‘Tis the Season to Be Jolly … Or Not

Posted 3 December, 2007 in Film |

Yesterday, your humble correspondent took in an afternoon screening of 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, Cristian Mungiu’s Palme d’Or-winning film about a Romanian college student in 1987 who helps her roommate procure an illegal abortion. The film is gritty, brutal, and absolutely uncompromising: it thrusts the viewer bodily into a world where everything — sex, life, morality — is negotiable. Mungiu uses static two-shots brilliantly to create a sense of creeping tension, and there is a dialogue in a hotel room that has to qualify as one of the most horrifying sequences I’ve ever sat through in a movie. The film’s quiet matter-of-factness only adds to the horror: this is a movie that sends its viewers out of the cinema afterward feeling pummelled, shocked, and drained.

It’s also one of the best films of the year.

This fall has been one of the strongest seasons in recent memory for cinema; week after week has offered thoughtful films for adults, films that don’t pander to their audiences or condescend or try to appeal to the lowest common denominator. The crop of movies that are currently showing on cinema screens includes some of the smartest, toughest films to appear in a long time, and also some of the darkest.

Where American filmmakers are concerned, this is perhaps not surprising: given the backdrop of a disastrous war that has now dragged on longer than World War II, a faltering American economy, and broad domestic dissatisfaction with the current American administration, it’s understandable that U.S. filmmakers would not be in the brightest of moods. Once one accounts for the bread-and-circuses diversions of films such as Enchanted and August Rush, one inevitably runs up against a string of films that question moral certainty and hold a bright, unforgiving light up to the subject of human venality and its consequences. When even a bubblegum horror film like The Mist takes up themes of paranoia and the poisonous effect that fundamentalist rhetoric bred out of a climate of fear can have on group dynamics, you know that something interesting is going on.

Of course, it’s the bread-and-circuses fare that seems to be catching fire at a depressed domestic box office. Disney’s fairytale, Enchanted, spent a second weekend at number one, while the feel-good holiday film This Christmas and Robert Zemekis’s 3-D IMAX cartoon Beowulf were number two and three respectively. By contrast, Brian de Palma’s well-reviewed Iraq drama Redacted disappeared after only one week. To date, Enchanted has brought in $70,620,000 domestically, according to the website Box Office Mojo. Redacted has earned $48,368 to date.

It was ever thus: particularly at the holidays, filmgoers don’t tend to want to be reminded of the way the world really is; they want to escape, to feel good. Unfortunately, by resolutely chasing the cheery, upbeat offerings at the movies, people risk missing out on some of the best, most complex mainstream cinema to be released since Hollywood’s last golden age in the 1970s.

For those who may be feeling a bit more adventurous this holiday season, or those who might need a break from all the sweetness and light, here is a quick look at some of the most impressive cinematic fare currently in theatres:

• No Country for Old Men. The Coen brothers return to form after a disappointing couple of outings. Their brilliant realization of Cormac McCarthy’s crime thriller actually improves on the book by opening up the Texas landscapes that seemed oddly constrained on the page. Long, languid pans of the Texas plains give way to sequences of intense, graphic violence that explodes without warning. The Coens use silence as eloquently as sound, and create a world in which morality is a movable feast, and even the most seemingly innocuous actions can have catastrophic consequences. A brilliantly edited film (one of the best I’ve ever seen), and almost bereft of music, No Country for Old Men is spare, lean, and tough. Not just the best American film of the year, it’s one of the great American films, period.
• Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead. At eighty-three years old, Sidney Lumet bursts back onto the American cinema landscape with his best film since 1982’s The Verdict. Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke are dynamite as two down-on-their-luck brothers who plan the perfect jewellery heist, only to have their entire scheme unravel around them. What starts out as a generic, Reservoir Dogs-style crime thriller turns into a dark morality tale that leaves none of its characters unscathed. Lumet’s understated direction proves that a master filmmaker doesn’t need a lot of flashy camerawork or CGI to create a brilliantly taut piece of cinema.
• Michael Clayton. George Clooney is spectacular as a fixer for a large law firm, who is called in to clean up the mess when one of the firm’s senior litigators melts down during a deposition. Tony Gilroy’s smart script blurs the line between good and evil, moral and immoral, focusing on the compromises we are willing to make to get what we want. Clooney and Tom Wilkinson have a knockout scene in an alley that effectively pulls the rug out from under characters and viewer alike, and underscores that in a venal, corrupt world, the man whom everyone labels crazy may indeed be the sanest person around.
• Gone Baby Gone. In its advertising campaign for this film, Miramax assiduously avoided mentioning director and co-screenwriter Ben Affleck, presumably to avoid being tainted by the whole “Bennifer”/Gigli/Jersey Girl association. They needn’t have worried. Affleck’s directorial debut is a dark morality tale about the search for a missing girl and the diverse, often competing, interests involved on the parts of the police, the girl’s wayward mother, and the two private investigators hired to augment the official hunt. A tough, violent, uncompromising film that ends on the kind of morally ambiguous note — in which one of the characters does (arguably) the wrong thing for the right reasons — that most Hollywood films run screaming from.
• Lions for Lambs. Robert Redford’s film is a potent, surprisingly even-handed look at American policy in the post 9/11 era. Redford has never been a particularly adventurous director visually, and the film’s war scenes are fairly lacklustre. But it raises some compelling questions, and ends up …(read more)implicating its audience in its rousing condemnation of all of us who sit on the sidelines doing nothing while the world burns.

In addition to these American releases, the aforementioned 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, from Romania, and Control – Anton Corbjin’s biopic of troubled Joy Division lead singer Ian Curtis — from the U.K., are both well worth your time.

So in this season of goodwill, don’t forget to check out some of the provocative, challenging, intelligent cinematic fare on offer. It’s box office dollars that will convince studio executives that it’s this stuff — rather than bloated, cartoonish fare like Are We Done Yet? or Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End – that audiences are really interested in.

1 comment to “‘Tis the Season to Be Jolly … Or Not”

Finn Harvor, December 5th, 2007 at 12:55 am:

• “[Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days] is also one of the best films of the year.”

  How many times has it been possible to say that a film shown commercially in English Canada fits this description and is … Canadian?

  I’m not asking rhetorically; I’d really like to know. More importantly, I’d like to know why. The answer can’t be solely because we share the same language as America. (After all, that should give our films an *advantage*.) Something else must be at work.

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