History Lessens

che, good looking: Gael Garcia Bernal (foreground) as Che Guevara in <i>The Motorcycle Diaries</i>, one of many films to struggle with the past.

che, good looking: Gael Garcia Bernal (foreground) as Che Guevara in The Motorcycle Diaries, one of many films to struggle with the past.

The year's movies underline the necessity and the difficulty of looking back.

Cindy Fuchs' best of 2004

by Cindy Fuchs

And I feel like I'm just writing my life away / I never thought shit could end up quite this way / There's a war going on outside no man is safe from / I'm here for the good fight, only the fakes run. --Jay-Z, "Ballad for the Fallen Soldier"

The annual ritual of looking back has rarely seemed so apt. As it turns out, a majority of the year's worthy films take up precisely this theme, treating the messy processes of memory and/or history as exercises in creativity, anxiety and futility. Too many current events — from the recent U.S. presidential election and the administration's current war-making to the genocide in Sudan and the imperialism of the world's reigning superpower — make the past seem relevant even as it seems elusive, incomprehensible and subject to revision.

Among the films casting memory as something closer to trauma than reminiscence are Michael Winterbottom's science fiction melodrama, Code 46, Guy Maddin's The Saddest Music in the World, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, written by Charlie Kaufman and directed by the wildly inventive Michel Gondry. The first is a complicated meditation on desire, will and responsibility. Tim Robbins and Samantha Morton engage in a painful forbidden romance that he will be able to forget and she must live with, owing to a choice he makes. Maddin's film, typically odd and aggressively revisionist, turns history into a mix of tragedy, competition and deception.

Eternal Sunshine is much better remembered, as it stars trendy and talented performers Kate Winslet, Jim Carrey, Mark Ruffalo and the Hobbit, with Carrey giving what seems likely to be the performance of his life. But even for its popularity, the film rethinks remembrance as a process of identity and self-determination. Carrey's passive hero only turns active when facing the loss of himself as he is best reflected in Winslet's blue-orange-pink-haired dynamo. (She gets points as well for her work in another movie about forgetting as a route to enduring fantasy, Finding Neverland.)

Other films — based on or, better yet, "inspired by," historical figures — grapple with the ways history undermines and also creates heroes. While the end of this year will be remembered for its surfeit of biopics (Neverland, Beyond the Sea, The Sea Inside, The Aviator), the most compelling, Walter Salles' The Motorcycle Diaries and Bill Condon's Kinsey, are more broadly interested in collective memory. Charting Che Guevara's youthful introduction to poverty and need, Salles' film is at once enchanting and muscular; Condon's investigates the conflagration of celebrity, science and sex spearheaded by intrepid researcher Alfred Kinsey and his brilliant wife, Mac (Liam Neeson and Laura Linney). As the much-publicized sex studies overtake their private lives, the film presents a moment when media became utterly invasive.

Other combinations of communal and individual experiences emerge in films built from historical events. First-time filmmaker Joshua Marston claims he was moved to make Maria Full of Grace by the story he heard about a drug mule. That the result is so remarkably immediate has to do with his decision to emulate documentary and trust in his actors.

As it happens, two other impressive films based on true events feature Don Cheadle (and neither is directed by Steven Soderbergh). Terry George's Hotel Rwanda reveres the incredible efforts by hotelier Paul Rusesabagina (Cheadle) to save 1,268 people during the 1994 Rwanda genocide. The film makes effective use of its episodic structure to show Paul's evolution as he comes to realize the racism that sets the ground for brutality, and is only made more relevant by its resonance with the present crisis in Sudan. Niels Mueller's The Assassination of Richard Nixon similarly focuses on individual transformation, this one a wholly unheroic and small man wanting to be more — masculine, lovable, important. Sean Penn is again stunning as Sam (definitely not "I am"), a would-be presidential assassin who not only dreams up a scheme where he'll hijack a plane to fly into the White House but also finds a way to get on a plane with a gun — in 1974 — and tell his dreams of greatness to maestro Leonard Bernstein.

Understanding himself as oppressed, Sam goes to visit the local Black Panthers' office (and shares a hilarious encounter with Mykelti Williamson). The potential potency of multiracial collaboration is the point of Baadasssss!, Mario Van Peebles' incredible breakdown of his own past as layered into his father Melvin's, as the film recounts the making of the elder Van Peebles' Sweet Sweetback's Baad Asssss Song as personal travail and political revolution.

Even more pointed, toward this and other ends, are the year's extraordinary documentaries. These include Robert Stone's Guerrilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst (reconsidering her story not so much through the SLA or even Hearst's experience as through the ludicrous behavior of the press, the police, and federal agents); Nick Broomfield's indictment of the death penalty as rendered in one woman's story, in Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer; Patrick Paulson and Michael John Warren's Fade to Black, about Jay-Z's historic Madison Square Garden performance last year; Zana Briski and Ross Kauffman's revelation of the ways that children might see their world as they become documentary photographers in Born into Brothels; and Jehane Noujaim's Control Room, which is less about its overt subject, Al-Jazeera, than the ways wars are premised on media, propaganda and lies.

Even among these amazing films, two stand out. In Tarnation, Jonathan Caouette pieces together his schizophrenic mother's history to find out his own and to chart a particularly small-minded culture that labels difference as deviance that must be "treated"; and Jonathan Demme's The Agronomist makes the excessively public life of Haitian radio journalist Jean Dominique significantly personal. Assassinated in 2000 following a life spent working tirelessly for the impoverished victims of U.S. interventions and global financial policies, Dominique lives again, a memory turned vital and inspiring.