And here’s my top five:
4/5. A Christmas Tale and Rachel Getting Married
I don’t normally “do” ties, but the latest films from Arnaud Desplechin and Jonathan Demme are so clearly spiritual cousins that I can’t bear to separate them here. The two films tell essentially the same story, in which a family’s festivities are beset by a ne’er-do-well relative who proceeds to stir up some long-percolating resentments in the process. Rachel Getting Married is the more emotionally accessible of the two, perhaps because of its wedding milieu- the arrangements are more or less set by the time Kym (a revelatory Anne Hathaway) arrives on the scene, and Kym needs her family too much to steamroll her sister’s marriage. And for all the trouble she causes, the final result is joyous, an infectious multi-cultural concoction of a wedding that has understandably created a longing in many marriage-minded audience members for a similar ceremony.
A Christmas Tale is a somewhat pricklier piece of work, in large part because it lacks the catharsis of Rachel. This is because Desplechin is far more interested in examining the conflicts between the family members (played by a stellar cast including Catherine Deneuve and Mathieu Amalric) than he is in resolving them. Desplechin realizes that family conflicts can rarely be pinned down to a single cause, and that years of letting these tensions simmer will only make them more pronounced, growing far out of proportion to whatever originally inspired them. But that doesn’t mean that the characters can’t try, and when one of the family members chooses to do the right thing for another, it doesn’t fix everything, but it’s a start.
3. The Duchess of Langeais
It’s gotten to the point where any new Jacques Rivette film is almost guaranteed a place on my yearly top 10 list. Yet even with my built-in love for Rivette’s work, The Duchess of Langeais stands taller than any film the master has made in over a decade. Working from a novel by Balzac (one of the novels that also inspired his mammoth Out 1), Rivette has fashioned an especially brittle tale of l’amour fou, one that’s all the more startling for being steeped in the mores of early 19th-century French society. Perhaps the most surprising thing about the doomed love affair between emotionally constipated general Guillaume Depardieu (another towering performance from an actor taken from us far too soon) and titular duchess Jeanne Balibar is that it’s all idealism, and that if not for the rigid rules of conduct that forbade impropriety, it might have been quickly resolved. Instead, the courtship spirals out of control until gamesmanship has given way to madness.
2. Silent Light
When I saw Carlos Reygadas’ debut feature Japon, I didn’t much care for the film itself, but I definitely recognized the filmmaker’s potential. Two films later, this potential has been fulfilled in Silent Light. Reining in his attention-grabbing tactics (unmotivated acts of violence, sex involving wrinkled and/or overweight people), he trains his visionary camera on a Mexican Mennonite community, and a betrayal that causes a rift in its natural order. From its glorious opening shot, Reygadas’ film contains one spellbinding sequence after another, and is almost certainly the year’s great directorial achievement- a film whose every frame attests to the protean gifts of the man whose vision made it possible.
1. Synecdoche, New York
Is Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut a film about a director who gets stuck up his own ass, or a film by a director stuck up his own ass? Audiences were sharply divided on the merits of Synecdoche, and indeed, it’s the sort of film that’s designed to provoke strong reactions in its viewers. But for me, no film of 2008 spoke more to the way we live now- not necessarily in the moment-to-moment telling of its story, but in the way it all plays out. In theatre director Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman), Kaufman has created a character who craves nothing less than to transcend his own existence by remaking the world in his image, and who among us hasn’t yearned to do the same? Yet for all his efforts, the scale of the project ends up swallowing him whole, and in the end reduces him to a bit player in his own creation.
Make no mistake, Synecdoche, New York is a movie that’s first and foremost about ideas. Yet for a film that stands so resolutely in opposition to traditional notions of entertainment, no movie this year has felt so alive to me, so full of possibility. Kaufman, already a masterful screenwriter, proves a skilled director as well, getting the most not only from his screenplay but from his cast as well. Hoffman’s better here than he’s been in ages, and he’s surrounded by a troupe of some of today’s most fascinating actresses, including Samantha Morton, Michelle Williams, Emily Watson, Dianne Wiest, and especially Catherine Keener as the anti-Caden, the wife who breaks free from Caden’s downward spiral by creating art that’s the exact opposite of her husband’s. Synecdoche certainly isn’t for everyone, but I expect that it’s a movie that we’ll still be passionately debating, arguing about, puzzling over, long after this year’s Oscar nominees have been relegated to the dustbin of movie history.
