2007 at the Movies: A Look Back

It’s time to look back on the year just past and recall the films most worth remembering and recommending. Several of the best movies of 2007 divide neatly into contrasting pairs – very convenient for a year-end wrap-up essay.

Serial killers inspired two very different, very fine movies, David Fincher’s Zodiac and Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd. Zodiac is a haunting, disquieting film of great technical skill and fine performances, and it was for me the movie of the year.

Tim Burton’s original and explosive talent has often been undone by inferior material. But the powerful Stephen Sondheim musical provides a perfect match. Some of us may have feared the opposite, that Burton and Sondheim would ruin each other, that the whole thing could turn into an arch, campy misfire. But the visual grace and narrative energy of this film is a wonder, as is Johnny Depp’s performance in the title role. The Grand Guignol overstatement in the bloody murder scenes seems to me a bit of a miscalculation, but the movie has an understandably powerful effect on audiences. The photography by Dariusz Wolski and the production design by Dante Ferretti are among the year’s best, and Timothy Spall and young Ed Sanders stand out in a superlative supporting cast.

Animation brilliance arrived in Pixar’s Ratatouille and in the French film Persepolis. If Zodiac is the feel-bad movie of the year, Ratatouille qualifies as the feel-good alternative. The best Pixar movie so far, it will leave you with a big silly grin on your face as you watch the story of a rat who aspires to be a Michelin three-star chef. It is a rhapsodic ode to food as art, to the romance of Paris, and to the alchemy by which Pixar’s wizards transform computer code into smashing entertainment.

Persepolis is far more bittersweet but almost as rewarding. Told mostly in black-and-white images like the autobiographical graphic novel it’s based on, it is the story of Marjane, an Iranian girl who grows up at the time of the downfall of the Shah and the rise of the fundamentalist mullahs. Her parents eventually send her to Europe, and her adventures there and upon her return to Iran make up the second half of the movie. It’s deeply moving without being sentimental, sharply humorous, and told with bracing clarity and insight.

Two phantasmagoric movies took as their starting points musical icons of the 1960s: The Beatles in Julie Taymor’s Across the Universe and Bob Dylan in Todd Haynes’s I’m Not There. The Taymor film features higher highs and lower lows: yet at its best, it’s the most exhilarating movie musical of recent years. The Haynes film is more consistently accomplished, and less interested in entertaining you, although I was enthralled by every minute. It steadfastly refuses to conform to the rules of real biography or of the fictionalized showbiz variety. Instead, with visual brilliance and sometimes astonishing imaginative leaps, it provides a kaleidoscopic journey through aspects of Dylan’s personality and work. (It also features one of the year’s best soundtrack albums.)

Two genre films were lifted into best-of-the-year status by the artistry of their directors: Paul Greengrass’s The Bourne Ultimatum and Andrew Dominik’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Dominik’s film, a meditative look at the legendary outlaw, is fairly demanding of audiences and it did not fare well at the box office. It is stunningly well made, although its script is uneven.

The newest Bourne movie is superbly crafted, somewhat mindless fun, just like the first two. It has two set pieces, one a game of cat-and-mouse in London’s Waterloo Station, the other a chase through the streets and along the rooftops of Morocco, that are among the best of their type ever. Paul Greengrass is one of the most skilled directors in the world, and I believe two of these romps are enough for him. I can’t wait to see what he does next, after making 2006’s best movie, United 93.

Two of the year’s movies take real-life stories with tragic elements (and endings) and turn them into journeys that are often joyous and exhilarating. The subject matter shouldn’t keep you from seeing these movies. Sean Penn’s adaptation of the best-seller Into the Wild, about a reckless yet inspired solo trek into the Alaskan wilderness, is remarkably compelling and beautifully acted. Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly tells the story of a French magazine editor paralyzed by a catastrophic stroke. Able to communicate only by blinking one eye, he managed to dictate the memoir the film is based on. Schnabel, the brilliant director of Before Night Falls, handles this story with visual eloquence, sharp humor, and emotional restraint.

Lake of Fire, a wrenching and brilliantly well-made look at the abortion issue, stands far above the other nonfiction films of the year. Be warned that it’s very strong stuff (it doesn’t go down easily like Michael Moore’s Sicko), but don’t miss it if you care about either the issue itself or about innovative documentary filmmaking.

Let me also draw your attention to two fine 2007 movies that barely got released in theaters, but could make for an extremely rewarding Netflix or Blockbuster rental:

The Italian is a Russian film dealing with a fascinating, heart-wrenching and very topical subject: the effect that the adoptions of Eastern European children by wealthy Westerners have on the local culture – a corrupting, distorting effect that may not immediately be apparent to Western observers. The movie uses a neat point-of-view trick to make its case vividly. A six-year-old boy, soon to be adopted by a well-to-do Italian couple (thus acquiring the nickname that is the movie’s title), becomes obsessed with finding his birth mother instead, and goes to surprising lengths to do so. At first the audience roots against him and for the adoption – but by the end one’s opinion is likely to have swung 180 degrees (at least). A splendid movie with excellent performances, including a really remarkable one by Kolya Spiridonov as the boy.

Into Great Silence is a 3-hour documentary about monks in the French Alps – simply following their daily lives over several months. This was a surprise boxoffice hit in Germany, drew an overflow crowd to its single festival screening in New York, on a Sunday at noon, and received a brief theatrical run at the nonprofit Film Forum. It's fascinating and moving, designed as "meditation rather than information," in the director's words. You’ll need to be in a patient and receptive frame of mind, but it’s like nothing you’ve ever seen.

And finally, two movies that I was fortunate enough to catch at festivals would certainly be on my list, but their theatrical releases will come in 2008. And they will be brief and limited releases, so catch them on DVD if you miss them in theaters. They are the scathing documentary Taxi to the Dark Side, about detainees held by the U.S. in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantanamo; and Gus Van Sant’s latest semi-abstract look at violence and anomie among suburban American youth, Paranoid Park. Both of these movies are as vital and as brilliant as any of 2007’s “official” releases.

Atonement

Atonement is a frustrating movie that ultimately fails in its daunting task: to render in cinematic terms a story that is not just literary in tone, but in fact is actually about a novel, the novelist, and her intentions. I have not read Ian McEwan’s novel, which is widely considered a modern masterpiece, but after seeing the movie adaptation I spoke to two friends who read and loved it to try to pinpoint some of the differences.

Centrally important is the much-discussed narrative twist near the end of the story. I won’t spoil this surprise, but suffice it to say that it involves the very nature of the story we are watching/reading. Readers of the novel report being overcome by the suddenness and brilliance of this device. Yet in the film, it provides a brief, sad surprise, but not much more. There is no real equivalent for the way the narrator of the novel, a novelist herself and a participant in the story, reveals the true nature of the characters and events she has been describing. And in the film the revelation falls flat, despite being delivered expertly by Vanessa Redgrave.

But the first 45 minutes or so of the film are enthralling. The setting is a country estate shortly before the outbreak of World War II. The words and actions of a young man named Robbie are completely misconstrued by the intensely impressionable young sister of the woman he loves, and this misunderstanding cascades into a tragedy of lovers wrongly separated. The atmosphere, the emotion, the shifting perspective are all expertly and beautifully rendered by director Joe Wright (Pride and Prejudice), scenarist Christopher Hampton, cinematographer Seamus McGarvey (The Hours, Charlotte’s Web), and especially the actors: James McAvoy, Keira Knightley, and Saoirse Ronan (really wonderful as 13-year-old Briony). This section of the film refuses to rush, and it succeeds in establishing the deeply sad love story that is the beating heart of both novel and film.

But after this the film is much less satisfying. Although crammed with incident, it remains emotionally static and unconvincing, even before it reaches that tricky bit of storytelling sleight-of-hand at the end. The recreation of the evacuation at Dunkirk is remarkable, but it throws the film out of balance visually – nothing else is conceived on such a large physical scale. The brilliant beginning has built up hopes in the audience that are nearly impossible to fulfill.

The film’s musical score by Dario Marianelli (who also worked with Joe Wright on Pride and Prejudice) deserves special mention. It captures the intense romantic yearning and tragic regret that infuse the story. The soundtrack album, brilliantly recorded, is very beautifully performed by the English Chamber Orchestra, with outstanding solos by the renowned pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet and the cellist Caroline Dale. My only objection is to a device that works well in the film but is jarring and distracting for home listening: a typewriter’s loud striking provides percussion in several of the cuts. It’s another attempt to translate a written story about written stories into movie language.

See Atonement for its performances and its beautiful production and its nearly perfect opening section. Be prepared for frustration after that. It’s a good but deeply flawed film.

Best of 2007

10 Best Features

Zodiac

Ratatouille

Across the Universe

I'm Not There

Sweeney Todd

The Bourne Ultimatum

Persepolis

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

The Italian

Runners-up:

Into the Wild

The Darjeeling Limited

Gone Baby Gone

Rescue Dawn

Hairspray

Michael Clayton

Grindhouse: Planet Terror

Juno

Best nonfiction films:

Lake of Fire

The War (Ken Burns, PBS)

Into Great Silence

The Other Side of the Mirror: Bob Dylan Live at the Newport Folk Festival, 1963-65

No End in Sight

Sicko

No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood

The Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men and P.T. Anderson’s There Will Be Blood are the two most acclaimed movies of the year. Both movies evoke the atmosphere and moral landscape of Westerns without actually being cowboy movies. No Country for Old Men has the plot of a contemporary crime thriller, concerning stolen drug money, with settings along the Mexican border that may remind you of Peckinpah. There Will Be Blood is a generational epic of capitalism, religion, and other “American values” that visually quotes movies such as Giant, Citizen Kane, Days of Heaven, and The Searchers. But neither movie is content to be entertaining. Would that they were!

I had a similar reaction to both of them: they are prodigiously, even beautifully, well crafted, and each is filled with wonderful actors giving their all. (In particular, Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood and Javier Bardem in No Country for Old Men have earned the praise and awards they’ve been getting.) Both movies’ narrative skill will pin you to your seat, spellbound throughout most of their long running times, although not always pleasurably so. And yet I was left cold and unmoved at the end of each of them, and I thought: Why would anyone want to tell these stories, and why should anyone have to sit through them? Both seem to me the products of a facile nihilism: Life is hell, and then you die. (This could apply as well to another highly acclaimed movie of the season, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead.)

I don’t believe my objections are as simplistic as wanting a happy, or at least satisfying, ending, although there was a palpable sense of “Is that it?” in the audiences at the conclusions of both films when I saw them. But a film is a journey, and part of what makes it work is the pleasure of actually arriving somewhere. The final half hours of these two films deliberately deny this pleasure to audiences. There have been many brilliant films with similar qualities and flaws. But for me at least, the narrative dead ends in No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood match their moral and philosophical emptiness.

This is not really the best that our top filmmakers can do. Last year’s Children of Men and Pan's Labyrinth and The Departed and United 93, and this year’s Zodiac and Sweeney Todd – violent and upsetting films all – are much better in my estimation. If you’re a film buff, you’ll of course want to see any new film by Joel and Ethan Coen and by Paul Thomas Anderson. Someday they may make films as accomplished as their talents seem to promise. In Fargo and in Boogie Nights, respectively, they came close. In these two new movies, heaviness and pretension defeat them.

Short Takes: Recent Releases

Michael Clayton takes itself very seriously. Luckily, you don’t have to. It’s a skillfully wrought, occasionally ridiculous corporate-legal thriller. Fine performances help a lot – George Clooney, Tom Wilkinson and Tilda Swinton are all excellent. And the hushed, solemn tone doesn’t necessarily wreck it as entertainment. The Bourne films have also learned this trick. But the whole thing has about as much real gravity as any weekly episode of 24 (which some people take seriously too, to my astonishment). Evil Corporations who will resort to anything, even murder, to protect their ill-gotten gains, make good villains – less politically charged than terrorists.

Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead

It’s interesting to learn that this is a first screenplay – an audacious one, to be sure, but not completely successful. The deliberately over-the-top approach, striving for something like classical tragedy, is eventually wearying, and it has the effect of making the last few plot turns rather too predictable. But Sidney Lumet maintains and intensifies both the narrative and acting tension throughout. The performers are first-rate. But the characters, a small-town jewelry store owner and his loser sons, can’t quite bear the philosophical weight that’s put on them.

Atonement

I brought high expectations to this movie, and this is always perilous to one’s enjoyment. And indeed I felt let down, particularly by the much-discussed “trick ending” which apparently worked much better on the printed page than on screen, despite the very able assistance of Vanessa Redgrave in telling that part of the story in the film. The first half hour or so of the movie is the best: it refuses to rush, it has a unity of location and time, and it has real feeling in introducing the star-crossed love story that is the beating heart of Ian McEwan’s novel and this adaptation. But while the second half of the movie is crammed with incident, it remains emotionally static and unconvincing. I have not read the novel, but I am reliably told it is very fine indeed. Much of its quality must have been lost in translation, and this would hardly be the first instance of that happening. The photography and the performances are first-rate. It’s not a bad film, but it is far from the great one that seems to have been attempted.

Lars and the Real Girl

Although the script and the supporting cast have their charms, and the direction is appealingly low-key, the only reason for this film to have been made, and the only reason to see it, is Ryan Gosling’s wonderful performance. The movie makes gentle fun of its own fey, contrived premise – a mail-order love doll becomes the object of real love – which may be the only sane way to handle it. But Gosling’s utter conviction brings truth and emotional weight to a story that would otherwise float away on a cloud of fey whimsy. You may go to this movie to laugh, but you’re likely to surprise yourself by crying very real tears.

Sweeney Todd

Tim Burton’s original and energetic talent has often been undone by inferior material. But the powerful Stephen Sondheim musical provides a perfect match. Some of us may have feared the opposite, that Burton and Sondheim would ruin each other, that the whole thing could turn into an arch, campy misfire. But the visual grace and narrative energy of this film is a wonder, as is Johnny Depp’s performance in the title role. The Grand Guignol overstatement in the bloody murder scenes seems to me a bit of a miscalculation, but the movie has an understandably powerful effect on audiences. The photography by Dariusz Wolski and the production design by Dante Ferretti are among the year’s best, and Timothy Spall and young Ed Sanders stand out in a superlative supporting cast.

Charlie Wilson’s War

If this movie managed to sustain the smart-alecky, light-fingered satire of its first half hour, it would be a new classic. Unfortunately, it becomes more pedestrian and less skillful as it progresses. Philip Seymour Hoffman gives a great comic performance as a charmingly boorish CIA operative. Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts are mostly just charming. It remains an enjoyable movie, and considering its subject – the secret American funding (by a Democratic congressman from Texas) of the Afghans’ war against the Soviet invasion – that is an accomplishment in itself. But there is the undelivered promise of so much more: a wisecracking political comedy with a real edge. And whether to avoid offending some of the still-living participants in this real-life story, or for other reasons, the filmmakers really miss the boat by soft-pedaling the irony of what happened: that Charlie Wilson’s war led directly to the struggle with Islamist fundamentalism that dominates today’s headlines.

I’m Not There

A kaleidoscopic biography of sorts of Bob Dylan. In formal audacity and technical skill, this is one of the year’s best movies. I’m not sure that it has much real meat or substance – I enjoyed every minute while I was watching it, but the impact hasn’t stuck with me the way it does with many other original and well-wrought films – or the way it does with Dylan’s songs themselves in other contexts. Nonetheless, the music, the actors, the visuals are all excellent, and this is the most satisfying film Todd Haynes has made to date.

Juno

Yet another charming comedy about an unexpected pregnancy. Like Knocked Up, this is handled fairly deftly as a slightly sentimental farce (although this one is less noisy and less aggressively tear-jerking than the earlier movie). Ellen Page and Michael Cera are both wonderful as the young parents, and the rest of the cast is fine too. It’s perhaps more than a little too careful to remain cute and not to cut too deep – the perfect Sundance movie.

Short Takes: Now on DVD

No End in Sight

This is a good, efficient, effective documentary about the war in Iraq and the flawed policies that have characterized it from the beginning – although if you’ve been paying attention to the news for the last five years, you may not learn much that is new. It has been named the best documentary of the year by many major critics’ groups, but it pales in comparison to Taxi to the Dark Side, a far more disturbing film that deals with Afghanistan and Guantanamo as well as Iraq. For the many who have been paying only half attention (or less) to the war, this could be a valuable, instructive work. But they are the least likely to see it, of course.

Stardust

An entertaining little B-picture at heart, although of course in the current fashion it has been lavishly overproduced. But it remains unpretentious and charming, and it features Michelle Pfeiffer in yet another exhilaratingly skillful turn as a villain, coming just a few weeks after Hairspray.

The Bourne Ultimatum

Superbly crafted, somewhat mindless fun, just like the first two. It has two set pieces, one in London’s Waterloo Station, the other a chase through the streets and along the rooftops of Morocco, that are among the best of their type ever. Paul Greengrass is one of the most skilled directors in the world, and two of these romps are enough for him. I can’t wait to see what he does next, after making 2006’s best movie, United 93.

Superbad

A fun, silly, goofy, charming teenage sex farce. The three lead performers, Michael Cera, Jonah Hill, and Christopher Mintz-Plasse, are so good that they lift the film to a higher level than its appealing, good-natured energy would otherwise reach.

Hairspray

Fun fun fun. Nothing great, and not as exhilaratingly transgressive as the John Waters original, but a very enjoyable romp. I miss some of the music from the Waters film too, particularly “The Madison.” It wouldn’t have hurt to mix some of those oldies in with the Broadway score, would it? Michelle Pfeiffer is particularly delightful as the villainess.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

By streamlining the longest of the Potter novels into the shortest of the films, the writer and director have come up with an efficient but rather bloodless end result. The most inspired of the five Potter films so far remains Alfonso Cuaron’s Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban – proof, as if it’s needed, that mere competence is trumped by directorial passion and originality every time.