Kichijiro (Yôsuke Kubozuka), who lies, betrays
and watches his own family murdered while he rejects his faith and still lives.
It’s an ongoing joke in the film that he constantly wants to confess to Rodrigues
after he’s yet again done something wrong (in one instance, betraying Rodrigues
and leading him to the Inquisitor).
But near the end, once all of the priests in Japan have
renounced their faith and Christianity is spoken of no more, he is the only one
to mention Christ to Rodrigues. Despite his constant wavering of faith,
Kichijiro, in a way, brings Rodrigues’s awareness back to Christ.
And there is another question. Who is the nobler sufferer?
The one who refuses to abandon his faith, or the sinner who apostatizes, again
and again, and yet seeks forgiveness and continues to believe despite his sins?
Silence is a
monumental achievement – the best film of the year.
2. Manchester by the Sea (Kenneth Lonergan)
Kenneth Lonergan’s follow-up to Margaret (2011), one of the greatest and most unheralded films of
this decade, was always going to be one of my new favorite movies. But Manchester by the Sea overwhelmed me
beyond my expectations with its raw power and heartfelt exploration of grief.
There’s a sequence midway through this movie that goes down as one of the most
powerful pieces of cinema I’ve ever seen.
I also really responded to the film’s lead character, Lee
Chandler (Casey Affleck) – someone who, by his own admission, can’t beat his
depression. He’s so disturbed and haunted by his past that, try as he might to
be an outgoing person, ultimately he can’t fight against it.
The film does not end with failure, but with an admission
that some people simply can never be the same. It’s in this way that the film
understands grief in a more mature and honest way than most other movies out
there. Both Lee and his nephew, Patrick (Lucas Hedges), grow in unexpected ways,
but their needs are incompatible. Patrick needs a guardian after the death of
his father, but Lee simply can’t move back to his hometown – there will always
be too many ghosts.
Even though the film is a slightly more contained character
piece than Margaret, it is still
bursting at the seams with fascinating supporting characters and a rich sense
of location. At the center of the film is Affleck's lead performance, which is
on another level from any other I've seen this year.
The scene in which he visits Kyle Chandler's body is so affectingly
quiet and restrained - it's just one moment of beauty in a film full of them.
Here are a few more: the moment in which Affleck gently
packs the pictures of his children one-by-one, after tossing his other belongings
carelessly into a box. Hedges walking into the bedroom and staring at the
pictures. Hedges visiting his father's body – so brisk and almost comical
compared to the earlier scene with Affleck visiting the body. The scene with
Affleck and the microwave - just staring at it, considering his past. Lonergan
just knocks it out of the park, again and again, with these small, specific
moments.
As usual, Lonergan builds a world of unbelievably complex
characters with inner lives that extend far beyond the picture. I am in awe of
him and what he has accomplished with this film, Margaret and You Can Count On
Me (2000).
And it's worth mentioning that the flashbacks are as well
implemented as I've seen in a film. They're quick and sudden, and so perfectly
placed in the overall narrative, offering context and heartfelt backstory to
the lives unfolding in front of our eyes. Manchester
by the Sea is a beautiful film, and in a different year, it would have
placed at the top of this list.
3. Everybody Wants Some!! (Richard
Linklater)
The feeling of Richard Linklater’s Everybody Wants Some!!
lingered with me days after seeing it. It’s a deceptively powerful film,
perhaps because underneath all of the good times and hard-partying, there’s a
profound sadness that’s only revealed when it’s all over.
I'm amazed how similarly the film works as Linklater’s masterpiece Boyhood
(2014) - there's really not much melancholy in the movie itself, but the
experience of watching it and then leaving the cinema allows the sadness to
slowly seep in afterward. Suddenly, you realize you can’t hang out with these
guys anymore, and you want the good times to continue. The film’s cumulative
power is so much bigger than I realized during the casualness of its individual
scenes, and it isn’t until the final quiet moments of the picture, right before
Let the Good Times Roll by The Cars starts playing, that the full impact
of what you’ve seen hits you.
The moment that best hints at this sadness in the film is during the
team’s baseball practice, in which Willoughby (Wyatt Russell) is quietly called
off the field by the coach, told he has to leave the team, and shakes the
coach’s hand (it’s later revealed he’s thirty years old and fudged his
transcript to get back onto a college team – he simply wants to relive his
glory years).
“Here for a good time, not a long time,” Willoughby says to the others
in a down-to-earth manner as he’s called off the field, echoing the film’s
tagline.
The other guys don’t know how to react, and we’re quickly whisked away
from the potentially melancholy moment by the ridiculously bad sportsmanship of
Jay Niles (Juston Street). It’s a technique that recalls something Martin
Scorsese does in The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), where Jordan Belfort briefly comes face-to-face with
one of the deeply disturbing consequences of his lifestyle (a co-worker’s
suicide) and then immediately brushes it aside and moves on to the next fun
thing. These movies don’t want to linger in the melancholy, but we’re always
aware it’s there, bubbling just beneath the surface.
In a strange way, Everybody Wants Some!! both doubles down on
the partying in Linklater’s Dazed and Confused (1993), and yet it’s somehow even more nostalgic and elegiac
than that movie. It captures what you wish college was like, in its most
idealized form.
Leaving the theater, I felt something I've experienced after some of
the best moments of my life – when, after being surrounded by friends, the
noise settles down and you slowly realize that that feeling won't return ever
again – not that exact feeling, anyway. In a way, this feeling is what’s going
to come over the characters in this movie in the near future. They’re all on
their way to unremarkable adulthoods, and it’s doubtful the rest of their lives
will live up to what they experience here.
The structure here is awesome – rather than cutting from one baseball
practice to a wild party and then back to another baseball practice, we just
get one long practice scene. By not cutting away from any one location too
quickly, we get the most out of the hang-out feeling, like we’re really living
in these scenes. Linklater and editor Sandra Adair give every scene breathing
room – we’re not just jumping from one thing to another. And Linklater does
such a good job of introducing fifteen central characters and helping us know
and understand each of them.
And I’m amazed by how subtly Linklater is able to infuse a sense of
melancholy throughout the movie. I think he partially does it through music,
and by showing these characters charging ahead for their youthful goals that,
sometimes, seem a little sad. Will they remember any of these frivolous games
in ten years? Will any of this matter?
Take, for instance, the scene at the county-western bar, where the
guys re-locate after Jay gets them kicked out of Sound Machine. One of them,
Nesbit (Austin Amelio), rides the bar’s mechanical bull ferociously - and as
the tune Driving My Life Away by
Eddie Rabbit plays, I suddenly felt a great deal of despair.
It's something about the match between music, activity and the
character's goal – he’s dead set on riding that bull as well as he can. And it
made me deeply sad - for the character, for the thrills and highs we try to
achieve every night as young people. It just reminded me of something. I don’t
know what, exactly. Maybe it felt reminiscent of a time, place and feeling I've
shared, and the truly insignificant goals we’ve all embarked upon that only
distract from the larger loneliness of a given night on the town. That’s all
here, in this one quick scene, with that song playing and Nesbit riding that
bull.
Sometimes I think a movie is well made, but I resist connecting to it,
or feel that it can’t be one of my favorites, because the characters aren’t
anything like me, or the picture doesn’t mirror my own experience. But watching
Everybody Wants Some!!, I was reminded that that’s not how great cinema
works. Sometimes great cinema shows you what you wish your life could be, and
makes you nostalgic for something you’ve never experienced. You respond deeply
to the feeling of the picture without it necessarily reflecting anything in your
life.
More than anything, this movie made me feel like I missed out. It’s
what I imagine an alternate life could have been like, if I was just a little
different from the way I am. A lot of what happens in the movie is almost like
what my life growing up in Texas was supposed to be like. The characters in
this film are the guys from my high school (in one case, quite literally), and
I always felt a little left out of this kind of thing – which is why I want to
make the version of this film from the outsider’s perspective (more on that in
a different post). But Everybody Wants Some!! warmly invites you to be a
part of the action for two hours. In Linklater's universe, we're all connected,
if only for a short amount of time.
After seeing the film three times and finding each experience
more rewarding than the last, there’s no question in my mind that La La Land is one of the most original
and immensely lovable movies of the last several years. Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash (2014) was one hell of a ride,
but he outdoes himself here with a sprawling and ambitious musical that’s
flat-out infectious in its energy.
What’s truly inspiring about La La Land is how impressive the film is on a technical level
(those one-takes!) and yet how the visual wonders of the film take a backseat
to the real feeling and emotion at the center of the picture. This is chiefly
because the two leads are the endlessly charismatic and talented Emma Stone and
Ryan Gosling, and also because the original music both elevates the story and
creates a feeling that’s exalting, sad, joyous and wistful all the same.
I must say that Stone in particular is just luminous in this
film – her charm has never been so effectively used. Although it’s tough to
pick between her and Natalie Portman (Jackie
– see below) for Best Actress, I think I’d have to go with Stone – it’s the
performance of a lifetime.
I don’t have much to write about David Mackenzie’s Hell or High Water, other than what about that damn movie! I mean, how
about that moment when Marcus Hamilton (Jeff Bridges) – spoiler ahead – leans over in horror as his partner, Alberto (Gil
Birmingham), is shot dead? They’ve spent the whole film teasing each other and trading
casual barbs, and then suddenly, in that one moment, we see how much Alberto really
means to Marcus. It’s just about heartbreaking.
Or how about that shot when Toby (Chris Pine) stays in the
restaurant and converses with the waitress, while we watch his brother, Tanner (Ben
Foster), rob another bank through the window? I mean, how about that!
I loved this movie.
6. Fences (Denzel Washington)
Fences
is
a powerful, stirring adaptation of August Wilson’s masterful play, with two of
the best performances of the year from Denzel Washington and Viola Davis. Washington
plays Troy Maxson, a garbage collector in 1950s Pittsburgh who once had great
promise as a baseball player, but landed in jail instead. Davis is his
long-suffering wife Rose, who stands beside Troy even as he begins a downward
spiral.
Davis nearly brought me to tears with her performance here.
I was reminded of why I loved this movie so much when she recently won the
Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress. She called her own father “the
original Troy” – he was a man who “groomed horses, had a fifth grade education,
didn’t know how to read until he was 15.” But “he had a story and it deserved
to be told, and August Wilson told it.”
What I also admired about Fences is that it doesn’t hide its theatrical roots – this is
unquestionably a play adapted for film. Yes, it has only a few locations, but
there’s nothing more cinematic than well-blocked scenes making excellent use of
their space, and Washington stages the film wondrously. More than anything,
though, the words matter here, and they absolutely sear as delivered by
Washington, Davis and the rest of the cast.
Arrival still
reveals its many layers after several viewings. I thought I had a handle on it
after seeing it the second time, but even then, I seemed to miss a key
component of its mystery. It’s a triumph of mood and atmosphere, but also of
ideas, with its concept of non-linear time being rather ingenious.
Amy Adams is outstanding here as Louise Banks, a linguist
carrying an unknown weight as she attempts to communicate with one of twelve
extra-terrestrial spacecrafts that have landed on earth. Her depression seems
to make sense to us given flashbacks early in the film – until we realize that the
specifics of her grief aren’t exactly what she (or we) think.
This is really the career pinnacle for director Denis
Villeneuve, who, with Prisoners
(2013), Enemy (2014), Sicario (2015) and now this film, has
become one of the best and most exciting new directors in Hollywood.
Jackie
should be celebrated, first and foremost, for being light years away from the
by-the-numbers biopic it could have so easily been. The film makes an American
tragedy an experiential drama that feels like a nightmare, and does such a
terrific job of dramatizing how traumatic the assassination of President John
F. Kennedy must have been for everyone involved – particularly Jacqueline
Kennedy (Natalie Portman).
There’s no question that Portman’s performance here is extraordinary
– she gives us a real window into this private woman’s world. And yet there’s
so much else to love about this movie that risks being ignored – the beautiful
conversations between Jackie and her priest (John Hurt); the supporting
performances from Peter Sarsgaard, Greta Gerwig and Billy Crudup; the haunting
score by Mica Levi; and the cinematography by Stephane Fontaine, all of which
add to the mood of this piece.
Even the blocking in this movie has an unreal quality to it.
Characters will sit in one position, talking to one another, and then with a
quick cut, they’ll be in a completely different position in the same room.
These kinds of choices give the movie an ethereal quality that helps us
understand what this experience may have been like for Mrs. Kennedy. Jackie is such an interesting, unusual
film, and the bold choices it makes only compliment Portman’s extraordinary
work in the lead role.
It's a miracle that a movie as contemplative as Knight of Cups exists in this day and
age. Terrence Malick finds real beauty here in the decadence of Los Angeles,
with locations as evocative as anything in his filmography (production designer
Jack Fisk does amazing work, as always). Malick also benefits from having an
incredibly strong, emotive lead actor in Christian Bale, who is fascinating to
watch in every quiet moment of this film. He seems to relish Malick's style of
filmmaking, inviting us to share his character's very real struggle without
having anything close to a traditional scene of dialogue.
The scenes with Bale's father (Brian Dennehy) and his
brother (Wes Bentley) are some of the best in the film. Cate Blanchett makes a
memorable impression as Bale's ex-wife, in a sequence in which we come to
understand so much about his character through his reactions to her work as a
nurse.
As always with Malick, I found myself lost in Knight of Cups in a beautiful way, and I
was made a little less aware of the current time and space around me. There's
no way in his pictures to really know where we are structurally in the story,
and so our minds are free to wander and take in the beauty of each moment. We
simply exist in the space of the movie, and that is a wonderful thing.
I wasn’t sure what to put for #10. Should it be one of the
films by two of my favorite directors – Clint Eastwood’s amazing, rock-solid Sully or Oliver Stone’s underappreciated
Snowden? Or one of the two great films by Jeff Nichols (Midnight Special,
Loving)? What about the funniest
movie of the year, Shane Black’s The Nice
Guys, or Andrea Arnold’s hypnotic American
Honey?
I’m going with an early-year favorite – Hail, Caesar!, the latest parable from
Joel and Ethan Coen. It’s at once a loving tribute to the Hollywood studio
pictures of the 1950s and also a
riotous takedown of the wobbly rules that keep the studio system in place.
And, as always with the Coens, it’s about much more. Josh
Brolin, as studio head Eddie Mannix, seeks advice from a priest in the
beginning and ending of the film. He’s morally conflicted about whether to take
a new job with a large salary in the airline industry, or to stay at the studio
and continue the more difficult job of managing out-of-line actors and
overseeing the day-to-day business of moviemaking. But whether he likes it or
not, there is a future coming his way that he can’t control, and one whose
influence he can’t always slap out of his actors – or can he?
The Rest of the Best
11. Midnight Special
(Jeff Nichols)
12. Snowden (Oliver
Stone)
13. Sully (Clint
Eastwood)
14. American Honey (Andrea
Arnold)
15. The Nice Guys (Shane
Black)
16. Swiss Army Man (Daniels)
17. Hacksaw Ridge (Mel
Gibson)
18. Billy Lynn’s
Long Halftime Walk (Ang Lee)
19. Weiner (Josh
Kriegman, Elyse Steinberg)
20. Certain Women (Kelly
Reichardt)
21. Allied (Robert
Zemeckis)
22. The BFG (Steven
Spielberg)
23. Café Society (Woody
Allen)
24. The Neon Demon (Nicolas
Winding Refn)
25. Wiener-Dog (Todd
Solondz)
26. The Light
Between Oceans (Derek Cianfrance)
27. Moonlight (Barry
Jenkins)
28. Hunt for the
Wilderpeople (Taika Waititi)
29. The Lobster (Yorgos
Lanthimos)
30. Miss Sloane (John
Madden)
Other Movies I Loved and Admired:
Elle
(Paul
Verhoeven)
Nocturnal
Animals (Tom Ford)
Popstar:
Never Stop Never Stopping (Akiva Schaffer, Jorma Taccone)
Rules
Don’t Apply (Warren Beatty)
The
Witch (Robert Eggers)
The
Hollars (John Krasinski)
Green
Room (Jeremy Saulnier)
Eye
in the Sky (Gavin Hood)
Voyage
of Time: The IMAX Experience (Terrence Malick)
The
Birth of a Nation (Nate Parker)
A
War (Tobias Lindholm)
Bleed
for This (Ben Younger)
Jason
Bourne (Paul Greengrass)
Triple
9 (John
Hillcoat)
Sausage
Party (Greg Tiernan, Conrad Vernon)
Elvis
and Nixon (Liza Johnson)
The
Girl on the Train (Tate Taylor)
Money
Monster (Jodie Foster)
10
Cloverfield Lane (Dan Trachtenberg)
Maggie’s
Plan (Rebecca Miller)
Rogue
One: A Star Wars Story (Gareth Edwards)
Zootopia
(Byron
Howard, Rich Moore, Jared Bush)
Best Director
Winner: Martin Scorsese, Silence
Runners-Up: Kenneth Lonergan, Manchester by the Sea; Richard Linklater, Everybody Wants Some!!; Damien Chazelle, La La Land; David Mackenzie, Hell
or High Water; Denzel Washington, Fences;
Denis
Villeneuve, Arrival
Best Actor
Winner: Casey Affleck, Manchester
by the Sea
Runners-Up: Denzel Washington, Fences; Andrew Garfield, Silence
and Hacksaw Ridge; Ryan Gosling, La La Land; Tom Hanks, Sully; Colin Farrell, The Lobster
Best Actress
Winner: Emma Stone, La
La Land
Runners-Up: Natalie Portman, Jackie; Amy Adams, Arrival;
Jessica Chastain, Miss Sloane;
Isabelle Huppert, Elle; Emily Blunt, The Girl on the Train
Best Supporting Actor
Winner: Jeff Bridges, Hell
or High Water
Runners-Up: Lucas Hedges, Manchester by the Sea; Liam Neeson, Silence; Peter Sarsgaard, Jackie;
Ben Foster, Hell or High Water; Glen
Powell, Everybody Wants Some!!;
Michael Shannon, Nocturnal Animals
Best Supporting Actress
Winner: Viola Davis, Fences
Runners-Up: Michelle Williams, Manchester by the Sea and Certain
Women; Lily Gladstone, Certain Women;
Margo Martindale, The Hollars
Best Original Screenplay
Winner: Manchester
by the Sea
Runners-Up: La La
Land; Everybody Wants Some!!; Hell or High Water; Hail, Caesar!
Best Adapted Screenplay: Silence
Runners-Up: Fences; Arrival; Sully
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