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.    

              

Lovers rock

The movie opens turning, the night’s stars unstuck and blurring, the 45 of Wanda Jackson’s ‘Funnel of Love’ loping on the turntable, the twin images of our far-apart lovers reclining in their respective nests. For some minutes, everything moves clockwise. (If only the screen were a circle!) It’s an ingenious way of getting us thinking about time in broader terms. It also gets us literally into the groove of Jim Jarmusch’s latest seriocomic cosmic concoction, a blend of genre mischief, thing/place/notion fetish, corny comedic routines, ruminations on time, science, civilization and technology, and the sort of normally neglected incidentals that Jarmusch has always aspired to construct movies from—few filmmakers so clearly enjoy just watching people do stuff: roll a cigarette, dance, play dominoes, select books to travel with. Only Lovers Left Alive is itself a trip, an appropriation of vampire lore as a way to address the nature of long-term love. It’s been done before but, in my experience, never so resonantly and, despite a heavy-handed moment or two—the historical references get a little old—so lightly.

There comes a point in relationships where living apart emerges as a viable option. In the case of Eve (Tilda Swinton) and Adam (Tom Hiddleston) it may have taken a century or two. Only Lovers begins with Eve in Tangier and Adam in Detroit—an undead city if ever there was—where he holes up in a dilapidated house making smoldering anonymous records he may or may not want people to hear. She embraces life and modernity, he’s a recluse despairing at the world’s entropic idiocy, obsessively accumulating objects from the past—though it’s notable that only Eve can carbon-date these objects with a mere touch. Adam’s gloom burgeons to the degree where suicide becomes a consideration. Eve, sensing this—there is some discussion of spooky action at a distance—takes a chain of redeyes to come meet him. But Eve’s arrival is followed by an unexpected visit from her little sister Ava (Mia Wasikowska), also a vampire. For a time the film becomes, of all things, a comedy about annoying in-laws who invade your place, touch your stuff, put the moves on your buddies, and drink all your blood.  

From Down By Law (1986) to Dead Man (1995), Jarmusch’s films have always transmitted ambivalence toward narrative, something he seems to regard largely as scaffolding through which he can weave digressions. Only Lovers has just about the friendliest balance of story and incident in any of his later, woozier, formally looser works. Ava’s tempestuous entrance and an eventual crisis involving dwindling blood supplies give the film enough midpoint momentum to support its loveliest, less urgent passages, the White Hills concert, or a wee-hour tour of the Motor City, complete with a visit to Jack White’s house and the Michigan Theatre, a movie palace-turned parking lot, on the site where Henry Ford built the first car. (The building recently featured in Peter Mettler’s The End of Time.)

What else? The revenant fashions are to die for, the angular drones of Jozef Van Wissem score drape scenery in aural smoke, and the typically eclectic cast, which also includes Anton Yelchin, Jeffrey Wright and John Hurt, accentuate the film’s supple tonal shifts. Eve is the anchor in the central relationship, but Hiddleston is the anchor in the cast, embodying both the gravity and mirth generated by this film made by a mature artist who, I’d guess, is reflecting on his own experiences negotiating love over the long term. Only Lovers is, in a sense, about the special pleasures of revisiting what’s known: books, records, friends, lovers. Or the work of beloved irreverent filmmakers who endeavour over time to keep finding new routes to explore, while adhering to certain old ideas about what their art should be, regardless of changing fashions. 

                                                  

TIFF' 13: Huddled together in the darkness

The Missing Picture

It is Monday morning. The September sun raised itself up via a lumbering crane shot over an overexposed Toronto shivering with cinema withdrawal—a Toronto as unseasonably chilly as Donald Rumsfeld’s smiling evil grandpa eyes, which twinkle eerily and often in Errol Morris’ The Unknown Known. The 38^th Toronto International Film Festival came to a close last night. Morris’ problematic, unmissable, semantically obsessed feature-length interview with the former Secretary of Defense was just one of several new works that, like the sadistic levels of air conditioning in most TIFF venues, left my teeth chattering and my soul on ice. Sometimes in a very good way.

Bastards

The best way? How about Claire Denis’ Bastards? This bleak masterpiece and true contemporary noir, with elements drawn from William Faulkner’s Sanctuary, follows a French naval captain as he absconds from his errant seaman’s life to move into a vast Paris apartment and plot revenge on a business tycoon he blames for the defiling of his niece, the collapse of his family’s business, and the suicide of his brother-in-law. Denis regulars (Vincent Lindon, Michel Subor, Grégoire Colin) help seal the film’s seductive doom, but it’s Chiara Mastroianni’s haunted, enigmatic performance as the tycoon’s wife that most perfectly captures Bastards’ choked air of desperation and inevitability. Nearly as good as Mastroianni—and not nearly as famous—is Leandra Leal as the femme fatale in Brazilian director Fernando Coimbra’s inventively structured kidnapping drama A Wolf at the Door, one of this year’s most welcome surprises.

You Are Here

Denis’ filmmaking is so sensual and intoxicating that, truthfully, Bastards didn’t leave me nearly as cold as, say, the ostensibly heartwarming but catastrophically misguided You Are Here, Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner’s blunt stab at helming a movie. This fumbling, cynically conceived bromance that turns into a rom-com stars Owen Wilson as a womanizing weatherman and Zach Galifianakis as his nutjob buddy. It is bracingly unfunny, fussed-over and forced, with a ludicrous lovers’ resolution. You’ll have better luck buying into the romance in Spanish director Manuel Martín Cuenca’s drearily immaculate Caníbal, which is about—you guessed it—a cannibal. In love. Things don’t go so well. It’s hard to give a shit. But Granada looks gorgeous. Better yet, just watch Jim Jarmusch's Only Lovers Left Alive, which may be my favourite vampire movie ever. It's certainly the only one I know of that is mostly about aggravating in-laws coming to visit. I have a feeling you'll be reading a lot more about this one here fairly soon. 

Gravity 

Things lighten up, so to speak, with Gravity, Alfonso Cuarón’s 3D astronaut survival chamber drama in which Sandra Bullock and George Clooney get walloped with debris while floating in space and struggle to find safe haven while their oxygen supply plummets. The visuals and soundscapes are absolutely astounding: I have never seen such sequences, in which the camera’s trajectory is so disorientingly aligned to that of the objects and people drifting helplessly onscreen. The opening 20 minutes or so make you feel as if we could go anywhere. If only Stephen Prince’s score wasn’t so annoyingly overblown and the character development wasn’t so disappointingly earthbound.

Under the Skin

Yet, just when you’ve recovered from Cuarón’s extraterrestrial traipsing, life on Earth suddenly seems exotic all over again in Under the Skin, Jonathan Glazer’s hypnotic science-fiction in which Scarlett Johansson’s lovely body is inhabited by an ebony alien stalking horny young men in Scotland before eventually getting stalked herself. A substantial portion of the film was made without the participants’ knowledge: Glazer put Johansson in a black wig and a white van and had her drive around and try to pick up unsuspecting Glaswegians. Presumably these guys figured out they were in a movie by the time she led them into a dark house where they stripped down and slipped into some obsidian interstellar goo from which they never emerge. Anthropological and austere, Under the Skin is an intentionally alienating experience for much of the first two-thirds, before its central character goes incrementally native and places herself in danger. All dialogue is virtually incidental and much of Johansson’s performance is designed to remain remote, but the film isn’t anywhere near as baffling as some reports have made it out to be. It is a hugely inventive story about a stranger in a strange land and the perils of empathy.

Night Moves

One more hostile intruder: who’s that guy Jake Gyllenhaal’s stalking in Enemy? Why, it’s Jake Gyllenhaal! Quebec director Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of José Saramago’s novel The Double is perversely withholding and surprisingly effective. It makes Toronto look like nothing but high-rises and freeways, the perfect backdrop for this tale of a lonely professor who spots his doppelgänger playing a bit part in a movie and decides that there can be only one. TIFF 2013’s other doppelgänger movie—double doppelgänger!—which is actually titled The Double, stars Jesse Eisenberg. I didn’t see it. Figured if I was going to get stuck with two of somebody I’d rather it be Gyllenhaal. I got a good dose of Eisenberg’s chronic slouching in Kelly Reichardt’s Night Moves, which also stars Peter Sarsgaard and Dakota Fanning and concerns an eco-terrorist plot that goes awry. Eisenberg gets on my nerves but he fits the role. The film is very good, if not quite the revelation of Meek’s Cutoff.

Stray Dogs

Festivals at their best remind us that cinema is meant to be a collective experience, so let’s embrace a few films about families—most of which, oddly enough, were part of Wavelengths, the experimentally minded and most dependable program at TIFF. A candidate for this year’s single best film, Tsai Ming Liang’s Stray Dogs—said to be the Malay-Taiwanese auteur’s last(!)—follows a family of three scraping by on the streets of Taipei. It is another masterwork of sumptuous tableaux laden with intense, burgeoning emotion and frequently accented with quietly mischievous humour.

The Strange Little Cat

Swiss director Ramon Zürcher’s beguiling feature debut The Strange Little Cat limits its scope to the preparation and execution of a simple family dinner, yet is full of clamorous life, seemingly normal until some cryptic comment or event intrudes before slipping away again. It may be the weirdest most seemingly normal movie I’ve ever seen. Cambodian documentarian Rithy Panh’s autobiographical The Missing Picture meanwhile attempts to chronicle a childhood spent pining for something the rest of us would consider normal. Panh was 11 when the Khmer Rouge marched into Phnom Penh and sent Panh’s family to a work camp. Panh wanted to tell the story of his adolescence through pictures, but because the visual documents of this era are almost entirely composed of propaganda, Panh decided to render his memories through elaborate claymation sequences.

     

12 Years a Slave

      

Running out of space here, so let me leave you with two favourite moments at TIFF ’13:

1. Toward the end of Hunger and Shame director Steve McQueen’s surprisingly conventional—but still totally grueling—12 Years a Slave, there is an odd scene in which the film’s star, Chiwetel Ejiofor, appears on screen in close-up, very still, and for a surprisingly long time. The previously rapt, reverent audience suddenly became very noisy when some asshole’s cellphone went off, and looking up at Ejiofor’s enormous head, I couldn’t shake the feeling that he was waiting for everyone to shut up.

A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness

2. My last film of TIFF ’13 was the tripartite A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness, by Ben Rivers and Ben Russell, another Wavelengths title. The film begins almost documentary-like, examining life at a Estonian commune, then follows musician Robert A.A. Lowe as he finds tranquility in the Finnish wilderness, then roams a gig in a small club performed by Lowe’s heavily made-up Finnish black metal outfit. The camera movement as sinewy and lovely as the music is crushing, harsh and, at times, a little silly. The final moments are perfect: Lowe exits the stage before the band even finishes, immediately and efficiently sets about wiping off his white make-up, puts on his coat and goes out the back door. I love this ending because. It is an eloquent reminder that this is all a show, that the darkness still looms, but that we can cast cinematic spells, use thunderous moments of art to keep it at bay, before shaking it off, going back out into the open air and getting on with the rest of it all.