Gateway Cinephiles

The Best Films of 2009

2009 has been an interesting year for cinema. While it didn’t boast the ridiculously generous quantity of superior films that 2007 can claim, or 2008’s uncommon breadth of form and subject, this year has proven to be a exciting one, provided viewers had the courage to seek out the gems amid an increasingly homogeneous sludge of multiplex inanities and arthouse banalities. No overriding artistic theme has emerged from 2009, but among its most estimable works were those that strove to bend the rules, to various degrees of success. 24 City, Avatar, The Beaches of Agnès, The Girlfriend Experience, Inglourious Basterds, The Limits of Control, and Of Time and the City all upended the conventions of genre, narrative, and visual possibility to marvelous effect. Yet it was also a year for astonishing films executed with established cinematic methods and within familiar generic modes: farce (In the Loop), horror (Drag Me to Hell), gangster (Gomorrah), science-fiction (Moon), and war (The Hurt Locker). The finest dramatic and comedic narrative features were not mainstream critical darlings, but already-forgotten greats like Bright Star, Goodbye Solo, and A Serious Man, or non-English-language triumphs such as 35 Shots of Rum, Summer Hours, and Treeless Mountain. Superior animated films were conspicuous in 2009 as well, as it saw the release of Coraline, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Ponyo, Up, and the lamentably undistributed Sita Sings the Blues.

Without further ado, let’s get to the best of 2009. To be considered, a film must have opened in America between January 1 and December 31, 2009 in wide, limited, or select city release. Film festival premieres don’t count, but even, say, a one-week run in New York City does. As with my previous year-in-review features, I’ve avoiding numerical rankings, which I find difficult to assign and fairly ridiculous anyway. This year I’ve selected five films that I believe are flat-out masterpieces, nine exceptional contenders, and one undistributed little marvel.

Go to the Best Films of 2009…

Mr. Cameron Wants You to Be Comfortable While He Does His Thing

Avatar
2009 (USA)
Director: James Cameron
Viewed: December 22, 2009
Format: 3D Digital Theatrical Projection (AMC West Olive)

I was only one year old when Star Wars was released in 1977, which means that for all practical purposes, I’ve always lived in a post-Star Wars world.  While I later participated quite enthusiastically in the broader consumer phenomenon often summed up as simply “Star Wars,”—encompassing sequels, toys, comics, and card games, to name just the few products I personally devoured—I was too young to catch Star Wars: A New Hope in its original theatrical release.  Even if I had been a few years older at the time, I obviously wouldn’t have been able to appreciate it as anything other than an entertaining tale of adventure.  Accordingly, when older generations speak of the revolutionary nature of Star Wars as cinema, of how it blew their minds and opened up previously undreamed possibilities in terms of the places movies could take us, I’ve always nodded along without ever truly understanding what they were saying.  How could I?  Subsequent cinema has been irrecoverably altered—or tainted, depending on your point of view—by the existence of Star Wars and is phenomenal commercial success.

Perhaps the highest praise I can bestow on James Cameron’s mind-bogglingly expensive 3D science-fiction epic, Avatar, is that I can now understand how my forebears felt when they first settled in to let Star Wars wash over them.  There’s nothing particularly nuanced about Avatar, which is essentially a standard science-fiction adventure, straight up, no chaser.  Thematically, emotionally, and structurally, its ambitions are modest, even pedestrian.  However, like Star Wars before it, Avatar is a revolutionary film.  You’ve heard it a hundred times before, but this time is indisputably true: This Is Like Nothing I Have Ever Seen.  It is fitting that it has been birthed by James Cameron, a technophilic film-maker whose finest works tell simple stories with relentless energy and discreet intelligence.  It’s a cliché to insist that a movie must be seen in the theaters to be appreciated, but Avatar is the first film in memory than positively demands that it be experienced in its full glory, and that means 3D digital theatrical projection.  This is a film that will be a shadow of its former self on even the most elaborate home theater system.  Trust me on this: cough up the funds for that overpriced multiplex ticket, and prepare to see a new world unfold before your eyes.

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Late to the Game: The Limits of Control

2009 (USA)
Director: Jim Jarmusch
Viewed: December 26, 2009
Format: DVD - Universal (2009)

Whether a given viewer will find Jim Jarmusch’s The Limits of Control to be a gorgeous slice of generic deconstruction and existential provocation, or just a frustrating string of opaque, inert set pieces will be a matter of taste.  Count me among those who, while conscious of the film’s pretensions, found Jarmusch’s latest work invigorating.  The film follows a sleepless Lone Man (Isaach De Bankolé, resplendent in sharkskin suits) as he travels across Spain on a sinister errand, meeting a progression of oddballs with whom he exchanges matchboxes and cryptic messages.  Backstory and motives are never elaborated upon, because of course the film’s thriller elements aren’t the point. (To wit, Jarmusch stages a James Bond infiltration sequence entirely off-screen.)  The director is working in Lynch-country here, sans that director’s smudging of dream and reality.  The Limits of Control is foremost about the evocation of mood: through conversations laden with significance; repeated dialog, objects, and motifs; Christopher Doyle’s sun-kissed cinematography; and the soundtrack by experimental metal group Boris.  While the absence of emotional footholds necessarily limits the film’s potency, Jarmusch nonetheless delivers a daring and inexplicably compelling work about, well, control, and its increasingly illusory nature in the modern world.

Late to the Game: Five Minutes of Heaven

2009 (UK)
Director: Oliver Hirschbiegel
Viewed: December 24, 2009
Format: DVD - IFC (2009)

Just as Oliver Hirschbiegel’s uncommonly penetrating Nazi epic Downfall pivoted on Bruno Ganz’ portrayal of Adolf Hitler, so too does his tale of the Irish Troubles’ aftermath rests on the shoulders of an actor.  However, Five Minutes of Heaven’s most riveting performance isn’t delivered by its most familiar face, Liam Neeson, whose repentant Loyalist now works in conflict resolution.  Leonine and haunted, Neeson suits the material well, but the film’s locus is unequivocally James Nesbitt, as the brother of a Catholic man a seventeen-year-old Neeson gunned down.  Goaded into confronting his brother’s murderer by a company that engineers reconciliations for television, Nesbitt is wholly mesmerizing as a frayed man who is utterly unapologetic about his hatred and his lust for revenge.  Hirschbiegel and writer Guy Hibbert never lose sight of the story’s essential theme of the futility of blood-for-blood, but they are unafraid of exploring other avenues, such as the insidious nature of indoctrination, the toxic effects of grief on families, and, most damningly, the manner in which the media exploits human tragedy and treats peacemaking as just another bit of niche programming.  It’s primarily some third act wheel-spinning and narrative goofiness that prevents the film from feeling like an unqualified success.

Late to the Game: The Hangover

2009 (USA)
Director: Todd Phillips
Viewed: December 24, 2009
Format: DVD - Warner Brothers (2009)

Although hardly the Second Coming of raunchy comedies that the hype suggested, The Hangover establishes that the “lost night” high concept can work when executed with sufficiently nasty enthusiasm and held aloft by a cast willing to fritter around in its weirder crannies.  Call it, Dude, Where’s the Groom?  Director Phillips and writers John Lucas and Scott Moore at least understand the appeal of their pseudo-detective story conceit.  They maintain the focus on delivering unexpected gags right to the end, at which juncture nearly every plot point clicks into place.  (Very, dare I say, Shakespearean, that.)  Frequently, the laughs the films coaxes are guffaws of sheer disbelief, whether from a teacher swiping kids’ field trip money for the casino tables, or a naked Chinese gangster popping out of a car trunk.  The cast keeps things afloat, especially Ed Helms in clueless square mode and Zach Galifianakis’ unexpectedly effective space cadet shtick.  Too often, however, The Hangover errs on the side of gleefully gratuitous slapstick, when it isn’t indulging in sexist twaddle.  Helms’ ludicrously shrewish wife in particular is an offensive bit of caricature that serves as a convenient straw-woman for the film’s stale, contemptuous “Let Boys Be Boys” ethos.

Late to the Game: Terminator Salvation

2009 (USA)
Director: McG
Viewed: December 18, 2009
Format: DIRECTV DEMAND

Just as Nick Stahl’s skittish, fatalistic John Connor fit Rise of the Machines‘ ferocious rush towards a bleak future, a zealous yet cynical Christian Bale–plagiarizing his Batman growl–suits Terminator Salvation’s gritty realization of that future.  This, and the admittedly seamless visual effects, is about the only thing that McG’s distressingly rote sequel gets right.  This outing’s central conceit–SkyNet has spawned an experimental half-human, half-machine abomination (a rugged, essentially charmless Sam Worthington)–isn’t remotely meaty enough to sustain a feature film.  The story is as limp as a noodle, but even as a mindless science-fiction actioner, Salvation fumbles.  At about the halfway point, McG trades genuinely frightening early set pieces for dull sensory incoherence.  Blessedly, it’s not the nerve-frying visual lunacy of a Michael Bay film, but just the undistinguished smash-bang nonsense that has characterized vast swaths of the past two decades’ action films.  That such mediocrity has befallen that Terminator saga is all the more frustrating given that the film-makers are clearly besotted with the previous films, loading Salvation with references and homages that range from the blatant to the clever. If only fanboy enthusiasm alone were sufficient to conjure a good film.

Once Upon a Time, In a Place Called “Crescent City”…

The Princess and the Frog
2009 (USA)
Directors: Ron Clements and John Musker
Viewed: December 13, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print (AMC West Olive)

It’s been five years since Disney Animation Studios has produced a narrative feature that was at least partly hand-drawn, and longer than that since the venerable House of Mouse’s roughly annual doses of animated cheer could be regarded as unique cinematic events.  (1999’s Tarzan being the last triumph by my reckoning.)  It’s not surprising, then, that The Princess and the Frog is being trumpeted by the studio itself as a kind of overdue return to form.  In the wake of forgettable computer-generated mediocrities such a Chicken Little and Meet the Robinsons, there is a steely logic in Disney’s decision to abandon its anemic Pixar apings and instead pursue films created according to the template of its successful Renaissance features.  Indeed, TPatF possesses all the hallmarks of the studio’s 1990s films: hand-drawn animation embellished with dazzling visual effects; Broadway-style musical storytelling; a young, appealing protagonist; goofy comic relief characters; and simplistic moral lessons.  Perhaps it’s the long absence of that Disney Magic(TM)–benign, kid-friendly entertainment executed with stunning visual achievement–that makes that familiarity work so well in The Princess and the Frog.  Certainly, there’s very little that’s unexpected in Ron Clements and John Musker’s Jazz Age fairy tale.  However, there’s also nothing wrong with following a formula when the result is so gorgeous.  Just as Pixar has established itself as preeminent purveyor of children’s fare that is thematically richer and more downright cinematic than most “adult” features, Disney Animation Studio once made unbearably lovely moving picture books, far lovelier than their often crude stories or questionable politics warranted.  Perhaps the highest praise one can offer The Princess in the Frog is that it reignites that latent tradition with enthusiasm and boundless affection for its forebears.

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Here at the End of All Things

The Road
2009 (USA)
Director: John Hillcoat
Viewed: December 3, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print (Landmark Tivoli Theater)

Much of the unexpected power of No Country For Old Men comes arrives in its final fifteen minutes or so, as an arguably perfect thriller evolves into a profoundly moving rumination on justice, ethics, and, most devastatingly, the role of parents as surrogate gods in a cold, empty world.  These themes are front-and-center in The Road, based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by No Country author Cormac McCarthy, which veritably howls the despairing thoughts that Sheriff Ed Tom Bell only murmured.  I’m reluctant to criticize director John Hillcoat—whose previous film was the spit-and-gristle Aussie Western The Proposition—for the film’s bracingly straightforward treatment of its central concern, namely the deity-mortal corollaries in the parent-child relationship.  Bracingly straightforward, after all, is McCarthy’s preferred approach in his novel, and Hillcoat’s film is nothing if not a remarkably faithful preservation of both the letter and spirit of the source material.  Accordingly, what The Road delivers is one of the grimmest, bleakest, most emotionally draining stories in contemporary narrative fiction.  It is not, needless to say, a corking good time at the movies. It is, however, a poignant, sharply realized work that starkly tackles moral dilemmas that have troubled humanity for millennia.

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Quick Review: Precious

2009 (USA)
Director: Lee Daniels
Viewed: December 1, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print (St. Louis Cinemas Moolah Theater)

It’s tempting to dismiss Lee Daniels’ Precious as a miserablist ordeal that puts its protagonist, an obese, illiterate teenage mother of the title (Gabourey Sidibe), through the proverbial wringer in order to elicit vague guilt and sanctimonious tongue-clucking from its audience.  The film leans heavily on the conventions of ghetto melodrama, but Precious is both too slight and too poetic to permit hasty categorization.  There’s a tinge of knowing fatalism to the film’s despair, no doubt derived in part from the real-life experiences woven into Sapphire’s original novel. Daniels flits between a dizzying array of social and cultural issues, but Precious retains an unsettled, even impressionistic tone that prevents it from descending into preachiness. The film’s formalist flourishes–such as Precious’ gauzy fantasies of fame and fortune, or the unexpected use of gospel and R&B to add a fresh twist to familiar narrative situations–mute the asphalt horror and lend credence to the film’s fuzzy, humanistic message.  While it’s Sidibe that provides the film with its restless, wounded mood, it’s hard to deny that, Oscar-bait or not, there’s something mesmerizing about sassy comedian Mo’Nique portraying one the most blisteringly vile mothers since Shelley Winters in A Patch of Blue.