Best of 2014: The Immigrant

Melodrama and mood piece, character(s) study and historical, James Gray’s The Immigrant presents us with types that turn into richly complex individuals and narrative tropes that transform into peculiar tales possessing both the broad strokes of myth and miniature movements of lived experience.

Set in New York in the early 1920s, the film introduces us to Ewa Cybulska (Marion Cotillard) just as she and her sister Magda arrive at Ellis Island after a gruelling journey from their Polish homeland. Magda is diagnosed with tuberculosis, Ewa is labeled a “woman of low morals” for unspecified events rumoured to have taken place en route from Europe, and the sisters are unceremoniously separated. Magda cannot escape mandatory quarantine, but Ewa evades deportation thanks to a shady saviour by the name of Bruno Weiss (Joaquin Phoenix). Bruno tells Ewa he works with an immigrant assistance organization; he actually manages a basement burlesque show and pimps out his performers, whom he houses in cramped apartments filled with yellowing lace and dappled mirrors. Ewa and Bruno’s relationship is driven by exploitation and childish ardour, desperation and stubborn optimism, or mere stubbornness, or the stubbornness that emerges out of a need to survive and to negotiate what exactly is survival.

The Immigrant’s third central character, an illusionist dubbed Orlando (Jeremy Renner), doesn’t enter the picture until its midpoint. In a film refreshingly devoid of irony, there’s something fascinating about the fact that the only man in the movie who doesn’t seem full of shit is the one who fools people for a living. Orlando is Bruno’s cousin, both sons of immigrants. They are old rivals, which feeds into what promises to become a love triangle, though this plot twist too is subverted.

Written by Gray and Richard Menello, The Immigrant is heavy on incident but grounded in character and performance. Cotillard has never been better, using languages and cadences to convey varying levels of deceit and desire. Renner, moustachioed and magnetic, echoes the grace and charismatic duplicity of James Cagney. Phoenix, in his fourth collaboration with Gray (following The Yards, Two Lovers and We Own the Night), is tremendously vulnerable without being ingratiating. His Bruno is a scoundrel, but he’s also struggling to make sense of the nagging compassion swelling in him. As the film moves toward its conclusion he somehow emerges as the most transformed and even tragic figure. This is one of the film’s masterstrokes, the way glimmers of moral fortitude are passed from one character to another.

                               

2014: The year in film

The best films of 2014 were merciless on marriage (unless you’re a vampire), often obsessed with things of the past (most especially if you’re a vampire) and enveloped in profoundly evocative, inventive, hypnotic, ingeniously deployed music from the likes of Trent Reznor, Mica Levi, Jozef van Wissem, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds and Radiohead’s Johnny Greenwood—music of the sort that rarely gets noticed by the awards people yet raises the atmospheres of their respective films to dizzying heights.

I’m alarmed by the dominance of US or UK films on this list of mine, which says something not about the quality of foreign language films in 2014 but, rather, their increasingly neglectful distribution in Canada—I’ve made a list elsewhere of the year’s best films waiting for distribution and all of them are from other, non-English-speaking countries.

I hope you’ve seen some if not several of the films below (I kick things off with a no-brainer—don’t be calling me no contrarian!), and that you feel compelled to seek out those you haven’t seen, or perhaps haven’t even heard of. As always, there’s no ranking, and in fact I urge you to pay equal attention to the titles listed in that final paragraph—sometimes those “honourable mentions” have a funny way of sticking with you longer than some of the titles that leap immediately to the final cut.

Boyhood

That Richard Linklater’s 165-minue, 12-years-in-the-making chronicle of one reasonably ordinary kid coming of age in Texas turned out to be a major crowd-pleaser serves as a welcome antidote to the token cynicism that to draw an audience you need baroque mythologies and shit blowing up every ten minutes—why not someone growing up every ten minutes? At once epic and intimate, sweeping and absorbed with minutia and achingly fleeting moments, Boyhood broadens our notion of what movies can do—and Patricia Arquette’s turn here has stayed with me as one of 2014’s most moving supporting performances.

Winter Sleep

It is the accumulation of several smaller events—a rock hurled at a car window, the reading of a letter, a meeting interrupted—that imbues Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s most recent film with its gravity. The story of a hotel proprietor unable to recognize how his condescension and arrogance has distanced him from those he loves and wants to be loved by—including his younger, resentful wife—Winter Sleep is roughly based on Chekhov but the way it unfolds over its three hours-plus, largely through protracted yet tense and riveting conversations in gloomy rooms, recalls Bergman.

Inherent Vice

Paul Thomas Anderson’s adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s novel is a comic narcotic noir about love, drugs, corruption and real estate in 1970 Los Angeles, with each of its key characters—Josh Brolin, Katherine Waterston, Joaquin Phoenix—representing a different aspect of that moment’s cultural sea change.

The Immigrant

Speaking of Phoenix, the consistently under-loved American auteur James Gray’s latest features another truly remarkable performance from the actor, in a role that incrementally, fascinatingly migrates from the film’s fairly despicable villain to a figure of tremendous pathos. Of course, the star of this gorgeous, Cimino-esque melodrama is the magnificent Marion Cotillard, in another of the year’s best performances, playing a Polish woman attempting to forge a life in 1920s New York. 

Two Days, One Night

And speaking of Marion Cotillard, she knocked it out of the park again this year as the first movie star to feature in a Dardennes Brothers film. She plays an emotionally troubled woman trying to convince her fellow factory workers to help save her job—by declining a pay raise.

Gone Girl, Force Majeure

Marriage is examined and diagnosed malignant in these two blackly comic, elegantly crafted but otherwise very different films, one a sprawling noir procedural about a missing woman from novelist Gillian Flynn and director David Fincher, the other a chilly chamber drama from Swedish director Ruben Östlund about a family ski vacation run horrendously off-track by a cowardly gesture made in a moment of panic.

Under the Skin, Only Lovers Left Alive

Jonathan Glazer’s adaptation of Michel Faber’s novel follows Scarlett Johansson as an alien hunter harvesting horny Scottish hunks before going perilously native. Deeply creepy in its tonal precision, with echoes of Kubrick and Roeg, and anthropological in its outsider view of life on Earth, this is science fiction without the token exposition. Jim Jarmusch’s latest, about non-violent vampires, is also a fantastical genre film, albeit one that forgoes most of its genre’s tropes in favour of the director’s trademark deadpan humour, nocturnal tours of Detroit and Tangiers, scenes of musical bliss, and, in contrast to the preceding marriage-stinks narratives, a tender and insightful tribute to long-term love. (I mean, really, really long-term.)

20,000 Days on Earth

Nick Cave could be a cousin to Tom Hiddleston’s pale, raven-haired, brooding rocker in Only Lovers, but Cave is a living, breathing, touring, eating (more or less), aging, hard-working family man residing in Brighton. Which is to say he isn’t fictional—or is he? Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard’s enormously inventive, insightful feature debut is a documentary profile of the Australian-born singer-songwriter on his 20,000^th day of existence, which involves car-bound conversations with ghosts, an aborted lunch with Warren Ellis, visits to his archive and his Foucault-lookalike shrink, and a recording session. ‘Higgs-Boson Blues’ gives me chills.

The Grand Budapest Hotel

Inspired by the fictions of Stefan Zweig, Wes Anderson’s frenetic, nostalgic, melancholy comedy is set in the 1930s, much of it in the titular alpine hotel nested in a fictional central European republic gradually falling prey to a thuggish foreign power. Dark times loom, yet at the Grand Budapest all efforts are made to stall time and maintain a rarified air. Ralph Fiennes gives one of his most dynamic and appealing performances as the dandyish proprietor and mentor to a young bellhop.

Stranger By the Lake

Alain Guiraudie’s Stranger By the Lake is a starkly seductive, all-male, Hitchcockian thriller set entirely at a secluded nude beach and the surrounding woods used for cruising. One evening, after everyone else has left the beach, a man witnesses a murder—but this doesn’t keep him from coming back the next day and flirting with the killer. Death and eros are tangled up, yet the motives are as mysterious as the sex is explicit.

Some other films I’d be remiss to exclude from any look back on 2014: the great Paulina García gave my single-most favourite performance in Sebastián Lelio’s brilliant character study Gloria; Mark Ruffalo was for me the stand-out in a trio of remarkable performances in Bennett Miller’s bracingly bleak Foxcatcher; Agata Kulesza is wonderful, fierce, sad and ornery in Pawel Pawlokowski’s exquisite Ida; Kelly Reichardt makes a couple of tonal fumbles but still comes off as one of the US’s best filmmakers with Night Moves; Nicolas Cage gave a fearsome yet heartfelt performance in David Gordon Green’s Joe; and Petra Costa made one of the year’s most haunting and lovely doc feature debuts with her grief memoir Elena.    

              

Midnight in Paris: Better living through better longing

Nostalgia is longing for a past that cannot be returned to—it’s passed. The word is used a lot in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, whose protagonist, Gil Pender (Owen Wilson), a dissatisfied Hollywood screenwriter, is writing a novel about the owner of a so-called nostalgia shop and wants to move to Paris so as to bask in a dream of what it would have been like to be a writer in Paris in the 1920s. The word nostalgia has also been used, and will be used plenty more, in all the exegesis surrounding the film. But in every case it’s used incorrectly.

My point here isn’t semantic; what I want to say is that Midnight in Paris, a great Woody Allen movie, is about something different and, in this context, more interesting than nostalgia, something that seems especially personal to Allen. It’s at the root of some of Allen’s most enduringly charming work, such as The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), and if one were inclined, if could be suggested as the root of Allen’s attraction to much younger women both onscreen, as in the magisterial Manhattan (1979), and off. Midnight in Paris is about fantasy, about the life or the youth or the love you never had at all, yet somehow seems to be slipping away from you with every moment. What Gil longs for never existed, and when he somehow slips away into some realm where his fantasy’s made real, his passage from one place to another is delightfully left unexplained. What makes this very funny film resonate, what imbues its whimsy with wisdom, is its understanding that even in fantasy our longing for that distant, obscure thing must reach its terminal point, and we have to start again, negotiating with the real world, or some rough approximation of it.

Gil is engaged to Inez (Rachel McAdams). They’re “doing” Paris with her parents, and will be unexpectedly joined by Inez’s pedantic former professor Paul (Michael Sheen). Each of these characters are pragmatists who condescendingly dismiss Gil’s impulse to leave both the US and the movie business, and while they’re at it they dismiss his novel too. One night Gil goes off alone to wander the Paris streets. On a particularly lonesome bend, at the stroke of midnight, he’s picked up by a passing car and taken to someplace where everyone parties like its 1922. He’s repeatedly told he “looks lost,” so it seems he’s found the right generation. He meets Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Gertrude Stein, and eventually Man Ray, Buñuel, and Salvador Dalí, (Adrien Brody, who wipes the floor with Robert Pattinson and is wildly funny as he arbitrarily obsesses over the image of a rhinoceros). Gil also meets Adriana (Marion Cotillard), who wants to go into fashion, is mistress to the likes of Picasso and Braque, and seems drawn to Gil’s odd sort of melancholy cheerfulness (a combination perhaps only Wilson can conjure so naturally). Like Gil, she also idealizes the past—her belle époque is his 1920s. So their hypothetical romance has a hitch: neither is living in the present.

Wilson is wonderful, emotionally dexterous and taking full ownership of what might otherwise be just another Woody surrogate. Cotillard is deeply alluring. The only weak link is McAdams, though I’d guess it’s entirely Allen’s fault since he’s written Inez far too flatly, telegraphing her obvious incompatibility with Gil from scene one… Well, not quite scene one: Midnight in Paris opens with a lovingly prolonged series of images of the Paris, shot by Darius Khondji, set to Sidney Bechet’s ‘Si tu vois ma mére’, with no close-ups of faces and, highly uncharacteristically for Allen, no voice-over. This lovely foyer to the narrative is all about place, about senses and seduction, about how time just keeps passing us by, and about projecting fantasy onto reality. Which, sometimes, is the best way to remind yourself where you really are.

Inception: Leave the dreaming to us

They move through cities that fold in on themselves, that resemble immense cemeteries, that erode into seas; through zero-gravity hotel corridors, across bridges, between skyscrapers, over arctic tundra, and into hidden chambers. The protagonists in Christopher Nolan’s Inception are in many ways your archetypical assemblage of criminal experts convening for the perfect heist, speaking in action movie boilerplate, wearing nifty duds, yet here the crime unfolds not in some bustling metropolis but rather in the vast and intricate dream worlds of the mark… or is it the dream of the criminal? If everyone’s sharing the same dream, can the dream “belong” to only one of the dreamers? While we try to sort this all out we can marvel at the scenery. The worlds within worlds invoked here are overwhelmingly impressive in terms of scale. Nolan, a great craftsman, has been given the resources to dream, and he dreams very, very big. I’m not sure he dreams very deep.

Master infiltrator Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is normally hired to extract information from the dreams he burgles, but a vaguely sinister, unfathomably affluent new client (Ken Watanabe) wants Cobb instead to plant information in his target’s unconscious mind. The goal is to penetrate the dreams of Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy), the son of a dying industrialist, and convince him to divvy up dad’s monopoly. Cobb has something ugly in his past—like all Nolan’s protagonists, he’s so ridden with guilt it’s turning toxic—and remuneration includes his hassle-free passage home to the US, where he’s a wanted man, so Cobb accepts, introducing the one-last-gig trope into Inception’s genre touchstones. Cobb gathers his cohorts: the supporting ensemble includes an unusually stuffy Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Bronson’s charismatic and dexterous Tom Hardy, Ellen Page, giving by far the film’s most natural performance, and Dileep Rao, that annoying magical guy from Drag Me to Hell. Gradually the group’s adventure becomes less about messing with Fischer’s business sense than it does staving off Cobb’s inner demons. Cobb’s been rattled by dream-encounters with his hysterical wife (Marion Cotillard), or at least his memory of her, with increasing frequency. He’s apparently in danger of slipping into this permanent, gray matter-draining REM state forever. Or, you know, something really bad, anyway.

Much time is spent establishing the rules of psychic corporate espionage—the unspecified injections used to plunge participants deep enough into sleep, the mental tricks required to navigate one’s way through another’s dreams without getting lost, the necessity of a dream architect, a sort of production designer of the future—though much of how this business really fails or functions is nonetheless left pretty sketchy. Nolan seems more concerned with the idea of inner logic than he does in its actual exploration. Still, there are enough intriguing details—the reliance on personal totems to ground the dreamers, such as Cobb’s tiny metal top, being chief among them—to satisfy one’s sense of having entered a world with some reasonably consistent chains of cause and effect, and the final scene, a cliffhanger of sorts, works to the film’s overall strengths.

More distracting is the sheer aneurotic, humourless tidiness of Nolan’s dream worlds, which bear little resemblance to the amorphous, murky, slippery dreams most of us experience, places far more vividly and idiosyncratically realized by filmmakers like David Cronenberg, Luis Buñuel, David Lynch, Richard Linklater, or Andrei Tarkovsky, a key influence on Inception’s morbid love story. The realms Inception traverses feel closer to some science fiction novelist’s notion of virtual reality than they do to the places we visit in out sleep. But if these realms fail to resonate as a reflection of our dreams at least they provide terrain for an unusually fantastical crime thriller, one which revels in elegantly edited set pieces that each fit snugly into their respective slots in the writer-director’s intricate stratagem. Inception is an exhausting film—and I actually think it kind of needs to be—and is more problematic the more you think about it. It’s also easily the most stimulating spectacle movie you’ll find on the menu this summer.