Starting January 1, 2010 I will countdown my top twenty films of the past decade, revealing one movie at a time, starting with number 20 on Jan. 1 and ending with number 1 on Jan. 20. I have decided to do a top twenty list because ten was too damn difficult. These twenty films will embody much of my taste in film, though the vast majority will be non-animated American films; your typical bunch—but these are the ones I tend to continue to love, watching them over and over again.
What about my top films of 2009, you may ask? Well, that list will come in due time, once I’ve seen what I consider to be the sufficient amount of films from this year. Considering so many good movies are released near the end of the year to cash in on the rewards season, it can be tough to play catch up. Yes, there will be one or two films from ’09 on the decade’s list, so you will have a good idea of what will show up at the top of the 2009 list.
In the meantime, I’m hoping to catch some more of the new releases in theaters.
Invictus ***1/2
Invictus is about many different things. It is about the maturation of South Africa into a nation where both apartheid and white presidents are out. All of this happens unbelievably quickly. Imagine if the United States voted a black president into office in the 1860s, or even the 1960s. Unfathomable. South Africa was going through radical changes in the early and mid-1990s, but Invictus tells the story a little differently. The film is about a nation coming together under the guidance of a man—Nelson Mandela—and how he tried to reconcile the hopes and fears of the traditionally mistreated black majority with the powerful white minority. But it is also about sports, in this case rugby, and how a simple game can transform and unify a people and a country.
Morgan Freeman plays Mandela as a quiet yet charismatic man, at once both laidback and stubborn. He moves slowly and deliberately, and he is clearly carrying familial turmoil, decades of imprisonment, and a lifetime of fighting for what he believes in. So when President Mandela asks the captain of South Africa’s national rugby team to win the 1995 Rugby World Cup, many of the characters in the movie are confused, but the audience cheerfully accepts the challenge. As the captain of the team, Francois Pienaar wants to appease the president, but he mainly wants to win. He is portrayed by Matt Damon as an open-minded white South African. “This country’s changed. We need to change as well,” Francois says to his club. With inspiration from Mandela, Francois transforms his team into both a formidable rugby team and the new symbol of South Africa. On the president’s orders, they travel to the slums and put on a camp for children. The team visits Robben Island Prison, where Mandela spent nearly twenty years of his 27 year prison term. These sequences are the most satisfying. They show how so much can change so fast.
In the end, the film is about rugby and race and politics, about a couple of men whose fates intertwined to help resuscitate democracy in a country suffocating the freedoms of its people. As a film, it is educational and inspiring. The third act drags longer than necessary, but it does little to lessen the film’s overall impact. As a director, Clint Eastwood has proven that he can consistently make really good films, and he has certainly owned this decade in that category. However, I daresay he has not made a truly great one since 1992’s Unforgiven. Invictus, while good, is no exception.
Avatar ****
About a third of the way through Avatar I was convinced the film was little more than glow-in-the-dark Lord of the Rings meets a Saturday morning cartoon version of Star Wars. The film had started to drag, the visuals had suffocated the plot, and I hadn’t seen a real-life human in about ten minutes. I quickly realized that in my haste to reconcile my own expectations with the hype surrounding the film I was attempting to appease the movie gods with some sort of homebred objectivity, however misguided. After all, this is James Cameron’s first film in twelve years; since Titanic, the most successful movie of all time, winner of eleven Academy Awards, and one of my favorite films of all time. What would—what could—I think of Avatar?
At the film’s end I was utterly bemused and simultaneously moved. But let me first rewind. The story centers on Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), an ex-marine who’s paralyzed from the waist down. His identical twin brother was a scientist working on an alien planet called Pandora. After he is shot and killed, Jake is recruited to replace his brother in the Avatar program. Led by Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver), Jake and a team of scientists link up to Avatar bodies that resemble the native humanoids called the Navi—tall, blue, and primitive in all but kicking ass. Jake and company are there to study Pandora, including its indigenous plants and people. However, Jake is tapped by Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), who wants him to assimilate into Navi society with the aim of removing the natives from their homeland. Both the scientists and the private military contractors are being paid by a private energy company. They need the Navi to relocate because their land also happens to be sitting on top of a large reserve of the energy resource.
Surprising to everyone, Jake successfully integrates into the Navi culture with the help of Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), the warrior princess of her tribe. In his Avatar body, Jake is known as a Dreamwalker to the Navi. They know he is not like them, yet they still train him in their ways and ultimately accept him into their clan. As the film progresses, we find it always visually dazzling but frequently poignant as well. Like Titanic, there is a love story—in this case, for both a person and a people—at the forefront of visually dynamic and often brutal scenes.
The film does not break new ground when it comes to the story, but it doesn’t need to. It’s obvious where the characters are heading, but it’s still satisfying when it happens. And in the third act, the film’s best, Cameron unleashes a torrent of battles and destruction and inspiration, of blood and tears and smiles. And when the credits roll, more people than not will realize what I realized: Avatar is one of the ballsiest and best movies of 2009. And I saw it in 2D.
Brothers ***1/2
Brothers is held aloft primarily by the strong performances of its three lead actors. Tobey Maguire plays Captain Sam Cahill, a family man committed to serving his country. Jake Gyllenhaal is his brother Tommy, a likeable enough guy who likes to get drunk and occasionally, and unsuccessfully, rob banks. Natalie Portman plays Grace Cahill, wife to Sam and sister-in-law to Tommy, whom she detests until he becomes a bigger part of her and her children’s lives after news of Sam’s death reaches their Minnesota home.
The rub is that Sam’s not really dead. His helicopter was shot down in Afghanistan, and we soon learn that he and one of his men are being held captive. The film intercuts between Tommy and Grace coping with the loss of a brother and a husband and Sam’s intense hardships as a “Prisoner of War.” This middle section of the film is troublesome because the Afghanistan story thread is unnecessary. It would have been more effective if we were only to imagine what Sam could have gone through in Afghanistan—how he survived, what he endured. Nonetheless, and I’m not ruining much considering it’s in the trailer, Sam eventually finds his way home.
In the third act these relationships come to a head. Sam is clearly suffering both mentally and emotionally, and it’s difficult for him to transition back to domestic life. This is especially tough considering so much has changed. Tommy has become an important part of his daughters’ lives, and Sam becomes convinced that Tommy and Grace have been intimate. Regardless of whether it happened or not, Sam is convinced it happened. He lives on pins and needles. His daughters often fear him. He can’t be close to his wife. And he is harboring severe guilt and grief.
The film is directed by Jim Sheridan, whose In America was one of the best films of 2002. At the heart of that film was family, and so it is with Brothers. I have mentioned the three leads, but there are also some other outstanding performances, most noticeably Sam Shepard as the brothers’ father and Bailee Madison as Isabelle Cahill, daughter to Sam and Grace. Her performance is so honest it’s heartbreaking. She cries at her father’s death, yet she cannot fully understand why or how he returned in the state he did. She upsettingly reminds him that “You weren’t here for my birthday,” sobbing through her anger, “you were in stupid Afghanistan.”
A Serious Man ****
A Serious Man is the kind of movie you must let wash over you. It is many things: religious fable, absurdist tragedy, surreal dark comedy. It’s no surprise that it’s also the new film by Joel and Ethan Coen, the consummate Brothers Grimm of eclectic moviemaking, their finished products more often than not a mix between First Edition Kurt Vonnegut and Bogart Noir. With A Serious Man we get something a little different, but it still incorporates many of their favorite themes. The single dominant trait of a Coen film is that the protagonist is in way over his head, and much of the time it’s not his fault.
In this film it’s Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg). Larry lives in a Minneapolis suburb in the mid-1960s. He has a wife and kids. He is a Professor of Physics. He’s Jewish. But all at once his life begins to fall apart. His wife wants a divorce, his daughter steals money from his wallet, he is simultaneously bribed and blackmailed by a student, and no rabbi has the spiritual answers he’s looking for. In a prologue to the film set in Poland some time ago, we learn that a family may have accidently invited an undead man into their home. The wife believes it cursed them. Is that what it takes to be cursed? Or was it because she stabbed the so-called dybbuk, and he may have just been a man? Maybe it doesn’t take anything at all.
Larry is inundated with so many irrelevancies throughout the film it makes for an incredibly relatable story. Every time he walks into his office he is harassed by Columbia Record Club seeking payment. His neighbor begins to slowly mow part of Larry’s lawn, effectively extending his property so he can add on to his home. When meeting with a rabbi, Larry receives a call from home. He quickly takes the call, thinking something terrible has happened. “F Troop is fuzzy again,” his son says. Jesus and Job, he can’t catch a break.
The film will no doubt have its detractors. It’s abstract, which doesn’t sit well with many people. The beginning sets the tone, but the ending never really comes. But it’s quite funny. “We can’t ever really know what’s going on,” says Larry at one point, and the movie continues to hammer on this point. Near the end of the film, we finally meet Marshak, the elder rabbi with whom Larry wanted to meet but was never granted the appointment. It is the day of Larry’s son’s Bar Mitzvah. When the son sits down, Marshak looks up and hands the young man his radio he had confiscated earlier in the film. The rabbi then says something profound, but we’ve heard it all before. Cue music.
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