Movies matter more than ever, I think. The best of them can be relied upon to counter the Cookie-Cutter Syndrome, that mind-shrinking virus that plagues the way so many people - and movie reviewers - conceive and communicate opinions these days.
Discombobulated by moral shades of gray? Convinced that America is the center of the universe or, conversely, the root of all evil? Hate homosexuality? Wish religious types would keep it to themselves? Whip out your own chosen cookie-cutter - say, Fundamentalist Agnosticism - and slam down your readymade POV on any aspect of art or life that gives you the willies. That way, reality can be shaped into simple, familiar forms. No need to fret about how much living, breathing, recalcitrant complexity has been cut away. Like the poet said: "Humankind cannot bear very much reality."
The five top films of 2005 are all about revelations, shining the light of day on what's been buried, what's gone (rightly or wrongly) underground. Each of these powerful visions edges us morally and spiritually out of easy, familiar readings of sin and redemption, violence and death. Most of all, they deconstruct different ideas and forms of love and home, brotherhood and community. The best motion pictures are votes for getting behind an artist's idiosyncratic gaze to eyeball The Big Picture in all its daunting, glorious, supercharged and infinite variety.
1. Tommy Lee Jones' "The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada"
An old-fashioned cowboy (director-writer-actor Jones) carries the corpse of his "brother" - an illegal immigrant carelessly shot down by a small-souled border cop - back to Mexico for burial. Revenge morphs slowly into penance and redemption as the cowboy forces the cop (Barry Pepper) to suffer Melquiades Estrada's long, terrible journey home. "Burials" celebrates, in unexpectedly salty and blackly funny forms, love and loyalty among men, the pleasures of the flesh and its awful dissolution, dreams of home and heaven, the fathering of a sinful son into La Vita Nuova and a colorful host of Western types and landscapes. "Pilgrim's Progress" by way of William Faulkner's "As I Lay Dying" and Sam Peckinpah's "Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia." (Acting awards: Jones, Pepper, Melissa Leo; film due in Seattle in February)
2. Michael Haneke's "Caché"
Epater le bourgeoisie with a vengeance! A middle-class French couple (Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche) find themselves stalked by a mysterious "watcher" who sends scary videos of their home and chilling postcards featuring a crude cartoon of a child spewing bright-red blood. Their picture-perfect life, filled with books and friends and a child that never touch them too deeply, comes under siege when a terrible offense the husband committed as a selfish child seemingly returns to haunt them. Though his Original Sin was committed against an Algerian orphan, what's really been "hidden" in the heart of this monstrous Everyman is moral vacuity, a failure of empathy so great it infects his every relationship. Multiplied by many, Haneke hints, such failures may poison the world. (Acting awards: Daniel Auteuil, Juliette Binoche; film due in Seattle in January)
3. Ang Lee's "Brokeback Mountain"
A love story so powerful it embraces us all. Two homeless cowboys (Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger) fall into passion by accident, then find they've become each other's lodestone for life. Exiled from their paradisiacal high country, manfully trying to bury their truest selves, Ang Lee's nowhere men drift through work, marriages and the years, until death makes their divorce final. During the Q&A that followed a recent Frye Museum panel on the best films of 2005, a gentleman in the audience - who hadn't, of course, seen "Brokeback" - announced that the movie was part of "a gay and lesbian conspiracy" and labeled Larry McMurtry, of "Lonesome Dove" fame, a "traitor" for having adapted Annie Proulx's short story for the screen. I give you the Cookie-Cutter Syndrome in full bloom, doing violence to a magnificent film that, by limning the terrible beauty of loneliness and loss in the New West, reveals the mutable shape of being human. (Acting awards: Ledger, Gyllenhaal, Michele Williams)
4. Steven Spielberg's "Munich"
Occasionally there are directors whose films don't so much look as though they were shot with a camera, as viscerally manipulated and moved in a hands-on dream. Wizards like Peter Jackson and Steven Spielberg project their love of cinematic texture, color, motion so sensually and directly, it's as though they make their homes in the very substance of celluloid. They recall the futuristic cop in Spielberg's "Minority Report" who prevented crime before it could be committed - by literally shaping video-screen reality with his eyes and hands. You might say that with "Munich" Spielberg has imagined a movie he hopes might stop a crime before it's committed endlessly. Demanding and nonpartisan, "Munich" exposes a world trapped in a cycle of violence, tit-for-tat terrorism. There's no exit from this horrorshow, once it gets rolling - from the Munich Olympics massacre in 1972 to today's suicide bombing in Iraq. To meet this film on its own homeground, one must leave a lot of baggage behind - as apparently the Israeli Mossad, conservative American pundits and knee-jerk Spielberg-bashers cannot. "Munich" invites all of us to break bread together - so simple, so impossible - in celebration not of god or country but of humankind. (Acting awards: Eric Bana, Geoffrey Rush, Ciarán Hinds)
5. David Cronenberg's "A History of Violence"
How and where might a man bury his bad self? Is it wise to go all schizophrenic, splitting off half of one's psyche? Cronenberg has always screened those questions darkly, from "Rabid" and "The Brood" to "Videodrome" and "Dead Ringers." In "A History," a perfect family basks in the warmth and neighborliness of an American Heartland community, especially after Tom Stall handily takes out two psychos about to visit mayhem on his diner customers. Just that one eruption of violence opens up Viggo Mortensen's low-key homebody to something stronger than pastel / pastoral passions - as well as blood debts called in from his gangster past. Stall's mask of sweet probity soon begins to muscle up into hard resolve to save his family and exorcize his demons. The question is whether, having let the beast out of its cage, he can ever go home again. You have only to compare "A History"'s two lovemaking scenes - one tenderly fueled by a high-school cheerleader fantasy, the other a primal, rough coupling in a stairwell - to wonder how much the darkness behind the brain may energize human creativity and how much the sunny rule of reason retards it. And vice versa, of course. (Acting awards: Mortensen, Maria Bello, William Hurt)
The second five are in alphabetical order:
George Clooney's "Good Night, and Good Luck."
A fairy tale told in voluptuous shades of black and white, featuring Edward R. Murrow (David Strathairn) playing Gandalf to Joseph McCarthy's (himself) Saruman. Was there ever such an enchanted time, when a noble newsman faced the television camera with truth, justice and the American way foremost on his mind? Probably not, as so many revisionists have been quick to testify, but how exhilarating to watch Murrow and his posse of dedicated reporters and researchers - as well as producer Fred Friendly (Clooney) - behave as though broadcasting the unvarnished truth were all that mattered. I thought of "Good Night" as I watched Katrina groupie/"People" magazine hottie Anderson Cooper edge Aaron Brown, far too aware of ambiguities, out of his CNN anchor chair. (Acting awards: Strathairn, Clooney, Frank Langella, Ray Wise)
Werner Herzog's "Grizzly Man"
A very creepy, gripping documentary about a loser among men who takes up with the tribe of bear. Child-man Timothy Treadwell returns obsessively to the wilds of Alaska to film himself chatting up and hanging out with grizzlies, recording pretentious rants into his camera, star of his own movie. Though he counts his ursine friends as fellow cast members, it's horribly clear that they hardly register his existence. Still, it's a shock to witness a man who so desperately wanted to be somebody reduced to a ribcage, a bear's leftovers. Werner Herzog turns his quirky gaze on Treadwell's footage as well as the friends and family he left behind - layering on his own personality to double the metacinematic frisson. Ambling through isolated meadows trailed by a couple of curious foxes, Treadwell joins Herzog heroes Kaspar Hauser and Aguirre, lost somewhere between feral and civilized life.
Fatih Akin's "Head-On"
A would-be suicide and an alcoholic janitor recovering from a head-on collision with a wall run into each other in a German hospital. Sibel longs to escape her strict Turkish family, while Cahit, an expatriate, seems to wish for nothing except another drink, an occasional roll in the hay, getting through the night. Inexplicably roped into a marriage of convenience, the older man reaps the rewards of domesticity while his beautiful wife revels in urban dives and one-night stands. Out of this unpromising union, a fragile love is born, put on ice for years, then resurrected back in Turkey. Settings are gritty and dark, and the actors' performances so sharp they hurt: as the two evolve, bleed, suffer, nearly die, come home at last, each becomes the other's slantwise salvation. (Acting awards: Birol Unel, Sibel Kekilli)
Craig Brewer's "Hustle & Flow"
A Memphis pimp gets his eye on the American Dreams and raps his way to unlikely success, carrying his "family" with him. Richard T. Jameson rightly likens this to a Frank Capra movie; it simmers and shimmers with that authentic "Wonderful Life" faith in the possibility of success against all odds, not to mention its sheer delight in an ensemble cast of wonderfully motley misfits. When DJay gets possessed by the notion that he could be somebody, that evolutionary idea gets inside the heads of everyone around him, literally transforming losers into standouts (especially bug-eyed, slow-witted Shug - Taraji P. Henson - breaking out of her cocoon in a glory of prettiness, song, humor and love). Graced with ripe, rhythmic language, "Hustle & Flow" never sells out its down-and-dirty origins as hopes rise. But what really fires up the film is the emergence of an authentic movie star: Terrence Howard, 36, hits the screen and claims it as his own as casually and completely as Marlon Brando used to do in his salad days. "Hustle & Flow" and Paul Haggis' "Crash" spotlight an extraordinarily graceful performer who makes acting look dead easy, like Fred Astaire dancing anywhere. (Acting awards: Howard, Henson, Anthony Anderson, D.J. Qualls, Ludacris)
Noah Baumbach's "The Squid and the Whale"
A cinematic kunstlerroman about growing up absurd as sons of two New York intellectuals (Laura Linney and Jeff Daniels) who share every juicy detail of their private lives and public posturing with their hapless offspring. When these monstres sacrés decide to divorce, they sit down with their brainy kids to talk rationally about necessary arrangements - for instance, which days the cat will spend with whom - utterly oblivious to the younger boy's tearstained, shattered face. It's all about them, how the two rival novelists will survive and one-up the other - while we are privileged to witness the ways their parents' separation wrecks comedy and tragedy alike in the brothers' lives. Writer-director Baumbach paints his pretentious parents as refugees from a screwball comedy - think of a Brooklyn College "Philadelphia Story" - all heartless affectation and fictionalized emotions. This ultimately forgiving biographical film never forgets that you must forge your own character, make your own art, despite the longing and loyalty generated by them that bore you. Hilarious, poignant, too true. (Acting awards: Linney, Daniels, Owen Kline, Jesse Eisenberg, Billy Baldwin)
actors to HONOR
Cillian Murphy, "Breakfast on Pluto"; Joaquin Phoenix, "Walk the Line"; Phillip Seymour Hoffman, "Capote"; Mickey Rourke, "Sin City"; Russell Crowe, "Cinderella Man"
ACTRESSES TO HONOR
Catherine Keener, "Capote"; Felicity Huffman, "Transamerica"; Naomi Watts, "King Kong"; Reese Witherspoon, "Walk the Line"[[In-content Ad]]
