Best Films of 2007

Before you look at this list, you should know that I haven't yet seen The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, The Savages, I'm Not There, Persepolis, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, or La Vie en Rose.

I have seen No Country for Old Men, Juno, Atonement, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, No End in Sight, Into the Wild, The Orphanage, Michael Clayton, and Gone Baby Gone-none of which are in my Top 10.

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford , dir. Andrew Dominik
The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford opens a crack in the wall of time past, allowing us a glimpse into a famous act of violence, a murder that appears simple and simply motivated now but that was, in fact, at once as prosaic as a street killing and as mysterious and mythic as the murder of a king. The film isn't merely a meticulous recreation of the Border States of the 1880s and of the last weeks of the life of Jesse James (and, after that, in a long, lyrical, ultimately heartbreaking epilogue, of the "coward" Robert Ford), it is a meditation not on the price of fame but on its crushing burden and on the way the “meaning of the past” slowly solidifies around one set of footprints, while all the myriad others are blown away like dust. The Assassination of Jesse James—which isn't so much an assassination as the suicide of a burned-out man sick to death of being "Jesse James," followed by the short-lived ascension to celebrity of his killer, who then is himself all-too-quickly ensnared in the fatality of being "Robert Ford" —is, I think, a genuinely great movie that tells us something sad, teasing, and true about the way legends are spun out of the whirl of time, chance, and ambitious men. I can't say enough about Brad Pitt (I can't believe I just wrote that line), who gives far and away the finest performance of his career as James, and Casey Affleck as Ford. Or about Roger Deakins marvelous cinemaotography. Or Nick Cave's great score. IMO, and that of a surprising number of others, this was the best film of 2007.

There Will Be Blood, dir. Paul Thomas Anderson
In what is something like a cross between Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane and Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, director PT Anderson creates a nutball classic—a lyrical, caustic, semi-delirious “biography” of a self-made tycoon in turn of the twentieth century America so caught up in amassing a fortune that his only pleasure becomes conquering and destroying anyone who betrays his trust, injures his vanity, or stands in his way. In miner-turned-oil-baron Daniel Plainview, Anderson conjures a protagonist who comes as close to being a Marlovian villain as any I’ve ever seen in the movies—the very personification of the soulless greed at the root of entrepreneurial capitalism. Daniel Day-Lewis performance in this life-denying/heaven-defying role is one for the ages. The wonderful Ligeti-like score by Radiohead’s lead guitarist Jonny Greenwood is the best of this past year—and one of the best in memory. Robert Elswit’s cinematography is almost as good as—and in the film’s long, lyric, wordless passages, frankly reminiscent of—Roger Deakins’ in The Assassination of Jesse James.

Inland Empire, dir. David Lynch
For several films now--beginning with Lost Highway (although you find hints of "doubles" in Blue Velvet and earlier films)--director David Lynch has delighted in not just oveturning one of the three unities (time, place, and action), but in seemingly obliterating all three. The same actors simultaneously play different characters in seemingly different stories and in seemingly different places. It's as if Lynch were depicting a world filled with parallel universes or, perhaps more to his point, a world in which dreams (which, of course, also obliterate the three unities) co-exist alongside "realities." Or sometimes simply replace realities.

What is interesting about Lynch movies—particularly his best movies—is how closely they mimic the logic of dreams. Though they may seem to make no or only partial sense while we're dreaming, they can when we awaken supply clues to their interpretation. This is another way of saying that, while the unities of place and time (and in Lynch, identity) are obliterated, the unity of action actually isn't. It just seems to be. With enough puzzling out, a plot can usually be pieced together from the dream-like motifs (and repetitions and transmogrifications of those motifs) that Lynch always supplies. His are not necessarily traditional plots with a beginnings, middles, and ends in which each part leads away from and toward another with high narrative probability; nor is narrative probabilities conventional in Lynch films, which work more to the rhythms of emotions (as dreams do) than to the syllogistic rhythms of logic, although his films are certainly not bereft of logic or of its great child, wit.

Hollywood may be the perfect setting for stories about dreamworlds, as dreams are its business. Mulholland Drive, Lynch's greatest film (and his most tragic), is about this very nexus. While Inland Empire is also a bit about Hollywood, its title gives you a kind of clue about how it extends out into the dark suburbs of that dream world. The Inland Empire is the name of an actual geographical spot in Southern California, comprising San Bernadino and Riverside counties. It isn't Hollywood; it is just east of L.A., neighboring it. Some of the film is set there; some in Hollwyood itself; and some, rather bizarrely, in Poland. But the Inland Empire—what a wonderfully evocative name!—is clearly also inside us.

It's funny how often Lynch revisits certain themes. He is obsessed with the reality of evil and the possiblity of transcending it; he sees the forces of both as impulses within us and without. It would not surprise me to learn that he believes in demons and angels—they've certainly showed up in many of his films (memorably in Fire Walk With Me, the prequel to Twin Peaks)—and that, though he sees the world as a temptation to do our worst to ourselves and those we love, he believes we are capable of salvation. Many of his films are like old-fashoned morality plays, albeit told by a Surrealist poet with a Freudian bent.

Above all else, love—which, as we are told in this film, is strange—is the mainspring of his work. Love as a spectrum of emotions that, at one end compels us to evil, selfish, sadomasochictic acts and, at the other, to brave, selfless, redemptive ones. His characters are often carried on a learning journey from one end of this spectrum to another, as in Blue Velvet and, I believe, this film.

Though I don't think Inland Empire is one of Lynch's great films; it is, IMO, easily one of the best films of 2007 (which is when most of the world saw it).

Be aware, if you plan to rent or buy the DVD of Inland Empire, that it was shot on what I think may have been ordinary DV video. Some of you are going to be a little appalled by the way it looks. I was not. After a bit of accomodation, the dark, blotchy, sometimes deliberately ill-ficused way it looks comes to serve its story in the same way that the opulent darkness of Mulholland Dr. served it.

The Lives of Others , dir. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck
Though I put this movie on my 2006 list, I saw it in 2007 (as did most other folks). In it, the gifted young German director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck has written and directed one of the best films of the year. The picture, set in the mids-80s in the lethally corrupt world of the German Democratic Republic (still the most Stalinist of Soviet client states even with Glasnost and the fall of the Berlin Wall looming a few short years in the future), revolves around three men who are in love with a beautiful East German actress—one a celebrated East German playwright who has thus far successfully managed the vertiginous balancing act between creating art and remaining loyal to the state, one a high-ranking Communist bureaucrat who wants the playwright discredited so that he can have the woman for himself, and one a lonely meticulous Stasi (East German secret police) agent who is given the job of digging up the evidence that will condemn the playwright. The movie operates simultaneously, and with astonishingly uniform success, on three levels: 1) as a political thriller in which we fear for the fate of the naive but courageous playwright and his ever-more-deeply-compromised lover; 2) as a socio-political expose of the cruelty and moral bankruptcy of the GDR apparatchiks, who, selfishly and heartlessly, use the ideals of Communism to advance their own positions and to answer their own needs, and of the vulnerability of the East German intelligentsia, who were regularly forced to choose between betraying themselves, friends, and loved ones or facing imprisonment and internal exile or ending their own lives, which so many did ; and 3) as a moral tragedy brought about by the basic human motives of love, courage, frailty, jealousy, fear, and vengeance, here greatly intensified by the unanswerable moral binds of a corrupt state. At the very center of the story is the Stasi agent, who learns—in spite of his own soulless efficiency and deep-seated belief in the utterly predictable, unswerving banality of human behavior—compassion and the possibility of change. By bearing witness to the lives of the playwright and his lover through electronic eavesdropping on conversations and phone calls, he, like an audience of one at a play that is played for mortal stakes, discovers his own humanity through theirs. Though the movie is deeply sad, it is also, finally, deeply satisfying in its affirmation that, even in the grey, stifling world of Communist bureaucracy, selflessness, heroism, and personal transcendence were still possible. The wonder of this wonderfully intelligent, wonderfully well-written movie is that its complex moral is so completely rooted in dialogue and action that it never stoops to monger its messages or hammer home its points. It is a model of artful plotting.

Eastern Promises , dir. David Cronenberg
I review this film in the next issue of Playback.

Zodiac , dir. David Fincher
I review this film in the next issue of Playback.

Sweeney Todd , dir Tim Burton
A bold rethinking of Sondheim’s great musical that in its youth, sexiness, and bloodiness reminded me of Polanski’s rethinking of Macbeth.

The Bourne Ultimatum , dir. Paul Greengrass
Greengrass’ second, exciting, expertly made installment of the Bourne saga (another very good one was made by director Doug Liman). This one boasts two memorable action sequences—one involving a race through the streets and across the rooftops of Tangiers, the other a terrific car chase through Manhattan.

(tie) Death Proof, (from Grindhouse) dir. Quentin Tarantino; The Kingdom, dir. Peter Berg; You Kill Me, dir. John Dahl; and The Lookout, dir. Scott Frank

I review the first two of these films in the next issue of Playback. You Kill Me is a dry, droll, silly but satisfying black comedy from director John Dahl, about a hit man with a drinking problem who is sent to AA in San Francisco by his Buffalo, NY mob boss. With the great Sir Ben Kingsley as the saturnine hit man, Frank, and Téa Leoni as his eventual love interest, Laurel. The Lookout , screenwriter Scott Frank's directorial debut, is a somewhat predictable (and sentimental) crime drama with an interesting Memento-like plot twist and a tough, touching performance by Joseph Gordon-Levitt as its mentally impaired protagonist. (This is the second very fine performance from Gordon-Levitt, who was also terrific in Brick.)