The 10 Best Movies of 2004
By Yeah, I know, it’s March, but I wanted to see a couple more things (one of which ended up quite high on the list), and re-screen a couple that are out on DVD. (And, hey, I won’t be the last person on this blog to get his list out!) So, anyway, in rough order of preference:
1. Sideways You know about this one; my original comments here, and I reply to its critics here.
2. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind For the philosophy, see John Holbo. A beautiful film, marvelously portraying the extent to which relationships exits in memory as much through pain as pleasure, and the punchline accepts Warren Zevon’s wisdom. Kate Winslet is a marvel, of course, and the supporting cast exceptional. That sounds like easily the best movie of the year, and if you ask me in a week I might think so. Basically, comparing Sideways (almost perfect if you accept it for what it is) and the more risky Eternal Sunshine shows the pointlessness of rankings, like trying to rank, I dunno, Lubitsch with prime Altman.
But for me, it’s not quite the masterpiece Kaufman/Gondry have in them, and a couple more viewings made me figure out why something was missing. I could complain about a few niggling flaws–too many flashbacks on the beach, for example–but that’s trivial, and when the success ratio is this high one accepts that Kaufman will occasionally fire a blank and forget it. While it’s Kaufman’s best script, there’s one flaw: compare the male lead characters. Remember BJM and Adaptation–in the former you had the chilling emergence of envy and cruelty, and of course his stand-in in the latter was riven by any number of productive dilemmas. But in this film, Joel Barish is basically a void, and as a result his suffering is more asserted than dramatized. (For all the bitching people do about the Giamatti/Madsen relationship, is this one any more plausible?) And that brings us to an even more problematic comparison, the actor. The underrwritten male character needn’t be fatal; look at what the cast of Million Dollar Baby did with virtually nothing to work with. So, if you think that Jim Carrey is the great, underrated actor many do, then David Edelstein’s conclusion seems inevitable. Me, I think he’s a competent but labored and soulless dramatic actor, and a gifted comic actor I don’t get (but whose histrionics when not trying to be funny are intensely irritating.) So I marginally prefer Sideways. But I’m not confident I’ll still believe that this time next year.
3. A Very Long Engagement I’m not sure why I was so reluctant to see this. I guess it’s that I distrust whimsy on a temperamental level, so was particularly concerned that Jeunet and war wouldn’t mix. And, yeah, the film is populated more by collections of quirks that characters. But his aesthetic command is so original and thrilling, and Audrey Tatou so irresistible, that you won’t care.
4. Vera Drake I reviewed it here.
5. Bad Education A marginal step down from his previous two films, but that’s certainly not an insult.
6. Maria Full of Grace No great formal innovations or breakthrough insight, but marvelously well-executed.
7. The Dreamers Perhaps the most obvious victim of incompetent Medvedite criticism this year-not in the sense that critics had moralistic objections, but that they confused the characters with the director. The issue is not that some critics didn’t like the film- Bertolucci almost always works at the edge of silliness, and whether a film falls over the edge (as, for me, did Stealing Beauty, The Sheltering Sky, 1900…) or not is highly idiosyncratic. Rather, many critics seem to misunderstand what Bertolucci was doing. Many reviewers focused on the silliness of the main characters, which is 1)true, but 2)beside the point. Yes, of course, the politics of May ’68 are largely background to debates about the merits of Clapton and Hendrix and movies and getting laid. But 1)that captures a real truth, and 2)I suspect most people have been there. One of his best; I suspect it will age considerably better than Last Tango in Paris. A.O. Scott gets it about right.
8. Red Lights You can never have too many well-turned Hitchcockian thrillers. And, actually, they’re now pretty rare when you think about it.
9. Kinsey You don’t hear much about it anymore, but despite its occasional lapses into the repressive hypothesis it was a better movie than one could have reasonably expected. I will never gainsay an Oscar nomination for Laura Linney, but Sarsgaard was the standout.
10. Hero Has been more than adequately discussed by my co -bloggers. I much prefer Yimou Zhang’s non-martial arts phase, but he’s one of the greatest talents in the medium.
Choice Reissues: Au Hazard Balthasar, I Vitelloni, The Big Red One
Honorable Mention: Festival Express (Especially for the Janis footage), Closer (Arbitrary but effective), Fahrenheit 9/11 (Frustrating missed opportunities and misdirection politically, succeeds on its found footage), The Aviator (Certainly makes much better Oscar bait than Richard Attenborough.)
Academy of the Overrated: Million Dollar Baby (first-class acting, very well crafted, script with more cliches than a Starship songbook), The Incredibles (first half lives up to the hype, but slides into dreary action picture far too early), Dogville (Oh, shut the fuck up.)