jentleman film journal.

What Hollywood is Doing Right

Apologies for the unintentional hiatus at JFJ. I’ll be posting regularly again starting with this one, though the frequency of posts may be a bit more erratic given my schedule. Thanks as always for reading.

One oft-quoted statistic that I’ve seen tossed around over the past six or seven months is the observation that 2011 saw the release of more sequels, representing a higher proportion of theatrically distributed movies, than any other year on record. Others decry the decline of original cinematic properties, with original releases (especially major releases) being pushed out of the way for adaptations deriving from sources as far-flung and unlikely as games of chance. Collectively, all of this is pointed to as proof of an ongoing decline in American filmmaking, where creativity is being routinely stifled in favor of sucking every last dollar out of whatever odds and ends are lying around. And, to be fair, I myself have been a part of that chorus; one of the earliest articles that was published here at Jentleman Film Journal was an examination of why studios were shying away from original properties.

Today, though, I’d like to approach that question from a different angle. Yes, it’s true that 2011 was a mildly dismal year at the movies, offering us nothing great and a pu pu platter of good, unambitious movies mixed in with a few ambitious, deeply flawed ones. Yet audiences more or less rejected that level of mediocrity, and 2012 has already seen a pretty significant bounce back from it, with box office revenues up a very healthy 21% from this point last year and what has been so far been a surprisingly satisfying crop of movies.

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A Jentleman’s Defense of “Drive”

Now that the dust has settled a little bit from the Oscars and 2011 is firmly in the cinematic rearview mirror, I’d like to take the time to offer up a more complete treatment of Drive, last year’s second-most critically polarizing movie and also my favorite movie of the year. (For those keeping score, The Tree of Life is, by my unscientific analysis, the only movie that more divided audiences and critics – The Help’s stirring of controversy being more social and political than aesthetic.) Admittedly, I’ve already written about Drive twice, once in my review in once in my ‘best of 2011’ column. However, as with The Artist, the backlash against and defenses of this movie have taken on a particularly hard, unintelligent character (“I loved it! It was so cool!” “Ugh, are you kidding? It was so boring!”), with the result that, somehow, no one who likes it has been able to try to articulate why Drive moves them.

As with The Artist, part of the issue is the movie’s highly stylized aesthetic. Just as The Artist is a directing achievement for revisiting the silent era and revitalizing its theatrical, glossy aesthetic as a modern-day crowd-pleaser, Drive director Nicolas Winding Refn reappropriates elements of ‘80s kitsch (the satin jacket, the gorgeously saturated photography, the dreamy synthpop soundtrack) and layers them onto a deceptively simple story. It’s all style and no substance, argue detractors: just as The Artist would have caused barely a ripple if not for being a throwback to a different era of filmmaking, the foundations of Drive don’t amount to anything meaningful.

Unlike The Artist, though, Drive’s aesthetic draws on a period both of less nostalgia and less artistic brilliance. Or, to put it another way: the silent era produced Metropolis, Nosferatu, The General, City Lights, and Intolerance, among many other masterpieces. The ‘80s, as defined by the aesthetic that Drive draws on, gave us Blade Runner, Scarface, and… uh… well, that’s about it, really. That, combined with its atonal violence, means that the audience that Drive ends up appealing to is a far more specific one: basically, young males with a particular affinity for a Eurocentric style of directing. In other words, me. Having that sort of narrow but vocal support, I think, can end up working against a movie, and logically so: when a bunch of people from a certain group are trumpeting a particular thing, be it a movie or a style of music or an article of clothing, it takes on a certain totemic status, making it hard for those outside the group to take it for itself.

I am, clearly, a member of that same demographic that so fervently admires Drive. I think, though, that Drive’s appeal to this group and the fundamental truth of its story are intimately intertwined. There is, in other words, something beyond the exciting style and cool soundtrack that is particularly appealing to my demographic, and it’s at the heart of what makes Drive a great film.

Both Ryan Gosling and Nicolas Winding Refn have been much quoted on the idea that Drive is a fairy tale; as Refn put it, “you have the driver who’s like a knight, the innocent maiden, the evil king and the dragon.” But, with apologies to director and star, they’re wrong, because in fairy tales, the main characters always live happily ever after; Drive isn’t nearly so optimistic, or so frozen in time, and if the Driver and Irene lived happily ever after, it would defeat the point of the movie, anyway. Drive isn’t a fairy tale so much as a medieval romance, a sort of modern day chanson de geste complete with a chaste love, a coat of arms (a golden scorpion on a white field), and – yes, here at least they were right – a knight in shining satin armor.

What separates the romance – and Drive – from fairy tale is that, where fairy tales of the sort that Refn thinks his movie is are about the rescue of the kingdom and the union of the prince and princess, romances are concerned with more complex and monolithic questions of duty, chivalry, and above all love, both as an ideal in itself and as an ideal limited by the real. The highest ideal of the medieval romance is the knight who not only loves a lady, but who loves her purely, and fights for her honor with no hope of reward but for the sake of bringing her that honor. Better still, thus, if she is already married and occupies a position high above his own, a situation which imposes certain social strictures to maintain the purity of the knight’s love. Our medieval forebears, of course, had few illusions about human nature, and recognized as easily as we do that iterated out over an extended period such a romance can only result in misfortune. That is why the most famous medieval lovers to come down to us today are not Roswall and Lillian but Lancelot and Guinevere, who give into temptation and in so doing destroy not only themselves but the Round Table and King Arthur’s entire idealized kingdom.

It should be clear that Drive works on the same principle, with the Driver as the heroic knight-errant and Irene as the lady love that he dedicates himself to, just as she herself is already dedicated to her far-off prince. (Though it’s admittedly a stretch to imagine Oscar Isaac as a prince of any sort.) In the romance, lust gets in the way and the romance loses its purity, or else the knight fails to live up to his ideal, but either way, it necessarily ends in tragedy. The Driver’s love for Irene is never consummated, but the situation implodes nonetheless, on account of him and his idealized chivalry as surely as Guinevere is undone by Lancelot’s love. The narrative innovation of Drive is that it recognizes that, in taking place in a world without chivalry and where violence is not an accepted way of life (as of course it is for the knight-errant), it is Driver’s very commitment to Irene – and the extreme behavior that becomes necessary to protect her – that prevents him from ever being able to be with her. His love may be pure, but once he has had to literally stomp someone’s face in for it, he can never be, as surely as he’ll never wash the bloodstains out of that white jacket.

I don’t mean to say that Drive is good because it can be read as a medieval romance; I’m sure that plenty of medieval romances are bad, just as I know that many movies are. I do think, though, that reading it in this way allows us to understand more clearly where the movie finds something true to supply its dramatic weight, which is that the Driver knows and accepts from the start that there is no future to his love for Irene. The power, and the tragedy, of Drive come in the fact that his character is so fully understandable. Critics of the film are fond of pointing out that we know very little about him, but for once that lack of a backstory is essential to his character. We know that he came to Los Angeles some time ago, alone; we know that the only person he has any sort of human connection to, prior to Irene, is his boss Shannon; we know that he moonlights as a getaway driver, but it’s a pursuit that seems to have little importance to or impact on him, a thrill or a pastime more than a career. He is isolated, both physically and emotionally; even his dreams, of racing a stockcar, are not his own but projected onto him by Shannon.

Then, into all this isolation, suddenly and without intention, there bursts Irene, this small, lovely, seemingly spotless woman and her child. Crucially, she is married and therefore unattainable, and that unattainability makes her, for him, less a person than a symbol, something that can be perfect and idealized because it can never really be known. It is this symbol, not any real person, that the Driver falls in love with and sacrifices everything to protect. (And, on a sidenote, the casting of Carey Mulligan, whose essence as an actress is of wide-eyed, lovable innocence, is part of what makes this work.)

The natural objection on narrative grounds is that there’s no reason that we should care if the main character’s motivation is essentially a fantasy, but what matters isn’t whether or not it’s real but that it’s real to him – and that, regardless of any of that, the consequences for his actions are necessarily and irrevocably real. That is, I suspect, why Drive appeals so strongly to the particular demographic that it does, partly because it celebrates a heroic, idealized love that appeals to the sort of kid who grew up reading legends about King Arthur, and partly because, like the best of those medieval romances, it sees that such loves are necessarily impossible and can never end well.

None of this is to say that you have to like Drive; it remains a specialty movie, and plenty of people have been perplexed or bored by stylized Scandinavian directing in the past. It is to say, though, that the movie is drawing on a set of real human emotions and situations, and that it allows those situations to play out honestly. That’s more than you can say about most movies that ever get made, and it’s rare that the ones that do also manage to establish themselves as the vanguard of the cinematic cool as well. You don’t have to enjoy or even admire Drive — but you do have to acknowledge that it’s more than a style-heavy frame for Ryan Gosling to bash heads.

The Year in Review, Part II: The Best Movies of 2011

Oscar nominations are due to come out on Tuesday, but we all know that today’s event is the premier event of the prestige season:  the Jentleman’s picks for the top films of the year. Unfortunately, the industry made it easy this year, since the really good films stuck out from a sea of mediocrity: 2011 was a year of studios trying to find the safest route possible, resulting in a bevy of sequels, spin-offs, and remakes, as well as a bunch of movies (Green Lantern springs to mind) that were technically new cinema properties but still read like retreads. The lack of innovation and originality – really, the lack of ambition – made it a particularly lean year.

You’ll see that same lack of ambition reflected in the films that made my list. The movies that have been getting attention this year can be more or less divided into two categories: movies with limited aims that are immensely successful within a circumscribed domain, and movies with lofty concepts and goals that end up falling short. “Good, but flawed” has been the construction deployed in a great many reviews that I’ve read, and it pretty much sums up the nature of 2011 in film.

First, a word on some notable contenders that didn’t make my list. There were several movies – Young Adult, 50/50, and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo come to mind – that I enjoyed but that in the end fell short either  in concept or execution. Others – and by ‘others’ I mean The Artist, Hugo, and Midnight in Paris – require a little more discussion.

Astute readers will remember that Midnight in Paris was one of my ‘dishonorable mentions’ for 2011, giving it the unique distinction of appearing (if in a supporting role) on my lists of both the best and the worst of the year. As discussed both in that piece and in my essay on Woody Allen, the reason is that Midnight is half of a great movie and half of a terrible one – and unfortunately that bipolar nature is crucial to the development of the film’s central character. A movie as sweet and funny and nostalgic as Midnight in Paris is when it’s midnight needs to be acknowledged, but Allen hates all his other characters so much that it’s hard to leave the film without a bad taste in one’s mouth.

The Artist and Hugo, meanwhile, are both well-directed films that have built a lot of their critical success on their obvious love of cinema. Hugo, though, ends up feeling like a two-hour-long dissertation on the importance of film preservation; it’s easily half an hour two long, the 3D doesn’t do much for it, and the kid is kind of annoying. The Artist, meanwhile, is more of a directing achievement than it is a narrative one: yes, it’s impressive that director Michael Hazanavicius has made a silent film that manages to be entertaining enough to also be the feel-good film of the year. Once you acknowledge that the silent element is nonetheless a glorified gimmick, though, much of what recommends The Artist falls away. It’s a slight, nostalgic piece that achieves everything it tries for, but it doesn’t end up telling us anything new or interesting.

All that being said – here are the top six movies that came out in 2011:

6. The trailer for The Tree of Life

The Tree of Life was by far the year’s most ambitious film, a meditation on family life, death, and the insignificance of mankind in the vastness of creation; it’s also opaque and ultimately unmoving. The trailer for the Tree of Life, however, might be the best short film ever made, beautiful and moving in equal measure for the entirety of its two-minute runtime. Why did I bother to watch Melancholia when I could have watched this trailer sixty-five times consecutive instead? And that’s not even a joke.

Okay, now onto the actual top five:

5. Bridesmaids

I remember walking out of Bridesmaids when I saw it back in late June trying to come up with excuses for why I’d liked it so much. What I came up with, though – that I felt especially sympathetic towards Annie Walker (Kristen Wiig) because I, too, was going through an uncertain, transitional phase of my life – increasingly looks to me like a reason for why the film can claim to be one of the best of the year. It’s one of those rare comedies that’s both funny and also fully and relatably human. Parts drag, and the cop that is Annie’s love interest is a woefully ill-conceived character (mostly though not entirely for the glaring plot hole of his being apparently foreign). But how often is it that the movie that is unquestionably the funniest of the year also a fully honest account of someone’s situation in life? For that achievement alone, it deserves to be on this list.

4. Moneyball

“It’s easy to be romantic about baseball,” Billy Beane says in Moneyball, and though the plot of the movie follows two characters whose goal is to eliminate that romance from their calculus of the game, it keeps seeping back in and taking over just when everything seems reduced back down to numbers and statistics. Moneyball is a quiet, considered character study in a genre – the sports movie – that is all about bombast and triumphalism; paradoxically, it manages to work as a baseball movie even though we’re a step removed from the action on the field. And, though I didn’t love Jonah Hill as much as it seems everyone else did, I’m not sure that Billy Beane isn’t the finest work that Brad Pitt has ever done in his career.

But what’s with those flashbacks and the storyline with the daughter?

3. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

If nothing else, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is the most impressive scripting feat of the year, a reduction of a lengthy, beloved, labyrinthine story into a sleek two-hour running time; no one is going to claim that it doesn’t demand your full attention, but if you give it the plot is eminently comprehensible. As far as narrative goes, this is probably the most engrossing film of the year, an absorbing mystery set in a gritty Cold War London that is masterfully calibrated to our imagination of what that era should have felt like. And, unlike – for example – The Artist, Tinker Tailor makes itself into something beyond an excellent example of its genre. For once, a spy movie isn’t about silly motivations like money or power, but is instead driven by more fundamental things like paranoia, trust, and betrayal. Meanwhile, can someone please nominate Gary Oldman for an Oscar sometime in the next decade? Because all signs point to his being subject to another oversight for Tinker Tailor.

2. The Descendants

This is one of those movies that I was talking about that achieves everything that it seeks to do but has circumscribed aims: there’s no denying that The Descendants is in some sense a small movie, and thinking on it intellectually it’s probably less accomplished a film than Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Yet I have to trust how I felt when I saw it, and the fact is that no film moved me as deeply, or in as fundamental ways, as this dramedy about a man confronting the hardest questions of family. I wrote in my review of The Descendants that “this is a movie about ‘real life’ in the Tolstoyan sense, ‘real life with its essential concerns of health, illness, work, rest, with its concerns of thought, learning, poetry, music, love, friendship, hatred, passions,’ ” and that still strikes me as the case: no other film this year confronted so honestly or wisely the question of why our struggles, no matter how apparently small, matter so much. (Other than the trailer for The Tree of Life, of course.)

1. Drive

Admittedly, I am exactly the viewer that Drive appeals to, and also admittedly, I don’t think there’s any film this year this side of The Help that’s polarized audiences so much as this one. No matter: as a visual experience, as an aesthetic experience, as a cinematic experience, no movie this year came anywhere close to Drive. In terms of narrative, it’s probably among the simplest movies of the year, almost a fable, a medieval romance updated to 2011 Los Angeles. Furthermore, there’s no denying that the story falls apart a little bit in the third act. But Drive is so stylish, and its performances so well-realized, that it’s impossible not to be swept up in it; and unlike so many movies like it, it plays by its own rules from beginning to end. All in all, the coolest and best movie, with the coolest soundtrack and the coolest star, that came out in 2011.

All of which is to say: Jentlemen prefer Drive.

The Week In Review: “The Iron Lady”

I justified writing my ‘Worst Of 2011’ piece a couple of weeks ago on the basis that I simply couldn’t foresee any of the remaining 2011 films cracking the list. Well, mea culpa, my friends, mea culpa: if The Iron Lady offers us any obvious lessons, it’s as a reminder to never discount Hollywood’s ability to produce bad films.

The biopic usually takes one of two forms. One is the approach taken by J. Edgar, this prestige season’s most significant biopic, or a bit more distantly by The Aviator, in which a movie tries to become a compendium encompassing all of its central figure’s life and accomplishments. These compendia often employ a framing device – in J. Edgar, it’s the writing of Hoover’s memoirs – in order to facilitate their moving back and forth in time. The other, generally more successful approach is that found recently in My Week With Marilyn and before that in The Queen, where the narrative focuses in a single illuminating episode from the character’s life.

In a move of head-scratching illogic, the producers of The Iron Lady elected to try a unique, untested, thoroughly inadvisable third method, where the basic structure is the same as that of the compendium biopic (framing device – flashback – framing device – flash less far back) but where the focus of the movie is on the period of the framing device and not on the actual historical events that the movie is supposed to be about. The movie opens with Meryl Streep as an old Margaret Thatcher doddering around thinking that her deceased husband is still alive, and there we stay for what feels like half an hour before we get to see anything of substance about the beginning of Thatcher’s remarkable career. When we do get to see episodes from Thatcher’s life, they’re abbreviated and abrupt, always returning in the end to this old woman having hallucinations of her husband.

But how can you be so tone-deaf as to make a movie about a historical figure as controversial and interesting as Thatcher and gloss over most of the events of her premiership? One could be forgiven for thinking that this was the filmmakers’ way of getting their revenge on a political figure that they particularly disliked, by insisting that the proper way to think of her is, more or less, as a crazy old loon. That’s not what their effort was meant to be, of course; more likely director Phyllida Lloyd thought that this approach would make some comment on life’s ironic character, or something like that. Nonetheless, the film suffers from a lack of courage in approaching who Margaret Thatcher, either as a politician or a person, really was. What makes The Iron Lady frustrating is that so much of it is so boring, but that you can still see in those all-too-brief looks at Thatcher’s career that there could have been a great movie made from this material.

I don’t mean to say that the movie would have necessarily been better in expressing an opinion on Thatcher. In refusing to deal with any of her accomplishments or failures, though, it denies us the opportunity to have an opinion on them, or to understand anything about her.  As it stands, the film we’re left with is a boring muddle that doesn’t tell us anything about its subject, and which thereby can’t tell us anything about its ancillary subjects of history, politics, and the personality within society.

Let’s All Feel Good About Race: “The Help” as a Critical Problem

When The Help grossed $170,000,000 domestically and became a surprise Oscar contender on its release in mid-August, studio executives at Dreamworks could be forgiven for chortling and patting themselves on the back. Less attractive was the fact that the film was immediately assailed by African American groups – notably the Association of Black Women Historians – for its facile representation of race relations.

A quick glance at the story of the movie should demonstrate why that was. The main character of The Help is a young woman named Skeeter Phelan (Emma Stone), who is the only member of her cohort of upper-class white women in Jackson, Mississippi to have gone to college; recently arrived back home, she wants to pursue a career in journalism, and decides that the way to do it will be to put together a book of interviews with the town’s black maids. These are women who have their own households but who spend their lives working in white homes taking care of white children, and, at least as the film portrays it, have more of a hand in raising those children than their own parents do.

This is, in other words, a movie about black women achieving some sort of self-actualization by way of a white woman, and more grandly about how we should all be able to get along, gosh-darn-it. Transparently, that makes it the sort of film that a thinking moviegoer would disdain. The thing is – and the reason that The Help becomes the year’s thorniest critical problem – that the movie is so well put-together, and so goddamn winning. It’s well-shot and the production design, recreating a saturated, visually sumptuous 1960s Jackson where Skeeter gets to drive around a navy Thunderbird and everyone lives in beautiful old Southern manses, is Oscar-worthy. Over and above everything else, though, is the fact that the cast is exceptional. It’s hard to say that The Help gives its black characters short shrift when Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer keep stealing the spotlight from Stone, the movie’s ostensible star, and somehow make themselves into the soul of the movie. Though the movie hits its sentimental notes as hard as it possibly can, I’d be hard-pressed to name more than five or six movies from this year that were as purely enjoyable as this one. It’s the sort of movie that grudging cynics such as myself like even as they hate themselves for liking it.

Yet examined more critically it’s hard to stay so enthusiastic, because The Help isn’t about race relations, or about the black experience of the 1960s, or even the risks of breaking with a closed system in the face of injustice, so much as it is a Hollywood fantasy that caters to letting white intellectuals feel good about themselves. Stone’s Skeeter is a stand-in for every do-gooding liberal who likes to think about how they would have held themselves if they’d lived in that era; the movie assures us that her differences come from being educated, but it’s hard to see how she emerged from this milieu at all, given how thoroughly she rejects any commonality that she may have with the rest of her social group. Meanwhile, the film’s black characters, all of whom are colorful, saintly personalities just waiting to be saved, seem constructed out of that same white Hollywood imagination of segregation. I’ve never seen a Spike Lee movie that I really liked – but I have no doubt that his most minor ‘joint’ has more to say about the black experience in America than does The Help.

Generally, in my essays for this blog, I’ve focused on deconstructing what makes good movies good, pointing out where films succeed, and trying to understand how they fail. The Help, however, is a thornier issue, because it works so well even when we know that we should know better than to be taken in. It’s not quite a Faker, because its agenda is so transparent; at no point does it hide what it is. Yet its ultimate point, which seems to be, more or less, that black people had a rough time of it in the ‘60s and that white intellectuals should feel good about being outraged by that, is as unenlightening – okay, we can say offensive – as anything in V for Vendetta.

Once again, a side of the issue comes back down to the question of historical representation: with a movie about as loaded a topic as race, how much do we need the representation of that subject to be absolutely truthful to historical record? (Indeed, how much do we in some way need it to not be absolutely truthful?) How much responsibility do the filmmakers have to recalibrate their stories to answer the complexities of historical reality?

In the end, the controversy over The Help isn’t so much over what the movie has to say as it is over whether such a loaded subject doesn’t demand a radically different aesthetic approach. Here, director Tate Taylor has fashioned a melodrama about race relations and segregation, and like all melodramas he’s painted in broad strokes: we have our irredeemable villain, in the abominable, bitchy Hilly Holbrook (Bryce Dallas Howard); our on-the-margins, sassy heroine (Stone, of course); and the group of misfits seeking to achieve justice (Davis, Spencer, and the marvelous Jessica Chastain). The Help is as much about monomyth and the contest of good against evil as is Star Wars. It’s just transposed into a more familiar, if no less fantastic, setting.

The difference is that, in a space opera, it’s possible – perhaps even necessary – to make a movie that is about monolithic good and evil and to still have it mean something real, because we don’t have a stake in that meaning beyond our affection or distaste for the respective characters. With the almost sole exception of movies involving Germany’s national bout of temporary insanity in the 1930s and ‘40s, that isn’t really possible with stories that are ostensibly historic. Partly, that’s because politics will get in the way of enjoying a good story every time: what movie about race in America doesn’t offend somebody? But it’s also because movies about history must also be about real people, and real people can’t be dealt with as archetypes. The Help isn’t totally guilty of this, mostly because Davis, Spencer, and Chastain are so good that against all odds their characters become real to us, but it’s impossible not to acknowledge as well how much the film tries to manipulate us into liking those characters from the get-go.

Returning to our original conundrum – the question of whether The Help is a good movie or a bad movie – I’m not sure, with all this in mind, that I could give a definitive answer one way or another. It is well-produced, and it is entertaining, and the acting is excellent; if I had to recommend a melodrama about race relations in the United States, this would at least make the list.

Before I gave that answer, though, I would have to look at you quite seriously and ask, “Why on earth do you want to watch a melodrama about race?”

The Week In Review: “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close”

Is it possible to tell a story about a trauma as near to us, and as deeply felt, as what happened on September 11^th, 2001? As a cultural reference point, it seems an obvious – perhaps even a necessary – subject for cinematic exploration. Yet each person has their own 9/11, as well, and it is difficult to address a subject so indelibly imprinted on the national and individual psyches in a way that does justice to both.

Stephen Daldry, by way of Jonathan Safran Foer, tries to solve this problem by constructing a narrative in which trying to comprehend a personal tragedy necessarily comprises comprehending the national tragedy as well. The protagonist is the eleven-year-old Oskar Schell (Thomas Horn), who lives in Manhattan with his father and mother (Tom Hanks and Sandra Bullock, respectively) and who probably has Asperberger’s, though the film is coy on that point. Oskar’s father, a jeweler, dies in the fall of the World Trade Center on September 11^th, an event that Oskar refers to repeatedly as ‘the worst day.’ When Oskar finds an old key in an envelope with the word ‘Black’ written on the back, he deduces that his father wants him to find the lock that it fits. He sets off across New York trying to speak to every person with the surname ‘Black’ to see if they know anything about it.

It’s easy to see how Oskar might have been a charming character in the novel that this movie is based on: one of the strengths of the medium of fiction is its ability to go inside the psychologies of people whose minds work in a different way, as in, for example, Mark Haddon’s protagonist Chris in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. On film, however, Oskar becomes one of the most annoying children ever seen on the silver screen. Probably some of this can be blamed on Thomas Horn’s performance, but much of it is because, outside of the cringe-worthy narration, we don’t have access to Oskar’s psychology, so when his behavior is unsympathetic there’s no reason to forgive him for it.

What’s most frustrating about Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, though, is the way that it can’t quite be content with being about Oskar’s journey to understand why his father is dead. There are a few scenes in this film that are genuinely moving, but Daldry immediately follows them up with something so unbearably sentimental and overwrought that you want to bash your head into a brick wall, and most of them arise when Daldry tries to pound home the cliché that, tragic and horrible as it was, 9/11 really brought us all closer together in the end.

“It’s never going to make sense because it doesn’t,” Oskar’s mother admonishes him at one point, and as a theme for a movie that is as good as any; if EL&IC had confined itself to letting Oskar – or, better yet, his mother – come to terms with the ramifications of that statement, it might have been more successful. By choosing this particular story, and this particular narrator, Daldry  gives into the temptation to make 9/11 something black and white, something so culturally enormous that it can be  shorthand to tap into certain emotions and give thematic weight. A braver film would have tried to plumb the enormous complexities of it instead.

A Complete List of Movies I Watched in 2011

After the jump — a complete list of the 93 movies that I watched in 2011, ordered by genre.

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The Week in Review: “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy”

These days, when we get adaptations of old novels or classic stories, they’re almost always brushed off and shoehorned into modern re-creations – not even Shakespeare is safe. It’s surprising and a little refreshing, then, when a director takes the literal path and maintains the setting of his source material without using any sort of modern anchor point.

Such is the case with Tomas Alfredson’s adaptation of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, based on John le Carré’s 1974 spy novel of the same title and this year’s All-UK All-Stars release. Like another major release of recent weeks, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, TTSS is structured as a mystery but has more global ambitions. Where most spy stories fall into a black-and-white, hero-and-villain nationalist paradigm, Alfredson’s adaptation instead looks inward, examining the masks that men construct and why it is so difficult to see clearly beyond them.

First and foremost, of course, it is a spy story, and one the uncomplicated surface of which hides layers of ambiguity and deception. Control (a decrepit-looking John Hurt), head of ‘the Circus’, believes there to be a mole among his top men, and enlists the aid of agent Jim Prideaux (Mark Strong) to find out who. When Prideaux’s mission goes wrong, though, Control and his right-hand man, George Smiley (Gary Oldman, never better) are put out to pasture. Only when another agent (Tom Hardy) learns of a leak from a second source is Smiley brought back into action to hunt down the mole.

Viewed from the perspective of comprehensibility alone, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is an achievement. Alfredson navigates the labyrinth of le Carré’s narrative without ever losing the audience and without having to rely on the sort of heavy exposition that so often reduces films of this genre to dutiful slogs through the literary terrain. A photograph, a gaze out of a window, the defeat on a man’s face: from such simple input Alfredson is able to develop all the information and relationships that power the movie. At just over two hours, it somehow seems uncluttered without being unsatisfying, just as it maintains an atmospheric intimacy even as it moves from London, to Istanbul, to Budapest, and back again.

But there is more, far more, going on here than the vagaries of procedure and investigation. The London that Alfredson envisions is a place of grit and grey, where paranoia hangs in the air as thickly as the fog and murmured meetings between spies take place in tiny shops or shuttered airless rooms; these men are marked not by the glamour of deciding the fates of nations but by the claustrophobia of knowing that their usefulness, and thereby their lives, rest in keeping their secrets and trusting that those around them will do the same. More than anything, Tinker, Tailor understands that the ideological battles of its Cold War – perhaps of all wars – are played out in the relationships between the men who fight them as surely as they are on the proxy battlefields of foreign nations. “It was an aesthetic choice as much as a moral one,” explains the mole after he has been caught, in one of the film’s most memorable lines, but we understand that this is a smokescreen for a betrayal that is more important to us as a betrayal of trust between colleagues and friends than as a failure of patriotism.

As a procedural, Tinker, Tailor is circumscribed and effective, letting us piece together the pieces along with Smiley in a way that satisfies somewhat more than the corresponding revelation of Dragon Tattoo. Yet Alfredson makes room as well for brief, quiet looks into the lives of his characters, and it is these heartbreaking moments of recognition that elevate his film to another level. The mystery is absorbing – but for Smiley and his allies, and so for us, it also matters.

The Year in Review, Part I: The Worst Movies of 2011

I thought I was going to hold off on putting out any ‘Year in Review’ posts until we’d formally closed out 2011, but, looking at my slate of movies from now ‘til New Years, I just don’t see what’s going to crash my Worst-of-the-Year picks. The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo? By some reports, it’s overlong and a little dull, but no worse than that. The Iron Lady? But how bad can a Meryl Streep movie really be? Only Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close looks like it has any potential to be a game-changer, but no matter how overwrought and emotionally manipulative it turns out to be, I just don’t see how it plumbs the depths pioneered by the material on this list. (Though I reserve the right to change that opinion.)

I was expecting to have a hard time figuring out what to include, in the way that it’s difficult to give an answer when asked who your five best friends are. But crap will out, it seems, even more readily than quality, and it seems that I’ve been fortunate enough this year to have only seen five films truly deserving of inclusion in the record of the year’s least inspired productions.

A final note: My list is, of course, based entirely on films that I myself saw. Cars 2, Green Lantern, The Smurfs, The Help, The Change-Up, most especially Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star — all had the potential to be mind-numbingly, offensively awful, and I, shamefully, did not give them the opportunity to depress me.

So, here we go:

Dishonorable Mentions: The Sitter, 30 Minutes or Less, J. Edgar, Midnight in Paris
The Sitter and 30 Minutes or Less were both slapdash, perfunctory efforts to cash in on the raunch comedy bubble, but neither had nearly enough disregard for their characters and their audiences to qualify them for this list. Formulaic and trite, to be sure, but I laughed a couple of times and didn’t emerge from the theater feeling any stupider. Astute readers will point out that I also didn’t hate J. Edgar when I saw it, and they are correct; its Dishonorable Mention comes from the fact that, for a movie directed by one of America’s most important living directors and featuring its biggest movie star as a seminal historical figure of the recent past, there are certain expectations, and J. Edgar failed to meet them. Midnight in Paris is also Dishonorably Mentioned because, as explored more fully in my article on Woody Allen, half of it is a really good movie, but the other half is really bad.

#5: In Time
2011 was the year the Justin Timberlake decided that he wanted to be a movie star, and the one where the few of us who went to see In Time discovered that he wasn’t one. The movie follows the conventional plotline of the Hollywood dystopia, with Timberlake playing a proletarian living in a dystopian world who discovers that it is all, in effect, a massive conspiracy to keep a few people living forever while everyone else dies young. Naturally, he sets out to bring down the system, which is represented by professional douchebag Vincent Kartheiser (known as the watery Pete Campbell on “Mad Men”). The premise is interesting, but the filmmakers make the Faker mistake and try to turn the movie into a grand statement about class and the evils of capitalism rather than focusing on telling a truthful story; even worse, the movie’s not even well-made enough to qualify as a Faker. Disappointing on multiple levels.

#4: The Hangover, Part 2
The first Hangover was a fantastic film, mostly by virtue of daring to break cinematic convention and tell a different kind of story; it traded on its novelty to become a huge hit when it came out in 2009. What does it say about Hollywood that its response to a movie that was all about freshness and novelty was to immediately pump out a sequel? Nothing good, that’s what. What does it say about us that we collectively gave them a nearly $600 million subsidy to do so by buying tickets to said sequel? Something much, much worse. THP2 is a clone of the first movie, but transposed into Bangkok and with every element bloated by an extra fifty percent. Even the concluding revelation is almost identical. I lauded Sherlock Holmes 2 for playing up the friendship — okay, we can say bromance — between its main characters. There is no such positive feeling in this movie.

#3: Twilight: Breaking Dawn, Part 1
Breaking Dawn follows in the pioneering tradition of The Deer Hunter in opening  with an interminable wedding scene, then succeeds in becoming progressively more boring afterwards. I went to see it to try to understand just what it was about these films that made women go mad about them. Apparently, they like watching emasculated men not fight with each other and fret about how to treat bland women who seem to exist only so that these men can continue to not fight about them. Actually, I’m not even sure you could term this a ‘story’: it has no discernible conflict, has no beginning, middle, or end in the traditional sense, and the only transformation in character comes in their literal transformation from a human being into a vampire. Basically, you get to spend two hours watching the characters invent stuff to be angsty about. If that’s your thing, you may respectfully disagree with my analysis here.

#2: The Three Musketeers
I described this movie as ‘inane,’ ‘soulless,’ and ‘utterly lacking in intelligence,’ which remains the most succinct way that I can think of to describe The Three Musketeers. Narratively lazy and, like The Hangover Part 2, totally uninterested in suggesting that its characters like each other at all, 3M substitutes gigantic, plush airships and anachronistic vulgarities for any sense of fun. It’s boring, tired, and insulting in equal measure.

That said, it could never approach the noxiousness of the bottom movie on this list…

#1: Melancholia
I was so incensed by Melancholia that, after seeing it, I immediately fired off an invective-filled email to my friend Will, purporting to be excerpts from a review that would remain unwritten. Here are some of my thoughts on the movie:
“A loathsome piece of crap.”
”Melancholia is a movie about the world ending — and when it does, by God, is it a mercy.”
“Some critics have trumpeted Melancholia as an artistic triumph, but this is great art only in a world where masturbation qualifies as great sex.”
“The worst movie of 2011, and possibly the current millennium as well.”
Melancholia is a Faker if there ever was one, a movie purporting to offer some sort of insight into the nature of our lives and our world but ultimately trading only in facile condemnations of human existence. Critics have made reference to its having beautiful imagery and drawn attention to Kirsten Dunst’s performance. That may all be true, but even if it is, it does nothing to mitigate the fact that this film is philosophically bankrupt and intellectually dishonest. There is no doubt that Lars von Trier has a vision. Unfortunately, it is only of things that he has decided that he wants to see.