2011 has come and gone. And when it comes to the cinema that’s a good thing.
It was, overall, a paltry year in filmmaking. Not a single quality blockbuster came out this summer, and it took until November for any real, quality cinema to come out on a consistent basis. The festival circuit also didn’t deliver as in years past, if one can judge at all by the screenings offered at the Vancouver International Film Festival.
It’s a flawed process in any year to try and find a theme linking the best films, but if there is one this year, it’s an inability to accept difficult truths.
This year we saw stories such as a family trying to cope with the death of a son, of a screen actor unable to accept the onset of technological advancement, and of a writer who prefers the glitz of the past over the cold, drab present.
There were certainly some excellent films that came out this year, and you’ll find my choices below. You’ll also find regrets, films I just couldn’t make it out to see over the past year. My excuse is that they likely came out in a two-month window, when I was already wrapped up seeing the few fantastic works that came out in 2011.
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Where else to put a film that takes a good crack at encompassing life, the universe, and everything? Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life is admittedly a tough go: it is long, complex and pretentious. But if you take it in, and I mean really let your mind stew over the thing, you find that the director is taking you on a personal journey to reacquaint yourself with God. And that’s to say nothing of incredible aesthetics that help to make this an entrancing work of cinematic art.
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Michel Hazanavicius’s The Artist is a risky proposal. Just imagine if it came before a Hollywood producer. “So… you want to make a silent movie, a form that has been dead and gone since the 1930’s? Get out.” So thank goodness this was made in France, an industry that has always been willing to go out on a limb. Hazanavicius does the silent film as well as any modern filmmaker could. He puts together a perfect cast with visages very capable of the mugging that wordless films require. And on top of that he gets wonderful chemistry out of his main actors. Jean Dujardin is a dashing but vainglorious silent star who refuses to accept that his art will be displaced by the sound era, and Berenice Bejo is just luminous as the young actress who loves him, but who is destined to displace him as the world’s biggest movie star. Its theme is one of adaptability, and the self-destruction that comes from lacking it.
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Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive is yet another film that illustrates the influence that Michael Mann has had on modern crime cinema. This L.A. noir borrows the brooding atmosphere Mann brought to films such as Heat and harnesses it in the service of a semi-western that gives only scant hints as to its anti-hero’s past. Ryan Gosling is silent and sensational as the Driver, a getaway man for hire who haunts the streets of Los Angeles with a deadly quiet intensity. Albert Brooks and Ron Perlman are also standouts as Jewish gangsters with acerbic wit.
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As I’ve written previously, it sometimes takes a film like Hugo to remind you why the movies are so great. We’re bombarded every year by assembly-line pictures from directors with little imagination, egged on by producers with an eye to nothing but profits. Martin Scorsese knows what makes films great, and he puts it all on display here, reminding viewers of the golden age of cinema when it was difficult to distinguish an oncoming train on the screen from reality. Just a magical little film that shows the joy in manipulating reality.
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Now here’s a film to soothe the cynic in all of us. Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris tells of Gil Pender (Owen Wilson), a jilted screenwriter who tries against all common wisdom to hold on to his fantastical impressions of Paris. His loose grip on reality literally takes him into the past, where he meets luminaries such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Salvador Dali, artists who were inspired to some of their greatest work by the city of love. It would be easy to scoff at Gil’s love for Paris’s if it weren’t for such a charming performance that makes it impossible not to like the guy. You get the impression that Allen himself is trying to impart his own love for the city on to audiences that have forgotten what makes it great.
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You’d think that reading a film’s source material would make it easier to understand. Not so in this adaptation of John Le Carre’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Director Tomas Alfredson channels the cool, wintery oppression he displayed in the horror film Let the Right One In to create a Cold War atmosphere that makes you feel as though you’re strolling the poorly-ventilated corridors of an aging university library. Gary Oldman’s George Smiley is the stonefaced protagonist here, trying to smoke a Soviet mole out of the highest levels of MI6.
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It’s better than Rocky. Really, it is. Gavin O’Connor has for years worked to displace Bull Durham director Ron Shelton as the best sports filmmaker in Hollywood and he finally does it with this MMA-themed drama about two brothers with everything to prove. The UFC douchebaggery is toned down just enough to permit an audience to sympathize with the seemingly meatheaded oafs who fight for a living. Tom Hardy is a wonder as a war vet with a mysterious past who comes home and falls into fighting as a way to atone for past sins. He ends up having to fight his brother Joel Edgerton, who is in the tournament as a way to save his family home. And Nick Nolte is just mesmerizing as their father, an ex-alcoholic and boxing coach who agrees to train Tom so they can get on a path to reconciliation. The deck is stacked so high against the three men that it’s impossible not to feel for them, or to cheer wildly for both when they meet in the film’s climactic final fight. I get chills just thinking about it.
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In our ongoing struggle to come to grips with what happened in 2008, Margin Call provides a bit more clarity and no less disillusionment. It shows a callousness at the consequences of one’s actions and an unwillingness to learn from one’s mistakes. A tight script from writer-director J.C. Chandor could work just as effectively as a stage play, but here it gets an excellent filmic treatment thanks to some outstanding actors, not the least of which is Jeremy Irons as the calmly cruel CEO of a hedge fund that’s burning up from the inside. Also of note is Simon Baker as his protege, who seems to have little knowledge of what makes the company successful but seems to move up the corporate ladder anyway.
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With two flicks on this list, I’d say it was a good year for sports movies. Bennett Miller’s Moneyball, from Michael Lewis’s book of the same name, was my less favoured of the two but it was still excellent by virtue of being a film of our time. I saw that about Moneyball because it’s a chronicle of the eroding influence of intuition and expertise. Oakland Athletics manager Billy Beane revolutionized baseball management by favouring algorithms and statistics over the haphazard intuition of his scouts, and though he hasn’t made the A’s a championship team, he has nevertheless made them into a consistently successful club, and his methods have been adopted to great success by other squads. Brad Pitt is solemn and melancholic as Beane, a manager doubted by everyone and has only his instincts to lean back on. Jonah Hill also excels as Peter Brand, an economics graduate finally given the chance to put theory into practice.
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John Michael McDonagh, brother of In Bruges director Martin McDonagh, turns the buddy-cop genre on its head in The Guard, an understated comedy that’s as funny as it is touching. Brendan Gleeson here plays Gerry Boyle, a seemingly incompetent officer who stands out by virtue of his integrity. Don Cheadle plays his foil, an FBI agent who comes to small-town Ireland to try and snuff out a gang of drug dealers making trouble in the tiny villages of the Emerald Isle. The dialogue is snappy and clever, and its characterizations vivid despite their simplicity. Or is that because of it?
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Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol was a great summer blockbuster released way too late, and by far the best of its series with some thrilling and innovative action sequences. Bridesmaids was a girly movie that can be enjoyed by both sexes, and Winnie the Pooh was charming and nostalgic, the perfect film for your children to watch while they’re home sick in bed. And wasn’t it great just to see The Muppets on screen again?
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The whole of 2011. No, just kidding. Well, kinda. I’ve already made a list of my most disappointing films of the year but it bears some updating. I didn’t like War Horse, which I found sappy even for Steven Spielberg. I also wasn’t a fan of The Devil’s Double, which took a story about one of history’s most depraved individuals and sapped anything interesting out of it.
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I most regret not seeing Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, a film I hear is only outdone in sadness by his 2009 film Antichrist. I also didn’t make it out to see Monsieur Lazhar or The Descendants, but I’ll gladly post reviews and updates to this list if I manage to see them before the Oscar ceremony.
Cinephiliac 
Great list –
I caught all of your top pictures except for The Warrior. So we are pretty much in agreement with only one issue. I rather liked War Horse.
Thanks for sharing your perspectives.
jmm