Showing the Way

This year's movies relied on less talk, more action.

by Sam Adams

SPLENDOR IN THE GRASS: Julie Taymor's Across the Universe revived the '60s in all its ardor and excess. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Blood oozed down the aisles in 2007, mingling with rancid butter and trampled ashes. The life went out of Tim Burton's movies long ago, but it was the right year for Sweeney Todd, with its carotid torrents and insatiable appetites. Seeking salvation through vengeance, Johnny Depp's wronged barber wields a seductive assortment of sanctified straight razors, seeking to open the throats of the men who destroyed his family. But when his simple plan goes intolerably awry, he quickly outdoes his prey in monstrousness, his quest for retribution quickly giving way to simple bloodlust.

Neil Jordan's The Brave One conjured a cesspit of slavering thugs who fell before the righteous blaze of Jodie Foster's 9mm, and villainous Arabs toppled like ninepins in The Kingdom. But Peter Berg's apparently opportunistic actioner closed with a startling last-minute reversal in which our FBI heroes and the son of a slaughtered Saudi terrorist are revealed to be united in their desire to kill 'em all. Quoth Mr. Todd: "They all deserve to die."

Vengeance is a primal theme, and it has hardly been scarce in the last six years. But it has always been justified, if sometimes a shade intemperate. This year, the desire for revenge ripped free from its moorings, catching innocents in its unfriendly fire. A belated slew of Iraq movies tried to make sense of the still-deteriorating situation, but the facts are too outrageous to be contained by fiction. In the Valley of Elah and Redacted hinted at unreconstructable wholes of which only splinters remain, but their hectoring — Elah's upside-down flag; Redacted's shrill performances — grated on the converted ears, and no one else turned up to watch.

More frightening by far than Rendition's chest-beating was The Bourne Ultimatum's casual depiction of innocents being snatched off the street: a hypo in the neck, a hood over the head, and into the unmarked Suburban you go. The government-authorized assassination of a newspaper reporter in a busy train station might be a tad far-fetched, but the operative word is "might."

In Ultimatum, as in The Kingdom, the intra-agency doublespeak zips by at the threshold of comprehension; you're not supposed to understand it all, because who does? The films' heroes act more than they talk, the only thing we can trust in an era when words that once seemed unequivocal — words like "freedom," or "security," or "torture" — have been twisted beyond recognition.

In No Country for Old Men, in There Will Be Blood, in We Own the Night and Into Great Silence, actions spoke louder than words. In Blood's near-silent opening, or No Country's wordless procedural passages, the pleasures and privations of manual labor were a welcome oasis in the virtual world.

Words were hard-won in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, carefully chosen and laboriously conveyed, but the movie is a riot of the senses, despite, or because of, its main character's near-total paralysis. Rebuking the fascistic clarity of high-def, Julian Schnabel and Janusz Kaminski conceived a restless camera-eye forever drifting in and out of focus, shifting its gaze with weightless ease.

In Cristian Mungiu's 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, the latest in a string of astonishing Romanian films that also includes the history-as-farce 12:08 East of Bucharest, the camera is itself paralyzed, resting immobile as a black-market abortionist plays hardball with a pair of desperate young women. Even if the outcome of their battle of wills is never in doubt, it's nonetheless thrilling to see three such finely conceived characters interact with one another, their natural empathy warped by the repression of a totalitarian state.

Although the film includes a lengthy shot of an aborted fetus, Mungiu insists that he has no political intent — that abortion is not, in fact, a political issue in Romania. How lucky they are. Knocked Up and Juno might not grapple fully with the issues involving their protagonists' decision to go full-term, but their simplifications were nothing compared to those who attacked the movies for being Trojan horses for the family-values brigade. When did it become regressive for (fictional) women to give birth? Is that not a choice we're supposed to be pro? Tone-deaf intolerance: It's not just for conservatives any more.

Speaking of tone-deaf, I'm at a bit of a loss to address a film culture that lauds Todd Haynes' I'm Not There while dismissing Julie Taymor's Across the Universe. The critics condescending trashed Taymor's polemical pastiche, a brightly colored examination of the way history is smuggled into three-minute love songs. More than I'm Not There's fastidious deconstruction, Across the Universe

revived the '60s in all its ardor and excess. Haynes shows the Black Panthers puzzling over Dylan's lyrics, but Taymor shows the Weathermen building bombs.

I don't want to create a false dichotomy between the two films, which despite their obvious differences have more in common than not. But the fact that Taymor was attacked for fannish devotion while Haynes was praised for his scholarship is a black mark on the profession. Few of the critics who attacked Taymor for quoting her source tagged Haynes for doing the same, but is "She came in through the bathroom window" any more incongruous a line than "See you later, Allen Ginsberg"? One would think a view fans of Southland Tales' messy aliveness might have responded to the grandeur of Taymor's vision, but apparently the music-crit establishment isn't the only one with a rockist bias.

The fratboy futurism of Southland Tales was surpassed in weight and resonance by Danny Boyle and Alex Garland's Sunshine, a powerfully nihilistic fable of self-willed destruction. Last-act missteps notwithstanding, Boyle and Garland's philosophical thriller — their third crack at the end of the world — seared to the bone. Apocalypse now and forever.

We'll never know if Christopher McCandless sought out his own destruction or just got caught up in his own rhetoric, but Sean Penn's Into the Wild powerfully incarnated both McCandless' exuberant visions and his glaring shortcomings. Critics unable to distinguish the movie's subject from its maker lashed out at McCandless via Penn, but the movie could only have been made by someone who's felt what McCandless once felt, and then lived to outgrow it.

For pure enjoyment, a three-way tie between Black Book, Syndromes and a Century and Superbad. Paul Verhoeven's WWII thriller Black Book plays like the best of Hollywood adventures, only with more fucking and the occasional bucket of shit. But Verhoeven's playfulness and his sadism are intimately linked; just when he's got you feeling great, he pulls the rug out, asserting that all victories are temporary and strife is eternal.

Syndromes and a Century's mirror-image reverie may seem esoteric, but only if you go in expecting it to conform to the rules of traditional narrative. Remove that onus and there's nothing "difficult" about it. There's nothing anyone who's ever read a book or entered a museum can't suss out for themselves, but the strictures of commercial (including art-house) exhibition have become such that audiences won't sit still to have their expectations challenged. With Syndromes, which never opened in my home market, the country's fifth-largest, they missed out on a film that, far from being a chore, left those who saw it beaming from ear to ear.

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Superbad showed what happens when a scabrously funny script in the Judd Apatow mode meets with a real director. Back from a decade in exile, Greg Mottola imposed the editorial discipline that Knocked Up and The 40 Year Old Virgin so painfully lacked. Marrying profane dialogue to sentiment may seem like an obvious trick, but find someone else who can make it seem so effortless. And, to paraphrase Pauline Kael, if you do find that someone, kill him.

Giving didacticism a good name, Bamako's cinematic lecture far surpassed An Inconvenient Truth. Indicting the West's exploitation of Africa's resources, Abderrahmane Sissako literally puts the World Bank on trial, making no attempt to disguise the constructed nature of the proceedings. Camera crews fully visible, he foregrounds the films as both political act and wishful fantasy. In real life, the guilty never pay for such crimes.

Persepolis' cultural mission comes in a more palatable package, but the animated accessibility of Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud's film shouldn't disguise its provocative intent. Its broadly humanist account of Satrapi's childhood demonstrates that Iranians go through unfortunate phases in musical taste, just like we do. But the attack on the "nonchalance and forced nihilism" of the European scions she meets at boarding school acts as a pointed rejoinder to audiences' turn-on/drop-out mind-set. Leery of fanaticism, people seem to feel it's safer not to believe in anything.

The Savages is damned by being "small," but nearly every moment in Tamara Jenkins' dark comedy hits home. Its joys are less in its sharp-edged dialogue than in its moments of quiet observation, like the way Philip Seymour Hoffman grabs for the suitcase of the girlfriend he's letting walk out of his life, and she grabs back, channeling her hurt and anger into a tragically inadequate gesture. Faced with the implacable specter of death and aging, the movie's characters can only watch as their lives ebb away, until they realize how their fear of taking action has sapped the meaning from their lives. Wouldn't it be great if that message caught on?

(s_adams@citypaper.net)